Tolkachev, A Worthy Successor to Penkovsky | Page 8

to service such sites, or to carry out other operational activities.
This method of action meant that a series of alternative contacts had to be built into every agent communication system, because a case officer could never know ahead of time whether he would be free of surveillance on any given day. Because of the heavy surveillance normally used against CIA case officers, another part of any agent communications system required that several case officers be read in on the case, so that any one of them who was able to determine that he was surveillance-free on a given day would be capable of communicating with the agent.
Another technique that was used to defeat KGB surveillance was to disguise the identity of the case officer being sent out to meet with Tolkachev. This technique was first used in this operation in June 1980. John Guilsher drove to the US Embassy building at about 7:20 p.m., ostensibly having been invited to dinner at the apartment of an Embassy officer who lived there. Once inside, he disguised himself so that when he later left the compound in another vehicle, he would not be recognized by KGB surveillants waiting outside. Checking to ensure that he was free of surveillance, Guilsher, while still in the vehicle, changed out of his western clothes and made himself look as much as possible like a typical, working-class Russian by putting on a Russian hat and working-class clothes, taking a heavy dose of garlic, and splashing some vodka on himself. Guilsher then left his vehicle and proceeded on foot and by local public transportation to a public phone booth, where he called the agent out for a meeting at a prearranged site.
After the meeting, Guilsher returned to his vehicle, put on normal Western clothes, and drove back to the Embassy. There he resumed his own identity and then left the compound and returned to his apartment. Tolkachev's case officers successfully used this technique, with some variations, for a number of meetings with the agent over the course of this operation.
Agent Compensation
As is the case with most agents, remuneration was a subject of great importance to Tolkachev and an operationally difficult matter to resolve. As the details were worked out over time, it became evident that he was primarily interested in obtaining a salary as a demonstration that the CIA highly valued his work, rather than as a means to enrich himself.
The dialogue regarding compensation began with the second personal meeting in April 1979. During a 15-minute walking contact, Tolkachev turned over five rolls of film that he had taken with his miniature camera and more than 50 pages of handwritten notes containing intelligence of both a substantive and operational nature. In the notes, he proposed to pass information over a 12-year period, divided into seven stages; he wanted to be paid a set amount at the end of each stage. He said that he considered that stage one had been completed with the passage of the extensive materials that he had delivered in January, added to what he had been able to pass before that time via his SW messages and written notes. He went on to say that he did not feel that he had been adequately compensated for his first year and a half "of lonely efforts to break down the wall of distrust" and for the significant information that he had provided to date. He provided a range of figures in the tens of thousands of rubles, which he said he believed would be fair compensation for the information that he had provided so far.
Tolkachev stated that he could either just pass information as he had outlined in his seven-stage plan, and ask for a sum of money "in six figures" equal to "what Belenko got," or he could go beyond this and keep passing new information as it developed and he got access to it. [3] Tolkachev wrote that, if he were cooperating just for the money, he probably would follow the first course, but, because he had tasked himself with passing the maximum amount of information to the United States, he did not intend to stop halfway, and "only the second course of action is viable."
In October 1979, Tolkachev returned to the subject of his reimbursement. Subsequent to the April letter outlining his salary demands, he had been told that the DCI had approved the passage to him of an amount of rubles equivalent to almost $100,000 for the information that he had provided to date. In response to this, Tolkachev now wrote that, when he said he wanted compensation in the "six figures," he meant "six zeroes!" He went on to say that he had heard on the Voice of America that "American specialists" estimated that the Soviets would have to spend $3