Wednesday, August 5, 2015

How Adolf Tolkachev sold secrets of Russian Radar to CIA

Adolf Tolkachev - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev Адольф Георгиевич Толкачёв (1927, Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan – September 24, 1986) was a Soviet Union electronics engineer who provided key documents to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over the years between 1979 and 1985. Working at the Soviet radar design house Phazotron as one of the chief designers, Tolkachev gave the CIA complete information about such projects as the R-23, R-24, R-33, R-27, and R-60, S-300; fighter-interceptor aircraft radars used on the MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27; and other avionics. The United States considered the most advanced airborne radar among the systems Tolkachev compromised was the passive phased array radar used by the MiG-31 Foxhound fighter. He was executed as a spy in 1986.

A MiG-31 Foxhound showing its Zaslon phased-array radar.
Adolf Tolkachev and the Cold War - Business Insider

Tolkachev struggled to convince the CIA he was trustwory: He spent two years attempting to contact US intelligence officers and diplomats, semi-randomly approaching cars with diplomatic license plates with a US embassy prefix. When the CIA finally decided to trust him, Tolkachev transformed the US's understanding of Soviet radar capabilities, something that informed the next decade of US military and strategic development







Pulitzer Prize-winning author David E. Hoffman's newly published book "The Billion Dollar Spy"
is the definitive account of the Tolkachev operation. It's an extraordinary glimpse into how espionage works in reality, evoking the complex relationship between case officers and their sources, as well as
the extraordinary methods that CIA agents use to exchange information right under the enemy's nose.
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