Tolkachev, A Worthy Successor to Penkovsky | Page 2

in the West, taking advantage of his travel abroad with Soviet delegations.
The point in time when Tolkachev chose to try to establish contact with the CIA in Moscow was a particularly sensitive one. CIA personnel in Moscow had several operational activities scheduled to take place over the next several months that they and CIA headquarters were loath to complicate by the possibility of getting caught in a KGB dangle operation. In addition, Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State-designate in the administration of newly elected President Jimmy Carter, was scheduled to visit the USSR soon to lay the basis for bilateral relations, and it was clear that the new US administration did not want anything untoward to roil the waters between the two countries. As a result, given the absence of any identifying data on this prospective volunteer, the lack of any indication of his access to sensitive information, and the difficult counterintelligence (CI) environment, CIA headquarters decided against replying to the note.
More Approaches
On 3 February 1977, the volunteer again approached the local CIA chief, this time as he got into his car. (Although the chief's car was parked near the US Embassy, it was blocked from the view of the Soviet militiamen guarding the Embassy by high snow banks, a fact that Tolkachev later said he had taken into account.) He again spoke briefly, dropped a short note into the car, and departed. The note reiterated the writer's desire to establish contact with an American official. Based on the previous CIA headquarters decision, no action was taken to respond to the note.
Two weeks later, the CIA chief was approached after work by the same individual, who dropped another note into the car. This note said that the writer understood the concern about a possible provocation. He claimed that he was an engineer who worked in a "closed enterprise" and was not knowledgeable about "secret matters," so he might not be going about this the right way. He said that he had not included specific information about himself because he worried about how his letters would be handled. He repeated his request that he be contacted, and he provided new instructions for establishing contact.
By now, the CIA chief was impressed with the man's tenacity and asked headquarters for permission to respond positively by parking his car in a spot that had been indicated in the note, so that the writer could pass him a letter with more details about who he was and what information he wanted to share. Headquarters, however, continued to demur, citing overriding CI concerns, and forbade any positive response.
In May, the volunteer approached the CIA chief for the fourth time, banging on his car to get his attention. The chief ignored him.
More than six months passed before the volunteer appeared again. In December 1977, he spotted an individual who had gotten out of an American-plated car and was shopping in a local market. The volunteer gave a letter to this individual and pleaded that the letter be hand delivered to a responsible US official. The letter was passed unopened to the US Embassy's assistant security officer, who in turn gave it to the local CIA chief.
In the letter, the volunteer again provided instructions and accompanying drawings for an initial contact with an American official. He went further this time, however, and included two typewritten pages of intelligence regarding the electronic systems for a Soviet aircraft, which convinced the newly arrived local CIA chief, Gardner "Gus" Hathaway, that a serious effort should be made to respond. He said that he wanted to do "what Belenko did." [2] Again, he provided some contact scenarios. Hathaway sent a message to Washington, urging that he be allowed to follow up and contact the volunteer. This time, CIA headquarters tentatively concurred, pending an evaluation of the intelligence sample.
In early January 1978, however, headquarters again disapproved contact. It cited the fact that an American official had been declared persona non grata by the Soviet government just one week previously, as well as the fact that the CIA had had to send home two case officers the previous year, when cases they had been handling were compromised. Headquarters concluded that they could not afford to lose another officer in Moscow, should the latest contact prove to be a Soviet provocation attempt. Meanwhile, the evaluation of the information provided by the volunteer showed it to be highly interesting but not likely to do "grave damage" to the USSR--a criterion that apparently had to be met in headquarters' view before it would approve taking the risk to meet the volunteer.
By fortuitous chance, in February 1978, the Pentagon sent a memo to the CIA citing the US military's high interest in any intelligence that could be provided on Soviet aircraft electronics and weapons control systems. As it