Tolkachev, A Worthy Successor to Penkovsky | Page 7

another "dirty mitten." The spy camera was matchbox-sized and had been fabricated by OTS so that Tolkachev could photograph documents clandestinely at his office.
The note passed to Tolkachev in the same deaddrop contained a communications plan that provided for a variety of methods of contact. For example, Tolkachev could be called at home once a month, on the date that corresponded to the number of the month, that is, 1 January, 2 February, 3 March, and so forth. Tolkachev would cover the phone between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. on those dates to await a "wrong-number" call. Depending upon the name asked for by the caller, Tolkachev would be directed to one of three prearranged deaddrop sites: "Olga," "Anna," or "Nina." The caller also had the option of asking for "Valeriy," which would trigger a personal meeting at a prearranged site one hour from the time of the call.
Once a month, on the date that corresponded to the number of the month plus 15 days--18 March, 19 April, 20 May, etc.--Tolkachev was directed to appear at one of several prearranged sites, at a specified time according to the month, and to wait for five minutes--a password and recognition signal were incorporated into the plan in case someone other than the regular case officer should make the meeting.
Once every three months, on the last weekend of the month, Tolkachev would have the opportunity to pass materials via deaddrop. Tolkachev would look to see whether a "ready to receive" signal had been made; if so, he was to put down a package in a prearranged site. A recovery signal would be put up the next day so that he could check to ensure that his package had been received. He was also given instructions on how to package and conceal any drop of materials for passage to the CIA. He also could trigger a deaddrop delivery by making a marked signal on any Monday; a case officer in turn would signal readiness to receive his package, using a parked-car signal the following Wednesday, and that night Tolkachev could put down his deaddrop package. A recovery signal would then be put up the following day to signal the successful recovery of his drop.
Tolkachev, however, resisted using deaddrops. In an April 1979 written message, he said that he did not understand why the CIA wanted to use deaddrops to communicate. He said that personal meetings would be no more risky than using deaddrop passes, because in both cases a CIA officer had to be free of surveillance to carry out the communications plan. Given this fact, Tolkachev said that it seemed to him that personal meetings were to be preferred, because they would be much more productive. He also noted that "psychologically" he preferred to exchange materials via personal meeting, because he worried that a drop could accidentally fall into the wrong hands and that in such a case the documents he provided could be traced back to him.
Hathaway agreed with Tolkachev's reasoning, as ultimately did CIA headquarters. As a result, beginning in April 1979, personal meetings with Tolkachev were used almost exclusively. Several were held with him in the second half of 1979, and more than 20 took place over the next five years. These personal encounters allowed Tolkachev to hand over to his CIA case officer hundreds of rolls of exposed film and hundreds of pages of written notes containing an enormous amount of valuable intelligence.
Surveillance Detection Runs
To ensure that the case officer was free from KGB surveillance before carrying out any element of the communications plan, the officer would conduct a surveillance detection run. This involved case officers moving about the city in an apparently innocent fashion, while unobtrusively checking to determine whether they were under surveillance. Although the 17th Department of the KGB, responsible for counterintelligence inside the USSR, had a large manpower pool, it could not maintain surveillance on all foreigners all the time, so it was important to try to convince surveillance teams, when they were covering a given case officer, that the officer was not involved in any operational activities when they were moving about the city.
As part of this process, every case officer went to great lengths to establish a routine that took him to various parts of the city on a regular basis, to do shopping, run errands, take part in recreational activities, go sightseeing, take the children out, walk the dog, and so forth. These routines were carefully constructed to try to bore the KGB surveillance teams, to the point where they would be moved to other, presumably more productive, targets. If and when the officers did find themselves free of surveillance while on these personal travels around the city, they would take advantage of this situation to look for prospective new deaddrop sites,