The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman (review)

All countries engage in spying and counterespionage, none more so than the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The three major targets for each superpower were the adversary’s military technology, the status of the adversary’s economy, and the nature of the adversary’s political decision-making at the highest levels.

The “billion dollar spy” of this new book is Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet engineer who worked secretly for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in aviation technology from 1978 until his sudden arrest in 1985. No, he was not paid a billion dollars. But he saved the United States a billon in research and development costs. He was awarded an escrow account of some $4 million—the highest recompense for a spy in U.S. history—but he managed to use only a fraction of it before his arrest. His contributions helped the United States for many years to understand developments in Soviet avionics and bore fruit during the 1991 Gulf War in defeating the advanced Soviet-made MiG fighters of Saddam Hussein’s air force.

The outline of Tolkachev’s career has been known for some time through articles published in academic journals, including a 40-page inside CIA account by Barry G. Royden, released in 2008. But what David E. Hoffman, a former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has done so ably is to study all accessible information from 944 declassified CIA documents, memoirs of intelligence officers, interviews with officials who met with Tolkachev more than twenty times, and acquaintances of the Tolkachev family. Based on the results of Hoffman’s impressive research, I disagree with the argument put forth by the former CIA historian Benjamin B. Fischer in his article “Double Troubles: CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2016), pp. 48–74. Fischer’s contention that Tolkachev was really a double-agent controlled by Soviet foreign intelligence (or perhaps did not exist at all) is undercut by Hoffman’s book.

The vast information Hoffman has assembled enables him to tell the story as if he were writing a John le Carré novel. Beyond the page-turning momentum, however, are revelations of great interest and fascination for me, a Moscow correspondent during Tolkachev’s Cold War years. These revelations are sure to attract scholars and espionage enthusiasts.

For example, how could a disaffected Soviet scientist make contact with the CIA in the highly controlled world of Moscow? Sometimes initial contacts with a traitorous military officer or diplomat were begun abroad. But Tolkachev never left the Soviet Union. As the senior scientist at the elite Phazotron design bureau, he lived under extremely tight security conditions. What he did was to approach a U.S. diplomat filling up his car at a gas station, hand him a note, and disappear. U.S. diplomatic cars were easy to identify because their license plate numbers always started with 004, meaning the United States.

What I learned during my Moscow assignment, and what Hoffman’s book confirms, is that dissident scientists sometimes also approached U.S. journalists for help. For example, I know two mainline U.S. correspondents who were asked by unidentified Soviet sources to convey to the CIA handwritten, highly classified information about Soviet missiles. The CIA was definitely interested in one of the would-be informers but apparently failed to make permanent contact. In the 1970s, the Congress had banned the CIA from using journalists in its operations.

On first approach in 1977, Tolkachev was rejected because the CIA station personnel thought the offer might be a “dangle”—an effort by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) to insert a phony “spy” into the CIA network to function as a double agent. What is remarkable is that Tolkachev came back three more times with follow-up approaches via U.S. diplomatic cars. What he did...