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

^{CHAPTER: 4} ORANGE PEELS FOR BREAKFAST

Joe Cassidy’s earliest memories are of the orphanage to which he was sent at age three, an institution with the grim, Dickensian name of the Home for the Friendless.

He was born on June25,1920, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the third of five children.His father was a foreman at the electric company.“My mother died from TB when I was about three years old,”Cassidyre counted.“My youngest sister, Maxine, died, I’m told, shortly after birth. I do not remember my mother or my young sister.I faintly recall being at the grave site at the burial of my mother, and some one gave each of us a ring.”

His father, suddenly a widower and unable to care for the children, placed Cassidy and an older brother and sister in the Home for the Friendless. Cassidy’s younger sister, Shirley, was taken in by a childless couple.

Cassidy and his siblings hated the orphanage. “My breakfast every morning all those years consisted of a bowl of milk with pieces of bread broken into it.” It wasn’t enough for a growing boy. He supplemented his diet by scavenging for scraps, even garbage. “I can remember finding discarded orange peels which I washed off and ate. I was hungry much of the time.”

Two stern overseers, Miss Moon and Miss Richardson, ran the orphanage. “We were given chores to do, and one of mine was to make beds. I would leave breakfast early, and on the way to the dorm I’d pass a cabinet where food was kept. The keys were almost always left in the lock. I would sneak in there and find something to eat.” Cassidy was so little at the time that he had to stand on a stool to reach the forbidden food.

“One morning, I took a banana. I had eaten about half of it when Miss Moon entered the dorm. I shoved the banana under the mattress. She came over to me and sat down, and the half-eaten banana squished through the peel and then through the metal springs and plopped on the floor. Miss Moon heard the banana fall and really gave me hell. And from then on, the keys were never left in the lock.”

The Home for the Friendless was a frugal place, and its officialdom had calculated that the orphans’ shoes would wear out more slowly if they were worn only in winter. “During the summers, we were made to go barefoot, which I hated. I was always stubbing my big toe. To this day I don’t like to go barefoot except in the shower or to bed.”

About the only happy moments for Cassidy were on Sundays, when his father visited. His father brought a bag of candy, but he was required to hand it over to Miss Moon or Miss Richardson, who divided it up among the children. Cassidy and his brother and sister complained to their father that they had little enough to eat, as it was. But there was no place to hide from the formidable Miss Moon, since any one coming to see the orphans was restricted to a community visiting area. “My Dad’s solution was to bring the Sunday funnies, and with me on his lap and my brother and sister beside me, he would open the paper in front of him and read us the funnies while we hid behind the paper and ate the candy.”

After five years in the orphanage, Cassidy and his siblings got a reprieve. His brother, Robert, was about to become a teenager, which meant he was too old for the Home for the Friendless. “My Dad persuaded his mother, who lived in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to come to Erie and provide a home for us.”

To Cassidy, by now age eight, his grandmother was like an angel of deliverance. No more sodden bread for breakfast, no more orange peels. “There was plenty of love and togetherness. We all finally got to know each other. In the orphanage, my sister lived with the girls, my brother was with the older boys, separated from me. We would see each other from time to time, but it wasn’t family.” At long last, in his grandmother’s house, Cassidy could enjoy a normal childhood.

For a boy who had literally been starved for years, the corner grocery store was nirvana. “We found out that the grocery store carried a running tab for families in the neighborhood. My Dad paid the bill every two weeks on payday. Well, I thought this was great—on the way to school in the morning I would stop in and get a dozen chocolate cookies. Next time, it was two bananas, or an orange and two apples.” The boy, still psychologically conditioned by his years in the orphanage, worried that someone might examine the grocery bill and confront him. But his father never said a word.

As a teenager growing up during the Depression years, Cassidy got into the usual boyhood mischief, none of it serious. When he was fourteen, his father remarried, and his grandmother moved to her own apartment. A year later, while in the ninth grade, Cassidy asked his father if he could quit school. “He finally agreed if I had a job.” Cassidy found one at four dollars a week, working for the Mehler Beverage Company up to sixty-five hours a week as a helper on a soft-drink truck.

Cassidy’s hometown, although the third-largest city in Pennsylvania, had none of the historic importance and social distinction of Philadelphia and none of the wealth and power of Pittsburgh. Situated on Lake Erie, in the far northwest corner of the state, Erie was geographically cut off from the rest of Pennsylvania. It was an industrial town with harsh, frigid winters that brought huge snowdrifts and that seemed to last half the year.

But if life in Erie was lackluster, and the hours on the job long, anything was an improvement over the orphanage. And Cassidy soon found work much flashier than hauling root beer. His best friend, Ray Dailey, knew Jack Parris, who owned a local nightclub. Although Prohibition had been repealed two years earlier, admittance to the Parris Social and Athletic Club was speakeasy style. “To enter you rang a bell at the top of the stairs, and an eight-inch slot would open, and a buzzer was pressed to let you in.

“They had slot machines, and pool tables in the rear, up over the Richmond Brothers clothier on State Street, and we went there often to shoot pool. Then we got to watching the floor show on Saturday nights. Soon it evolved to helping out at the bar when they were very busy. Washing glasses, et cetera. One night I was asked by a patron to fix a couple of Tom Collinses, and before long I was a regular bartender.

“Jack was quite an entrepreneur. He was raised in a poor Italian family and soon not only owned the club but a model and hobby supply store, which I ran for a while, and a neon-sign company. We became good friends, and a lot of times he would give me his Packard to drive some of the showgirls home.”

For a sixteen year old, tooling down State Street with showgirls in a fancy car was a definite step up from hauling soft drinks. But Cassidy did not entirely neglect the spiritual. “Although my family was Presbyterian, and we went to Presbyterian Sunday school, all my friends were Catholic. On Saturday night, we’d tend bar, work all night, and then go to mass. We ran two floor shows, the last one at two A.M. We’d close at five-thirty, wash glasses, and straighten up the place. We would leave the bar at five forty-five, run over to the cathedral a few blocks away for six o’clock mass, and then back to Clark’s restaurant for breakfast on Jack’s tab. I’ve gone to Catholic church ever since.”

By now, Cassidy had a steady girl, Ray Dailey’s sister, Pat. “We always bought the five-cent new song list each week, and we listened to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade together on the radio.

“These were Depression days. Wages were low, but we could buy ground beef four pounds for a quarter. My grandmother helped me buy a car for thirty-five dollars. Gas was seven or eight cents a gallon, and they cleaned your windshield and checked your oil and tires.”

When Cassidy was eighteen, he found work at Erie Forge and Steel Company as a laborer, laying railroad ties. It was tough work, but soon the war in Europe brought better jobs at higher wages. Cassidy was offered a job as third helper on the open-hearth furnace. Wearing dark glasses and long-sleeved wool shirts to protect themselves from the intense heat, the helpers shoveled sand into the furnace, to repair holes caused by the extremely high temperatures.

“There were about five guys in a circle, taking turns,” Cassidy recalled. When the furnace’s hydraulic doors opened, a machine called a charger fed scrap metal into the flames. “What comes out is molten steel.”

After a few months, Cassidy was promoted to second helper. He still had to shovel sand into the furnace, but now he also got to tap it out. “When it’s time to tap it out, you open up the back of the furnace. You poke an air hose into the back of the furnace until the molten metal starts to pour. The crane operator takes the ladle and pours it into an ingot, about fifteen feet by six feet.”

It was hard work, but by now Cassidy was a rugged, handsome young adult. After Pearl Harbor, the steel plant was working overtime, and Cassidy’s friends were going off to war. Because his job was considered essential to the war effort, there was little chance he would be drafted. But Cassidy chafed to join up.

“By late 1942, most of my buddies were in the service, and one of my best friends had already been killed. I told the personnel office I’d like not to be exempt from military service at my next call-up. They honored my request, and I was drafted in February 1943.” Private Cassidy reported to Fort Lee, in Petersburg, Virginia, for basic training, and then was selected to attend school to become a drill instructor.

He rose rapidly through the ranks, and after a year he was promoted to first sergeant, skipping several grades. Cassidy also got engaged to Pat Dailey, but he did not often go home to Erie to see her, because of the expense and lack of leave time.

Hilda Marie Prince, a young woman from Petersburg who worked in the PX, noticed the good-looking sergeant. When Cassidy’s grandmother died in the late summer of 1943, Prince heard about it and urged Cassidy to stop by before he left on emergency leave for the funeral.

He did. “She had a bag of food for me to take on the trip.” Cassidy was touched by the gesture. When he returned, they dated and were married after the war. “Eleven months later, we had a daughter, Shelby Jean.” But Cassidy’s marriage to Hilda went rapidly downhill. “As I look back now, I do believe she saw me as a ticket out of the burg-Petersburg, that is—because the marriage was a bust right from the start.”

In 1947, Cassidy was transferred to the First Cavalry Division in Japan and detailed to the 302d Reconnaissance Company. His wife and daughter remained in the states. After a year, he was shipped back to Fort Lee, where he remained until 1952, when he was assigned to the Far East Command. The Korean War was under way, and Cassidy, again without his wife, was sent to Japan, expecting he would end up in Korea. Instead, he was detached from his unit and assigned to Kokura, Japan, as an administrator in the office that identified the remains of GIs killed in action and shipped them home for burial. It was a grim but fortunate assignment for Cassidy; almost everyone in his old outfit was killed in the war.

A year later, the army allowed dependents to join their spouses in Japan. Hilda and Shelby Jean arrived in Kokura. Hilda was finally out of Petersburg, but she was unhappy in Japan. She wanted to return home but took a job in the PX and stayed on until Cassidy’s tour ended in 1955. They returned to the states and bought a home in the Strawberry Hill section of Alexandria, Virginia. That December, a son, Barry J., was born into their cheerless marriage.

Cassidy was assigned to a clerical job in the adjutant general’s office at nearby Fort Belvoir. It was dreary work, and when Cassidy heard of an opening at the base’s nuclear field office, he applied and was accepted. The office supervised a school for nuclear power plant operators, as well as the Belvoir power plant itself.

In April 1959, Cassidy earned a high-school general-equivalency degree, twenty-four years after he had dropped out of the ninth grade. Four months later, he was called in for the interview that was to change his life forever.

Joe Cassidy, nightclub bartender, steelworker, and career army man, unexpectedly metamorphosed into WALLFLOWER, a neophyte spy and counterespionage agent for the FBI, working against the highly trained, professional officers of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie. On the face of it, the match seemed unequal.

Could an amateur such as Cassidy really be expected to fool the Russians? If the Soviets ever discovered the truth, they might retaliate against him. He was playing a potentially dangerous game; if he lost, he realized, he might just end up dead.