Spycraft - Melton [77]
Tolkachev’s family situation required a change of communications plans. Since the inception of the operation, unattributable calls from pay phones located throughout Moscow to his home had been used by case officers to initiate unplanned meetings. This worked well until Tolkachev’s son, in whose room the phone was located, became a teenager. Like most teens, at the first ring of the phone, the young man ran to it. The commo plan that successfully evaded KGB surveillance for four years now became vulnerable to a teenager who thought that every incoming call could be for him.
From the earliest stages of the case, the CIA began planning for a means of exfiltrating Tolkachev and his family out of Moscow. Ideally, Tolkachev would remain in place as long as possible, but there was always the potential of an emergency requiring immediate exfiltration. Tolkachev realized the consequences if he were ever caught. Four months after his initial meeting he asked his case officer for a “poison pill,” stating, “I would not like to carry on a conversation with organs of the KGB.” His request was refused by Headquarters, but he persisted and eventually wrote a personal letter to the DCI pleading his case. Tolkachev reasoned that the tasking required him to request highly sensitive documents that were outside his normal work. If he was willing to take this risk, then the Agency should be willing to provide him a poison pill. Additionally he suggested that this “means of defense” would limit any disclosures he might unwillingly make during an interrogation.
Tolkachev assumed that if he were to be arrested, the scenario would begin with a summons to the office of his boss where he would be seized. Now, as security continued to tighten at the institute, any time he was called to the office, he would conceal the poison pill beneath his tongue so he could immediately bite it. Given these urgent circumstances, Tolkachev stopped all document photography but continued to make notes on topics of known intelligence value. His Moscow officer was prescient when writing to Headquarters: “this is indeed a man who is driven to produce, by whatever means he deems necessary, right up to the end, even if that end is his death.”
When the institute’s new security regulations in early 1983 indicated to Tolkachev that Soviet authorities were suspicious that sensitive information was leaking, exfiltration planning was moved to the front burner. His case officer evaluated escape plans and concluded the “Leningrad Option” would be best. This involved getting his family to Leningrad, then smuggling them out of the USSR in an OTS-constructed concealment cavity built into a vehicle.29 If the family was unable to reach Leningrad, a backup plan called for them to be picked up on the outskirts of Moscow where they would remain in hiding until exfiltration from the country by another means.
Tolkachev was offered details of the completed plan in April but refused to accept them “because of his current family situation.” Both his wife and son knew people who left the USSR for Israel and later wrote back that they regretted the move. The CIA escape plans were no match for his wife’s emotional bond to the Russian homeland or his son’s attachment to his friends. Tolkachev later commented that he could not think about exfiltration “because I could never leave my family.”
Headquarters determined the aviation information Tolkachev reported in March of 1983 had not been disseminated outside of CIA until June, leading to the assumption that no leak could have alerted the KGB in April. Nevertheless, the Agency decided to restrict future meetings with Tolkachev to twice a year and provided a new SRAC device to replace the one he destroyed. He was directed to use extreme caution, limit collection