In late 1985 and early 1986, as a result of information Ames provided to the KGB, the CIA lost almost all its agents in the Soviet Union. In time the agency would learn that 10 of them had been executed; a complete list of their names and code names appears below for the first time. Many others were sent to prison. In all, three dozen agents were lost. The following excerpts from Nightmover describe six of them.
Sergei Motorin: During the summer of 1980, Motorin was posted to Washington as a third secretary to the Soviet embassy. A young major in the KGB who was married, he attracted the attention of the FBI when the bureau got a telephone call from a friendly insurance adjuster informing them that Motorin had been in a car accident. There was a hooker in the car. Not long afterward, the FBI watched Motorin walk into a store in downtown Washington and barter his operational allowance of vodka and Cuban cigars for stereo equipment. Using these indiscretions as leverage, the FBI persuaded him to begin spying for the U.S. He identified for the FBI the name of every KGB agent in the Soviet embassy in Washington. At each of its meetings with Motorin, the FBI gave him a modest cash payment, at first $100, later $200. After each meeting, the bureau also put aside $500 in an escrow account, to be held for Motorin against the day that he might defect.
At the end of 1984, Motorin returned to Moscow. Six months later, Ames handed over his identity, and the agent was doomed. A Soviet court that heard the evidence against Motorin said he had received $20,000 from the FBI, citing his purchase of a water bed as proof of his Western decadence. Soon after, he was shot.
Adolf Tolkachev: On June 13, 1985, the same day Ames turned over his cache of secret CIA documents to Sergei Chuvakhin in Washington, the KGB arrested one of the CIA's key assets in Moscow. A defense researcher who was a leading expert on stealth aircraft technology, Tolkachev was identified in the documents Ames turned over. The CIA later concluded that Tolkachev had first been betrayed by renegade CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, but that Ames' identification helped to seal his fate. Tolkachev was executed on Sept. 24, 1986.
Valeri Martynov: In November 1980, Martynov arrived in Washington with his wife Natalia to take up his duties, ostensibly as third secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington. He was actually a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. In the spring of 1982, however, he was recruited through a joint FBI-CIA courtship program and began feeding information to the Americans.
From the CIA's point of view, Martynov's importance lay in his potential as a sleeper agent who might rise through the ranks and prove useful in the future. After Ames betrayed him, however, the KGB ordered him to return to Moscow in November 1985. Martynov told his wife and his two young children that he would be back in Washington shortly. Ten days later, Natalia received a note from her husband asking her to come back to Moscow with their son and daughter. As soon as their plane landed, Natalia realized that her husband was in trouble.