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

^{CHAPTER: 14} THE BIG APPLE

In June 1973, four months after he retired from the army, Cassidy got a letter from his Soviet controllers instructing him to purchase a shortwave radio.

“Buy a new Zenith Royal 7000 radio,” the message said. “Do it outside your home city and without registering your name. Pay in cash.”

Cassidy acted on his instructions. “I bought the radio for around two hundred and fifty dollars, a Zenith Royal 7000 Trans-Oceanic,” he said. “I still have it.” The Russians provided him with certain times and frequencies to listen to Radio Moscow on the mornings of the first and third Mondays of each month. The messages were transmitted in Morse code, in a cipher keyed to the same miniature dictionary, The Universal Webster, that Cassidy had been given by the Soviets nearly seven years earlier. He used the dictionary to decipher the coded messages.

In early September, Mikhail Danilin left Washington for the last time. Cassidy was told in the June letter that his next personal meeting, with a new “Mike,” was to take place in December in New York City where Russian intelligence officers worked under diplomatic cover at the Soviet mission to the United Nations and in the UN secretariat. “Return in your package both special cameras unless you have a new job with an access to classified documents,” the instructions continued. “Your messages to me are okay but in the future try to leave larger margins on both sides on the top and at the bottom of the sheets you are writing on…. Do not forget to steam my letter before developing.”

Finally, the letter asked Cassidy to brush up on his cryptography. It included sixteen six-digit groups containing a coded test message. “To refresh your skill in reading my coded messages try to work out this one,” the letter said.

A few days before Christmas, Cassidy drove north from Florida to keep the rendezvous with the Russians. “I had to drive,” he recalled. “If I flew, it would look funny going through security with a hollow rock full of film.”[1] The fake rock, it had also occurred to him, might look to security like a good place to hide drugs. Aside from Cassidy’s concerns about airport security, he was going to need a car in New York to go to all the drop, signal, and meeting sites specified by the Russians. In the end, however, O’Flaherty decided to transport the rock north.

In New York, Cassidy checked into a motel in Howard Beach, Queens, which, to the vast embarrassment of both Cassidy and the bureau, turned out to be a hot-sheet motel, whose patrons used it for quickie sex. Next day, WALLFLOWER moved to the Hilton near John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Meanwhile, O’Flaherty flew to New York from Tampa, carrying a gym bag with the hollow rock, which contained the two small cameras and films of secret documents that Cassidy had photographed before he retired. O’Flaherty, with his FBI credentials, would have no trouble going through security. But no one at the airport bothered to ask why he was traveling with a rock in his carry-on bag. In New York, fortunately, O’Flaherty had not been booked at the seedy motel; he stayed with his mother in Rockaway Point, Queens, in the house where he had grown up.

Cassidy’s instructions from the Russians, were, as always, detailed and meticulous. “Come to New York City on December 22, 1973 (Saturday),” he was told. “At 2 P.M. leave your stuff at the following place: From 104th Street in Queens walk west along 165 Avenue to its dead-end. Put your package behind the right side of the concrete wall with railings preventing cars from going further.” If for some reason the dead drop was not suitable, he was given a “reserve place” in Brooklyn.

The meeting place with the new “Mike” was to be an antique shop in Brooklyn. “At 4 P.M. come to the entrance to ‘Bea’s As Is’ at 3004 Avenue J. Stay there for 3–5 minutes then walk slowly along right side of Avenue J, turn right to New York Avenue, turn right to Avenue K, towards Nostrand Avenue. Have a book size package in yellow wrapping in your hand and a smoking pipe in your mouth.”

The instructions then supplied the seemingly odd parol that was to be used for identification. “If someone approaches you and asks: ‘Could you tell me where is the nearest drive-in theatre?’ You should answer: ‘Beltsville Drive-in is the nearest I know but the best one is Rockville Drive-in Theatre.’”[2]

If no one approached Cassidy, he was told to “repeat the whole thing on the next day.”

After the personal meeting with the new “Mike,” Cassidy was instructed to go to a dead drop in Brooklyn to pick up his rock: “My package will be between the pole and metal fence going along 36 Street.”

The GRU was not making matters easy for Cassidy in the Big Apple. To signal that the pickup had taken place successfully, he was to drive all the way to the Yorkville section of Manhattan and place “a horizontal line with a red marker on the lamp pole located at the south-eastern corner of the intersection of the First Avenue and 90 Street (near Mobil Gas Station) in Manhattan, NYC.” But not just anywhere on the pole. “It should be put on the side of the lamp pole facing First Avenue and as high as approximately 3–4 feet from the ground.” The Soviets undoubtedly wanted the mark to be facing the street at that height so it could easily be seen from a car driving by.

If Cassidy failed to establish contact with the GRU on either day, he was given several alternate dates to appear at the antique shop. He was directed to “come to New York City on the last Saturday of last month of each quarter (March 30, June 29, September 28, December 28, 1974… etc.) until we meet at 4 P.M. Stay at the entrance to ‘Bea’s As Is’ Shop.” But if he received a postcard signed “Mike,” he was to appear at the shop at 4 P.M. two weeks after the date on the card.

O’Flaherty met Cassidy in New York and gave him the hollow rock. At 2 P.M. Saturday, Cassidy hid the rock in the dead drop in Queens. Then he drove to a shopping mall in Flatbush to kill time until the meeting. At 4 P.M., he was waiting in front of the antique shop, yellow package in hand and pipe in mouth. FBI agents had the shop and the entire area under surveillance.

Cassidy did not have to start down the complicated route he had been given. A man approached and asked about the nearest drive-in theater. Cassidy gave the required reply. They began walking slowly along the street, talking as they went. The Russian introduced himself, not surprisingly, as “Mike.” He proved to be none other than Oleg I. Likhachev, the same officer who had handled Cassidy for a time in Washington four years earlier, before Cassidy had been transferred to MacDill.

Likhachev, now stationed in New York, explained that the rock that Cassidy was to pick up in Brooklyn after their meeting would contain a vial of acetone, which he was to use in the future as the first step in developing secret writing. The Soviets had coated their invisible writing with a new, protective chemical layer that required the use of acetone as a solvent before steaming the pages and crushing the capsules to develop the writing as before.

When Likhachev confessed he had not yet retrieved the rock that Cassidy had left two hours earlier, Cassidy complained and pretended to be highly upset. The previous “Mike,” he let Likhachev know, had always cleared the dead drop quickly. Any delay, Cassidy implied, was jeopardizing his security. He did not need to spell out the reason for the GRU man; if someone accidentally happened on the rock, opened it, and turned the film over to the authorities, the documents might be traced back to Cassidy.

Likhachev sought to soothe his agent. “We really like you,” he said. “You’re number one with us.”

Now that Cassidy had returned to civilian life, Likhachev encouraged him to find employment that would continue to give him access to information of interest to the Russians. He suggested a mapmaking agency or a government printing office where regulations or manuals were produced.

As they strolled along the Brooklyn streets, Likhachev worked the conversation around to his main purpose.

“Do you have any trouble getting on military bases?” he asked.

“No,” Cassidy replied, “I have a sticker on my car.”

“We’d like you to make several trips around the country,” Likhachev said. “You’ll be traveling around checking bases.” He then assigned Cassidy to go to the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the nerve-gas test site, and to several other military bases.

“At Dugway, where you see humps, especially look for humps with pipes on them, let me know. And anything else you can find out about Dugway.” The Russian also asked Cassidy to travel to Key West and find out how many submarines were based there. He was instructed as well to visit the Orlando naval-training center and a nuclear-ammunition depot at the air force base in Charleston. Finally, he was told to spy on a 1,700-acre former army base at Slidell, Louisiana, across from New Orleans on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. The base, once used as an artillery range, had been turned over to the Louisiana National Guard. The Soviets apparently suspected the army was hiding nerve-gas stocks at Slidell because they directed Cassidy to look for twenty mounds with pipes sticking up from them, the same configuration he was told to look for at Dugway. But Likhachev told Cassidy, without explanation, not to travel to the West Coast or New England.

Finally, Likhachev pressed Cassidy to find a replacement for himself, now that he had left the army. “He wanted me to try to develop other sergeants,” Cassidy recalled. “Did I know a sergeant who could do the work I was doing? He said, ‘There is a weakness in every man. We try to exploit it.’”

Cassidy realized he was in a delicate position; how could he satisfy the Soviets and still get out of the assignment? Cassidy remembered Nicky, a master sergeant at Edgewood Arsenal who had a job similar to his but in the other lab (DDEL). “I went up to Edgewood and took him and his wife to dinner—to renew my friendship, to see if he was still there and had the same job.”

With the FBI’s approval, Cassidy passed on the sergeant’s name to the Soviets. Behind the scenes, the bureau then warned Nicky that he might be contacted by a foreign intelligence service. The sergeant did receive a phone call from a foreigner, but the caller hung up.

Later, the Russians urged Cassidy to set up a meeting between one of the Soviets and the new sergeant. But Cassidy refused, and he hit upon a good excuse. It was too risky for him, he warned the GRU. “I told the Soviets I didn’t want to divulge to the sergeant what I was doing.”

After the meeting with Likhachev, Cassidy drove first to the dead drop to pick up his rock, then into Manhattan to leave the red mark on the lamp pole in Yorkville. Afterward, he made the long drive back to Queens to meet with O’Flaherty and other FBI agents waiting at the house in Rockaway Point.

O’Flaherty recalled the scene. “We sat at the kitchen table and got a hammer and broke open the rock gently. We counted the money and looked for the microdot and the secret writing.”

It was close to midnight when Cassidy drove back to the Hilton. It had been a long day. But now, as a civilian, he had a new assignment; he was to crisscross the country spying on military bases for Moscow.

Cassidy headed home for Florida, but there was a problem. It was the time of the gas shortage, and he was running low. On his way from New York, he drove through Springfield, Virginia, where Charlie Bevels lived, and at 2 A.M. “we gave him twenty-five gallons of gas,” Bevels recalled. “I think it was Christmas morning.”

For Cassidy, it was another Christmas Day spent on the road, away from Marie. It was getting increasingly hard to explain to the neighbors.

For some time now, the couple next door had been expressing curiosity about why Cassidy traveled so often. “In Saint Petersburg,” Marie Cassidy said, “the Mitchells, Bill and Betty Mae, especially Betty Mae, a school administrator, were suspicious. They wondered why Joe would go away for several days at a time. I would say, ‘You know the military. Especially Strike Command, they’re all over the place.’ No one else ever suspected.”