Adolf Tolkachev

Who was Adolf Tolkachev?

Adolf Georgievich Tolkachev Адольф Георгиевич Толкачёв was a Soviet Union electronics engineer who provided key documents to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency over the years between 1979 and 1985. Working at the Soviet radar design house Phazotron as one of the chief designers, Tolkachev gave the CIA complete information about such projects as the R-23, R-24, R-33, R-27, and R-60, S-300; fighter-interceptor aircraft radars used on the MiG-29, MiG-31, and Su-27; and other avionics. The United States considered the most advanced airborne radar among the systems Tolkachev compromised was the passive phased array radar used by the MiG-31 Foxhound fighter. He was executed as a spy in 1986.

His distrust of the communist government seemed to spring from persecution his wife's parents had suffered under Joseph Stalin. He told the CIA he was inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

Tolkachev attempted five times from January 1977 to February 1978 to approach cars with U.S. diplomatic license plates in Moscow, coincidentally approaching the CIA Moscow bureau chief Gardner Hathaway at a gas station, but the CIA was wary of counterintelligence operations by the KGB.