Free The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman Page A

guarantee there would be no further compromises. This left many officers in the clandestine service bewildered. Did Turner not grasp the basics of espionage operations? The case officers and their agents were never free from risk. They could never guarantee there would be no more compromises. 13
    In Moscow, Hathaway was furious; Turner’s action seemed incomprehensible. It ran against everything Hathaway stood for—against his sense of mission and desire for aggressive espionage operations. Instead of running agents, Hathaway’s case officers were forced to sit on their hands. Hathaway kept them busy as best he could, looking for new dead drop sites and making maps, preparing for the day they could resume running spies. 14
    Meanwhile, the station began to lose intelligence sources, and one of them was the valuable volunteer from the early 1960s, Alexei Kulak, the KGB scientific and technical officer code-named fedora by the FBI. A war hero in the Soviet Union who joined the KGB and was assigned to New York, Kulak walked into the FBI field office in New York in March 1962 and volunteered to work for the United States for cash. He was overweight, a heavy drinker who loved big meals. Kulak served two tours in the United States and in those years was considered an authentic agent by the FBI, but by the mid-1970s they began to lose confidence in him and suspected he was controlled by the KGB. 15 In 1976, Kulak was preparing to return to Moscow, probably never to return to the United States. Hathaway, then getting ready to take the reins as chief of the Moscow station, went to New York City to personally recruit Kulak for the CIA. The meeting, in a hotel room, was filled with tension, as an FBI man berated Kulak and Hathaway struggled to win his confidence. Hathaway won out, and Kulak agreed to work for the CIA once he returned to Moscow. He left the United States equipped with dead drop and signal sites. His CIA crypt was ckkayo .
    In early July 1977, he filled a dead drop in Moscow for the first time, and the contents were startling. Kulak provided a handwritten list of Soviet officials in the United States who were attempting to steal scientific and technical secrets. Even more promising, he said in the fall he would provide “lists of all Soviet officials and scientists worldwide involved in the collection of U.S. scientific and technical information,” as well as five- and ten-year plans of the KGB’s scientific and technical directorate. This would be a gold mine, a KGB blueprint ten years into the future on one of the biggest issues of the day, Soviet theft of Western technology.
    Right on schedule in the autumn, Kulak signaled for the dead drop. But at this point, Turner’s stand-down was in effect, and the Moscow station did not respond. Kulak signaled a second time. The station did nothing. Hathaway was forced to watch as a valuable source was frittered away. The Kulak operation withered. 16
    The man who had first approached Fulton at the gas station was standing on a street corner near a market in Moscow on December 10, 1977, looking at the license plates on every car, searching for the prefix D-04 that signified an American diplomat’s vehicle.
    More than a year earlier, he had heard an astonishing news report while listening to a Voice of America broadcast on a shortwave radio in his apartment. He learned that a Soviet air force pilot, Victor Belenko, flew his MiG-25 interceptor from a Soviet air base in the Far East to a civilian airport in Japan and defected. It was a daring escape from the Soviet Union, and Belenko was granted asylum in the United States. As a defector, Belenko provided the Americans with an intelligence windfall, surprising new details about the feared and mysterious Soviet interceptor, designed to chase and shoot down the high-flying SR-71 “Blackbird” U.S. reconnaissance jet. In Japan, Belenko’s plane was disassembled by a U.S. and Japanese team, which yielded still more secrets,