The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman

Author:David E. Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780385537605
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

13

TORMENTED BY THE PAST

His family and friends called him Adik. His eyes were the color of ash, under a broad forehead and thick brown hair, with a crook in the bridge of his nose from a boyhood hockey accident. He stood about five feet six inches tall. Tolkachev seemed a quiet fellow to those who knew him. He liked tinkering with electronics and enjoyed building things with his hands, holding a soldering iron or wood plane, fixing a radio, or hammering together a cold frame. Tolkachev was so reserved that he never told his son what he did at work or took the boy to his office.

But inwardly, his mind was not at ease. He was haunted by a dark chapter of Soviet history, and he wanted revenge.1

Tolkachev was fifty-four years old in 1981. He suffered from high blood pressure and tried to pay attention to his health, jogging in the spring, summer, and fall and skiing in the winter. He drank alcohol only rarely. He was usually up before dawn, especially in the long winter, according to letters he wrote to the CIA. Every other day during the week, he got out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and went for a run outdoors, if it wasn’t raining or biting cold. He usually took the main elevator down to the ground floor and pushed open the heavy door onto the tree-lined square, Ploshchad Vosstaniya, or Square of the Uprising, commemorating the revolts against the Russian tsar and later the Bolshevik Revolution. Day after day, he ran the same route: first across the square toward the broad boulevard known as the Garden Ring Road, then a right turn toward the U.S. embassy, past the guard shacks that stood in front of the embassy, then another right turn, down a small lane and the spot where, three years earlier, he had handed a letter to Hathaway, in the shadow of a small Russian Orthodox church.2 Tolkachev knew these streets well; he had walked and run them tirelessly in earlier years, searching for cars with license plates indicating they belonged to American diplomats, hoping to drop a note through an open window.

In a letter to the CIA, Tolkachev described himself as a morning person. “You probably know,” he wrote, “that people are sometimes divided into two different types of personalities: ‘skylarks’ and ‘owls.’ The first have no trouble getting up in the morning but start getting sleepy as evening approaches. The latter are just the opposite. I belong to the ‘skylarks,’ my wife and son to the ‘owls.’ ”

After his jog, Tolkachev said, he usually woke his wife and son and made them breakfast. Natasha, who worked in the antenna department of the institute, was a heavyset woman, and she often left for work before Tolkachev, in order to catch the bus. Tolkachev liked to walk to work, through the backstreets.

Their son was growing fast and stood five inches taller than his father. Oleg had not been a rebellious teenager, but his interests

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