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On a more practical level, Polyakov wanted his two sons to be well educated and placed in professional jobs, which could be assured by his rise in the GRU. His career, in turn, was aided by the CIA, which gave him some minor secrets and provided two Americans whom he presented as the fruits of his recruiting. They became double agents for the CIA. A year after signing on with the FBI, Polyakov was posted back to Moscow, where he had access to GRU penetrations of Western intelligence. Before long he began serving up moles, including Frank Bossard, a guided-missile researcher in the British aviation ministry and U.S. Army Sergeant Jack Dunlap, a courier at the National Security Agency.
Any suspicions that he may have been a Soviet plant were allayed by the quality of the information he provided. In the late 1960s, while running the GRU's key listening post in Rangoon, Polyakov gave the CIA everything the Soviets collected from there on the Vietnamese and Chinese armed forces. Rotated back to Moscow as head of the GRU's China section, he photographed crucial documents tracking that country's bitter split with Moscow. A CIA specialist on Sino-Soviet relations drew on rich detail from a Soviet source -- whom he learned just last week was Polyakov -- that enabled the analyst to conclude confidently that the Sino-Soviet split would persist. The paper was used by Henry Kissinger, helping him and Nixon forge their 1972 opening to China.
Polyakov's promotion to general in 1974 gave him access to a cornucopia of intelligence beyond his immediate mission: for example, a shopping list, several inches thick, of military technologies sought by Soviet spies in the West. "It was breathtaking," recalls Richard Perle, an Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Reagan. "We found there were 5,000 separate Soviet programs that were utilizing Western technology to build up their military capabilities." Polyakov's list helped Perle persuade Reagan to press for tighter controls on Western sales of military technology.
By the late 1970s, CIA officers treated Polyakov more like a teacher than an informant. They let him call the shots about meetings and dead drops. CIA technicians built him a special, handheld device into which information could be typed, then encrypted and transmitted in a 2.6-sec. burst to a receiver in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. And Polyakov often copied documents using film that could be developed only with a special chemical known to him and his handlers; if processed normally, it would come out blank.
Using such tradecraft, Polyakov obtained more than 100 issues of the classified version of Military Thought, a strategy document produced monthly by the Soviet general staff. The periodical contained frank assessments by leading Soviet military strategists. Said Robert Gates, a career Soviet analyst and CIA director for President Bush: "There were a lot of debates at the time over Soviet military strategy and doctrine in terms of how their forces would be used in a war." Polyakov's purloined documents "gave us insights into how they talked to each other about these issues, whether they thought that victory in a nuclear war was possible." The answer, thankfully, was no. Polyakov proved that Soviet military leaders were not crazy warmongers. They were as afraid as we were. This insight may have prevented U.S. miscalculations that would have touched off a shooting war.