Mystery? Intrigue? Danger? All trademarks of the “spy world.” During the Cold War, Russia, as well as most of the rest of Europe, had extensive manpower devoted to intelligence gathering, counterintelligence, and so on. Todays blog will center on a Russian spy of sorts, actually he was an engineer with access to many of the Soviet Union’s greatest advances in military technology. Much of my insight comes from a new book I recently finished reading, The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman. This will be a two-part blog due to its length.

During the Soviet Union’s existence, especially during the Stalin era, many injustices were visited upon innocent people ranging from imprisonment to execution. Stalin’s paranoia and cult of personality caused many to feel as though they could not speak honestly about their feelings without fear of being overheard and arrested; even spouses would sometimes speak to one another under the covers. Stalin’s vicious way of destroying the lives of so many of his people proved to be the catalyst for those wishing to exact revenge upon both Stalin and the Soviet system. Because of the impact of Stalin’s reign of terror on Adolf Tolkechev, his family, and his wife’s family, he became The Billion Dollar Spy. He sought revenge by sharing state military secrets with America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Tolkachev was an engineer working at the Soviet, state-run defense institute working on current and next-generation radar systems. He had been plotting to hit the Soviet Union where it would hurt them the most: national defense. Soviet military technology was very secretive and their adversaries knew little about it. Tolkachev actively sought out U.S. diplomats in Moscow by looking at the license plates on their cars – he could tell which were U.S. embassy plates by the prefix. So determined was he to share his secrets with the U.S. that he spent nearly two years trying to connect with them. It was as if he were saying “I have  military secrets to share with you but you won’t listen to me.” The KGB had done such an outstanding job of eliminating spies, especially in Russia, that the U.S. didn’t trust that Tolkachev wasn’t on their payroll or trying to offer them disinformation.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had done a fine job of placing its spies all over the world – particularly in the United States. At the same time, the U.S. had virtually no spy network established in Russia – especially Moscow. The few spies the U.S. managed to plant or turn were quickly discovered and eliminated by the KGB. That was until Adolf Tolkachev.

From 1979 through 1985 Tolkachev met with the CIA 21 times in Moscow – right under the noses of the feared KGB. The information he passed on was so valuable that it caused the United States to alter its own military tactics and technology to accommodate the “priceless” information given to them by Tolkachev. Adolf passed them information about “look down, shoot down” radar capabilities, as well as much, much more. “Look down, shoot down” radars would allow Soviet aircraft to see planes flying beneath them and this would provide them a lethal advantage in combat. Thanks to Tolkachev, the U.S. never had a plane shot down by a Soviet-built plane because they were able to exploit gaps in their technology. It was said that Soviet radar technology surpassed that of the U.S. but Tolkachev’s info not only leveled the playing field, it gave the U.S. the advantage for more than ten years.