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

^{CHAPTER: 21} CASSIDY’S RUN

In many ways, Operation SHOCKER was a microcosm of the cold war. Like so much that happened during that unique and dangerous period, it was conducted in secret. It ran for twenty-three years, which made it the longest espionage operation of its kind in the history of the cold war. It was marked by success, failure, triumph, and tragedy.

SHOCKER was a classic illustration of how the cold war was fought by the intelligence agencies of the two sides, largely unseen by the public. For more than four decades, the often dangerous games of espionage were played in the shadows. The opposing armies clashed in a silent war known only to the combatants.

Operation SHOCKER and the two cases it spawned, PALMETTO and IXORA, demonstrated both the lengths to which Soviet intelligence went to seek to penetrate America’s defenses and the efforts of the FBI’s counterintelligence agents to contain the threat and protect the nation’s security. In the process, both sides experienced gains and losses.

SHOCKER, as this book has revealed, cost the lives of two FBI agents. It may arguably have placed the lives of many more Americans at risk by providing Soviet scientists with the formula for a secret, albeit unstable, nerve gas—information that might have proved useful or spurred the Russians to accomplish a breakthrough in that deadly field.

At the same time, SHOCKER achieved many of its intelligence goals. Ten Soviet spies were identified, including three illegals: the PALMETTOS and IXORA.[1] The surfacing of the illegals, rare in the annals of espionage, alone justified the lengthy counterintelligence operation, at least in the view of the FBI agents who ran it.

By the questions the Soviets put to WALLFLOWER, the FBI and the Pentagon discovered a good deal about what the Russians knew and did not know about American military strength and secrets. The United States also learned more about how the Soviets recruited and ran American agents and more about their tradecraft techniques as well, from hollow rocks, new chemicals for secret writing, and rollover cameras, to codes and communications.

In addition, the six Soviets sent to handle Joe Cassidy were kept busy running a controlled source, which left them less time to recruit and run real spies. From defectors and Soviet scientists now in America, the FBI obtained fragmentary feedback indicating that the Russians had wasted time and money trying to replicate or counter GJ, the nerve-gas formula fed to them by Joe Cassidy. But as Vil Mirzayanov disclosed, they also developed Novichok.

Operation SHOCKER was only one skirmish in a much larger war. Both superpowers were secretly working at full tilt to develop hideous nerve-gas weapons. If the sarin and VX brewed in the labs of Edgewood or the soman and Novichok produced in the plants along the Volga had ever been unleashed in war, millions of people might have perished. Few Americans or Russians knew about the secret research conducted and the nerve-gas weapons produced in their respective countries.

During the cold war, the world lived with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The essential insanity of the period was captured by a single, familiar acronym: The nuclear strategy of the United States, mirrored by that of the Soviets, was officially called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

As the cold war has receded into history, the nuclear danger has diminished but by no means disappeared. Today, there is increased concern over the threat of biological and chemical warfare.The 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subways and the emergence of terrorism at home—including the bombings of the WorldTrade Center in NewYork and the federal building in Oklahoma City—have led to greater public awareness that the new peril might come not from the atom but from weapons of all kinds, including a droplet of nervegas or a microscopic anthrax spore.

The vulnerability of American civilians and the nation’s military forces to chemical and biological warfare has become a politically volatile issue. Gulf War syndrome, the unexplained illness that has struck thousands of U.S. troops who served in the 1991 war against Iraq, is blamed by many veterans and at least some experts on exposure to nerve gas. After years of denials, the Pentagon admitted in 1996 that American troops might have been exposed to nerve gas when combat engineers blew up an ammunition dump at Khamisiyah in southern Iraq in March 1991.[2]

The political sensitivity of anything to do with nerve gas might explain why the Pentagon has refused to make any information available about Operation SHOCKER. The Defense Department, it can be assumed safely, does not want to explain why it approved passing any data about nerve gas to the Russians, especially information about a nerve gas for which there is no known antidote, even though the gas was never perfected and put into production.

One of the army intelligence agents who worked on Operation SHOCKER for many years had a son who served in the Gulf War. He spoke about the risks of the deception phase of Operation SHOCKER but would not allow his name to be used. Even so, he was extremely reticent and guarded in his comments, until suddenly he blurted out, “Wouldn’t it be a shame if you killed your kid because of something stupid you did twenty years ago?”

Behind his comment were presumptions that the information passed from Edgewood to Moscow in some way enhanced the Soviet nerve-gas program and that the Russians in turn helped Saddam Hussein to acquire chemical weapons. But the extent of such aid is uncertain. Vil Mirzayanov has asserted that the Soviets gave Iraq Agent 33 and perhaps other chemical weapons, although he also said he was sure that Novichok was not sent to Iraq.

Some of the people involved in the Iraqi chemical-weapons program did study in the Soviet Union. For example, Dr. Emad el-Ani, a leading Iraqi chemical-weapons expert, studied at the Timoshenko Defense Academy, the Soviet chemical-warfare school in Moscow. And in 1995, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had blocked an attempt by Lieutenant General Anatoly Kuntsevich, former deputy chief of Soviet chemical-weapons forces, to sell five tons of nerve-gas components to Syria. The FSB reportedly concluded that the chemicals were really destined for Iraq.

According to American officials, there is little evidence that Iraq received significant assistance from the Soviets in procuring or producing its supplies of nerve gas. One high-level U.S. arms-control official said that Saddam Hussein obtained the equipment he needed to manufacture nerve gas mostly from Western European companies. The chemicals themselves, such as ordinary alcohol and organophosphate compounds, are easily available. “It is probably not beyond the ability of a reasonable Ph.D. in organic chemistry to mix the stuff together,” the official said. “It’s not clear they would need help from the Soviets.”

A CIA official cautioned that the agency had only fragmentary information on possible Soviet help to Iraq’s nerve-gas production and added, “By the mid-nineteen eighties, they [the Iraqis] had pretty much indigenous capability. They did not have to go outside.”

Charles A. Duelfer, the deputy chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which was created after the Gulf War to search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said, “We have no firm evidence that there was direct Soviet involvement in the Iraqi chemical program…. Which is not to say it didn’t happen, but we haven’t seen any direct evidence.”

Few of the scientists on either side seemed to have many regrets about their role in developing nerve gas; Vil Mirzayanov and Saul Hormats were the exception, not the rule. “Millions of civilians will die if nerve gas is used,” Hormats, the former director of development at Edgewood, said in an interview with the author. “We would kill a whole generation of babies.” Hormats worked at Edgewood for thirty-seven years, and his views changed only gradually. “Had we gone to war with the Soviets in the nineteen fifties, CW would have been a decisive weapon,” he said. “We would have won more battles, and less of our soldiers would have become casualties. My responsibility was to help our army fight the war with minimum casualties and the greatest chance of success. As for morality, is it more moral to kill a soldier, to disembowel him and leave him to die, or to have him take a whiff of gas and die in five minutes? Which is more moral? The immorality—and half a dozen generals would say same thing—is the sons of bitches who get us into war, not how the war is fought.”

By the early 1980s, however, Hormats’s opinion of nerve gas had changed sharply. “Because by then it was a war against civilians, the Soviet army would not be harmed. They had masks and protective gear. CW would not contribute to our winning the war. A chemical war in the fifties was moral; a chemical war in the eighties would have had no effect on winning the war and would only have harmed civilians.”

Hormats, white haired and in his mid-eighties when interviewed, had lost none of his intellectual vigor. “War is a failure of democracy and of government,” he said. “We ought to worry more about getting into wars, not how we fight them.”

It is easy and even fashionable to say with the benefit of hindsight that the cold war was a useless conflict or that intelligence operations such as SHOCKER ultimately had no impact on the outcome. But those arguments overlook an essential truth. One does not have to resort to Reaganesque rhetoric about evil empires to understand that there is a critical difference between democratic institutions and totalitarian governments.

Indeed, the history of the twentieth century is the history of the battle between democracy and dictatorship, between governments, however imperfect, where the people rule and governments of the right or left whose rulers crush freedom to maintain their power. The cold war was a part of that larger conflict. It was fought, to a considerable extent, by the intelligence agencies on both sides. The men and women who carried out these operations believed they were doing what was right in that time and place.

Looking back, few regret the effort. Colin T. Thompson participated in the hidden war for several decades, mostly in Asia, as a clandestine officer of the CIA. He is a thoughtful man, far from a gung-ho defender of all of the agency’s schemes and operations. But, reflecting on the cold war years, he asked: “What were we supposed to do? Let the Soviets take over the world?”

That same conviction—that somehow the battle needed to be fought, even if the victories were few and limited—motivated men such as Phil Parker, Jack O’Flaherty, Gene Peterson, Charlie Bevels, Jimmy Morrissey, Mark Kirkland, Tren Basford, and the other FBI agents who participated over the years in Operation SHOCKER.

But the central figure, upon whom the entire operation depended, was Joseph Edward Cassidy, a plain American soldier, who saw his duty and performed it without question even as it took over, and at times could have endangered, his life. None of the frustrations of the operation—the escape of the PALMETTOS, or the risky decision to pass information about nerve gas to the Russians—in any way detracts from his own service.

For twenty-one years, Cassidy successfully pretended to be a traitor to his country, an Aldrich Ames inside the United States Army. He played his extraordinary role to perfection and never once slipped up to betray his true loyalty. In an age of few heroes, Joe Cassidy was a genuine American hero.

“Cassidy,” Phil Parker said, “had a good run.”

During the life of the operation, more than 4,500 pages of classified documents, all cleared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were passed to the Soviets in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One former bureau official with knowledge of the case said the Russians paid their “agent” more than $200,000. The FBI would not divulge the overall cost of the operation.

Gilberto Lopez y Rivas and his wife resumed their academic careers after their precipitous return to Mexico in 1978. Their past remained a secret. But some of Lopez’s former colleagues at the University of Minnesota later heard additional shards of information about the pair.

The story that Lopez was only helping the Cubans circulated after he left the campus, but Professor Rolando Hinojosa-Smith learned something more when he ran into Lopez at a conference in Mexico. “I went to teach creative writing at the University of the Americas in Puebla in the late seventies. He came down to see me because I was chairman of department, and he had left all of a sudden, and he apologized. But he said he can’t come back to us. I said, ‘Well, you broke a contract but that’s not irreparable, it was only a summer course.’ He said it was impossible for him to come back. He said, ‘I’m a member of the Communist Party.’”

In the 1980s, Lopez gained media attention in Mexico as a firebrand anti-American activist. In May 1983, for example, after the murder of navy Lieutenant Commander Albert Schaufelberger, an American military official, in El Salvador, Lopez led a street demonstration of four thousand people that blocked rush-hour traffic in Mexico City for hours.

“The death of the North American is the natural result of U.S. intervention in the country,” Lopez declared. “Latin American nations have the right to assassinate those people who meddle in internal affairs in a direct manner.” The marchers outside the American embassy chanted: “If you don’t want to die, leave Salvador.”[3]

By the 1990s, Lopez had become prominent in Mexican politics as a leading member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the main opposition party of the left in Mexico.

In late March 1991, Lopez was in Moscow again, this time as a participant in a three-day conference on “Lenin and the 20th Century.” Although the Soviet Union was only nine months away from collapse, Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported the event in familiar phrases, referring to Lenin as “our great compatriot.”[4]

While researching this book, the author discovered that Lopez was working at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in San Angel, a section of Mexico City. At the time, his wife, Alicia, was teaching in the anthropology department of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in nearby Ixtapalapa.

In a telephone conversation, Lopez was asked whether he would be willing to be interviewed. From his reaction, it was clear that the call came as a big surprise. “Well,” he said carefully, “I have to consider my position here and that of my wife.”[5]

It was pointed out that Lopez was safely in Mexico and could talk about whatever he had done if he wished. Besides, the cold war was over. Lopez said he would meet with the author if he came to Mexico, but he was not promising an interview. Soon afterward, Manuel Guerrero called the author from Minnesota. Lopez, he said, had thought about the request and definitely would not agree to an interview.

In 1997, Lopez was elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Mexican Congress. As a PRD congressman, Lopez became the spokesperson, and for a time the head, of the congressional commission attempting to mediate the conflict in Chiapas, where Zapatista rebels took up arms in 1994, calling for more democracy and Indian rights.

In the summer of 1998, Lopez accused President Ernesto Zedillo of escalating the Chiapas conflict and preparing to crush the rebels militarily. The federal and state governments, he said, “displace the Chiapas indigenous people from their communities, they massacre them; they pursue them; they torture them, and they jail them.”[6] In July, when two U.S. diplomats were detained by suspicious villagers in Chiapas, Lopez called their presence “open meddling” in Mexican affairs.[7]

Until the publication of this book, Lopez’s previous secret life as a Soviet spy was undisclosed. His term as a member of the Chamber of Deputies is up in 2000.

Early in May 1981, Freundlich, having cooperated with the FBI for three years, was asked by the bureau to approach his Soviet control, Nikolai Alenochkin. From the unexpected contact by the illegal, Alenochkin would immediately surmise that IXORA had been compromised.

Dan LeSaffre was IXORA’S case agent when the bureau orchestrated the approach. “Our objective was to get rid of Alenochkin,” he said. “Once he’s been approached by IXORA, he has to report it.” And once he reported the contact, he might be sent back to Moscow.

“We did not expect to turn Alenochkin, a heavy-duty GRU man,” said the FBI’s Jack Lowe. “But it might cast a shadow on Alenochkin with his own people. It makes them rethink all the cases and freeze other operations.”

Alenochkin was serving his third tour in the United States. He had handled IXORA in the 1970s and had returned to New York a little over a year earlier. The FBI believed he was the deputy resident of the GRU station inside the Soviet mission.

When an approach of this sort took place, LeSaffre said, the Soviet officer “would often go under ‘house arrest.’… He would never be alone. There would always be someone with him, even to drive to the office.”

From the bureau’s point of view, there was a logical reason to disrupt the GRU’s operations and attempt to force Alenochkin’s departure from New York. True, he would simply be replaced. “But when you start replacing officers they are usually not as good,” LeSaffre explained. “When you get rid of a top-grade officer like Alenochkin, you may get a lesser one in his place.”

For the encounter with Alenochkin, Edmund Freundlich wore a tiny recorder for two reasons: so that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents could gauge Alenochkin’s reaction and to make sure that IXORA followed instructions and did not try to deceive the bureau.

The ploy succeeded. Alenochkin, who normally could have been expected to remain in Manhattan another two or three years, was abruptly recalled to Moscow on August 7, a little more than a month after IXORA approached him.[8]

Edmund Freundlich died in New York at age seventy-one on the day after Christmas 1990. His nephew, Robert, lived in a New York City suburb with his wife, Jill. They were flabbergasted to learn from the author that Uncle Edmund had been a Russian spy.

“I had a sense he had in some way been active pursuing his communist leanings,” Robert said. “But I didn’t know it involved doing anything that remotely approached espionage.”

Jill Freundlich could scarcely believe that this kindly, avuncular man had a secret life. “Everybody loved Uncle Eddie,” she said. “I have two children and there are several others in the family. He loved children.”

When Jill and Robert Freundlich cleaned out Edmund’s apartment, they kept few of his possessions. “There were many letters signed ‘Amigo,’ Edmund’s unknown friend, that Robert found…,” Jill said, “but he threw them away.”

There was one keepsake she recalled, however, that perhaps, in retrospect, revealed something of the inner life of the man who had survived the Nazis, then toiled at a nondescript job for Robert Maxwell while living a double life as a spy for Moscow, waiting for the telephone call that might signal nuclear Armageddon.

“He had his mother’s notebook,” Jill remembered, “with a four-leaf clover in it.”

Mikhail Danilin was still working for the GRU in Moscow as late as 1993. According to a friend, he had broken a leg and then was hospitalized with a heart attack late that year. In 1994, he died in Moscow.

Boris Libman, who ran the soman plant for the Soviets after he was let out of prison, emigrated to the United States in 1990 and eight years later was living quietly in an East Coast city.[9]

Vil Mirzayanov, too, came to the United States in 1995, after all charges against him were dropped. He was admitted under a law that assists Soviet scientists in emigrating. His wife and sons joined him, but the marriage broke up. In December 1997, Mirzayanov married Gale Colby, the activist from Princeton who had rallied to his cause.

Robert Schamay, the FBI man who was pulled off the mountain to go to Minnesota in 1976, was shot during a bank robbery in Salt Lake City in 1982.[10] Schamay recovered from his wound and retired to the Sun Belt seven years later.

Charles Elmore, the young FBI agent who had translated the PALMETTO wiretaps in Minneapolis, won his desired transfer to California after the Lopezes fled to Mexico. On August 9, 1979, he had just begun work for the day in the small resident agency in El Centro, California, 110 miles east of San Diego, when James Maloney, an employee of the federal job-training program, walked into the office with a shotgun and killed Elmore and a second FBI agent, Robert Porter, then shot and killed himself. Maloney had been arrested and questioned by the FBI seven years earlier after an anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco.[11]

Jack Lowe, one of the FBI agents who had helped to turn IXORA, was working at bureau headquarters in the 1990s. On his desk he kept a small gift, a memento to which no one paid any particular attention, a nail clipper bearing the insignia of the Queen’s Guards.

Phil Parker retired to his native Virginia, where he worked as a security consultant. Joe Cassidy’s case agents, Jack O’Flaherty, Charlie Bevels, Jimmy Morrissey, and Donald Gruentzel, have al lretired.O’Flaherty lived not far from the Cassidys, and their families remained close over the years.

Joe and Marie Cassidy retired anonymously to the Sun Belt, revealing to no one their double lives. They did not tell their friends and family; even Cassidy’s own son and daughter knew nothing of his years as a spy. To their neighbors, the Cassidys seemed a typical older couple. Marie remained active in dancing and theatrics in the pleasant community where they lived, and Joe, to those who knew him, appeared to be a genial, retired army sergeant, just another ordinary American content to live out his golden years peacefully in the sunshine.

Julie Kirkland remarried and built a new life for herself in the far West. But she has never forgotten her years with Mark. Their sons are grown men now.

The government never formally acknowledged to her that Mark Kirkland died while working on an espionage case for the FBI. In April 1991, however, the bureau held a ceremony at its new Minneapolis field office at which both Kirkland and Tren Basford were given official recognition for their service. Julie and her children were there, along with Tish Basford and her son and granddaughter.

At the ceremony, a wall was unveiled in which the names of the two agents, and other FBI agents who had died in the line of duty, are inscribed. On behalf of Mark, Julie Kirkland received the FBI’s purple cross, which the bureau gives to the families of fallen agents, and a citation. The citation did not say anything about national security or espionage, but she was told the truth informally. That day, Julie Kirkland said, “was the first I got the name of the case-PALMETTO. Dennis Conway told me.”

The purple cross rests in a walnut box. The medal is a five-pointed gold cross that surrounds a medallion with a purple star at its center. It hangs below a white ribbon with a purple center stripe. Officially, the medal is known as the FBI Memorial Star.

A brass plate on the box bears these engraved words: “In memory of Mark A. Kirkland, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice. In honor of Special Agent Kirkland who lost his life in a plane crash in Dewey Lake, Minnesota, on August 25, 1977, while conducting an aerial surveillance for the FBI in connection with a highly sensitive matter. Mr. Kirkland’s performance in this case was in the highest traditions of the Bureau and this special acknowledgment is presented in his memory. William S. Sessions, Director, April 26, 1991.”

Julie Kirkland treasures the purple cross. She keeps it in a place of honor, on a shelf in the dining room of her home.

“I think I’ll give it to my son Kenny,” she said. “It means a lot to him. He was only three, but he remembers his father.”