Tale of Soviet spy reads like a thriller

Technology has revolutionized the art of intelligence, as satellites hundreds of miles above the planet can take photos that lay out a target’s defenses and vulnerabilities. It has made monitoring arms control agreements and troop movements detailed to a degree once considered impossible.

Those advances will most likely never replace human intelligence — the on-the-ground spies who conduct much of the espionage that does more than provide visual images. The vagaries of running human operatives, often in difficult places, make reading David Hoffman’s The Billion Dollar Spy (***1/2 out of four) gripping and nerve-wracking.

Hoffman’s billion-dollar spy is Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet radar engineer who grew weary of his regime’s failed promises and propaganda and became the first active Soviet citizen working as a spy for the United States inside his country in the late 1970s.

At first, Hoffman writes, CIA agents working in Moscow thought Tolkachev was too good to be true. They could not believe that this man stuffing notes through the car windows of U.S. operatives was for real. Neither could their superiors in Washington, who feared Tolkachev was a KGB plant who would expose the agents who talked to him.

Tolkachev’s specialty was radar and how the Soviets were developing a system, similar to that used in U.S. AWACS planes, that would look down from high altitudes and see aircraft and other threats below. He brazenly took documents from work and copied them at home and later used a CIA-supplied camera to photograph them, often providing dozens of rolls of film to U.S. agents.

The Air Force estimated Tolkachev provided $2 billion worth of intelligence in 1980s dollars.

“He had provided the United States with blueprints for several of the most modern radars then being developed and installed on Soviet interceptors and fighter planes,” Hoffman writes. “In December [1979], the Defense Department told the CIA in a memorandum that as a result of Tolkachev’s trove of documents the air force had completely reversed its direction on a $70 million electronic package for one of the latest U.S. fighters.”

Those benefits came at a considerable human cost. Tolkachev worried constantly that he would be discovered. He asked the CIA to give him a suicide pill he could take if he was captured and imprisoned. The CIA resisted, fearing that Tolkachev might incorrectly fear he would be discovered, overreact and take the pill. That would eliminate the best spy the agency had ever had in the Soviet Union.

This human tension hangs over every page of The Billion Dollar Spy like the smell of leaded gasoline. U.S. intelligence and military officials in Washington could not get enough of Tolkachev’s information, but they often lost sight that they were dealing with a real person operating in the most dangerous environment. The same was true for U.S. operatives in Moscow. A false move could mean capture and imprisonment and the end to a once-promising career.

In the end, Tolkachev’s fate was determined not by the top people in either intelligence agency but by one of the CIA’s washouts, proof again that the human factor can render the best technology meaningless.

Hoffman, a veteran journalist, knows the intelligence world well and has expertly used recently declassified documents to tell this unsettling and suspenseful story.

It is an old cliché that any true story about espionage resembles the best of John Le Carre's fiction. That’s especially true here. The Billion Dollar Spy reads like the most taut and suspenseful parts of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Smiley’s People. It’s worth the clenched jaw and upset stomach it creates.

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal​

By David E. Hoffman

Doubleday, 336 pp.

3 1/2 stars out of four