Circle of Treason (14 page)

Sergey Ivanovich Bokhan, a GRU colonel run by the CIA during two tours in Athens, Greece, was one of the few agents who survived the wholesale arrests, imprisonments, trials, and executions that began in the summer of 1985. That he was not among the missing or the known compromised can be attributed to his fear in late May 1985 that he was being recalled to Moscow on a ruse. Burton Gerber, chief of SE Division, and Dave Forden, our chief in Athens, agreed that something was amiss shortly after Bokhan signaled for an emergency meeting. He informed us that he had received a message from his brother in Moscow asking him to return to deal with some problems connected with his son, who was a cadet at a Soviet military academy. The brother knew of no issues and the CIA abetted Bokhan's departure from Greece followed by his arrival in the United States, where he lives today.

To this day, however, as with Gordievsky, a mystery surrounds Bokhan's possible compromise. (The Gordievsky riddle is described in
Chapter 17
.) Ames has insisted that he did not give up major CIA and FBI assets until 13 June 1985, which was about three weeks after Bokhan's precipitate departure from Greece. Either Ames identified Bokhan to the KGB earlier than he admitted, or Bokhan and we incorrectly interpreted the message from Moscow. A third possibility exists, as it does with Gordievsky. Bokhan was betrayed by someone or something else and the KGB's plan to bring him home failed. The truth remains unknown, at least to Sandy and Jeanne because we have no current access to information on the subject.

The story of Bokhan's cooperation with the CIA began in Athens in the spring of 1976 during his first tour abroad. The circumstances of his
recruitment could well have been titled “Foreign Language Mishaps Abroad” or “Sign Language Sometimes Works.” A CIA station officer had struck up an acquaintance with Bokhan, based on their mutual interest in tennis. They played periodically, but conversation was limited because the case officer spoke no Russian and only a little Greek. Bokhan spoke Greek but little English. After one such get-together, the CIA officer returned to the CIA station and reported: “I know I pitched him and I think he said yes and I think he pitched me and I know I said no.” A Russian-speaking officer attended the next meeting and so began the long relationship between Bokhan and the CIA. He had indeed said yes to the recruitment pitch. He was encrypted CKWORTH, later changed to GTBLIZZARD.

SE Division officer Dick C was sent to Athens in the summer of 1976 to handle Bokhan for the duration of the latter's assignment. Meetings were overtly recorded and held approximately every other week in three or four different safe houses, according to a rotating schedule. Bokhan provided information on GRU operations and personnel in Greece and elsewhere in the region, photographed GRU correspondence to and from Moscow using a CIA custom-made camera that looked like a candy cane key fob, and furnished copies of the unclassified version of the Soviet publication
Military Thought
, not generally available in the West.

One of Bokhan's most famous agent leads was to an individual who provided the GRU with the top secret instruction manual for the U.S. spy satellite known as the KH-11. According to Bokhan, one afternoon in 1977 he walked into the GRU residency's work space to find Mikhail Zavaliy, a fellow residency officer under naval attaché cover, working intently on a cable to Moscow. When Zavaliy was summoned to the resident's office, Bokhan stole a peek at the message Zavaliy had begun to write. Zavaliy had just received a copy of the manual for the KH-ll. Bokhan could provide no further details other than that the word “Rugger” appeared in Zavaliy's draft. Bokhan also did not know who or what Rugger was, but speculated that perhaps it was an individual's last name. Bokhan signaled for an unscheduled meeting and passed the information to Dick C.

Bokhan's lead was passed to the FBI, which eventually arrested William Kampiles, a former CIA entry-level employee assigned to the Directorate of Intelligence Watch Office, in August 1978 and charged him
with six counts of espionage. As it turned out, Rugger was simply the logo that appeared on the shirt Kampiles wore during his meeting with Zavaliy in Athens. Kampiles was convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison. In the late 1990s he was scheduled to be released after serving nearly nineteen years of his original sentence.

While Bokhan always appeared for meetings on time and prepared for work, his love for and purchases of consumer goods with his CIA gains became legendary at headquarters and remained a constant tug-of-war between case officer and agent. Dick C often reminded Bokhan of the need to curb his spending so his unexplained apparent affluence would not attract the attention of KGB security, but Bokhan was equally steadfast in his numerous requests for more money. On one occasion he noted that, according to recent news accounts, trash workers in New York City were on strike with a demand for higher wages. As Bokhan correctly reminded Dick and those at CIA headquarters, the New York trash collectors already made more than he and “I'm not giving you garbage.”

Despite his protestations, Dick C limited Bokhan to a thousand dollars a month in cash, with another thousand deposited to an escrow account maintained at CIA Headquarters. However, true to form Bokhan continued to spend all that he was given on everything from expensive shoes to a fur coat for his wife, an exercise cycle, and gifts for his superiors at GRU headquarters.

Bokhan and his family left Athens by train in late summer 1978 en route to permanent reassignment in Moscow. He arrived at the railroad station laden with numerous suitcases containing the spoils of his CIA labor. There he and his family received a rousing send-off from members of the local Soviet embassy. Dick C, heavily disguised as a filthy, impoverished European hippie, silently watched the entire scene while sitting on the ground at the end of the station platform to ensure that Bokhan was free of KGB escort. He was.

Before his departure, Bokhan was trained in internal communications and issued materials that included a pre-arranged signal by which he could indicate that he was alive and well. He activated this signal about a year after his return to the Soviet Union but no further word was received from him until 1982, when he returned to Athens for his second tour, now a full colonel and deputy GRU resident. He followed his Athens recontact instructions perfectly, and Dick C, who was occupied with new
challenges, was sent to Greece to make the initial contact and introduce Bokhan to a new CIA case officer. The operation proceeded smoothly and productively until May 1985, when the fateful cable arrived from Moscow that precipitated his escape, thus changing his life, that of the son whom he left in Moscow, and that of the daughter and wife whom he left in Athens.

The case of Adolf Grigoryevich Tolkachev demonstrates how it was possible for the CIA Station in Moscow to conduct regular personal meetings with a Soviet military electronics expert in the heart of Moscow and, in so doing, produce reams of high-quality intelligence. It also shows how easily such an important operation can be brought to an untimely end, with drastic consequences to the Soviet scientist in question, by the acts of a CIA traitor.
¹¹

Tolkachev (first encrypted CKSPHERE, later GTVANQUISH) made his initial approach in January 1977, by passing a note to then-Chief of Station Bob Fulton, who was filling his tank at a Moscow gas station. The note, while indicating the bearer's wish for a confidential discussion with an American official, did not give any precise details about what the individual could or would do for us. Therefore it was decided not to reply to his overture.
¹²

Tolkachev would make five more approaches, of increasing specificity, before CIA headquarters approved plans to respond to him. The CIA was well aware that the KGB Second Chief Directorate, which ran operations against our station in Moscow, had a well-developed program to place “dangles” or false volunteers in our path. This was done for several purposes: to tie up the slender resources of our small Station, to uncover our personnel and methods of operation, to get active officers declared persona non grata, and to increase our understandable reluctance to deal with such volunteers. The KGB knew full well that some of the most dangerous cases, among them GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky and KGB officer Aleksandr Cherepanov, had begun in this way. Tolkachev himself realized the problem, telling us in a February 1978 note that he seemed to be caught in a vicious circle. For his own safety, he could not tell us too much about himself and his access. Yet without this information we appeared to look at him as a “provocation.”

More than one year after Tolkachev's original attempt to make contact, he received his first response from us—a telephone call from station officer John Guilsher, a fluent Russian speaker. By this time Tolkachev had produced detailed intelligence related to Soviet military aircraft and fully identified himself. Gardner (“Gus”) Hathaway, who had replaced Fulton as Chief of Station, had pushed for this move, and had finally convinced headquarters. This was only a halfway measure, however, because headquarters would not approve a personal meeting, preferring instead a system of secret writing letters and dead drops. Not until January 1979 did Guilsher finally get the green light for a personal meeting. This took place on New Year's Day, when the two met by pre-arrangement and walked around on the freezing Moscow streets. As described in the section above on Kulak, this was the period when DCI Turner disapproved of other attempts to conduct personal meetings in Moscow.

More than twenty personal meetings took place in the next five years, either on the street or in Tolkachev's car. There were several rocky periods, to include a major security investigation at Tolkachev's place of employment, and the periodic inability of station officers to evade KGB surveillance. (Guilsher left Moscow in 1980.) During these five years, Tolkachev produced hundreds of rolls of film, some taken with a regular 35-mm camera, and some with CIA-manufactured equipment. Like Polyakov before him, he sometimes complained about problems with CIA-issued gear. He also passed hundreds of pages of detailed written notes. The reaction of U.S. military analysts was highly enthusiastic. Tolkachev provided details on Soviet military weaponry long before it was deployed, and thus long before information on the systems could be picked up by technical collection. It sometimes changed the direction of our own research and development and, by so doing, saved the U.S. government billions of dollars. Indeed, his production was so voluminous and so significant that it was still being exploited by a task force as late as 1990.

What was Tolkachev's motivation for this intense, almost compulsive, desire to provide us with intelligence damaging to his own country? During the life of the operation he wrote us a number of personal notes. In them he explained that he was not a Communist, and that, if he had not had a security clearance, he would have been active as a dissident. In this connection, he mentioned that his wife's family had suffered during the Stalinist purges. Another family factor was providing for his only son, to include items of
Western manufacture not available in the USSR. In general, one gets the impression of a close-knit family. Yet money was an important factor. He requested immense sums from us, and was unhappy when we did not accede to his demands. To our explanations that we were concerned with his security, and did not want him to appear to be unduly affluent, he responded that he did not want the money to spend, but to reassure himself that we considered him of high value. (This theme also appears in the Smetanin operation.)

Our last personal meeting with Tolkachev took place in January 1985. We hoped to meet him in March 1985, but were unsuccessful in our attempts to arrange a contact. On 13 June station officer Paul Stombaugh was detained by the KGB and taken off to KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka, where he was held for some hours before being released. Stombaugh had been on his way to a scheduled meeting with Tolkachev. The inevitable conclusion was that Tolkachev had been arrested. This turned out to be the case. On 20 September 1985 the Soviet media reported on the event, describing Tolkachev as a staff member at one of Moscow's research institutes who had been arrested in June trying to pass secret materials to the United States. The next year they issued a report that he had been executed for high treason.

It is a virtual certainty that Tolkachev was compromised by Edward Lee Howard, either in late 1984 or early 1985. Howard had been made aware of the operation in preparation for his planned assignment to Moscow in 1983. Ames knew almost nothing abut the case, certainly not enough to pinpoint Tolkachev before the latter's arrest. Neither Sandy nor Jeanne knew anything about it either because it was the most carefully compartmentalized of all SE operations. Ironically, after the June arrest of Stombaugh, Ames was handed the Tolkachev files and asked to prepare an analysis of what had gone wrong. He never finished his task because he was diverted to the debriefing of Yurchenko, the KGB CI officer who defected at the beginning of August, and subsequently began Italian-language training. However, in the unlikely event that the KGB had any unanswered questions after Howard's reporting, a search of Tolkachev's office and residences, and revelations during his post-arrest interrogation, Ames would have been in a position to fill the gaps.