17. ⁠Crossing the Iron Curtain: Revenge in Russia (Ep 4)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Will Tolkachev fall at the final hurdle and land in the hands of the KGB? How do the CIA go about protecting their assets in the field? And, does it really take a spy to catch a spy? As we reach the final instalment of the story of Adolf Tolkachev, the plot reaches its dramatic crescendo. Tolkachev has now been working for the CIA for over half a decade and the pressure is clearly taking its toll on both him and the US agents around him. As the two Cold War powers face off on the outskirts of Moscow, which behemoth will come out on top? Listen as David and Gordon conclude their series on the unbelievable story of the Billion Dollar Spy. ------------------- Pre-order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [email protected] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:33.2	Tolkerchev would take the documents home and photograph them.
0:40.6	When the case officer commented that this was dangerous,
0:44.2	Tolkachev laughed and said,
0:45.8	Everything is dangerous.
0:48.0	In a written note,
0:48.9	Tolkachev explained further his unwillingness to accept an exfiltration plan.
0:53.6	He wrote that he and his wife had some
0:55.5	acquaintances who'd left the Soviet Union and eventually ended up in the United States. The
1:00.4	woman in this family had subsequently written to Tolkachev's wife about how much she missed her
1:05.9	homeland. Tolkev said that his wife had commented that she could never leave Moscow, let alone the Soviet
1:12.3	Union because she would suffer too much nostalgia. Tolkachev said that given his situation,
1:18.9	I cannot think about exfiltration since I would never leave my family. Welcome to the rest is classified.
1:25.2	I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And what you heard there comes from an official CIA study into the Tolkachev case, which was
1:31.6	published in 2003. And we've been looking at this really extraordinary story about Adolf Tolkachev,
1:38.0	an engineer, but who had access to incredibly important secrets from the Soviet Union,
1:43.3	about radar, which were valued so highly that
1:45.8	he was known as the billion dollar spy because of the sheer significance of those details
1:50.6	that he was passing to the CIA from the late 70s through into the early 80s.
1:56.9	We've heard how he was a driven man, he was relentless, how he demanded suicide pills, but also
2:03.6	Led Zeppelin records, amongst other things, to keep him going, how he was being met on the
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