Employees of three KGB departments, the best personnel of the foreign intelligence service and even the legendary Mosfilm worked on his arrest. The collaboration of a talented engineer and the CIA pushed the Soviet defense industry and then the country into a bottomless abyss, from which it was not destined to get out.
Hardest of spies
The scouts divide traitors and agents into three categories. The first, in most cases, could not realize themselves in the service, so they decided to play with secret agents. Such, as a rule, "burn" earlier than others. The latter betray their country, colleagues and people for money. Salaries in intelligence and other special services are not to say very high.
By the way, not only agents inside the Soviet special services, but also American intelligence specialists, often sinned with left-wing earnings. The third type of traitor is ideological. These, as former intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers note, are people of a special mindset who tried to take revenge on the state for something. As a rule, this was either an undeserved demotion or an attempt to hinder career growth.
Adolf Tolkachev, who worked in the secret research institute of radio engineering "Phazotron" for more than twenty years, was able to combine three types of traitor at once. By some strange logic, a capable engineer and leader decided to test his fortune for strength and began to actively work out options for cooperation specifically for American intelligence, although, by Soviet standards, he was far from poor and could live in grand style.
As a small digression, it should be noted that the Americans, although they were busy with the constant expansion of the agent network, could not reach such a level of contact. The barrier between CIA agents in Moscow and high-ranking employees of Soviet research institutes was consistently built by specialists from the 1st, 2nd and 5th Directorates of the KGB of the USSR. By the mid-70s, thanks to the efforts of the Soviet security officers, the intelligence network of the CIA and MI6 in Russia was virtually destroyed, and it would take years for the Western intelligence services to build the network from scratch. If not for the sudden luck …
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First contact
In 1978, Adolf Tolkachev, who had risen to a leading position in one of the leading research institutes of the defense industry, appeared at the end of the building of the US Embassy in Moscow. He failed to get inside the first time. However, the CIA resident in Moscow under diplomatic cover Gardner Gus Hathaway immediately received information from the embassy security. The Americans prepared for the next meeting with Tolkachev: especially for him, Hathaway slowly drove out of the embassy grounds, turned a corner and stopped for a while. A few seconds later, Tolkachev knocked on the glass on the passenger side and handed over a small envelope.
In it, as historians of the special services note, Adolf Tolkachev put a note indicating his position and the research institute in which he worked. No further information was contained there. The engineer, planning to betray his own country, was extremely cautious and hoped that the CIA operatives would come to him themselves. In order to "grease" future colleagues and convince them of their own value, Tolkachev supplied the note with some data on Soviet radar stations included in the air defense system and onboard radars of the latest fighters.
However, on the other side of the barricades, they were in no hurry to make contact. American intelligence officers, almost completely devoid of agents in the course of a delicate game, knew well that an initiative agent could also be a "decoy" of the Chekist, who would feed the CIA with disinformation in all possible directions. But several months of checks, during which Tolkachev did not contact the agents, gave an amazing result. Tolkachev was taken into development, he received the pseudonym Sphere, and the Top Secret stamp was put on his personal file.
CIA agents handed over to the US Department of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) valuable data on the development of Soviet engineers in the field of radar. In particular, they talked about radar stations for fighters, as well as means of detection and guidance of guided missiles of the "air-to-air" and "air-to-ground" type.
Missed beat
In the early 1980s, Soviet agents in the US intelligence services reported to Moscow about the largest leak of classified weapons materials. In the reports of sources of the USSR foreign intelligence, it was indicated that the American special services and the military have information not only about the newest interceptor fighters that have just entered service, but also about prototypes of aviation technology that never made it to the factories. Suspicion instantly fell on three key research institutes: one was closely associated with the aviation industry, the other two with radar and microelectronics.
From the description of the documents that came to the United States, it became clear that, among other technologies, American intelligence also got the main secret of Soviet fighter-interceptors: a radar capable of quickly detecting and locking on a target in the so-called lower hemisphere - an area outside the pilot's line of sight, which was always controlled only by electronics … A communications systems engineer who worked in one of the closed research institutes in the Moscow region, in an interview with Life, confirmed that by the beginning and in the mid-80s, the leadership in this direction belonged to the Soviet Union.
One of the counterintelligence officers, Boris Kryukov (the name and surname have been changed at the request of the interlocutor), who has already retired with the rank of colonel, in a conversation with Life told about the scale of Tolkachev's work for the CIA.
But that's not all. Some details have leaked about the operation of the equipment on the next generation aircraft, such as the Su-24 and Su-24M, as well as the flagship of the Russian fighter aircraft, the Su-27. Some of the top-secret information was immediately transferred to leading American companies for processing, after which Soviet solutions were quickly adapted for American fighters and bombers. In just a few years of work, Tolkachev turned huge aviation regiments into heaps of metal. And although the aircraft were not cut for parts, their combat effectiveness in the event of a war could be zero.
Torn country
When information about Tolkachev's cooperation with the Americans was confirmed, they decided not to delay his arrest. The traitor was taken after serious preparatory work: a series of covert searches were carried out at his house and dacha, during which it became clear that the leading engineer of the Fazotron Research Institute had been cooperating with the CIA for a very long time. When clarifying the scale of Tolkachev's work for the Americans, it became clear that bloodlessly eliminating the damage caused was impossible.
Adolf Tolkachev, together with his wife, who knew about his "part-time job", was detained on the way home from their summer residence on June 9, 1985. By that time, the Soviet engineer had already worked for the CIA for six years. Expecting such an outcome of events, Tolkachev did not deny and at the very first interrogation in the SIZO admitted that in exchange for secret information about the operation of aviation and ground systems, he received huge sums of rubles and dollars, as well as expensive imported medicines and cassettes with rock and roll … By the way, Tolkachev was handed over by the American intelligence officer Edward Lee Howard, who was offended by the country, who loved alcohol, girls and drugs. It was he who "whispered" to the Soviet residency in the United States that Tolkachev is the very agent Sphere.
The former head of Soviet counterintelligence, Rem Krasilnikov, has repeatedly said that for many years Tolkachev was "the number one CIA agent" in the Soviet Union and, according to the most conservative estimates, helped American developers of aviation and missile technology save at least 100 billion in current dollars.
However, something else is important. It was after the most important strategic secrets related to the country's defense began to flow abroad that the Soviet Union got involved in an incomprehensible and illogical arms race. It is difficult to say whether the USSR lost the Cold War or not, but under the last three defense ministers in the history of the USSR - Grechko, Ustinov and Sokolov - most of the high-tech industries worked exclusively for the military.
A significant role in the destruction of the civilian high-tech industry, of course, was also played by the personal ambitions of the heads of the military departments, as well as related ministries and law enforcement agencies. It should be recognized that, had it not been for Tolkachev's betrayal, the crisis in the defense industry, and therefore in the country, would have been significantly weaker. The historian of the special services, producer Boris Konovalov, in an interview with Life, noted that some military specialists still, either out of ignorance or deliberately, belittle the scale of Tolkachev's personality.
Tolkachev's dream - to live beautifully, well-fed and to be sung by the country - never came true. Already in 1986, he was convicted of high treason, and on September 24, 1986, Tolkachev was shot. The Soviet defense industry "stretched out" for several more years, but was never able to recover.