TOPHAT: the Polyakov case

In November 1961 a colonel on the Soviet delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee in New York offered his services to the FBI. He was Dmitri Polyakov, and under cover he was a senior officer of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. The FBI called him TOPHAT. Over the next two decades, as he rose to major general, he became, in the words of two of the CIA officers who worked his case, quoted in a CIA review, the "highest-ranking spy ever run against the Soviet Union during the Cold War"^1,6,7.

A walk-in in New York

Polyakov had served in New York before, from 1951 to 1956, and was back from 1959. Russian accounts say that at his first meetings with FBI agents in November and December 1961 he named Soviet cipher clerks, dozens of GRU and KGB officers in the United States and GRU illegals⁷. Why he volunteered is debated. He described himself as a Russian patriot repelled by the Soviet elite; a KGB officer later said he was embittered after Moscow refused to let a seriously ill son be treated in New York⁶. Sandra Grimes, who worked on the case at CIA from 1967, believed he thought the West too weak to resist the Soviet leadership without help⁵.

Run from Moscow, Rangoon and New Delhi

When Polyakov went home in 1962, he kept passing material in Moscow through dead drops. Once he was posted abroad again the CIA ran the case, under the cryptonyms BOURBON and later ROAM^6,7. His postings gave the Agency long stretches of access: military attaché and GRU chief in Rangoon from 1965 to 1969, and GRU chief in New Delhi from 1973 to 1976 and again from late 1979. He was promoted to major general in 1974 and between tours taught at the Military-Diplomatic Academy, which trained GRU officers⁷.

Grimes, who started out filing his reports on index cards, described the breadth of his access: Soviet weapons and military doctrine, the GRU's officers and agents, and, as he rose, the foreign and economic policy that reached the top of his service⁵. Published accounts credit him with documents on the Sino-Soviet split, data on Soviet antitank missiles, and leads to Soviet agents in the West, among them the British aviation ministry official Frank Bossard⁶. He insisted on modest pay, reportedly taken largely in tools and sporting gear⁶.

He also chose his own tradecraft in Moscow. "We followed his lead on dead-drops," Grimes said⁵.

Betrayed twice

In June 1980 Polyakov was suddenly recalled from New Delhi and never returned. He retired. The CIA's alarm faded when his articles on hunting began appearing in a Soviet sporting magazine⁴.

What the Americans did not know was that he had already been sold. In November 1979, Robert Hanssen, then an FBI agent in New York, volunteered to the GRU. The Justice Department's inspector general later found that the most significant information Hanssen passed in 1979–81 "concerned the identity of a long-time FBI asset in the GRU"². The unclassified report does not name the asset; other accounts identify him as Polyakov⁶. The GRU did not move against him then.

In 1985 Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, began selling secrets to the KGB. A Senate inquiry found that on 13 June 1985 he handed over documents identifying more than ten top CIA and FBI sources, and Ames admitted in court documents that he disclosed Russian military and intelligence officers cooperating with the CIA³. Grimes, who had worked alongside him, said Ames gave the KGB the information that let it catch Polyakov⁴.

Arrest and execution

In 1986 the CIA noticed that Polyakov's son had come home early from India and that the hunting articles had stopped⁴. He had been arrested on 7 July 1986. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentenced him to death on 27 November 1987, and he was shot on 15 March 1988⁷. Grimes said confirmation came only when the Soviet press reported the execution⁴.

His loss was one of the cases in the collapse of US human sources inside Soviet intelligence in 1985–86 that a CIA team, including Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, later traced to Ames^1,3. See 1985, the Year of the Spy.

What the record does not show

No CIA or FBI file on TOPHAT has been declassified. The case is known from Hanssen's prosecution record, the Ames inquiries, the accounts of retired officers and Russian publications, which do not always agree on dates.

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PERSON · 1921 1921–1988 Dmitri Polyakov GRU major general who spied for the FBI and CIA from 1961 to 1980, under the code names TOPHAT and BOURBON. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988. AGENCY · 1918 Soviet Union · 1918–1992 GRU (Soviet military intelligence) The Red Army's foreign intelligence service from 1918 to 1992: its interwar illegals, its wartime networks in America, the Western spies inside it, and its part in the war scare of the 1980s. November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history. 16 April – 25 November 1985 1985, the Year of the Spy In 1985 the FBI arrested a string of Americans spying for Moscow, Beijing and Israel, a KGB officer defected and re-defected, and the CIA lost almost every agent it had inside Soviet intelligence. OPERATION · 1977 January 1977 – 24 September 1986 The Tolkachev case From 1979 to 1985 Soviet radar engineer Adolf Tolkachev photographed secret designs for the CIA in Moscow, handing over hundreds of rolls of film. Betrayed in 1985, he was executed in September 1986. 20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis.