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From the author of the Pulitzer Pr- ize–winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of the CIA’s most valuable spy and a thrilling por- trait of the agency’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War While driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station heard a knock on his car window. He was handed an envelope by a man on the curb. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and develop- ments in military technology that were totally unknown to the United States. In the years that followed, that man, a Russian engineer named Adolf Tolkachev, cracked open the secret Soviet military re- search establishment. He used his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of 3/795 material about the latest advances in avi- ation and radar technology, thereby alerting the Americans to possible developments far in the future. He was one of the most pro- ductive and valuable spies to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. Tolkachev took enormous personal risks—but so did his CIA handlers. Moscow station was a dangerous posting to the KGB’s backyard. The CIA had long struggled to re- cruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev became a singular breakthrough. Using spy cameras and secret codes as well as face-to-face meetings in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and the CIA worked to elude the feared KGB. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA and on interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against 4/795 his own nation. Exciting, unpredictable, and at times unbearably tense, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant work of history that reads like an espionage thriller. David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor at The Washington Post and a correspondent for PBS’s Frontline. He is the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Olig- archs: Wealth and Power in the New Rus- sia. He lives with his wife in Maryland. Published by Doubleday 2015. Also by David E. Hoffman The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book. Copyright © 2015 by David E. Hoffman All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Ran- dom House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Ran- dom House companies. www.doubleday.com DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Book design by [to come] Jacket design by [to come] Jacket illustration © [to come] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [to come] MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 8/795 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition To Carole Everything we do is dangerous. —Adolf Tolkachev, to his CIA case officer October 11, 1984 CONTENTS Cover About this Book By David E. Hoffman Title page Copyright page Dedication Epigraph PROLOGUE 1 OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 2 MOSCOW STATION 3 A MAN CALLED SPHERE 4 “FINALLY I HAVE REACHED YOU” 5 “A DISSIDENT AT HEART” 12/795 6 SIX FIGURES 7 SPY CAMERA 8 WINDFALLS AND HAZARDS 9 THE BILLION DOLLAR SPY 10 FLIGHT OF UTOPIA 11 GOING BLACK 12 DEVICES AND DESIRES 13 TORMENTED BY THE PAST 14 “EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS” 15 NOT CAUGHT ALIVE 16 SEEDS OF BETRAYAL 17 VANQUISH 18 SELLING OUT 19 WITHOUT WARNING 20 ON THE RUN 21 “FOR FREEDOM” EPILOGUE 13/795 A NOTE ON THE INTELLIGENCE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES About the Author PROLOGUE he spy had vanished. T He was the most successful and val- ued agent the United States had run inside the Soviet Union in two decades. His docu- ments and drawings had unlocked the secrets of Soviet radar and revealed sensitive plans for research on weapons systems a decade into the future. He had taken fright- ful risks to smuggle circuit boards and blue- prints out of his military laboratory and handed them over to the CIA. His espionage put the United States in position to dominate the skies in aerial combat and confirmed the 15/795 vulnerability of Soviet air defenses—that American cruise missiles and bombers could fly under the radar. In the late autumn and early winter of 1982, the CIA lost touch with him. Five scheduled meetings were missed. Months had gone by. In October, an attempt to ren- dezvous with him failed because of over- whelming KGB surveillance on the street. Even the “deep cover” officers of the CIA’s Moscow station, invisible to the KGB, could not break through. On November 24, a deep cover officer, wearing a light disguise, man- aged to call the spy’s apartment from a pay phone, but someone else answered. The of- ficer hung up. On the evening of December 7, the next scheduled meeting, the future of the opera- tion was put in the hands of Bill Plunkert. After a stint as a navy aviator, Plunkert had joined the CIA and trained as a clandestine operations officer. He was in his mid- 16/795 thirties, six feet two, and had arrived at the Moscow station in the summer for a tour de- voted to handling the spy. He pored over the files, studied maps and photographs, read cables, and talked to the case officers. He felt he knew the man, even though he had never met him face-to-face. His mission was to give the slip to the KGB and make contact. In the days before, using the local phone lines they knew were tapped by the KGB, a few American diplomats had organized a birthday party at an apartment for Tuesday evening. That night, around the dinner hour, four people walked to a car in the U.S. em- bassy parking lot, under constant watch by uniformed militiamen who stood outside and reported to the KGB. One of the four carried a large birthday cake. When the car left the embassy, a woman in the rear seat behind the driver held the cake on her lap. Driving the car was the CIA’s chief of sta- tion. Plunkert sat next to him in the front 17/795 seat. Their wives were in back. All four of them had earlier rehearsed what they were about to do, using chairs set up in the Mo- scow station. Now the real show was about to begin.1 Espionage is the art of illusion. Tonight, Plunkert was the illusionist. Under his street clothes, he wore a second layer of clothes that would be typical for an old Russian man. The birthday cake was fake, with a top that looked like a cake but concealed a device un- derneath created by the CIA’s technical oper- ations wizards. Plunkert hoped the device would give him a means of escape from KGB surveillance. The device was called the Jack-in-the-Box, known to all as simply the JIB. Over the years, the CIA had learned that KGB surveil- lance teams almost always followed a car from behind. They rarely pulled alongside. It was possible for a car carrying a CIA officer to slip around a corner or two, momentarily 18/795 out of view of the KGB. In that brief interval, the CIA case officer could jump out of the car and disappear. At the same time, the Jack- in-the-Box would spring erect, a pop-up that looked, in outline, like the head and torso of the case officer who had just jumped out. To create it, the CIA had sent two young engineers from the Office of Technical Ser- vice to a windowless sex shop in a seedy area of Washington, D.C., to purchase three inflatable, life-sized dolls. But the dolls were hard to inflate or deflate quickly. They leaked air. The young engineers went back to the shop for more test mannequins, but prob- lems persisted. Then the CIA realized that given the distance from which the KGB fol- lowed cars in Moscow, it wasn’t necessary to have a three-dimensional dummy in the front seat, only a two-dimensional cutout. Il- lusion triumphed, and the Jack-in-the-Box was born.2 19/795 The device had not been used before in Moscow, but the CIA had grown desperate as weeks went by, with no contact with the agent. A skilled disguise expert from headquarters was sent to the Moscow station to help with the device and to bring Plunkert some “sterile” clothing that had never been worn before, to avoid any telltale scents that could be traced by KGB dogs or any tracking or listening devices that could be hidden inside. As the car wound through the Moscow streets, Plunkert took off his American street clothes and put them into a small sack, typic- al of the kind Russians carried about. Wear- ing a full face mask and eyeglasses, he was now disguised as an old Russian man. At a distance, the KGB was trailing them.

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