Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 116

Global Security and Intelligence Studies - Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2016
Review of The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold
War Espionage and Betrayal
David E. Hoffman (2015). The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage
and Betrayal. New York: Doubleday . 0385537603. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp Xii,
336
The Billion Dollar Spy is easily one of the catchiest titles to come out of the
nonfiction Cold-War war-in-the-shadows era. In fact, the dust jacket art makes it
appear to be misplaced on bookstores shelves, as it looks like one of those seemingly
churned out “thrillers.” Instead, David E. Hoffman has given us a real-life thriller that
rivals its fictional counterparts, except there are no exotic locations, handsome James
Bond, or Jason Bourne type men or exotic and dangerous femme fatales.
Adolf Tolkachev is the hero of the book and, unlike our cinema stars, was a
hero in the greatest sense of the word. Tolkachev is perhaps as great of a hero as the
earlier Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, code named HERO who informed the clueless West
among other things of the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the West,
those who sold secrets to the Soviets generally did so for financial gain. Robert Hansen
stands to mind for sheer greed but so do the Walkers, a family that was a spy ring
whose disclosures to the Soviets left the West vulnerable to a first strike by Soviet
nuclear ICBM submarines as they disclosed how NATO tracked Soviet submarines
through the critical UK–Greenland–Iceland gap. Then you have those who were
attracted for ideological purposes, generally those of a leftist bent to start with such as
the Cambridge Five and the Rosenbergs, and other Soviet agents that were attracted
by the New Deal. Tolkachev is vastly different from these types because it is harder to
get a grasp on his motivations. Penkovsky is easier to understand as his family, despite
his rise to some prominence, had suffered from the Bolshevik Revolution. However,
Tolkachev is harder to profile in any of the normal psychological aspects.
Yet Tolkachev seems to be a mere historical footnote until this work. How
important was he? In the late 1970s, it seemed that the Soviets had moved ahead of
the West in fighters and radars. Tolkachev from 1978 to 1985 gave his handler officers
thousands of pages of top-secret documents. The book goes into great detail how
Tolkachev had to be ingenious and innovative in gaining access to the materials as
well as the necessary spy craft. The parts on his use of cameras, dead drops and such,
all standard spy genre fare, become far more interesting when you realize a single slip
means the death of not a fictional character but a man with a family. The key revelations
that Tolkachev gave to the West dealt with their ground radars that defended against
attacks, and radars on their warplanes that provided an unknown new capacity, that
would gain a tactical advantage in aerial combat by achieving faster lock-on for their
missile systems.
Hoffman savages the Central Intelligence Agency by taking them to task for
their failure to respond to the Soviet threat by developing sources. Hoffman lays out
in brutal fashion that James J. Angleton, head of counterintelligence from 1954 to
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doi: 10.18278/gsis.2.1.10