Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 25, 2019 12:26:09 GMT -8
The Billion Dollar Spyby David E. HoffmanInfo: Kindle editionGenre: non-fiction Publication Date: July 7, 2015 Length: 310 pages Quick Rating: It's the equivalent of two books in one: Factual history and a good spy thriller. Summary: From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Dead Hand, comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War
 This is a well enough written book that you don’t need to be interested in the subject matter of the CIA or Cold War spying to enjoy it. This reads like a suspenseful spy novel. But it’s one based in fact. The book is built around the Soviet informer, Adolf Tolkachev, and the ongoing relationship between him and his CIA handlers. But the book handles many of the subjects in a general sort of way. You learn so much about how the CIA operated back in the 70s and 80s, you wonder how all this became unclassified. Obviously the techniques have moved on. If the KGB already knows all this anyway, there is probably little harm in revealing it. And because this is mostly about a string of successes (Tolkachev and some others), it’s good PR for the CIA. A hundred writers could take up this same material and you can be sure 99 of them would make it dull. Hoffman does a very good job of capturing the drama, both regarding what it was to be an informer and what is was to work deep inside Russia as a CIA spy. One area of fault is that detecting if one is being followed by the KGB arguably takes up 25% of the book. But we get almost zero information as to the tricks and techniques for doing so. One assumes this is the part that is still classified because these techniques would still obviously be useful today. Trade secrets would be involved. I’m just guessing at this, but this is a huge hole in this book because so much of it deals with talking about both the informers and the CIA handlers trying to shake their tail. But there is almost nothing said about how they do so. Otherwise, you do get some interesting information on a lot of the hardware the CIA was using back then. You learn a lot about Tolkachev himself who is absolutely committed to damaging the Soviet Union as much as is humanely possible. His willingness to risk everything is both exemplary and a bit chilling. I won’t say much more about the specifics because this non-fiction book reads like the best of spy thriller fiction. There are some twists and turns. You become wrapped up in the fate of Tolkachev. Will he stop before he gets caught? Will he get caught? Will he agree to exfiltration for him and his family to America? Will the CIA simply use him up and move on to the next one? That’s the kind of razor-edge tension inherent in this story. It is very much worth a read.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 25, 2019 13:25:37 GMT -8
I mentioned Clint Eastwood's Firefox in a discussion with KFZ recently, and it's appropriate to note the same point here. His character -- a half-Russian USAF pilot who is fully bilingual in English and Russian -- is sent to capture and fly off a new Soviet fighter with a special helmet that reads the pilot's thoughts and thus can react faster than other fighters (but requires someone who can think in Russian, since the helmet computer naturally isn't bilingual). Part of it involves being in Moscow, and they discuss the matter of escaping too much KGB attention. This is somewhat like the effort The Billion Dollar Spy devotes to making sure the KGB isn't following you.
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Post by artraveler on Aug 25, 2019 17:30:02 GMT -8
In the movies the followers are always obvious. Of course, that is to add drama and to let the viewer think even they can be a spy. A well trained field officer will blend in with surroundings and watches from a location that enables him to see without being seen. For example a man waiting for a bus is not exceptional, but if several buses pass and he doesn't board than he is suspect. A raincoat and fedora (classic spy garb) is only approbate when weather requires, otherwise it is suspect. A man in a suit carrying a briefcase on a college campus is normal, but in a bar is suspect. A hat and a jacket taken on or off can break the image as you follow or observe someone. No officer is allowed in the field until he has spent time observing targets and not being observed. Once observation techniques are learned a gut instinct develops you can almost feel the eyes on you. One of my friends put it this way. Act normal, be paranoid, attract no attention and suspect everyone.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 25, 2019 17:54:01 GMT -8
In Fletcher Knebel's novel Seven Days in May, the Secret Service chief followed General Scott as he travels on one of his missions. This is mainly about following a car without being spotted, and of course Scott and his companions are hardly professional spies (though he was keeping watch just in case), but Knebel does discuss the techniques. I obviously can't speak to his accuracy.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 25, 2019 18:20:35 GMT -8
I love FireFox. Great flick.
Viktor Belenko, the Russian pilot who few a Mig-25 “Foxbat” fighter in Hakodate, Japan, is mentioned often in this. Adolf Tolkachev had heard that he was paid millions by the U.S. Government. Adolf Tolkachev wanted similar compensation.
And I think Hoffman does an excellent job describing the conflicting mindset of Tolkachev. The conclusion (the obviously correct one) is that he wasn’t doing it for the money. But he wanted suitable respect for what he was doing.
Money was quite a sticking point for quite a while with this guy. But the CIA began to cough up a hundred thousand rubles here, 300,000 there. They kept him happy. And an external escrow account was also built up in his name that reached over a million dollars. I read the epilogue but nothing was mentioned about what happened to that money.
I’m now reading “The Dead Hand” which is by the same author. Ominously, it won the Pulitzer Prize. That’s a warning sign. It doesn’t seem like a hit-piece on Reagan…yet. But there must have been a reason for the award. These awards are now given out because they are soft on Communism and/or hard on conservatives.
That aside, this nowhere reads like the same spy novel as “The Billion Dollar Spy.” I don’t see myself making it through this one. But I’ll give it a little more to see if it grips me.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 25, 2019 18:39:20 GMT -8
The book does get into a few teeny bits of info like this, Artler. But it’s really too bad more info wasn’t included. We just keep reading about having to try to loose surveillance (or at least to make sure there was none to begin with). We are told at one point that this is a bit of an art rather than a science. There was a “feel” to it. I don't doubt that at all and jibes with what you're saying. But the book notes that some always had the feeling of being watched. The nature of the job, according to the author, was that taking risks was part of the game. Sometimes you just had to do it.
The author did note that it tended to be easy to spot the KGB cars because there was a dirty triangle on the grill where the automatic car wash didn’t reach. Apparently this was a very consistent thing. Factoids like that were fascinating.
It is said more than once in the book that Tolkachev had a very nondescript look and manner. He just did not naturally draw attention to himself. And they said he could blend away into the air after a meeting. Hate to be a stickler, but no mention as to technique. Did he dive into the bushes? Sprout wings?
They did mention an interesting Jack-in-the-box device for alluding the KGB. With a KGB car behind, you'd turn a corner and be blind for about 10 seconds. The guy in the passenger side (who was trying to lose his tail) would jump out the door and take off. Meanwhile they would put a device in his place and spring it which would be a dummy outline of a man sitting in the passenger seat. Apparently this worked quite well.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 25, 2019 18:41:45 GMT -8
I checked out The Dead Hand in wikipedia. The title refers to a Soviet plan, in the end their leadership was decapitated by an American first strike (there was no danger of that, but we're talking paranoia here), to have a reprisal strike that could be launched anyway. The article had virtually nothing about the book's contents, but it referenced material on it, including a review in the New York Slimes.
Apparently the book is sympathetic to Reagan and even more so Gorbachev, giving the latter especial credit for ending the Cold War. His real target seems to be Dick Cheney and the Defense Department under Bush 41, for the lack of interest in helping Russia clean out no longer wanted nuclear weapons (and workers).
But it probably is ominous that all the source materials are from left-wing sources.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 25, 2019 19:18:29 GMT -8
Well, I will say in all fairness that he doesn’t present Reagan as a dope, at least so far. And if he presents George Herbert Walker Bush as a bit of a dope, no love lost there.
Spoiler: I hope everyone reads “The Billion Dollar Spy” completely cold. It’s a good story. But without giving too much away (don’t read on…just get the book and enjoy it), I would say it was “diversity” that definitely was not a strength in this one. I’ll explain more later. Let’s just say that someone got it into their head to try to recruit outside the normal Ivy League schools. They went for some partially hispanic guy. And although the author doesn’t come right out and say it was a bid for “diversity,” it clearly was. And it didn’t turn out well. Not that Aldrich Ames (University of Chicago) was the paragon of white, yuppie, dependable America.
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Post by artraveler on Aug 25, 2019 20:45:07 GMT -8
Agent x is meeting with his handler at 16:07. Meeting times are never at even hours or half hours. Both men are in the same town and only a few miles apart. Both men may leave their location hours before the meeting and travel a route that allows them to watch windows for reflections of followers. They will board public transportation on and off several times and will pay close attention to the traffic around them, watching for cars, and trucks with repeat colors, dents, dirty windshields and passengers and plates. If either of the men do not show at the scheduled time there is a fallback time and location and the clearing procedure will be used again. It may take an entire day to be sure there is no one following or observing. The same type of procedure is used for dead drops for messages and the like. Often a handler may not know if his agent has gotten a message for days or even weeks, depending on cover. All of this is in the days when there were little or no CCTV in major cities. I suppose spooks now days have accurate maps of where the cameras are and make an effort to avoid them. Some of the hardest to avoid are the cameras on street lights and around business. Next time you go to the store observe the camera racks on the roof-smile your on candid camera  The first question you must ask yourself is where would you put a camera or where would you wait to watch someone and look there. Do you sit in public places with your back to the door? Do you know where the exits are? Do you drive the same way home every day? Do you know where all the cars in your neighborhood belong? Are you armed and how many weapons are you competent with? Do you have a bug out bag with basic necessities and money, I prefer silver over gold ? Do you have a valid passport or several? As you see the list can be extensive and completcated. Most importantly can you walk away from your cover and fade into another. It is not as easy as they make it sound in the movies or books. |
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Post by timothylane on Aug 25, 2019 20:55:44 GMT -8
Many years ago, one of the old copies of Reader's Digest that I got from my grandmother, from 1941 or 1942, included an article by (at least nominally) J. Edgar Hoover on catching spies that included some basic craft about following and detecting a follower. This included things like going on and off public transport or visiting shops with multiple doors in and out.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 26, 2019 7:49:21 GMT -8
Thanks for the details on techniques, Artler. I find that interesting.
It also mentioned in this book, at least with Tolkachev (and I think in the later stages), they had a second and sometimes a third handler ready to meet the informant in case the primary couldn’t be sure he was clear.
That’s an interesting point. In the book, it was noted that they avoided anything near a few places where they knew cameras existed. And it doesn’t sound as if there were many places like that. Indeed, that must have been back in the day when CCTV was few and far between.
One interesting technique that CIA agents used was to inoculate themselves from KGB observation by habit. If someone was known to go to an electronic parts store every Sunday in the morning (even if he was otherwise watched under normal circumstances), soon the KGB wouldn’t even bother. Thus the agent might be able to slip away for fifteen or twenty minutes.
It seems it was more common that a handler would use a lower-level (or just other) person in this regard. He would somehow sneak into a place and then disguise himself as someone who he knew the KGB would ignore in that situation. The other guy often had to stay inside in complete silence because these were usually places that were known to be bugged.
The modern cop shows in Britain (real or fictional) just would not happen without CCTV. It’s everywhere and the police state, despite its drawbacks, is useful in regards to surveillance and catching the bad guys. I seriously doubt that most British cops could think their way out of a wet paper bag. They don’t need to anymore. They all just look at the CCTV. Any real work goes to forensics where the heavy lifting is done. A character such as Sherlock Holmes is not even conceivable in this day and age.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 26, 2019 8:19:03 GMT -8
I’m 12% in “The Dead Hand.” This isn’t quite as gripping as “The Billion Dollar Spy” but does give you some background on the mindset of both sides in the Cold War.
It’s interesting to see the reaction of President Reagan (or Governor Reagan, or private citizen Reagan) as he is given intel on the nuclear aspects of the Cold War. For instance, he’s given a tour of Cheyenne Mountain in his run-up to his bid for the presidency in 1980. It’s an impressive looking facility. Reagan was accompanied by Martin Anderson, policy advisor to the campaign:
Reagan learned that there was virtually no time to react to incoming missiles. Plus, when he became president, one of his advisors who was a specialist in this regard, took note of the completely archaic and unworkable system of command-and-control inside the White House. Decapitating civilian control would have been easy and guaranteed. They implemented changed.
Reagan was most disturbed by the calculus that everyone else accepted, that the only response was to obliterate most of the population of the USSR.
Reagan, like Trump, was an outsider. He had not taken to thinking habitually about nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union as most others had. The state of affairs horrified him. And when he said his ultimate goal was the elimination of nuclear weapons, he meant it.
He also specifically meant to break the Soviet Union instead of appeasing them. He was well aware of what the system was and called a space a spade (“Evil Empire,” for example). Reagan thought the Soviet Union was a cancer on the planet that needed to be brought down, not propped up.
Reagan was like fingernails on the blackboard to the already hostile and paranoid Soviet leaders. But his assessment of the Soviet Union was correct as corroborated by such people as Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky was the KGB’s second-ranking official in the London office and he was also working as an agent for the British.
That description sounds a lot like today’s Democrat Party.
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Post by artraveler on Aug 26, 2019 8:53:40 GMT -8
The most important aspect of undercover work is situational awareness. A spy, a cop, a soldier or a citizen cannot afford to be unaware of what is going on around them.
Most people leave their house, drive down the street go to the store and never have any idea of who or what may be watching. They have never experienced extreme violence from unknown sources and have no idea how to deal with it. That is the reason so many people are harmed in shootings. Bad guys almost always telegraph their intentions before they commit their crimes. There is no way enough trained police can be everywhere, however, a watchful person will often pick up on subtle clues. You have no doubt heard of people who leave a mass event of violence for no good reason. Unknown, often to themselves, they have picked up on a suspicious act, sometimes it is only a feeling. In combat these are the people who make the best scouts and run point.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 26, 2019 8:58:23 GMT -8
One can see where the information Reagan received on the possible consequences of nuclear hits in the wrong places -- which were precisely the places the Soviets would target -- would have led him to the idea of stopping the missiles before they go off. Back when the Nixon administration was working on an ABM system, I saw a cartoon of someone addressing Defense Secretary Mel Laird, "Congratulations, Melvin, only one ICBM got through." Point well taken, but I'd rather my country was hit be one ICBM than a hundred or a thousand or whatever.
Your comment on Gordievsky, not surprisingly, is just about exactly what I thought.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 26, 2019 9:05:26 GMT -8
I have always had eyes which constantly scanned the area around me. I enjoy observing people so this helps make things interesting. There is so much happening around us that is fascinating if one will only keep one's eyes open.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 26, 2019 9:22:19 GMT -8
As with Mr. Kung — perhaps for different purposes — I am increasingly taking stock of public places. Mainly, I’m looking for the next shooter. I don’t, for example, just blindly walk into a store if I can first see in from the outside. And once in, I do scan the crowd.
People are coming unhinged. Yesterday morning at about 7:00, I hear someone making a bunch of noise outside. There’s a black “homeless” man sitting on the steps balling his eyes out loudly. He’s crying, but it’s a phony sort of crying, as if he’s trying to sooth himself. I say little more to him than “What’s up?” While crying hes say, “Oh, sorry. I forgot it was Sunday.” He moved on down the street without a fuss. There was complete coherency in the exchange (if you strip out the crying). That leads me to thinking that for many of these “homeless,” it is just a rehearsed act to some extent. This isn’t the first tine I’ve noticed this.
More craziness. Yesterday afternoon around 4:30 I heard someone yelling outside. I peek out the front door. There is some guy at the bottom of the hill yelling at the top of his lungs to his wife or girlfriend who is stationed at the top of the hill about 50 yards away. They are a youngish couple. She sensibly says “I’m not coming all the way down there to talk to you.” She’s not screaming. But he’s carrying on like a big over-stuffed baby.
Believe me, things are primed in America like never before for a complete social breakdown. And I needn’t remind anyone here that the Democrats have made a living out of social breakdown as a party. It’s a vote-getter for some odd reason. They are like today’s Civic Counselors. They make you feel good by telling you that your problems and faults are actually the fault of someone else.
Imagine a woman, for example, going to another woman counselor for help. (We’re talking about this general subject elsewhere.) What are the odds that toxic femininity will simply feed toxic femininity with the woman never taking the blame….it’s all the guy’s fault? I bet that happens a lot.
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Post by artraveler on Aug 26, 2019 9:38:21 GMT -8
He also specifically meant to break the Soviet Union instead of appeasing them. He was well aware of what the system was and called a space a spade (“Evil Empire,” for example).The counter to this was developed in the late 50s. Planers in the puzzle palace and think tanks came up with a work around for bureaucratic immobility. They started with the premise that the US will never again suffer a Pearl Harbor event. Intelligence agencies, military and civilian, were tasked with developing procedures of evaluation to discover if the Soviets were gearing up for a first strike. Over the years this plan was known as Single Intergrated Operation Plan, SIOP. One of the principal planners was the late General Curtis LeMay.
Every president from Eisenhower on has access to information developed by this system. In short, the plan calls for an American first strike against any enemy who intelligence sources have determined is spinning up their military for a nuclear strike against the US. The deterrent aspect is that every enemy intelligence agency knows that the SIOP is and that once triggered it can only be stopped by direct order from the President.
In the 70s operation REFORGER (return of forces Germany) included an intelligence aspect with CIA officers stationed at Rammstein AFB. The intelligence arm was to war-game how to counter KGB efforts to undermine NATO assets in the west. In other forms SIOP still exists as a deterrent. It has been renamed at least twice in the last 25 years, but the basic premise remains the same.
If intelligence sources determine that an enemy is planning a first strike with nuclear weapons the US will strike before their missiles leave the pads with everything in the inventory. Reagan had this in his pocket when he was dealing with Gorby, and so does Trump dealing with Russia the Mullahs, and China.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 26, 2019 10:57:45 GMT -8
It’s mentioning in “The Dead Hand” that under Andropov (this may have extended back to Brezhnev as well), the Soviets started a new program of integrated spying whose purpose was to ascertain if the West was going to launch a first strike. As the author noted, because of their unfamiliarity with the West, some of the tells signs they relied on where comical. One was whether or not the price paid for blood at the blood banks went up — presumably because the West was preparing for an assault. They were not aware, as the author notes, that (this was in Britain) they did not pay for blood donations. Andropov is painted as being a paranoid Soviet fuddy-duddy out-of-touch-with-reality ideologue who seems a likely candidate if there had been a first strike by someone. This was obviously during that strange period when they went through a whole slew of General Secretaries in about ten years. Andropov didn’t last long but longer than his successor, Chernenko. (Does anyone remember his name? I barely do.) And then came the longer-lasting Gorbachev. I guess he’s not technically the last General Secretary. Wiki has Vladimir Ivashko listed as succeeding him for a few days in August of 1991. Honestly, I’d never heard of this guy. Gorbachev is interesting in that he wasn’t an old hard-liner. The problem for him surely was the idea of the difficulty of being “half pregnant.” How do you liberalize Communism without the desire for freedom exploding out of control? I don’t pretend to have the answer for why the Soviet Union rather quickly was eradicated by liberalized policies while China has thus far been able to make use of controlled capitalism. Just remember....you used the word first . . . |
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Post by timothylane on Aug 26, 2019 11:10:57 GMT -8
Blood donations to the Red Cross are indeed free (though I believe they do charge those receiving them). However, there are organizations that do indeed pay for blood and plasma donations. Many people I've known have made use of that source of income, including me. Since these are private firms, I have no idea if the Soviets could ever have computed the total value of such payments from all of them. Of course, that's in America. Maybe Britain had no private organizations collecting blood or plasma donations.
There's a reason the Politburo was sometimes referred to as a gerontocracy. It was jokingly said in 1996 that a Bob Dole meeting (not a rally, but he and his top supporters) looked like a Politburo meeting -- a bunch of dumpy old white guys. All too much truth to it, which is why I tended to be especially eager to see different candidates. (For several elections in a row, I voted in the gubernatorial primary for a Louisville woman -- first Rebecca Jackson, then Anne Northup, then Barbara Holsclaw.)
Incidentally, in meeting Northup once as a campaign worker, I asked her if she was relayed to Francis Meagher, a noted Irish leader who commanded the Irish Brigade up to Gettysburg. (Her maiden name is Meagher, and swimmer Mary Meagher is her sister.) Her family thought they were related, but I don't know if they ever really checked it out.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 26, 2019 12:47:03 GMT -8
And I always wondered if Ronald Reagan was related to Donald Regan.  |
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