They called him by fanciful code names — Top Hat, Bourbon, Donald, Roam — and on the days when his latest cache of secrets would arrive at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA officer says, “it was like Christmas.” There was something for everyone. The names of four U.S. military officers working as spies for the Soviet Union. Hard evidence of Beijing’s deepening animus toward Moscow, which President Nixon exploited to forge his 1972 opening to China. Technical data on Soviet-made antitank missiles, which allowed U.S. forces, years later, to defeat those weapons when they were employed by Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. This intelligence trove was provided by General Dmitri Polyakov, a barrel- chested weekend carpenter and collector of fine shotguns who served as a top officer of the Soviet military intelligence agency, the GRU. Polyakov began working for U.S. intelligence in 1961, and during the succeeding decades % he passed increasingly precious secrets, at blood-chilling personal risk. In Moscow he brazenly stole from the GRU stockroom a special kind of self- destructing film that he used to photograph secret documents, as well as hollow, fake stones in which to conceal the film in meadows for pickup by U.S. spies. To signal his handlers, he would ride the tram past the U.S. embassy and activate a miniature “burst” transmitter hidden in his pocket. During postings abroad, he would pass information face to face: in the back alleys of Rangoon or among the bulrushes along the Yamuna River in New Delhi, where his CIA contact would pretend to fish while a hidden recorder taped Polyakov’s staccato military briefing, punctuated by peacocks screeching in the background. In an interview with Time last week, that CIA officer, who asked that he not be named, recalled how worried he felt when Polyakov was suddenly ordered to return to Moscow in June 1980. “You know, if anything happens, you are always welcome in our country,” the American began to babble, like a nervous lover. “I hope the day will come when I can sit down openly with you and have drinks and dinner in our country.” The Russian fixed him with steel-blue eyes and replied, quietly and evenly, “Don’t wait for me. I am never going to the United States. I am not doing this for you. I am doing this for my country. I was born a Russian, and I will die a Russian.” But what will be your fate, asked the American, if your spying is discovered? The reply came in Russian: “Bratskaya mogila” — a common, unmarked grave. No one knew what became of America’s perfect spy until January 1990, when the state-controlled Soviet newspaper, Pravda, reported that on March 15, 1988, General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov was executed for espionage. CIA and FBI agents who knew the Russian agonized over what mistake they might have made that resulted in his unmasking. Only recently did they learn the truth. Aldrich Hazen Ames, a career CIA officer, was arrested in February and sentenced to life in prison after he admitted taking $2.5 million from the KGB, starting in 1985, in return for secrets that included the identities of many Soviet and East bloc citizens spying for the CIA. At least 10 of these people are believed to have been executed.
