Spy for a billion. the traitor Tolkachev inflicted the greatest damage in the history of the USSR. Ksenia Kirillova: Adolf Tolkachev: a feat of betrayal Spy Adolf

The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler 1943 - USA (74 min) Prod. Universal (associate producer Ben Pivar) Dir. JAMES HOGAN Scene. Fritz Kortner based on a story by Fritz Kortner and Joe May Oper. Jerome Ash · Music. Hans J. Salter Starring Ludwig Donath (Adolf Hitler / Franz Hubert),

THE PRICE OF BETRAYAL
In February 1977, a CIA officer working in Moscow under the diplomatic cover of the American embassy discovered a note under the windshield wiper of his car. The anonymous writer who wrote it claimed to have access to military information that is so valuable that it can tip the balance of power in favor of the United States. The author expressed a desire to meet with a member of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A few weeks later another note appeared. It was accompanied by a description of some of the technical details of one of the Soviet radar systems. But even this was not enough to convince the CIA leadership of the sincerity of the author of the messages.

In the attempts of the unknown to get in touch with the Americans, the novice psychiatrist would have seen signs of hypomanic behavior, but CIA Director Stansfield Turner regarded it in his own way, finding in the actions of the stranger confirmation of his suspicions that all this was a provocation of the Lubyanka. It was known that the "outdoor" KGB was monitoring the American and British embassies 24 hours a day. What kind of idiot would dare to approach like that?! Only one who has nothing to lose, since he was not a real initiative spy, but acted under the guidance and at the instigation of the State Security Committee.

However, CIA resident in Moscow Gardner Gus Hathaway did not share his patron's point of view, considering his fears inadequate. Hathaway always believed that intelligence officers, like orderlies of nature, do not eat carrion. They are predators that kill sick animals. The thought that it is possible to miss the "golden goat", which itself suggests itself in the network, did not give him rest. In a categorical telegram addressed to Turner, he asked permission to call the author at the number listed in one of his notes. The director reluctantly agreed.

CIA station chief in Moscow Gardner Rugg "Gus" Hathaway (right) in one of the rooms of the US embassy, ​​early 80s.

“We got your note,” Hathaway said to the man who answered the phone. - In the telephone booth, which is the second to the left from the entrance to the Institute of Radio Industry, a package is waiting for you.

The CIA's Moscow station staff watched from their cars as a thin, nondescript man approached a telephone booth and grabbed a package. It contained a list of questions about Soviet radars, detailed instructions on how and where to leave answers, and a small amount of Soviet money equal to five hundred dollars.

A week later, the thin man put his message in the agreed place. All doubts about whether he was a double agent or not were instantly dispelled, since the data he presented was so secret that the CIA headquarters immediately understood that the KGB would never risk revealing it.
An American intelligence officer was sent to meet with a volunteer recruit.
“My name is Adolf Tolkachev, I am the chief specialist of the Soviet Union in air navigation systems,” the nondescript man introduced himself. With these words began his work at Langley, which lasted almost eight years.

Subsequently, Hathaway took "Sfie" - the operational pseudonym assigned to Tolkachev by the CIA - for personal communication. A fact that eloquently testified to the importance attached by the Americans to cooperation with the "initiator" agent and the value of the information received from him.

Tolkachev provided the Americans with detailed data on the electronic control systems used by Soviet MiG fighters, as well as the countermeasures they used to elude American aircraft and radar.

Prior to the exposure of "Sfie", the CIA had managed to accumulate more than two million dollars in its accounts in American banks - an insignificant amount compared to what the United States could have spent on relevant research in the field of electronics. Thus, the spy saved American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

“... Employees of the Central Intelligence Agency like to joke that Tolkachev took them into custody, - Aldrich Ames, one of the leaders of Langley, later reported to Moscow, a super agent of the Lubyanka, - it was he who repaid all the budgetary costs of the CIA, literally on a silver platter, presenting the United States with Soviet aviation radio electronics. Start a world war, and in the air NATO would have an undeniable advantage..

The Americans shared the secrets received from Sfieh with their main ally in the Middle East - Israel, and soon the Arabs, whose air force was 99% equipped with Soviet military aircraft, discovered their vulnerability and reach for the air defense systems of the Jewish Defense Army.

Change is profitable. Never before in history has the United States been able to secure a more cost-effective agent. The profit received by the Americans from the CIA-Sfie joint venture amounted to about 20 billion dollars. Adjusted for inflation, today it is about 100 billion.

Change is profitable. Multibillion-dollar contracts for the supply of Soviet aircraft and air defense systems to Arab countries were thwarted ...

TRAITOR FOUND. WHAT TO DO?
Having received a tip from Aldrich Ames, the Soviet counterintelligence officers carefully found out which scientific programs and projects Tolkachev had direct access to, and which he showed an increased interest, not due to official necessity, ordering special literature from the secret library of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of the Radio Industry.

It turned out that the spy's interest in information constituting military and state secrets is unlimited, and access to them is unlimited. There was something to grab your head from - over the past seven years, a lot of documents under the heading “Owls. Secret" and "Especial Importance".

(Note: During the investigation, Tolkachev spoke in detail about the methods he used to collect top secret and secret materials. Their essence boiled down to the fact that he "to the fullest" used blunders in secret office work and the regime at the research institute where he worked.
He established that documents in special suitcases were not checked when they were handed over at the end of the working day, which made it possible to store them for several days and take them home for photographing; resorted to various tricks to fill out "Permits" for the issuance of secret documents - left unclosed brackets, and after the official's signature, entered the necessary documents and closed the brackets; fraudulently received a blank "Permit" form, filled out its front side, entered there only a small part of the inventory numbers of documents that he had previously got acquainted with in the First Department, and handed it over to the American intelligence officer with photographs of the original "Permission" and a description of the ink color of the signatures of officials for their forgeries on the new form.
Thus, the "Permission" cards were replaced twice. It was the second, fake card with its illogicality that attracted the attention of the checking operative worker.
Some of the documents were photographed by Tolkachev in the toilet room of the institute. Tolkachev arranged a "workplace" for shooting top secret materials at his home - from drawing boards, wooden blocks and a clamp with a spherical hinge received from the Americans, with which he fastened the Pentax camera.)

So, the KGB analysts decided, the original ideas that Tolkachev managed to get acquainted with have already found a worthy appreciation overseas and are now being developed in the secret laboratories there, or, being materialized, are already working for our enemy! Damn it! Everything that we have achieved as a result of incredible efforts has been bought up by the Americans for next to nothing. However, soon the panic mood was replaced by a sober calculation. An order was received: “Develop an action plan that neutralizes or minimizes the damage done!” And smart heads at Lubyanka remembered one old operation.

"KHOROVOD"
For the first time, an operation to misinform the enemy under this code name was successfully carried out against American intelligence agencies more than fifty years ago. Yes, so fortunately, that in the end allowed the USSR to get ahead of the United States in the field of rocket science and space exploration by a whole decade.

During an air parade held in August 1955 in the presence of foreign diplomats and military attachés of countries with which the Soviet Union was in a state of cold war, an armada of heavy bombers flew over Red Square for 15-20 minutes at an ultra-low altitude, link by link. new type. These aircraft turned out to be much more than the foreign intelligence officers operating in Moscow could have imagined. As a result, they got the impression that dozens and hundreds of machines of this heavy-duty type roll off the assembly lines of our aircraft factories.
In fact, the same squadron of these monster planes flew in circles, appearing again and again over the heads of the stunned foreigners every three minutes.

The purpose of this distraction was to create the appearance that the USSR intended to increase the power of its offensive forces by throwing the entire resource of the military-industrial complex into the production of super-heavy bombers, that is, we are going to focus in a possible war on the use of aviation. In reality, the Soviet Union was building intercontinental ballistic missiles at an accelerated pace.

The deception succeeded. As a result, the United States, despite the fact that they had at their disposal the rocket production technology exported from post-war Germany and its creator Wernher von Braun, ceased to pay due attention to the development of rocket science, and began to develop new types of aircraft, massive production and improvement of air defense systems - the Russians in a possible war, they intend to deliver air strikes with super-powerful bombers!

Successfully carried out in 1955, Operation Khorovod had serious and far-reaching consequences. So serious that the launch by the Soviet Union in October 1957 of the first artificial Earth satellite brought the administration of US President Dwight Eisenhower and the American intelligence services into a state of shock. They could not believe that the USSR was able to recover so quickly after the war, and even more so in such a short time to create such a powerful launch vehicle. The United States rushed after, but time was lost.

The triumph of the disinformation operation of the main adversary became especially obvious after six years, when on April 12, 1961, a Russian, not an American, was the first in space!

A week later, Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was fired. And although the formal reason for his elimination was considered an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, everyone in the American administration understood very well that President Kennedy could not forgive him for his miscalculations six years ago and the lag in the development of space systems ...

Operation Khorovod, carried out by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (military intelligence) together with the USSR State Security Committee, has become a classic of counter-espionage and the art of disinformation.

GAME FOR BIG
This is how they decided to play at the Lubyanka: strike at the same time in several directions.

First of all, it was necessary to turn Tolkachev into a channel for promoting outwardly tempting, but, in fact, disorienting or dead-end ideas to the enemy. In this way, we would be able to lock the Americans' research into an "unusable object", forcing them to scatter material resources and scientific potential.

When planning to use "Sfie" for its own purposes, the KGB of the USSR proceeded from the fact that he, who had served his overseas masters flawlessly for many years, enjoys their unconditional trust and so accustomed them to the use of exquisite dishes - overvalued information - that they, without hesitation, will swallow and others, but already cooked in committee kitchens. Why not? After all, patients swallow dummy pills instead of narcotic pills. The main thing is that the patient trusts the doctor!

In the course of studying the subscriber cards of the secret library of the Research Institute of the Radio Industry, counterintelligence officers established that since 1981 Tolkachev has consistently shown an increased interest in the technology of creating a stealth bomber by Soviet specialists. It was at this time that the Americans began to actively develop their own version of the aircraft, which cannot be detected by radar. The American "stealth" was a complete analogue of our "invisibility". We were far ahead of the United States in this direction, so the services of "Sfie", a contract supplier of top-secret information related to our project, would have been a godsend for the enemy.

Over the next ten months, Tolkachev regularly supplied his overseas customers with information concocted according to the KGB prescription in special "kitchens" - in the secret laboratories of the branches of the All-Russian Research Institute of the Radio Industry. The American scientists and technicians working on the Stealth project were suddenly bombarded with information. As a result, with the help of Sfie, we managed to prevent the completion of work on the Stealth within the time frame set by the Americans and forced the US military-industrial complex to make unreasonably high costs.

But the most important thing was that, thanks to the efforts of Soviet counterintelligence officers, the American version of the domestic "invisibility" posed no more threat to the USSR than an airship. The American generals were able to verify this already during the first flight tests of the "stealth". The Pentagon was waiting for a discouraging discovery: the newest aircraft was invisible only to the American national air defense system! Meanwhile, about 30 billion dollars were spent on its creation ...

WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
The explanations are simple. Unable to force the Americans to completely abandon the idea of ​​​​creating an aircraft that is not picked up by radars, Moscow tried to make it obviously vulnerable to our air defense systems. To do this, Tolkachev was slipped a specially developed technical documentation in a secret library.
The rest was completed by the human factor. Trying to report as quickly as possible on the completion of the construction of the miracle aircraft, the engineers of Northrop Corporation, the main manufacturing contractor, often mindlessly, mechanically copied the very technology that Sfie supplied them, not even suspecting the deception.

It took the Americans a total of about eight years to correct the data that got into the laboratories of the Northrop corporation through the efforts of the USSR State Security Committee. For the first time, "stealth" was used only in 1991 during the hostilities against Iraq, during Operation Desert Storm.

DETENTION
“Our client gets drunk every time he visits the dacha,” Vladimir Zaitsev, deputy commander of Alfa, reported his thoughts to the generals, “so on Sunday evening, when the Tolkachevs leave for Moscow, the spy’s wife will most likely be driving. I will put two of my fighters, disguised as policemen, by the road leading to the dacha. One of them will pretend to chastise the driver of a truck parked at the curb. The second will make a sign to the summer residents to stop. As soon as the Tolkachev’s car stops, “alfovtsy” will jump out of the back of the truck, surround the car and seize it.”

... Everything happened as Zaitsev planned. While Tolkachev's wife was thinking about why they were stopped, the Alpha fighters not only managed to handcuff her husband, but also cut his clothes to shreds to make sure that he did not have poison with him.
Tolkachev was found to have a written message about the latest developments in military equipment, mini-cameras with captured top secret documents. During a search of the apartment, a number of physical evidence of his espionage activities were seized, including secret writing tools, codes, ciphers, instructions, an ampoule with poison, handwritten materials containing top secret information, large sums of money and jewelry.

A few hours later in Lefortovo, without recovering from the shock, “Sfie” wrote a confession with his own hand ...

In October 1985, William Kusevich, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, published an article: "...According to materials obtained from high-ranking US intelligence officials, Tolkachev was one of the most successful CIA agents in the Soviet Union...
For several years, he passed on invaluable information to the Americans about the latest Soviet research in the field of aviation technology, especially avionics - electronic tracking and countermeasures equipment, including modern radars and so-called "stealths", or technology with which an aircraft cannot be detected by radar. Such research is a major achievement in the field of military aviation ...
He was one of the most profitable sources and saved us billions of dollars by passing on information about the direction in which Soviet aviation would develop ... As a result, the United States lost one of the most valuable agents in the USSR.

On June 16–23, 1986, the case against Tolkachev was heard in a court session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The materials of the investigation were fully confirmed in the course of the trial. Tolkachev's guilt was established by the testimony of witnesses and material evidence.
The military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, having found Tolkachev guilty of treason in the form of espionage, sentenced him to an exceptional measure of punishment - the death penalty.

Required addition. On April 28, 1994, Aldrich Ames, a former CIA officer accused of spying for the USSR, was sentenced to life imprisonment by an American court. One of the charges brought against him is the "surrender" of more than ten valuable CIA agents. And among them - "Adolf Tolkachev, an employee of a top secret research institute, who handed over to the Americans, in particular, information about the "friend or foe" system. He was recruited in Moscow on a" monetary" basis and dissatisfied with his official position. He was shot on September 24, 1986." If this is true and Ames "surrendered" Tokachev at the very beginning of his cooperation (April 1985), then we have an example of a successful joint operation of two Soviet special services - intelligence and counterintelligence.

A person can become a traitor out of weakness or out of hopelessness.

Spies choose their profession voluntarily.

Boris Akunin "Nothing is sacred"

God forbid, at the end of June 1941, to be in the place of a fourteen-year-old teenager named Adolf, who lives in an ordinary Moscow house on 4th Meshchanskaya Street. From the first day of the war, the life of Adolf Tolkachev turned into hell, as if a well-educated, always studying "A" young man had to be responsible for the misfortunes and disasters that Adolf Hitler brought down on the country. The boy, as usual, received the ill-fated name Adolf from his parents. In the mid-1920s, sister of mercy Elizaveta Nikolaevna Kurapaeva from a family of Orenburg philistines fell in love to death with a young doctor at the Aktobe city hospital, Georgy Tolkachev, who was fond of German romanticism. And when their first child was born in January 1927, his father suggested calling him Adolf.

A short, physically fragile, proud guy who did not want to bend before the yard punks was beaten mercilessly, so much so that in one of the fights his nose was broken. After spending a month in a multi-bed ward, Adolf left the hospital with a firm conviction that people are bastards and that they need to quickly accumulate strength in order to be able to stand up for themselves with their fists.

Capable, with an excellent memory, Adolf had "five" in all subjects and "went" to the gold medal. Before the matriculation exams, Nina Afanasyevna Fefelova, head of the public education department of the Shcherbakovskiy district of Moscow, visited the school. Uncultured, having hardly graduated from the Perm Pedagogical Institute, she clearly followed the basic rule of Soviet pedagogy - "the school should be the center of communist education."

Looking through the lists of contenders for the medal, Fefelova drew attention to the future gold medalist Adolf Tolkachev, going under the first number.

Are you completely out of your mind!? yelled the head of the district. - We defeated Hitler in the Great Patriotic War, and after that all sorts of “adolfs” will receive gold medals from us? Yes, it's a complete wreck!

A frightened school director named Savich made an unacceptable mistake in his youth - he joined the party of socialist revolutionaries, the so-called "SRs". Having such a “dark spot” in his biography and knowing that there are no former enemies for the Bolsheviks, he immediately assured Comrade Fefelova: “correct conclusions will be drawn from her fair remarks.”

The undeserved "four" in algebra - Tolkachev's favorite subject, which deprived him of a gold medal, forever left in Adolf's soul a heavy trace of hatred for the Soviet school and its teachers.

In the ninth grade, Adolf read an article about radar in the popular science magazine TECHNIKA- YOUTH, which combined modern advanced radio engineering with combat experience in warfare. The young man was struck by the capabilities of these devices, which combine accurate calculations and lightning-fast actions of the weapons controlled by them.

After graduating from school, Tolkachev entered the Moscow Military Mechanical College at the department of optics and radar, and then in 1948 he passed exams at the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute (KhPI) at the Faculty of Radio Engineering. The city of Kharkiv at that time was one of the largest scientific centers of the country - it is enough to recall the graduate of KhPI Nobel laureate Lev Davidovich Landau.

Adolf studied well, in the fourth year he received a Stalin scholarship, and actively worked at the Department of Radar. After a brilliant defense of the graduation project, Tolkachev was invited to work in Moscow, in the design bureau of plant No. 339, which developed radars for the latest fighters.

Adolf was successfully promoted, received two copyright certificates for inventions, passed the exams for the candidate's minimum, but then his career slowed down sharply, and, first of all, this was due to Tolkachev's negative attitude to business trips to the flight range located in the Astrakhan region.

The authorities believed that the test site was the face of the plant, and evaluated the employees based on the results they received in the process of testing equipment on combat aircraft. Working conditions at the training ground were extremely difficult - many months of business trips away from the family, forty-degree heat in summer and piercing wind in severe frosts in winter. Drunkenness was a serious problem on business trips. Separated from the family, a person “fell off the coils”, giving himself to drinking in his free time, and often during working hours, since there were plenty of reasons for this - the successful completion of the next stage of testing, birthdays of colleagues, holidays. Drunkenness flourished thanks to the availability of free technical alcohol, which was a kind of "currency". Everything was paid for with alcohol, from overtime work to successful technical solutions. Sad statistics showed that people who constantly traveled to the landfill rarely lived to be fifty years old. Perhaps this was also facilitated by uncontrolled powerful radiation of microwave frequencies (SHF) by radar transmitters.

In 1957, Adolf married Natalya Ivanovna Kuzmina. Her father, Ivan Petrovich Kuzmin, was the editor of the newspaper Light Industry, and her mother, Sofya Efimovna Badmas, worked as an economist at the People's Commissariat of the Forestry Industry. Sofia was born in the city of Kremenchug, in a wealthy Jewish family. In August 1937, party member Sofya Badmas was arrested for ties with a Trotskyist sabotage and terrorist organization and in December of that year she was shot. Following his wife, Ivan Kuzmin was soon arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and their two-year-old daughter was taken to an orphanage.

In 1947, Kuzmin was released from the camp with a ten-year term of disqualification, and he was able to reunite with his daughter only in 1953 after the death of Stalin. In 1955, his father was rehabilitated "for lack of evidence," and in December 1956 he died.

After graduating from school, Natalya Kuzmina entered the Moscow Energy Institute, and in her fifth year she was assigned to the 339th plant. During her pre-graduation practice, she met the leading engineer Tolkachev. This serious, well-read, laconic man helped her in writing her diploma, and gradually the working relationship between them turned into a friendly one. They were united by many things, and first of all, by the injustice they faced in their lives. Natalia and Adolf began dating, and two years later they got married. In May 1965, a son, Oleg, was born in the Tolkachev family, and it became crowded in Natasha's small room. The Tolkachevs applied to the factory committee, and a year later they were given a two-room apartment.

The house in which the apartment was received was unusual. The "Stalinist" skyscraper in the Krasnopresnensky district, on Vosstaniya Square, was one of the seven Moscow "wonders of the world" erected to commemorate the leader's seventieth birthday.

Subsequently, KGB investigators, as well as Tolkachev's handlers from the CIA, could not figure out why a family of ordinary engineers was able to get an apartment in a house for the Soviet elite, located two hundred meters from the American embassy.

In the early 1970s, the country plunged deeper and deeper into stagnation. Billions of rubles went into arms, but the most necessary was not enough. His Majesty "deficiency" ruled the ball. The development of new technology - exactly what Tolkachev was doing - was carried out extremely inefficiently. One-fourth of the staff could have been disposed of without any damage, but that was out of the question. The inflexible and unwieldy economic mechanism had rusted, and much rested on the enthusiasm of individuals. A breakthrough in the space industry and our superiority over the Americans, especially after the death of Chief Designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, gradually leveled off.

Not believing in the "chatter" of newspapers, radio and television, Tolkachev, like millions of Soviet people, fell to the shortwave receiver, listening to "enemy voices." It was not without reason that a ditty went among the people - "There is a custom in Russia - to listen to the BBC at night." The work no longer brought satisfaction, and more and more complications and problems that arose were required by the authorities to be closed on an “urgent basis”. Gradually, Tolkachev thought more and more about changing the society in which he lives. To a large extent, he was prompted by the act of Academician Sakharov. The man who had everything, was favored by the Soviet authorities, had the courage to oppose the system. Sakharov decided on an act that forever turned his future life upside down - he published his manifesto abroad and gave an interview to Western media. Another dissident, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had no less influence on the Tolkachevs. Listening to The Gulag Archipelago, Natalya cried, remembering her dead parents.

On September 6, 1976, Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko on the latest MiG25 fighter, which was called the Flying Fox according to the NATO classification, flew over the border and landed in Japan. Foreign experts immediately arrived at the airfield, primarily the Americans, who began to thoroughly study the "Russian" aircraft. Tolkachev learned about this incident before most Soviet citizens, since the research and production association NPO Fazotron - this is how plant No. 339 began to be called since 1971 - in order to minimize the damage from the hijacking, was entrusted with reworking the onboard radar of the MiG25 fighter.

Belenko's act prompted Tolkachev to decide to fight the existing Soviet regime by weakening it, especially since he had in his hands such a powerful weapon as state secrets. Over and over again, Adolf is obsessed with the idea of ​​making contact with the Americans in order to pass on the secret information that he has.

As a result, he directed all his efforts to the realization of his plan.

Tolkachev's first attempt to contact the Americans took place on January 3, 1977. A man approached the car of Fulton, the chief of the CIA station at the US Embassy, ​​at a gas station for foreigners and spoke in English,

You are an American? I would like to talk to you.

Fulton asked,

What do you want?

It's hard for me to speak, - and switching to Russian, he added, - Sorry, - after which he leaned over to the car and put a piece of paper on the seat.

Everything happened in just a matter of seconds. The man turned around and walked along the alley, and Fulton returned to the embassy without noticing that he was being followed. The handwritten note outlined a proposal for a meeting "on a strictly confidential basis" with a time and place. In response to a report sent to the CIA, it was stated: "... although the note looks authentic, but, fearing provocations by the KGB, you should not make contact."

On February 7, 1977, at seven o'clock in the evening, Fulton, leaving the embassy, ​​found the same man near his car.

What would you like? Fulton asked, opening the door. Instead of answering, the man threw a letter into the car and quickly disappeared. In the letter, the unknown person said that he was aware of the Americans' fear of being provoked by the KGB, but this did not apply to him. He is an engineer, works at a secret enterprise and would like to meet, as he has specific proposals.

At CIA headquarters, again, the suggestion of an unknown man was viewed with suspicion and Fulton was ordered not to respond to signals.

On December 10, 1977, at the Tishinsky market, an unknown person approached the butler of the American embassy with a request to pass the letter to someone in the embassy. CIA station chief Gus Hathaway found two typewritten pages in the letter with data on the airborne radar stations of Soviet military aircraft. The letter reported that its author was currently involved in the alteration of the radar of the MiG25 fighter-interceptor, in order to eliminate the damage received as a result of the hijacking by the pilot Belenko. Among others, the letter contained lines that sounded like a bolt from the blue to American military and civilian experts - "I have access to the development of systems for detecting and destroying targets in the lower hemisphere."

The fact is that the United States based the concept of future wars on the use of Tomogawk cruise missiles, which hit a given target with high accuracy. The appearance in the Russians of a radar capable of detecting targets against the background of the earth, that is, those under the wing of a fighter, would become a serious threat to cruise missiles flying at low altitude. That is why the information contained in the December 10th note stunned Americans. Realizing the possible significance of the information received, the CIA decided to take the person who transmitted the note “for development” and give him the code name SPHERE - “SPHERE”.

The meeting, which took place on March 1st, 1978, could be considered fateful - an unknown person finally revealed his identity. Late in the evening, when Hathaway and his wife were getting into the car in Bolshoi Devyatinsky Lane, a man already familiar to him approached the car, held out an envelope and said,

You are welcome.

Thank you, - answered Hathaway, and the car started off.

The note received read “…. To remove any doubts, I provide basic information about myself. I am Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev, born in 1927 in the city of Aktyubinsk (Kazakh SSR). Since 1929 I have been living in Moscow. In 1948 I graduated from the Optical-Mechanical College (Department of Radar), and in 1954 - from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute (Department of Radio Engineering). Since 1954 I have been working at the NPO Fazotoron. My family: wife (Kuzmina Natalya Ivanovna), 12-year-old son (Tolkachev Oleg).

The very first meetings of the Americans with Tolkachev clearly showed that they were dealing with a disciplined, accurate person, who exactly followed the instructions received, who deliberately took the path of espionage, and most importantly, personally involved in the development of secret equipment.

Coming into contact with the Americans, Tolkachev outlined in detail a long-term plan for working with the CIA, designed for twelve years. In it, he proposed to transfer to the Americans data on radars, rocket and cannon weapons, drawings, diagrams, as well as real components and parts of the latest aircraft.

At a meeting on January 1, 1979, Tolkachev agreed with John Guilsher, an employee of the Moscow residency, about the amount of monetary compensation, and photographic equipment, which should facilitate the collection of data. In order to increase the efficiency of obtaining classified information, Tolkachev was given the latest achievements in espionage technology - Molly miniature cameras and Pentax ME SLR cameras.

With the help of this technique, over eight thousand pages of the most secret information were photographed. Filming of documents was carried out in Tolkachev's office and even in the toilet rooms, however, the lion's share of the materials intended for transfer to the Americans was photographed secretly from his son and wife directly in his apartment. The method invented by Tolkachev to take out secret documents was ingeniously simple and was based on the "gaps" made by the State Security Committee when writing the "Instructions for maintaining state secrets at sensitive enterprises of the USSR."

During the period from January 1979 to June 1985, Tolkachev personally met the Americans a total of 21 times. An analysis of the information transmitted by Tolkachev contained information about 54 top secret developments created and designed by the military-industrial complex of the USSR. According to experts, the information obtained with the help of Tolkachev was worth about two billion dollars.

It is well known that among the reasons that prompted a person to embark on the path of espionage, money plays an important role. The leaders of the intelligence services are well aware that the exorbitant amounts received by agents as a reward in some cases become the reason for their failure. During the recruitment, CIA residents drew Tolkachev's attention to this circumstance, however, he made it clear that money for him is a sign of respect, a sign that his work is appreciated. In total, during his work in the United States, Tolkachev was transferred about 800 thousand rubles, and 2 million dollars accumulated on his deposit account in a foreign bank, but this money was never useful to him.

Psychologists from the CIA and the KGB, who studied Tolkachev's personality type, independently came to the conclusion that he is an introvert, that is, a person outwardly calm, not openly expressing his emotions and feelings. As a rule, this is a pedantic, very punctual person who performs any work thoroughly correctly, to the letter, to the comma. It is possible that thanks to this, Tolkachev avoided failure for so many years.

The first priority of the Americans was the well-being of the agent, constantly risking his life. The CIA headquarters strongly recommended that contacts with Tolkachev be made through electronic means of communication, however, employees who directly contacted Tolkachev understood how important it was for a person who lived in constant tension to shake hands and look into the eyes of a handler whom he trusted. .

After establishing full-fledged contacts, Tolkachev requested a lethal capsule with poison, which the Americans had the code name L-tablet (from the word lethal - lethal). Several attempts were made at CIA Headquarters to convince their agent that it was undesirable for him to have such a pill, since there was a danger of panicking and taking the pill unnecessarily. On December 8, 1980, Tolkachev handed over a pen with a deadly poison, but he failed to use it in a moment of real danger.

The ancient Roman playwright and poet Terentius owns the expression: "I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me." These words can be attributed to Adolf Tolkachev. In addition to spy equipment, he asked his curators to get medicine for himself and his wife, glasses, and books banned in the USSR. When his son Oleg became interested in Western rock bands, Tolkachev asked for records from Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep and other bands, explaining that although all this can be purchased in Moscow on the "black market", but these were poor quality re-recordings, my son loves the clean sound. When, after graduating from school, Oleg entered the Institute of Architecture, at the request of Tolkachev, they sent him drawing pencils of different hardness for his student son, ink, pens, washing gum and other drawing accessories that were impossible to get in Moscow.

He loved his wife, was crazy about his son, and it is not clear why he became a spy, realizing what he dooms his family to in case of failure.

Ironically, Tolkachev fell victim to betrayal, and if he chose his path voluntarily, then the person who betrayed him became a traitor because of his own weakness, addictions and exorbitant conceit.

Edward Lee Howard, born in 1951, the son of Spanish immigrants, a man with a clear aptitude for languages, after graduating from the American University in Washington, worked as a volunteer in the Peace Corps (English - Peace Corps). After his marriage, he bought a house in the suburbs of Chicago, but the life of a married man seemed boring to him, and he decided to go to work in the CIA.

I'm going to get those CIA bastards, I'm going to crush them like they never dreamed of.

Figuratively speaking, a car driven by Edward Lee Howard jumped into the oncoming lane, where a fatal collision for Adolf Tolkachev was inevitable.

From the moment they received information from Howard, the KGB began an active search for an American spy at the enterprises of the USSR Ministry of Radio Industry. The task of the KGB was facilitated by the head of counterintelligence of the Soviet department of the CIA, Aldrich Hazen Ames. For $50,000, he gave the Russians information about a number of CIA agents in the KGB, in intelligence and industry.

Having established the name of the American spy, the state security officers launched surveillance of Tolkachev, secretly visited his house several times, where they found a spy cache on the mezzanine. Time passed, and there were no contacts between Tolkachev and the Americans, and, losing patience, the top leadership of the KGB decided to arrest the spy.

The arrest of Tolkachev and his wife took place on June 9, 1985. Under the pretext of an alleged traffic accident, KGB operatives, dressed in the uniform of employees of the State traffic inspectorate, stopped the car in which Tolkachev and his wife were at the exit from the suburban village near Moscow and asked him to get out of the car and present documents. As soon as Tolkachev left the car and handed over his documents, he was immediately seized and at the same second, fearing that the spy would use the poison capsule, they put a gag in his mouth. Natalya Kuzmina was asked to transfer to another car. What Tolkachev feared most of all - falling into the hands of the KGB - took place.

On August 1, 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, deputy head of the counterintelligence unit for the United States and Canada, applied to the American embassy in Rome and was transferred to the Andrews airbase near Washington. Yurchenko told the Americans about a number of agents working for the KGB. Among them was a certain "Robert" - a former CIA officer who was trained, but even before the start of a business trip to Moscow, he was fired from intelligence. Calculating Howard from this description was not difficult.

Soviet intelligence agents warned Howard that one of their employees had fled to the United States and that if he felt that trouble was beginning, he must immediately go into hiding. On September 21, 1985, Howard flies to Helsinki via New York and Copenhagen, and from there he is taken to the USSR in the trunk of a Soviet embassy car.

In August 1986, Howard was granted political asylum in the USSR. He died on July 12, 2002 at his Russian dacha under mysterious circumstances (according to one version, he broke his neck). His body was cremated, but where the ashes are buried remains unknown.

Another Soviet agent, Aldrich Ames, who contributed to the exposure of Adolf Tolkachev, was arrested on February 21, 1994 and two months later sentenced to life imprisonment with confiscation of property, which he, to this day, is serving in a maximum security prison Allenwood in Pennsylvania.

Once in the KGB detention center in Lefortovo, Tolkachev admitted to espionage, but firmly insisted that his family knew nothing. During the trial, a three-judge military tribunal charged Tolkachev with espionage. During the announcement of the verdict, Tolkachev stood and held himself upright. The judge read out the verdict: "to be found guilty of treason in the form of espionage and subjected to the highest measure of punishment - execution." Tolkachev looked ahead, and his face did not express any emotions. His request for clemency was later denied.

After the verdict was announced, Tolkachev was allowed a farewell meeting with his son Oleg - 15 minutes in a crowded prison meeting room. It was a tragic moment for both of them. Tolkachev apologized to his son.

No, no, no, - Oleg answered, meaning that there was no need to say that.

While on an official visit to Moscow in October 1986, US President Ronald Reagan turned to Mikhail Gorbachev with a request to transfer Tolkachev to the jurisdiction of the United States: "After all, espionage is a war without corpses, isn't it, Mr. Gorbachev?" The Secretary General disappointed the president: “It’s too late… they’ve already shot…” The sentence was carried out on September 24, which was reported to Gorbachev by the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Viktor Chebrikov at a Politburo meeting at the end of September.

Natalya Kuzmina was also tried and sentenced to three years, allegedly for complicity in her husband's espionage activities. After serving her term, she returned to Moscow and got a job as a dispatcher in a boiler room. Until her death in 1991, Kuzmina worked actively in the public organization Memorial. Their son Oleg Tolkachev graduated from the Institute of Architecture and currently works in Moscow as the director of the company "Enterprise" ARC Group ".

And let me make a small digression at the end of the story.

The fact is that the author of these lines, by the nature of his activity, was seconded to the laboratory of NPO Fazotron, and from 1980 to 1985 he personally communicated with the lead designer Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev. Although for more than 30 years much has been forgotten, what is the memory of the man whose fate was so tragic.

Outwardly, he was a short, stocky man, with slicked back salt-and-pepper hair, intense dark gray eyes, a dimple in his chin, and a broken nose that reminds one of Michelangelo's self-portrait.

In communication, Adik - as his colleagues who had worked with him for a long time called him in the eyes, and behind the eyes of everyone else - was a personality, as the British say, “to be a little too buttoned up”, that is, “buttoned up”. He did not allow himself any amication and profanity, which is very common among the technical and creative intelligentsia.

His speeches at meetings and discussions were distinguished by laconicism and impeccable logic, and a good knowledge of mathematics and physics helped in solving technical problems. He did not speak foreign languages.

Conversations on topics not related to work, he, as a rule, did not support, with the exception of automobile problems. The fact is that Tolkachev, like the vast majority of car owners in the USSR, independently maintained and repaired his “iron horse”. Of course, he could have contacted a car service, but the quality of the services provided there was "below the baseboard", and, it seems, fussing with the car gave him pleasure.

Somehow, at a meeting, in anticipation of the eternally late bosses, a conversation turned on the toponymy of Moscow streets. I said that I was born in the center of Moscow, in Ulansky Lane, but, alas, this does not apply to light cavalry soldiers - everything is much more prosaic. The lane got its name in the middle of the 18th century, since the yard of the clerk Ivan Ulanov was located in this area. The landmark of the lane is the nearby building of the Tsentrosoyuz - the only building in Moscow designed by the great architect Le Corbusier. After the meeting, Tolkachev asked me to go to his office so that I could explain in more detail how to find this building. My interlocutor said that his son is studying at an architectural institute, and on Sundays they all walk around Moscow with the whole family, looking for various kinds of architectural sights. For the first time in the entire time of communication, warm notes were heard in the voice of Adolf Georgievich. Of course, I immediately complied with his request.

A couple of days after Tolkachev's arrest, when a team of KGB investigators was conducting a search in his office, Viktor Alexandrovich Tarasov, the laboratory's chief engineer, unexpectedly rushed in - a man in his fifties, a drunkard, a swearer, a connoisseur of jokes and, as he called himself, "a former womanizer." In the past, he was a capable engineer, but, unfortunately, he lost his knowledge and ability to work under the influence of his love for strong drinks that completely absorbed him. He had just returned from a business trip and was not aware of the latest developments.

What do you want, comrade? - A serious man, apparently the senior of the group, turned to Tarasov.

Yes, I actually need Adik.

What else Adik?

Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev.

And on what issue?

Yes, before I left, I borrowed a “chervonchik” from him, so I want to give it back.

I'm afraid that this is not possible in the foreseeable future, but now, if you please, leave the premises, - the man said sternly in a tone that brooks no objection.

When the head of the laboratory, Chernyak, explained to Tarasov what happened in his absence, he thought about it, and then uttered a phrase that has become part of the annals of NPO Fazotron:

Gee, oh my. Sergei Markovich, but if I knew that things would turn out like this, I should have borrowed a “twenty” from Adik.

Was it a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy? Perhaps no great playwright could answer this question.

, Kazakh SSR, - September 24) - Soviet engineer in the field of radar and aviation, CIA agent in -1985.

Biography

Tolkachev had a fairly high salary compared to many other Soviet citizens - about 350 rubles a month. He lived in a high-rise building next to the embassy of the United States of America, which later allowed him, under the guise of ordinary walks, to meet with a resident of American intelligence in the USSR.

Tolkachev's cooperation with US intelligence agencies

Tolkachev was aware of the danger of exposure and, despite his enormous financial resources, tried to live without attracting attention. Of all the wealth, he had only a VAZ-2101 and a country cottage. Perhaps this is the reason for such a long period of his activity.

Failure. Arrest, investigation and trial

The KGB of the USSR managed to get on the trail of Tolkachev absolutely by accident. In 1985, his handler, Edward Lee Howard, was fired from the CIA for embezzlement and drug addiction. An embittered Howard defected to the side of the USSR and gave the KGB a lot of top secret information, including the name of Adolf Tolkachev. According to other sources, information about him was transferred to the USSR by Aldrich Ames in May 1985. On June 9, 1985, Tolkachev was arrested, and on June 13, his contact Paul Stroumbach was arrested. During the investigation, Tolkachev confessed everything and asked the Soviet leadership not to pass a death sentence on him. The Supreme Court of the USSR considered Tolkachev's case in 1986 and found him guilty of committing a crime under Article 64, part "a" of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, and sentenced him to capital punishment - the death penalty by firing squad. On September 24, 1986, the sentence was carried out.

Documentaries

• About the espionage activities of A. G. Tolkachev in 2007, a documentary film "" from the series "Spies and Traitors" was filmed
• One of the series "Traitors" with Andrei Lugovoi (2014) tells about the activities of the spy Tolkachev

Write a review on the article "Tolkachev, Adolf Georgievich"

Literature

• Hoffman, David E. The Billion Dollar Spy / Per. A. Shirikov. - M .: AST, 2016. - 432 p. - (corpus). - 3000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-17-091347-3.

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An excerpt characterizing Tolkachev, Adolf Georgievich

The first time of his arrival, Nikolai was serious and even boring. He was tormented by the imminent need to intervene in these stupid household affairs for which his mother had called him. In order to get this burden off his shoulders as soon as possible, on the third day of his arrival, he angrily, without answering the question where he was going, went with frowning eyebrows to Mitenka's wing and demanded from him the accounts of everything. What these accounts of everything were, Nikolai knew even less than Mitenka, who had come in fear and bewilderment. The conversation and accounting of Mitenka did not last long. The headman, the elector and the zemstvo, who were waiting in the ante-room of the wing, heard with fear and pleasure at first how the young count’s voice, which seemed to rise ever higher, hummed and crackled, heard abusive and terrible words, pouring out one after another.
- Rogue! Ungrateful creature! ... I will chop up a dog ... not with my father ... robbed ... - etc.
Then these people, with no less pleasure and fear, saw how the young count, all red, with bloodshot eyes, pulled Mitenka by the collar, with great dexterity, with great dexterity, between his words, pushed him in the behind and shouted: “Get out! so that your spirit, bastard, is not here!
Mitenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran into the flower bed. (This flowerbed was a well-known area for saving criminals in Otradnoye. Mitenka himself, when he arrived drunk from the city, hid in this flowerbed, and many residents of Otradnoye, hiding from Mitenka, knew the saving power of this flowerbed.)
Mitenka's wife and sisters-in-law, with frightened faces, leaned out into the hallway from the door of the room, where a clean samovar was boiling and the clerk's high bed stood under a quilted blanket sewn from short pieces.
The young count, panting, paying no attention to them, walked past them with resolute steps and went into the house.
The countess, who immediately learned through the girls about what had happened in the wing, on the one hand, calmed down in the sense that now their condition should get better, on the other hand, she was worried about how her son would endure this. She tiptoed to his door several times, listening to him smoke pipe after pipe.
The next day the old count called his son aside and said to him with a timid smile:
- Do you know, you, my soul, got excited in vain! Mitenka told me everything.
"I knew, thought Nikolai, that I would never understand anything here in this stupid world."
- You were angry that he did not enter these 700 rubles. After all, he wrote them in transport, and you didn’t look at the other page.
- Daddy, he's a scoundrel and a thief, I know. And what he did, he did. And if you don't want me, I won't tell him anything.
- No, my soul (the count was also embarrassed. He felt that he was a bad manager of his wife's estate and was guilty before his children, but did not know how to fix it) - No, I ask you to take care of business, I'm old, I ...
- No, papa, you will forgive me if I did something unpleasant for you; I can do less than you.
“To hell with them, with these men and money, and transports along the page,” he thought. Even from the corner of six kush I understood once, but from the page of transport - I don’t understand anything, ”he said to himself, and since then he has no longer intervened. Only once did the countess call her son to her, inform him that she had Anna Mikhailovna's bill for two thousand, and asked Nikolai what he was thinking of doing with him.
“But how,” Nikolai answered. – You told me that it depends on me; I do not love Anna Mikhailovna and I do not love Boris, but they were friendly with us and poor. So that's how! - and he tore the bill, and with this act, with tears of joy, he made the old countess sob. After that, young Rostov, no longer intervening in any business, with passionate enthusiasm, took up the still new for him cases of dog hunting, which had been started on a large scale by the old count.

There were already winters, morning frosts shackled the ground moistened with autumn rains, already the greenery had become narrower and bright green separated from the stripes of turning brown, knocked out by cattle, winter and light yellow spring stubble with red stripes of buckwheat. The peaks and forests, which at the end of August were still green islands between the black fields of winter and stubble, became golden and bright red islands in the midst of bright green winters. The hare was already halfway lost (molted), the fox broods began to disperse, and the young wolves were larger than the dog. It was the best hunting time. The dogs of the hot, young hunter Rostov not only entered the hunting body, but also knocked out so that in the general council of hunters it was decided to give the dogs a rest for three days and go on departure on September 16, starting from the oak forest, where there was an untouched wolf brood.
This was the state of affairs on the 14th of September.
All that day the hunt was at home; it was frosty and poignant, but in the evening it began to rejuvenate and warmed up. On September 15, when young Rostov looked out the window in the morning in a dressing gown, he saw such a morning, better than which nothing could be better for hunting: as if the sky was melting and descending to the ground without wind. The only movement that was in the air was the quiet movement from top to bottom of descending microscopic drops of mist or mist. Transparent drops hung from the bare branches of the garden and fell on the newly fallen leaves. The ground in the garden, like poppies, turned glossy wet black, and at a short distance merged with the dull and damp cover of fog. Nikolay went out onto the porch, wet with dirt, which smelled of withering forest and dogs. The black-spotted, broad-assed bitch Milka, with big black bulging eyes, saw her master, got up, stretched back and lay down like a brown, then unexpectedly jumped up and licked him right on the nose and mustache. Another greyhound dog, seeing the owner from the colored path, arching its back, quickly rushed to the porch and raising the rule (tail), began to rub against Nikolai's legs.
- Oh goy! - that inimitable hunting echo was heard at that time, which combines both the deepest bass and the thinnest tenor; and from around the corner came Danilo, a hunter and hunter, trimmed in Ukrainian brackets, a gray-haired, wrinkled hunter with a bent rapnik in his hand and with that expression of independence and contempt for everything in the world that only hunters have. He took off his Circassian hat in front of the master, and looked at him contemptuously. This contempt was not offensive to the master: Nikolai knew that this Danilo, who despised everything and stood above all else, was still his man and hunter.
- Danila! - said Nikolai, timidly feeling that at the sight of this hunting weather, these dogs and the hunter, he was already seized by that irresistible hunting feeling in which a person forgets all previous intentions, like a man in love in the presence of his mistress.
“What do you order, your excellency?” asked the protodeacon's bass voice, hoarse with chirping, and two shiny black eyes looked from under their brows at the silent gentleman. "What, or can't you stand it?" as if those two eyes said.
- Nice day, huh? And the chase, and the jump, huh? - Nikolai said, scratching Milka behind the ears.
Danilo did not answer and winked his eyes.
- He sent Uvarka to listen at dawn, - his bass said after a moment of silence, - he said, he transferred it to the Otradnensky order, they howled there. (The translation meant that the she-wolf, whom they both knew about, went with the children to the Otradnensky forest, which was two miles from the house and which was a small detached place.)
- Do you have to go? Nikolai said. - Come to me with Ovarka.
- As you command!
- So wait a minute to feed.
- I'm listening.
Five minutes later, Danilo and Uvarka were standing in Nikolai's large office. Despite the fact that Danilo was not large in stature, seeing him in the room gave the impression similar to when you see a horse or a bear on the floor between the furniture and the conditions of human life. Danilo himself felt this and, as usual, stood at the very door, trying to speak more quietly, not to move, so as not to somehow break the master's chambers, and trying to express everything as soon as possible and go out into the open, from under the ceiling to the sky.