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

especially regarding the interceptor’s radar and avionics. 17
    The Russian man on the street corner carried a letter in his pocket. Since January, he had been trying to contact the CIA by spotting cars used by the Americans. Starting with his approach to Fulton at the gas station, he had made four approaches, but all were ignored or rebuffed. Then he went on a long work trip out of town and lost track of his quarry. Now he was searching again for the Americans.
    At the market, he spotted a car with the plates. An embassy employee got out of the car. The Russian man quickly walked up to him, handed him the letter, and pleaded that it be delivered to the responsible U.S. official.
    The embassy employee who received the letter at the market was the majordomo of Spaso House, a portly man who managed the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Moscow. When he brought the letter to the CIA’s Moscow station, Hathaway opened it and found two typewritten pages of intelligence about radars for Soviet military aircraft.
    In the letter, the man described how, after Belenko’s defection, orders came down to modify the radar in the MiG-25. He then wrote something that seized Hathaway’s attention. The man said he had access to development of a “look-down, shoot-down” radar system. He also said he could provide schematics for a radar that was becoming the basic unit for interceptors like the ultrafast MiG-25.
    Again, he provided some scenarios for a possible contact and said he would be waiting for it on January 9, 1978, in the New Year.
    He wanted “to do what Belenko did,” he wrote. But he still did not say who he was.
    The next morning, Hathaway went to visit a friend who was a defense attaché in the embassy.
    “What the hell is look-down, shoot-down radar?” Hathaway asked, getting right to the point.
    The friend replied, “Are you kidding? That’s one of the most important damn things in the world!” 18
    Such a radar would allow Soviet aircraft at a higher altitude to spot low-flying planes or missiles against the contours of the earth. At the time, it was believed the Soviet warplanes lacked the capability; the MiG-25 flown by Belenko did not have it. Moreover, Soviet ground-based radars also couldn’t see targets at low altitude, and the United States had spent years preparing to exploit this vulnerability, either with low-altitude bombers or with advanced cruise missiles to fly under the Soviet radars.
    Hathaway was frustrated by the stand-down and by Turner’s fears. “What the hell is wrong with headquarters?” he asked. “They have lost their mind! What are we going to do, sit on our ass?”
    While he had a healthy respect for the KGB, Hathaway knew they weren’t perfect, and he felt confident the CIA could run agents in Moscow. “You have to understand, everyone in the station, to a man, knew exactly, we can operate against these people,” he said. Hathaway felt Turner wasn’t getting good advice. He insisted that Turner send his close aide, Williams, to Moscow. Once he arrived, Hathaway took him out on a surveillance detection run, to see the KGB’s methods firsthand—methods that were sloppy, even if the surveillance was pervasive. Hathaway and Williams listened to the KGB radio transmissions with the small CIA scanners. “We hit a red light, and we could hear pomidor! Tomato! They were dumb enough to yell ‘red light,’ ” Hathaway recalled. He sent Williams back to Langley with a plea: let the Moscow station come back to life. Williams seemed to get the point. But Turner was unmoved, and there was no change in the stand-down.
    After delivering the note in December 1977 about “look-down, shoot-down” radar, the man at the gas station was given a CIA code name, cksphere .
    Hathaway pressed headquarters to examine the information cksphere had provided. From the notes earlier in the year and in December, Hathaway saw the man was an engineer at a top secret military research laboratory.
    In an