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August 12, 2015 42 mins

During the Cold War, the CIA and KGB were in a constant game of cat and mouse to steal each other's secrets. David E. Hoffman talks with us about the work of one incredibly important spy, who is the subject of his latest book.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're going to touch on
history that's a little more modern than what we usually
cover on the podcast, and that is the Cold War

(00:22):
between the US and the uss are I recently was
lucky enough to get to chat with author David E. Hoffman, who,
as you will hear in the course of this interview,
is really an expert on that conflict and its roots. Mr.
Hoffman has been a journalist for three decades, and he
was covering politics during the Reagan presidency, including working as
a White House correspondent during the U S. Soviet summits

(00:44):
at that time. He served as the Moscow bureaut for
The Washington Post from until two thousand and one, and
then is the Foreign editor and Assistant Managing editor for
Foreign News. He continues his journalism career and he's written
several books as well about Russian and Soviet politics, including
the Pulitzer Prize winning The Dead Hand, which details the

(01:05):
end of the Cold War. Mr Hoffman's most recent book,
The Billion Dollar Spy, is some exceptionally thrilling nonfiction. So
without further ado, here is Holly's interview with David E. Hoffman,
where they're going to talk about the subject of the
book and the nature of the Cold War. So, as

(01:26):
I said, today, we are lucky enough to be talking
to David E. Hoffman, the author of The Billion Dollar Spy,
among other fabulous books, and we're gonna be talking about
the Cold War and some spy techniques in a little
story that unfurls in the midst of them. So first,
I have to say, the Cold War is one of
those things that many people, even people like me that
are old enough to have remembered that period of time,

(01:48):
sort of have a little bit of a nebulous knowledge about,
in large part because so many of the mock nations
that were happening were covert, and there's also been kind
of them the water ring down of what we know
through fictionalized media that portrays it in ways that are
not accurate. So I'm curious what you think are some
of the biggest misconceptions people have about Cold War espionage.

(02:12):
The Cold War was this giant, four decade confrontation between
two blocks of countries each had their own ideology. Uh
the West stood for individual liberties and freedom and democracy,
and the Soviet Union with communism, promised on the kind
of utopia someday. It never really materialized. But in this conflict,

(02:34):
which was carried out in propaganda and diplomacy, it was
also carried out by building these huge and very frightening
nuclear weapons, the missiles launched at each other. But there
was also a shadow war, a war in dark alleys,
and that was the war of intelligence. And one of
the misconceptions is that it was always carried out with
covert action. We like to think about covert action because

(02:56):
we see and read about it. The Bay of Pigs
was a real covert action. American and other spymasters sent
spies behind the lines into the Soviet Union, parachuting them in.
That was actually trying to do something to change the
course of history. But there was another side of it
where this war was intense for four decades, and that
side of it was espionage. Espionage and covert action are

(03:19):
two different things. Espionage is quite simply stealing the secrets
of your adversary. It's very important to know what your
adversary is thinking. Both sides carried out intense espionage against
each other for more than four decades, And in writing
this book, I was peering into this particular world, not
of covert action, not of people carrying guns and starting

(03:42):
wars or carrying out assassinations, but just silently in the shadows,
trying to slip away and steal the secrets of the
Soviet Union. And your new book actually centers, as you said,
around primarily the work of Adolph Tolkachov, who became an
agent for the CIA after he made contact in a
rather interesting way. Well, you talk a little bit about

(04:05):
his method of reaching out and his difficulty establishing a
relationship even after he had initially made real contact. The
Soviet Union was a giant prison, a closed society. The KGB,
which did the spying abroad, also did it at home.
In other words, it was the secret police. And one

(04:26):
way that the Soviet Union tried to protect itself was
to reject contact with foreigners, and that KGB had teams
of people rolling the streets trying to spot any foreigners.
And the foreigners who lived and worked in Moscow, including
the Americans, found that KGB followed them everywhere, even when
they took their dog out for a walk KGB man

(04:46):
was following them. So this was a very difficult environment
for the CIA to try and find and recruit spies,
and in fact they had very very few. And one
of the reasons that they were so reluctant, he might
even say a little bit scared, was that any Russian
they might approach and even strike up a conversation with,

(05:07):
that person could get into a lot of trouble and
may be accused of treason and executed. So it was
immensely dangerous. And when people did approach the CIA and
say I'd like to help you or give you some information,
it was often assumed they were a trap. They were
called a dangle and all there was somebody that the
KGB like bait was putting out there to try and

(05:29):
grab the CIA. So when this man ate off, Tolkachov
first approached an American filling up his car at a
gas station in Moscow, and he came up to the
man and said, I'd like to talk to you. The
man said, well, it'd be difficult to talk right here,
and then Polkachov gave him a note and disappeared. What
Tolkachov didn't know is the man he had picked out

(05:51):
to approach at the gas station. Actually was the head
of the CIA in Moscow in the Moscow station, So
Tolkachov essentially volunteered that first time. But the CIA was
afraid to talk to him because they thought he could
be a KGB trap. And Tokajo didn't give up. He
was a very determined individual, had his own ideals of

(06:12):
what the world should be like, was very disenchanted with
the Soviet Union, wanted to change things, and he essentially
was out there the story the Soviet Union as best
he could by leaking their military secrets. And he tried
again in February. The first approach was January. He tried
again in February. He tried again, and he tried several times,

(06:33):
but headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia said to
the Moscow station, he probably a trap. Don't respond, don't
take him up on his offer. So here you have
a guy who was sincerely trying to offer very sensitive
information to the CIA and they weren't taking it. And
he was not by any means to train spy. Right.

(06:56):
He was an engineer. No, It's what made him different
than a lot of the others. If you look at
the list of Cold War spies that came from the
Soviet Block, almost all of them were either in the
k g B or in the military intelligence, or somehow
associated with diplomacy or the security services. Tolkachov he worked
in a laboratory that built radars for Soviet warplanes, but

(07:19):
he was an engineer, and he was never trained at espionage,
but he did a lot of it. And while his
entry into the world of the spy game came in
the late nineteen seventies, the event that led him to
that point where he felt so compelled to reach out
and try to make contact really started decades earlier with
his wife's family. Can you talk a little bit about

(07:41):
his wife's childhood and how the events that happened then
co mingled with events happening in the seventies to sort
of drive Tolkachev to this moment in his life. Yes,
Tolkachov was fourteen years old, uh fourteen year old boy
growing up in Moscow when World War Two broke out,
and a month after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, German

(08:02):
planes bombed the Moscow. Moscow was a city at the
time built of timber and a lot of wood, and
the Germans dropped incendiary bombs and the planes got all
the way through to Moscow. Because the Soviet Union had
very primitive radar. Radar was invented in the thirties, the
Soviet Union was way behind, so they couldn't spot the bombers,

(08:23):
and Tolkachov and all people of his generation ran for
cover in the Moscow metro stations to hide from the bombers.
So in response to that, the Soviet authorities realized they
needed to train young people to study radar to build
better radar, and he got sucked up into this, but
he was sent to essentially the equivalent of a vocational

(08:44):
high school to study radar. He was then sent to
the equivalent of a university to study radar. All the
years of World War Two, and for several years afterwards
he's studying, and finally after the war he was sent
to a top secret institute in Moscow, only twenty minutes
from where he lived, and said, here's your first job.
You're gonna build radar. And at that instant he met

(09:07):
uh young woman named Natasha. She was eight years younger. Um,
it was the fifties, it was an optimistic time. They
fell in love and They got married in nineteen fifty seven.
They got married the year of Sputnik. They thought things
would get better in the Soviet Union. They thought that
the war and everything was behind them. Well, Natasha had
grown up an orphan. Why was she an orphan? Her

(09:29):
mother and her father were purged by Stalin. Her mother
was accused of being a subversive and was executed. Her
father sent to the Gulag for a decade. And when
her father came out of the Gulag after the war,
he lived only a year or two, told her what
had happened and died. So she was very, very torn
up about the legacy of Stalin and Tolkachov. When he
married her, he had the same feelings. They were quietly

(09:53):
working in the system. Natasha worked at the same institute,
she worked in the intended department, and yet at night
at home that they were just full of resentment at
what had happened to her family. They thought things would
get better in the fifties during the period called the Thaw,
and they were optimistic, But by the sixties that optimism

(10:14):
was passing away because the Thaw hopes were never realized.
There was a little bit of loosening up especially in
the arts. But the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the crushing of
the product spring, really put an end to it. Now,
Natasha and Adi as he was called, that was his nickname,
Audi had a son in so in the late sixties.

(10:38):
Even though Tokachov was very disenchanted, he didn't do much
about it. But by the early seventies things had really
gone bad in the Soviet Union. It was the period
known as stagnation. There were breadlines, you couldn't even buy
a pair of jeans, and Tokachov said, I've got to
do something. I've got to do something. And it was
all because of his resentment about the past, about what

(11:00):
had happened in Natacha. And you know, she was two
years old when her parents were taken from her. She
grew up an orphan, and this bitterness drove him to
do something. By the way, a millions of families and
the people in the Silviet Union were affected by those
purges in n seven and think thirty eight, and a
lot of them didn't do anything about it. Tookchov acted

(11:24):
and his story is really fascinating for a number of reasons.
Um one thing that struck me is that he is
so deeply disillusioned with his country that it seems like
the risk involved in what he was doing. I don't
know that I would say it didn't really bother him,
but it was negligible compared to what he wanted to do.
I have a couple of thoughts about that. The first

(11:46):
is Tokachov himself, because of what had happened in Natasha
orphaned to two years old by Stalin all that messerby.
He did not want to put his family through that.
He had a young son, and so he waited almost
ten years as he stewed over this because he knew
that if he did something against the authorities, if he
did something publicly, he could easily be arrested, and he

(12:08):
didn't want to put them through that that occurred to him.
He thought about that hard. Also, he thought maybe I
could do something simple like handout pamphlets on the street.
He described himself as somebody who sort of had the
heart of a dissident, And he thought about that for
ten minutes and realized, if I started handing out pamphlets

(12:30):
on the street, They're gonna arrest me and I'm gonna
be imprisoned. So he had and he found himself driven
to take him bigger risks, and in many ways it
was because he wanted to do more damage than just pamphlets. Now,
the bigger risks the spying were from the beginning a
huge risk to himself, to his family, and to the

(12:52):
CIA case officers he met with. Espionage was an order
of magnitude more risky than handing out pamphlets, and he
knew that. He told the CIA, everything we do is dangerous.
So from the beginning he knew he was entering a
different world, uh life threatening world. He was exceedingly determined

(13:15):
two carry this out. He proposed to the CIA when
they first started talking to him, a plan that would
go over twelve years and seven stages. He had an
all workout. He was an engineer. He gave them drawings
of his apartment. He told them exactly you know how
his office looked down to the dimensions of his desk.

(13:36):
He was very precise. So this guy entered the world
of danger and risked himself knowingly and with the goal
that he described to the CIA as doing the maximum
damage to the Soviet unions in the shortest possible time.

(14:03):
Next up, we will hear about some of the surprising
ways that Tolkachov got information from his engineering job to
the c I A and I kind of love that
what really did the most damage would in terms of
his behaviors and how he procured information is what would

(14:25):
really be considered low tech today, but even then was
a little bit low tech. He would take these documents
from his offices, walk home for lunch, take pictures of
all of them, pack them back up, go back to
the office, and refile everything. Um, and I have to wonder.
I know you mentioned in the book that there was
part of the reason he was doing this was that

(14:47):
there wasn't that much security around sort of people looking
at and pulling these documents. But can you speak a
little bit about the level of danger he was putting
himself in just in doing this, in walking out with
top secret documents and carrying them on the street home
and then back. You know, this was all his idea.
He told the CIA a couple of months after they

(15:07):
started working together, there's this big security gap in my office,
which is I worked with all this secret stuff. But
if I put it into my overcoat and walk home,
it was a twenty minute walk to his apartment. Nobody
will stop me on the way out, and if I
bring them files back and put them back by five o'clock,
they won't know they've been missing. So he did that,
especially at the beginning of the operation when there was

(15:29):
somewhat lack of security and the CIA's problem was there
were no xerox machines. Then xerox machines in the Soviet
Union were locked up. Like I said, the country was
a prison, and uh Tonkenchov couldn't go to Tinko's or
fed X and make copies. So how to make copies
and to see I struggled with this in terms of
coming up with a proper camera, and there were several

(15:50):
spy cameras involved with the story. But the point of
your question is what worked. And one of the things
that worked here was that they decided to give him
a Pentax m E thirty five millimeter film camera, the
kind of camera you'd find around the neck of any
tourist anywhere in the world, a very and they gave
him a clamp which he could hold it steady and

(16:11):
clamped to the back of a kitchen chair. And so,
using this very simple method of a standard thirty five
millimeter camera, Tokechov, walked the documents in this coat out
of the office at lunch twenty minutes home. Nobody was home,
his wife was at work, his son was at school,
laid the documents out on the table, photographed him with
this thirty five millimeter camera stowed all the camera gear,

(16:34):
walked back to his office, and nobody was the wiser
for a long time. For thousands and thousands of pages
of documents, and the c I was clever because they
didn't want Kodak film laying around in Tolkachov's house. That
would be a giveaway. There wasn't any Kodak film in
the Soviet Union, but they wanted him to have a
high quality film. So they got very high quality American
film and they secretly wounded into Soviet cassettes and put

(16:58):
it in Soviet boxes. So if any money solid it
would look like he just had a tourist camera out
on this table. But he was doing this day after day,
not very high tech, but exploiting the whole insecurity in
this building, and it worked incredibly effectively. I mean, he
got blueprints, documents, plans, He revealed a decade out of

(17:21):
planning that the Soviets were doing for the future, as
well as details on their existing technologies. And he knew
he was sharing important information. But I wonder if he
realized just how important and how long reaching his work
was going to be. Do you think he really grasped
the gravity of like how much he was really helping
the United States In terms of the time it would

(17:45):
take it. He thought it would take more than a decade,
and he had all these stages, and so it turned
out that he fulfilled that goal years before he thought
he would. My year three of doing this, he had
pretty much given the c I every thing he said
was going to take him for twelve years. At the
same time, he knew very well how significant it was,

(18:06):
and uh, you know, his hands every day. His whole
life from when he was fourteen years old was wrapped
up in this issue of radar. Radar is extremely important,
especially in the kind of war that the Cold War was,
where two sides are faced off against each other on
hair trigger alert, and it's very important to get early

(18:26):
warning if you're to be attacked, and that's what radar does.
And in the air and dog fights and air to
air combat, and radar can make the whole difference between
life and death, and he had devoted his whole life
to that, So he had a lot of knowledge. And
the Soviet Union had the largest land borders in the world,
and they had to defend those landboards. We were lucky
we were between two oceans and a continent away, but

(18:49):
they had Europe on their doorstep, and the Cold War
lines ran right through the heart of Europe. So for
the Soviet Union defending itself against a powerful NATO, and
how for American threat and there was a that this
was a military confrontation. We had bombers that we were
planning to fly under their radar. And in the years

(19:10):
Tolkachov work, we were building something called the strategic cruise missile.
Now we're all very familiar with the cruise missile, but
it was the top secret thing back then, and when
eventually was invented, its goal was to fly under the
Soviet land based radars. Well, if you were investing billions
of dollars in that strategic cruise missile which could hug
the terrain and fly under the radar, would you want

(19:31):
to know what the radar capabilities were. Well, when Polkachov
told us that they had this gap, which is the
gap was at low altitudes. Their radars didn't work under
nine feet. Well, that helped us build a very threatening
cruise missile that the Kremlin worried could fly right under
the radars and land in red square. And you know what,

(19:54):
a couple of years later, a nineteen year old boy
from Germany flew Assessina right through those radars and landed
in red where mm hmm. And you mentioned, you know
that he had really shown us this gap, and the
money that he saved the US on weapons R and
D by revealing these sort of gaps really saved the

(20:16):
US quite a bit of bacon and ended up kind
of being the reason that your book is named what
it is over and over again took off broadest information
about Soviet air defenses. And to most people, this thing
air defenses, what does that mean? You know, it seems
sort of vague, and so what this is in nuclear missiles,

(20:36):
it sounds something very distant. But actually it was one
of the most hard fought issues of the Cold War,
which was how could our airplanes and bombers sneak in
or our cruise missiles sneak in, or how could they
be prevented from sneaking in, and we had a long
period of confusion and uncertainty about whether the Soviets had
strong radars or not and how they work well. Along

(20:59):
comes Tolkachov, and for several years he starts providing blueprints,
top secret documents, all the information we needed to evaluate
these radars. On the other side, those that will be
flying in warplanes we might face in a you know,
and a dog fight, and those on the ground that
might be there to prevent our bombers from getting through.

(21:21):
At one point, Tolkachov even provided the CIA circuit boards
taken from Soviet radar so we could study the metallurgy
and the transistors, everything, and so by essentially neutering Soviet
air defenses, he saved the United States from research that
we didn't need, from weapons that we didn't need, and

(21:42):
the Air Force at one point estimated in response to
our request from the CIA, the Tolkachov had saved two
billion dollars in research and development that wasn't necessary. And
that estimate was even before he gave them another six
or seven thousand pages of top secret documents. So knowing
what your adversaries doing, having a spy reading the mail

(22:05):
and looking at the blueprints was of a measurable value,
and it didn't happen very often in the Cold War
when I am engineer, probably benefits that really couldn't be
quantified in terms of like R and D monetary numbers.
I mean, the whole idea that he had saved US
two billion dollars is why I titled the book The
Billion dollars Spy, because these were real savings. There was

(22:27):
one radar effort that was being made by the Army
and Navy to come up with some kind of radar,
and when they saw the information from Polkachov, they completely
reversed course and built something they will be more effective. Right,
So they saved seventy million dollars just from one thing
in the in the thousands of pages of documents, that's
how valuable it was. Other parts of it, you know,

(22:49):
that didn't go, say to the White House in a
blue border document. This wasn't the kind of intelligence for politicians.
It was the intelligence we used to build our own weapons.
And some of it went right into the top secret
programs for the stealth bomber, for the cruise missile, for
the F fifteen, and the things that we were building,
because the Cold War until the end was a giant

(23:10):
military confrontation, and we were constantly seeking an advantage in
that military confrontation. So one of the things I discovered
here is that Tolkachovs intelligence that the positive intelligence is.
The CIA calls it the stuff, the secrets that he
actually stole. Some of it went right smack into our
top secret military programs, the black programs, the skunk works,

(23:33):
the places where we were trying to build radars to
read the mail of the Soviet radars. And I want
to turn down to another one of the major players
in this narrative, Edward Lee Howard. Can you talk a
little bit about how his story plays out and how
he goes from being UH an agent of the CIA

(23:54):
to an enemy of the US. Edward Lee Howard was
UH young man grown up in New Mexico, and he
had done a couple of things, work in the Peace Corps,
got a master's degree in business from American University, and
he kind of had a couple of middle management jobs,

(24:16):
one in Chicago. But he was bored and he wanted
something better with his life, and he rode away to
see I and he approached CIA at a time when
they were trying to find best in the brightest people
that had some economic good stance, not only spies that
were just you know, daring do but people who could
think on their feet. And he got accepted. So Howard

(24:38):
went into the career training program of the CIA and
he went through a year standard year of training, which
is tradecraft everything, the whole training thing. And he was
hoping for kind of a good comfy spying job like
in Switzerland. But because of several people moving around, he
got sent and assigned to Moscow, and he said, well,
it will be good for my career. He accepted the assignment.

(25:01):
Um he was married and it had just had a
young son, so his whole family got that special passports
for their diplomatic cover in Moscow. He was going to
become the CIA's handler of Tolkachov and he was trained
in all the special tradecraft for working in Moscow, how
to evade detection, how to you know, get away from
the KGB. And he was just on the verge of

(25:22):
going literally within weeks. And this will be his first
assignment abroad for the CIA. Although as I mentioned, he
had worked in the Peace Corps, but in Latin America,
he never really worked in the Soviet Union like this,
And there's a routine process. When you're about ready to
go abroad for the CIA, you get a lie detector test. Well,
Howard flunked his lie detector test on some question about

(25:45):
whether there was a crime somewhere in his past, and
the c I said, take it again. He flunked it again.
He flunked it four times. And when that happened, even
though he had gotten his special passports and you know,
diplomatic cassports and was not ready to move to Moscow
to see, I said, we cannot send to Moscow to

(26:06):
handle our most valuable spy, a young man who's flunked
live detective tests four times. So Howard was fired from
the CIA. He was fired sort of unceremoniously, um, you know,
to see. I kind of hoped he would find his way.
He was young enough that he find another career, and
for a while he moved back to New Mexico. He
got a job in the state legislature. There. He seemed

(26:29):
to be recovering a little bit from the shock of
being fired, but actually he was deeply resentful. He was
really angry what had happened to him. He felt they
had never given him a chance, and he decided to
get back at the CIA by betraying there most valuable ASTs.

(26:49):
Right back up with Mr. Telling us about howard decision
turn on the United States. Howard, not too long after,
for he had settled in New Mexico, decided he was
going to get his revenge, and he at one point
walked into the Soviet consulate in Washington and said, you know,

(27:10):
my name is Alex and I have something for you,
and he showed xerox of his old CIA building paths.
And a little while after that somebody with a Russian
accent called his house and said, more interested in the
manuscript you have to sell. And pretty soon all this
coded language begins, and Howard begins to deal with the
Soviets and the KGB. Um he meets them in Europe,

(27:33):
he meets met them once in um Vienna. And you know,
tolkach Off at this point is five or six five
years into espionage for for the United States. Twenty one
meetings were held with tolkach Off on the streets of Moscow,
almost all of them within three miles of the front
door of KGB headquarters. They were not detected in any

(27:55):
of those twenty one meetings. But the KGB got winto
this because how told them, And uh, I don't want
to give away much more of the story in terms
of how it plays out, because it's so sort of
beautifully orchestrated in the book that I want people to
definitely experience that for themselves. But what I do want
to ask you about you managed to convince the CIA

(28:19):
to declassify a lot of the source material that you used.
How did you manage that? You know? I begged, cajoled, implored, lobbied,
I tried to work a lot of different angles. Um.
I went to the CIA and said, look, you know,
I'm a writer. I want to work as an outsider
as a journalist. UM, I need the information. Please declassify

(28:41):
the files. And it took a long time. It took
a couple of years, and in the end, what they
gave me was put through their own declassification process, so
they didn't give me anything that was secret. They gave
me declassified files which had many you know, gaps and
redactions and things deleted. Um So in many ways I
got the standard treatment. And it took a long time,

(29:04):
but they came through with enough of the operational files
that I could write the book. It was a tough,
tough thing to get it all together. And in the end,
the positive intelligence, the business about radars and what Tolkachov
actually stole, I didn't get any documents on, and I
had to put that together myself by interviewing people. And
this book is based on nine and forty four pages

(29:27):
of operational cables that the CIA d classified for me,
but it's also based on extensive interviewing with the people
that were involved. And this is something that all historians encounter,
which is documents initially get you very excited, but after
a while you find it's the human stories and the
people who participated that are essential element of telling the story.

(29:50):
And you were absolutely no stranger to the Cold War
before writing this book. You covered that area era of
global politics extensively in your journalism year. You want to
pull a Thugh Prize for your previous book about the
Cold War arms race, titled The Dead Hand. But I'm
wondering that, even with that level of familiarity that you had,
did you come across any revelatory information while working on

(30:12):
this book that really surprised you. Well, there's a lot
of different kinds of surprises. I'll tell you one I've
always had in the back of my mind that CIA
officers were out there on the street and when they
had an agent or a spy, they'd say, you know,
can you tell me about the latest ss A team missile?
And I had the impression of people that were spies

(30:34):
for America, both the spies and the case officers who
handled them, as having these detailed discussions about top secret information.
But what I learned is the CIA has two kinds
of people out there working, and many of them are
like these case officers I described in the book, who
are not schooled in all the details of the missiles

(30:56):
and the radars. They're schooled in human psychology, which is,
how do you handle the spy, how do you look
him in the eye, how do you steady his nerves?
And that itself is a whole discipline. And those guys
who were running the Tolkachov operation and planning to meet
with him and thinking about his needs, they actually had

(31:16):
no idea what was in those roles of film he
was giving them. They passed those back to the headquarters,
and somebody back there worried about that. So for me,
it was quite interesting to see that in the cockpit
of espionage, a lot of it was very much this
human factor, and that that's what case officers focused on.
And the whole complex, very very dense business of the

(31:39):
military confrontation was not something that the case officer dealing
with Kokachov worried about, but he did think about Tokachov
wants some Western rock music for his son. Now, if
we give him an album that says You're I A
heap on it and someone spots that in his apartment, well,
that be suspicious. Maybe we should give him the records

(32:01):
the music from Uri a Heat that his son wants
on a beat up old cassette with no label, and
maybe we should buy that cassette in East Germany or
someplace that won't look that suspicious. So this choreography of espionage,
the human fact, of the psychology, the body language, the
all of that was a specialty, and I think that

(32:23):
readers of this book will come to appreciate and understand
that choreography in a way I certainly did that was
much different than my very simple minded, stereotyped idea of
what spies did well. And I will say this, I really,
really loved how you wrote about David Rolfe, who was
his second case officer, and how he really viewed himself

(32:47):
as uh sort of an advocate, as a connection between
Tolkachov and the people he was reporting back to. You
Like that really struck me as something I never would
have really thought about in those terms. Uh So I
appreciate that because it really did sort of open up
a whole vista of thinking to me. And as I

(33:07):
was saying, you know, even for the case officers, this
uh choreography of espionage was an art form, and it
was something that they spent an enormous amount of time
trying to perfect and not screw up. And because David
Rolph said, I know, if I make one mistake, it
could cost pokach Off his life. Okay, onto slightly lighter fare.

(33:30):
I have one last question which is not really so
deeply related specifically to the story, but one of the
things again, another thing that never occurred to me, but
which jumped out at me over and over in reading
this book was how common it seemed for husbands and
wives to both be working for intelligence agencies. And on
the one hand, it makes perfect sense, but it's something

(33:52):
that just never occurred to me. And again this is
probably informed by being a person who takes in, you know,
modern culture and entertainment where there's off it more often
than not, there's this whole secret life situation going on.
So I'm wondering, just in your research, how often that
scenario of married couples both being part of an agency

(34:13):
is sort of do rigor or were those outliers that
just happened to come up a lot? In this book,
almost all CIA case officerss that went abroad who were
married both husband and wife work for the CIA. UH
The wives were usually put on a contract in the
husband's with full time employees, So the wives had a
very important role, and it was oftentimes obscured by the

(34:37):
fact that they weren't the case officer. But for example,
in David Ross's case, when he goes on this huge
surveillance detection to try and escape the KGB for a
meeting he was going to have, he actually went out
of the country to try and fool them, came back
early when they weren't looking, and as soon as he
comes back in the country, he takes a cab. He

(34:57):
gets out of a cab, he takes a mett. He
does all these things right, including a duffel bag that's
got a disguise that's brought by one another guy's wife
to his wife at the school was he's teaching, and
then she drives and meets him at the Metro and
picks him up, and then he puts onto the sky.
So a lot of what the wives did was part
of this constant shadowy handing off and trying to escape

(35:19):
this KGB surveillance. And because they knew what was going on,
because they were sometimes driving their husbands someplace, the KGB
was lulled a little bit by the routines that they
went on. And if the wife drove to school every
day and drove home back and forth every single day,
that kind of lost interest in that, and that was
an opportunity. And if the wife could stick a little

(35:40):
duffel bag inside the car the KGB couldn't see, they
were very, very important in helping these operations actually succeed.
It's so fascinating to me because there were so many
incidents just like the one you described where even at
the very beginning of the book you're talking about a
gentleman and his wife, it's actually two diplomats, I think
in their wives in a car and one of the
wives is holding a jack in the box, which is

(36:02):
this pop up silhouette that will replace the silhouette of
her husband after he jumps out of the car when
they go on a turn, disguised as a birthday cake.
And I was like, really, his wife just did that.
So I really loved that part of the operation. And
she was under contract. And you know the that think
that jack in the box, which is a pop up

(36:23):
cut out the fool the KGB. You know, she when
he jumped out, she would reach forward from the back
seat and pull a lever that popped up that thing
and pretended like nothing was happening. And when that car
went zooming down the boulevard and the KGB went zooming
after thinking the guy was still in the car, but
actually he was in disguise on a side street going
off to meet the spy. I loved it. And the

(36:45):
book is so full of details like that that I'm
sure our listeners will absolutely delight in the both. The
Billion Dollar Spy has been out for several weeks now
and it has gotten rave reviews and well deserved, so
congratulations on that. So I think people who are fascinated
by spy stories and espionage and intelligence and history, we'll
just find a feast of information. So thank you so

(37:07):
very much for taking time to chat with us today.
I can't tell you how much we appreciate it. Well,
thanks for having me, and I hope readers enjoy it.
I am confident that they shall thank you, Mr Hoffman.
I love, love, loved the information that came up at
the end of that interview that Mr Hoffman shared with
us about CIA spouses. That really surprised me, but it

(37:29):
made so much sense. I have always been kind of
curious about that, like if you're if you're a spy,
what happens to your spouse. So again, this book is
called The Billion Dollar Spy. It's by David E. Hoffman,
and it is available now and you can learn more
about it at David E. Hoffman dot com and you
can follow Mr Hoffman on Twitter at the Dead Hand. Okay,

(37:51):
and I have a little bit of listener mail as well.
This comes from our listener Ellen, and she says, Hi,
Tracy and Holly, I've been listening to your podcast for
almost a year now out I feel that it is
necessary to tell you why I started listening because I
know Holly has a love for Disney that I also share.
I have always enjoyed history and I found your podcast
when I was training for the Dopey Challenge. If you're

(38:12):
not aware, the Dopey Challenge consists of running a five k,
a ten k, a half marathon, and a full marathon
at Walt Disney World during Walt Disney World Marathon weekend
every January. Since I was going to be running forty
eight point six miles over the course of four days,
I needed to listen to more than just music in
my training, and your podcast got me through many long
hours of running. I did complete the Dope and attached

(38:34):
as a picture of me with all my medals. I
also wanted to share that the first podcast I listened
to was the Heavy Green episode and you read a
fan mail about Kendall mint Cake. I couldn't believe this
because my brother in law grew up in Kendall, and
I thought it was a crazy coincidence to immediately know
what you were talking about. Because I have had Kendle
mint Cake many times and even visited Kendall. I felt
like it was time to write because I have some

(38:55):
podcast ideas to share, and she shares some with us.
I'm not going to give those away because uh, I
really love them. She offered up a couple of different
female astronomers from the early twentieth century, and I think
we know that I love astronomy, so high level of
likelihood they'll eventually make it into circulation. I don't know when,
but so Ellen, thank you for this awesome email. Because

(39:16):
I knew what the Dope challenge was. I ran the
Goofy and Tracy was actually with me on that trip
before the Dope was officially established, and at that point
we used to do kind of an informal version that
we called the Dope, but the ten K didn't exist yet,
so it was just the five K, the half and
the full. Uh. I cannot imagine doing the dope. I
guess I could. No, I guess I could. It's only

(39:39):
six more miles than the weekend I did. But I
will tell you this, Nope, I don't. I don't want
to run any more. Marathon's all run a half every
month with a smile on my face, but the full
marathon just I got real angry about my late tea. Yeah.
I occasionally will think to myself, maybe I should run
a marathon, and I don't even get all the way
through marathon before I'm like no, Like, I would definitely

(40:03):
do another half. That half is pretty fun, and I
think I can training for the half, but there's just
so much training involved in a full marathon and I
don't have time for that. That's what it is. And
when you're doing something like this, which is an amazing
feat where you're training to run multiple races over four days,
in your training, there are big chunks of your life
that just don't exist anymore because you're putting on my ledge.

(40:24):
Like you have to kind of do mock weekends that
aren't the full mileage that you do on something like
the Dopey, but where you'll run a lot on a Friday,
and then a lot more on a Saturday, and then
a lot more on a Sunday, and usually there's so
long and one right after the other that you're exhausted
and you really can't get anything else done that weekend.
So my hat is off to you, Ellen. She looks
so joyous with all of her medals. Thank you for

(40:45):
sharing those. You are awesome. That is a huge accomplishment
and I applaud anyone and everyone that even undertakes it,
whether you finish or not, that's just some gumption that
I have to respect. If you would like to write
to us, share your stories of gumption or Disney this
It's or talk about spying, you can do that at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can
also go to Facebook dot com slash mist in History,

(41:07):
on Twitter at mist in History, at pinterest dot com
slash mist in Hisstory. We have a tumbler at miss
in history dot tumbler dot com or on Instagram at
mist in History. And uh we have a spreadshirt store
at Misston History dot spreadshirt dot com where you can
get all kinds of history themed goodies, from shirts to
phonecases and everything in between. UH. If you would like

(41:30):
to visit our parents site, that's how stuff works dot com,
courage you to do so. You can also visit us
on the web at misston History dot com and check
out our archive of all of the episodes that have
ever existed, plus show notes for all of the episodes
Tracy and I have worked on, as well as the
occasional of their blog post or Goody and some cool
visuals to go along with all these things so again.
Visit us at house to works dot com and Mimston

(41:52):
hisstory dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how staff Works dot com. E

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