
How a troubled past turned a Soviet engineer into a valuable spy - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/adolf-tolkachev-cia-kgb/400769/?single_page=true
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hga
"Troubled past" as in his wife's parents were senselessly murdered or sent to
a camp when she was ~2, she grew up in an overflowing orphanage (the Great
Terror killed an absolute minimum of 13-15 million and broke many more like
her father; the same fate was shared by the people who ran the 1937 census
when it told the truth), etc.

------
revelation
_Edward Lee Howard, a one-time CIA trainee_

So the CIAs incompetence got him killed.

~~~
hga
More complete quote from the article:

 _in late 1984 and early 1985, he was betrayed to the KGB. (CIA officials
believe the informant was Edward Lee Howard, a one-time CIA trainee who had
been fired after failing a series of polygraph tests. Howard, who defected to
the Soviet Union after Tolkachev’s arrest, denied betraying the Soviet spy.
Howard died in Moscow in 2002.)_

The Official Story per Wikipedia and consistant with the implication he was
just a trainee
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lee_Howard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lee_Howard)):

 _Howard was hired by the CIA in 1980 and was later joined by his wife, Mary,
where they were both trained in intelligence and counter-intelligence methods.
Shortly after the end of their training and before going on their first
assignment, a routine polygraph test indicated that he had lied about past
drug use, and he was fired by the CIA in 1983 shortly before he was to report
to the CIA’s station at the American embassy in Moscow._

It's hard to imagine how he'd get the right sort of info on such a critical
spy.

~~~
perfTerm
If Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA, is any sort of indicator (and it is
as a factual history of the CIA), the CIA has been (and probably still is) an
absolutely inept institution with a tremendous amount of incompetance. I'm not
quite this far but I'm getting there. I'm sure it will talk about this guy.

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Asbostos
Isn't it hypocritical to see the Soviet Union as bad for executing a spy when
this guy's [1] been imprisoned by the US for nearly half his life for the same
thing?

If spying is good, it doesn't matter who's side you're on. It's still good.
Unless there's some sort of neutral decider about which countries it's "noble"
to spy on and which it's bad.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Pelton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Pelton)

~~~
joshuapants
There's a difference between someone dying of a 9mm cerebral hemorrhage in
Lubyanka after being disappeared and someone getting a fair trial and sentence
in a Western Democracy.

> If spying is good, it doesn't matter who's side you're on

I think you're being purposefully obtuse here.

