Lindsay Moran
speaker
134 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard today
Lindsay Moran’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that's because we had no idea was this person showing up as a way to kind of flush out who are the intelligence officers.
Walk-ins have to be handled with suspicion because there's always a case that someone pretending to be a defector is really just bait.
In the case of Tolkachev, I think it's worth noting that he approached the CIA many times, and that both rose the suspicion at the CIA, but also was part of what made the CIA ultimately believe him.
So Tolkachev was a Soviet radar engineer, and he was working in Moscow for an institute connected to advanced aviation and defense technology.
From the outside, he looked like a fairly typical Soviet professional.
He was educated.
He was technically skilled.
And he was, by all accounts and observations, living within the constraints of the Soviet system, which, of course, was very repressive.
But internally, he was deeply disillusioned with that system.
Typically, when we see someone approach a foreign intelligence service, they're doing it because they want money.
You know, our most notorious moles in the United States or in history have been people who were motivated by money and they went to the Soviets or the Russians and they sold our secrets.
Tolkachev was someone who was really motivated by ideology and by his desire to bring down a political system that he despised.
The KGB monitored embassy staff, tracked their vehicles, followed them throughout the city, you know, sometimes even overtly so.
And, of course, used both physical and technical surveillance as a way to monitor their methods.
And so even small mistakes, turning the wrong corner, staying too long in one place,
Repeating a pattern, that could expose both the officer and Tolkachev.
And in an environment like that, running an agent like Tolkachev required exceptional discipline and also patience from everyone involved.
A dead drop is a rudimentary tradecraft trick that we used all the time during the Cold War.
And people are surprised to realize that we still use it today because it's incredibly lacking in technology.
And what a dead drop means is that the intelligence officer and his or her source find an agreed upon place where that source will store or hide information.
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