Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War over Nerve Gas

^{CHAPTER: 11} SUNDANCE

By the spring of 1969, Cassidy had been stationed at Edgewood for seven years, and the FBI began to fret that the Russians might regard it as a suspiciously long time for him to remain in the same job. Moreover, the nerve-gas deception was winding down after three and a half years.

It had been difficult enough to keep Cassidy in the Edgewood lab as it was. Shortly after his marriage, Cassidy was informed by the army that he was being sent to Karlsruhe, Germany. There was some suspicion within the FBI that the army wanted to transfer Cassidy there so it could take over the case. (Because the FBI operates primarily within the United States, if the case moved abroad the army would have jurisdiction.) Morrissey managed to outflank the army and squelch the transfer. According to Charlie Bevels, the FBI had to maneuver around the army bureaucracy more than once.

“Cassidy’s name kept showing up on a list for Vietnam,” Bevels recalled, “and every six months or so Jimmy Morrissey had to go to the Pentagon and get his name off the list. Joe was uneasy because he couldn’t explain it to anybody. He didn’t want any special privilege.”

The army inadvertently solved the bureau’s problem that spring by promoting Cassidy, a master sergeant, to an E-9, the rating for sergeant major. “Since there was no E-9 slot at Edgewood, I had to find a slot,” Cassidy said. “I checked and found one open at the United States Strike Command [STRICOM], in Tampa, Florida. I put in a request for transfer.”

Unknown to Cassidy, the FBI was orchestrating his move to Tampa. The bureau, Phil Parker recalled, saw a major benefit that might flow from the transfer. “The GRU’s officers in the embassy could not meet him in Florida, because of travel restrictions on Soviet diplomats, who were normally confined to a twenty-five-mile radius of Washington.” As a result, he said, the FBI hoped that the move would force Moscow to surface a new contact, perhaps an illegal, who might lead the FBI to other unknown Soviet agents.

Nothing is easy in the bureaucracy. If the FBI was going to run an espionage operation out of STRICOM, the military had to be told. Tom O’Laughlin, the ex-FBI man then working for the Joint Chiefs, was designated to bell the cat. He traveled to Tampa and briefed the base commander, a four-star general. O’Laughlin was successful in his delicate mission. The general agreed to accept Cassidy.

Operation SHOCKER was now set to move to Tampa. STRICOM, located at MacDill Air Force Base, was the Pentagon’s unified command for a large group of army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps units around the country. The command was created in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy. As its name implies, its purpose was to allow the military to respond quickly to a flare-up anywhere in the world.

In July, as Cassidy prepared to move to Florida, he received instructions from Oleg Likhachev to return on the day after Christmas to Washington, where he would meet “an old friend.”[1] While Cassidy would have no difficulty getting leave to make the trip north, for the moment these instructions frustrated the FBI’s plan to force the Soviets to reveal a new contact.

The following month, Cassidy said good-bye to Jimmy Morrissey and Charlie Bevels, and he and Marie left for Tampa. He contacted the Tampa FBI office and met with Dennis R. Dickson, who served briefly as his case agent. In the files of the Tampa office, WALLFLOWER was given a code number, TP510.[2] He and Marie bought a house on the water in St. Petersburg.

At FBI headquarters, Gene Peterson chose a new code name, ZYRKSEEZ, for the case that the FBI had up to then designated as CHOWLINE and the Joint Chiefs called SHOCKER. Peterson chose the loopy spelling of Xerxes for a crafty practical reason: He knew he would be able to use it right away, without the usual bureaucratic delay for approval. The panjandrums in charge of such matters could see at a glance that ZYRKSEEZ was unique; it would not have to be laboriously checked against previous bureau code names because there was no way in the world it would duplicate a cryptonym already in the files.[3]

Even so, Peterson was given a hard time over the code name. A few days later, someone from the records branch called him, complaining vociferously about the unusual spelling.

“What’s with this ZYRKSEEZ?” the file keeper asked. “We can’t pronounce it.”

“You don’t have to pronounce it,” Peterson shot back. “All you need to know is where to file the damn card.”

In December, as instructed, Cassidy returned to Washington. On the day after Christmas, he waited on a street in Prince Georges County, Maryland, at the designated time. As promised, an “old friend” appeared.

Mikhail Danilin, by now a second secretary of the Soviet embassy, was back from Moscow. He smiled broadly at the sight of the agent he had lamented he might never see again.

After the two men had greeted each other, Danilin instructed Cassidy to pick out several drop sites in the St. Petersburg area. That would be good news to the FBI; the bureau’s plan appeared to be working.

Danilin told Cassidy to bring the description of the locations to their next meeting. Once the drops were agreed upon, Danilin said, Cassidy was to buy a camera, photograph military documents from MacDill, and place the film in hollow rocks at the drop sites at designated times and dates. The agent who cleared a drop would leave a paper bag as a signal that the film had been picked up. Cassidy was to return to the drop site each time and verify that the paper bag was there.

Then Danilin explained that “another USSR agent” might clear the drops in Florida. Cassidy agreed to his instructions but grumbled to Danilin about having to come north at Christmas, leaving his wife by herself.

To the FBI, Danilin’s passing mention of “another USSR agent” was important additional evidence that the bureau’s plan was on target: Given the restrictions on travel by Soviet diplomats, the agent almost had to be an illegal.

In the world of espionage, illegals are a prime catch. Because illegals do not operate under diplomatic cover, they can be anywhere—the woman who works in the hair salon down the street, the friendly clerk in the hardware store, or even the neighbor next door. Unless illegals are identified by a defector, they are virtually impossible to find. Their spying usually goes undetected.

Back in Florida, with the help of the FBI, WALLFLOWER drove around St. Petersburg picking out likely drop sites for the GRU. Most were in residential areas or near stores or office buildings, which would make surveillance that much easier for the bureau. In a park or wooded area, it would be difficult for the FBI to get close enough. Cassidy was to explain to the Soviets that the Tampa Bay area was less rural than northern Virginia, compelling him to select sites in more populous places. As instructed, he also bought a 35 mm camera.

Then, in May 1970, he met his new FBI case agent, a tall Irishman from Brooklyn who still retained a trace of his New York accent along with a lot of street smarts. At age thirty-five, John J. O’Flaherty was already a bureau veteran. The two men took to each other immediately, the start of a lifelong friendship.

At six foot two, Jack O’Flaherty was a handsome, impressive-looking man with an athlete’s build. The son of a mounted policeman in New York, he was born in Brooklyn but grew up in the Rockaways in Queens. He went to St. John’s University and joined the police force in 1957, working the four-to-midnight shift and attending law school at St. John’s by day. “A family friend, Mike O’Brien, encouraged me to apply to the FBI and gave me an application,” O’Flaherty said. “From time to time, he needled me, what happened to that application I gave you? So, finally I applied.”

He joined the FBI in March 1961 at age twenty-six, worked as an agent in North Carolina, and was assigned to the Cuban squad in New York, his first taste of foreign counterintelligence work. He married and, after a tour in the San Juan office, arrived in Tampa in August 1968.

On July Fourth weekend 1970, Cassidy drove north to Washington for another meeting with Danilin at their old haunt, the parking lot of the bowling alley in Springfield. The Soviets approved most of the drop sites he had selected, and Danilin accepted Cassidy’s explanation about why the drops were to be in more built-up areas.

Cassidy received a packet of what looked like ordinary lead of the type that is loaded into a mechanical pencil. He was instructed to crush the lead, dissolve it in water, and use the solution to raise the secret writing he would receive from the Soviets. This replaced the earlier method of steaming.

Almost six months later, Cassidy went to Washington again. On the day after Christmas, he picked up three hollow rocks containing two new rollover cameras to use in addition to his 35 mm camera. There were also instructions from Danilin for the first drop in Florida. The message said: “6 Mar. 9:00. Base of bush by large palm tree at Rafael Blvd. and Snell Island Blvd. (south of stop sign).”

After collecting the rocks, Cassidy met with Danilin, and then drove back to Florida, where he turned the rocks over to O’Flaherty. In Tampa, arrangements had to be made to select the classified documents that Cassidy would photograph for the GRU. An ad hoc committee of representatives of the armed services was created at STRICOM to screen the feed before the Joint Chiefs in Washington gave final approval.

Snell Isle, misnamed because it is really a peninsula along Tampa Bay, is a quiet, mostly residential section a mile and a half long and less than a mile wide. Almost half the area is taken up by a private golf course.

With the first pickup by the Russians scheduled for the night of March 6, 1971, O’Flaherty swung into action. He tried to leave nothing to chance in preparing for the moment of contact. There was a two-story condominium directly across the street from the drop site on Snell Isle. O’Flaherty approached Jerry Koontz, a seventy-four-year-old widower who lived on the second floor, overlooking the palm tree. Koontz was a retired sales manager for Sinclair Oil. “He allowed us to use his apartment.”

Also in the line of vision of the drop site, catercorner and a block away, was a building that housed the Tampa Bay Engineering Company. O’Flaherty approached William O’Neill, the firm’s president, and asked if the FBI could take over the building on the night of March 6. O’Flaherty never explained the reason, but he assured the executive, “There won’t be any shooting.” O’Neill agreed.

On the evening of March 6, the stakeout was ready. O’Flaherty waited in the dark in the condo across from the palm tree with his FBI team and a bug-eyed Jerry Koontz, for whom retirement had never been this exciting. “In the front room were two photographers, Fred Webb, who was in charge of the FBI photo lab, and George Austin, and two agents, Joe Hall from the Washington field office, and Larry Doyle from New York. Five of us in the dark, watching.”

The two visiting FBI men were counterintelligence agents, experts at spotting Soviets, in case Danilin or anyone else from Washington dared to risk violating the twenty-five-mile rule. The photographers were looking through a night-vision scope.

Promptly at 9 P.M., Joe Cassidy placed three hollow rocks at the base of the palm tree. Inside were rollover cameras with photos of eleven documents, one stamped TOP SECRET, nine marked SECRET, and one CONFIDENTIAL. The document marked TOP SECRET was entitled “CINPAC Keystone Robin (Charlie) Movement Planning Conference (U) MSG DTG 110338Z DEC 70.”

If all went according to plan, a Russian spy would appear within half an hour. Would he arrive by car? On foot? O’Flaherty had attempted to cover all the bases. “We had an agent with a tie-clasp camera riding the bus line in case the illegal arrived by bus.” Other agents were in the engineering offices as backup, watching from a distance.

Time ticked by as O’Flaherty and the four other FBI men in the condo strained to see any activity around the palm tree, which was nestled against a thick hedge. George Austin was peering through the night scope.

“All of a sudden George says, ‘I see a hand,’” O’Flaherty recalled. “We couldn’t see anything. But through the night scope he could. The individual had come from the opposite side, from behind the palm tree, and reached through the bushes. His fingers were inches from the rock, groping for it, and then he gave up. He comes out from behind the bushes. My first thought is, Is this a professional spy? He has white slacks on. The last thing he should be wearing.” Through the night scope, the photographer could see the man was young, tall, and slender, with dark hair and glasses.

“He comes out front, and the cameras are going. He picks up the rocks and puts them in a bag. And then he walks away, south on Rafael. Now we’ve got a person, and he’s moving in a direction where we did not have anybody.” It was 9:23 P.M.

O’Flaherty silently cursed. The skinny Soviet spy in white slacks was eluding their grasp, and there was nothing they could do about it. Who was he? Had agents been stationed on Rafael Boulevard, they might have been able to get a closer look or a better picture, but it might not be possible to identify the man from the photographs, since he was almost certainly an illegal, an unknown face.

The FBI had decided in advance not to try to follow whoever appeared at the drop. SHOCKER had been running for twelve years, and O’Flaherty was not about to blow the operation by putting men on the street; if the spy became aware that he was being tailed, the game would be over. “We wanted fixed surveillance for security reasons, no cars,” he said.

Luck was on the bureau’s side. The unknown spy had forgotten to leave a paper bag by the palm tree to signal that the drop had been cleared. He realized his mistake and came back. Seven minutes later, at 9:30 P.M., a light blue Volkswagen suddenly appeared. The man jumped out, with the car’s motor running, and left a Publix supermarket bag at the base of the tree. Then he got back in his car and zoomed away.

Through their night-vision scope, the photographers could make out the license plate: 1E-17128. From the condo, O’Flaherty called Joseph F. Santoiana, Jr., the FBI’s special agent in charge (SAC) in Tampa, at his home. The SAC called in the license number and asked Tampa to run the plate. By the time O’Flaherty and his team reached the office, they had their answer. The Volkswagen belonged to a rental agency in Miami. Around midnight, teletypes were sent out to Miami and to FBI headquarters in Washington reporting all that had happened.

SHOCKER had surfaced an unknown spy and created a new case. The FBI gave it a separate code name: PALMETTO.

Now the FBI’s task was to identify the man. Before dawn, a teletype arrived from headquarters instructing Tampa and Miami to follow up but emphasizing that the surveillance be discreet.

The FBI was moving with an excess of caution. “Sure, we could have staked out the rental agency,” O’Flaherty said, “but they [headquarters] were very concerned about blowing the case.”

At 7 A.M., Special Agent Sam Jones, of the FBI’s Miami office, checked with the rental agency in Miami, an establishment known as Lester-U-Drive-It. Donald W. MacArthur, the manager, identified the man who had rented the car and returned it an hour earlier. He was apparently Mexican but had produced a Canadian driver’s license. The name on the license was Gilberto Lopez y Rivas.

MacArthur remembered that when Lopez rented the car, he had said that he had arrived in Miami on a Greyhound bus. Jones reasoned that he might have left the same way. The FBI man went to the Greyhound terminal and spoke to the ticket clerk. Jones brought with him the photographs taken through the night scope. But the clerk shook his head; he could not remember selling the man a ticket.

“You know how many people we get going through here?” the clerk asked. He paused, then recalled something. “Wait a second—bad breath! The guy had bad breath! I remember him now.” The clerk had given the man directions to San Antonio. He suggested the most direct route, but Lopez bought a ticket on an earlier bus with stops in New Orleans and Houston.

“Now we alerted all the divisions along the way,” O’Flaherty said. “FBI agents were watching the Greyhound terminals in all three cities, New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio.

“Several agents were getting on buses to try to spot him. The Greyhound with Lopez aboard arrived in New Orleans the next day. The FBI saw him on the bus. Agents boarded the bus in New Orleans and watched him leave the bus in Houston. He took a cab to Houston Intercontinental Airport.” The agents did not want to get in too close and did not trail the taxi, though they later interviewed the driver. He said his passenger had entered the terminal. Checking further, the FBI established that he had boarded a Braniff flight to Mexico City. Jean Hadid, a Braniff ticket agent at the airport, identified Lopez.

Lopez was gone, at least for the moment, south of the border. The FBI knew nothing about him yet, except his name, if it was his real one. But O’Flaherty knew one thing, as he looked back on the kaleidoscopic events of the last forty-eight hours: Something unprecedented in the history of espionage had occurred. The man who called himself Gilberto Lopez y Rivas was the first illegal ever surfaced by a double-agent operation of the FBI.