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

^{CHAPTER: 5} RECONTACT

When Cassidy left for Korea in September 1960, he told the second “Mike” that he expected to return in December 1961. But he did not make it back until February 1962.

The FBI, anxious to keep Cassidy in play against the Soviets, wanted him near Washington. The arrangements were made quietly. Much later, Cassidy was told that his records had been flagged; he was not to be given new assignments by the army in the usual manner. Cassidy received orders to report from Korea to the Maryland Air National Guard office at Edgewood Arsenal, on the Chesapeake Bay, fourteen miles east of Baltimore.

Cassidy landed in San Francisco and took a bus across the country. He had hoped the time away might improve relations with his wife. It did not. “When I got back to Alexandria, I called my wife, and she picked me up. At the house, I said, ‘I’ve been assigned to Edgewood.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re going to be assigned there by yourself. I’m not going with you.’ So I slept on the couch that night.”

Angered and disappointed but not entirely surprised by the final breakup of his family, Cassidy reported to Edgewood. After he found a furnished apartment, he drove to Newport News, Virginia, to get his teenage daughter, who was living with an uncle. His son, now six, stayed with his mother.

As soon as Cassidy and his daughter were settled in at Edgewood, he got in touch with the FBI. His bureau handlers fretted that the army’s delay in returning him to the states might have spooked the Russians. Although it was two months later than planned, the FBI decided to have Cassidy follow his instructions for recontacting the GRU. There was little else the bureau could do.

Cassidy drove from Edgewood and crushed the crayon in front of the photography store in downtown Washington. The next day, as instructed, with pipe in mouth and book in hand, he strolled along a residential street in Maryland. But no Soviet spy appeared to inquire about the nearest movie theater.

For several months, until May or June, Cassidy dutifully crushed crayons in front of the photo store on the designated days and walked the specified street with pipe and book.

Nothing happened.

“The bureau tried different ways to recontact the Soviets,” Cassidy said. “They put up an index card at the Y saying, ‘Lost watch,’ and it gave my name and phone number at Edgewood. There was no response.”

Finally, in August 1963, the FBI tried a risky and unorthodox ploy. “Don Gruentzel came up with the idea. I met him in Washington one day. He wrote a note that said, ‘I’m back from Korea’ and gave the telephone number of my office at Edgewood. It said, ‘I’m the person you were involved with at Belvoir.’ We got in his car and drove to Sixteenth Street, across from the Russian embassy. There were some kids, maybe ten or twelve years old, playing on the street. He called one over and gave him the note and told him to deliver it to the embassy and give it to whoever came to the door. Don gave him fifty cents. I said, ‘Maybe you should have given him the fifty cents when he came back.’

“From where we were parked, we were in a position to see what happened. We watched the kid deliver the note. The person who opened the door didn’t look around. He took the note and went inside.”

Not many days afterward, Cassidy was in his office in Edgewood when he received a phone call. “It was a foreigner, speaking very slow in a low voice…. He said he was glad I had returned from Korea, and he arranged a time and place for a meet, near Greenbelt, Maryland.” WALLFLOWER was back in business.

The meeting took place on September 19. This time, neither Polikarpov nor Fursa appeared. A third Russian, Boris G. Kolodjazhnyi, showed up. He was listed as first secretary of the Soviet embassy, but to Cassidy, predictably, he introduced himself as Mike.

Cassidy’s assignment to the National Guard was of little interest to Kolodjazhnyi. But the GRU officer was well aware of the main activity at Edgewood, the army’s chemical-warfare center.

There, in the laboratories at Edgewood, army scientists operating under the tightest secrecy experimented with and developed the nerve gases that were the most lethal agents in the nation’s controversial arsenal of chemical weapons.

The Russians now believed they were close to achieving one of their prime objectives: penetrating a major U.S. defense activity. From their perspective, Cassidy’s new assignment proved that even a noncommissioned officer was worth recruiting, because he might, in time, have access to information of enormous value. The GRU man pressed Cassidy. “He knew what was at Edgewood. He wanted to know about the chemical center. I told him I didn’t know anything.”

The bureau set out to remedy the problem. It began orchestrating Cassidy’s transfer to the nerve-gas laboratory, a process that took several months.

In October, Cassidy met again with the GRU. This time, yet another officer showed up. His name was Mikhail I. Danilin, and he was to become Cassidy’s principal Russian handler. The fourth Mike served as Cassidy’s Soviet control for eight years, longer than any of the others. On the State Department diplomatic list, he appeared as an attaché in the cultural section and later as an embassy third secretary. As was the case with his predecessors, he was an officer of the GRU.[1]

At six foot one, Danilin was a big man, as tall as Cassidy. He was softspoken, quiet, handsome, and dark haired. He, too, pressed Cassidy for everything he could learn about nerve gas. They met again three times in the spring of 1964.

As Cassidy recalled it, the strings for his move to the nerve-gas laboratory were pulled by Special Agent James F. “Jimmy” Morrissey, who later succeeded Don Gruentzel as his case agent. A short, clever Boston Irishman, Morrissey was a leprechaun with a law degree, a fanatic Red Sox fan, and a man of great charm, with a natural talent for counterintelligence.

“Morrissey brought a guy from army personnel to talk to me,” Cassidy said. Soon after, Cassidy was recommended for promotion, and on June 10 he moved into a slot in the Weapons Development and Engineering Laboratories (WDEL) at Edgewood, known as “Weedle.” The companion lab at Edgewood, the Defense Development and Engineering Laboratories (DDEL), was called “Deedle.”

In October, Danilin met again with Cassidy. The GRU officer was, of course, delighted to hear that Cassidy had been transferred to the weapons lab. Cassidy was where the Russians wanted him. Danilin asked where Cassidy worked in the lab and what documents he saw. He bombarded Cassidy with all sorts of questions about nerve gas. “He was interested in formulas and method of delivery,” Cassidy said. Danilin also inquired about incapacitants developed at Edgewood—such as BZ, which can cause disorientation and temporary paralysis—and riot-control agents such as CS. His main interest, however, as might be expected, was in nerve gas.

Cassidy was not a scientist—he had never even gone to college—but one of his jobs at the weapons laboratory was to file the documents produced by the chemists and engineers.

The Strangelovian world in which Cassidy now found himself was one that operated in deepest secrecy, with almost no public knowledge of its existence. Nerve gases are among the more horrible weapons ever developed, no less deadly than nuclear bombs and biological agents such as anthrax, Ebola virus, or the bubonic plague. A tiny drop of nerve gas, inhaled or in contact with the skin, can kill almost instantly.

Closely related to common insecticides, nerve gases were unknown until the approach of World War II. Appropriately, they were first developed by the Nazis. In 1936, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, a chemist with I. G. Farbenindustrie in Germany, had discovered the first nerve gas by accident while researching compounds to kill insects. He synthesized an organophosphorous ester known as tabun, or GA.

Soon, Schrader and Nazi scientists were developing far more powerful nerve gases: sarin, also known as GB, which Schrader discovered in 1938, and soman, known as GD. The Nazis built a nerve-gas production plant in Breslau, disguising its output under the code name Trilon, a popular soap. At the end of the war, the Soviets captured German stocks of nerve gas, dismantled the plant in Breslau, and transported it back to the Soviet Union. U.S. Army intelligence found Dr. Schrader, however, and obtained the nerve-gas formulas from him. As a result, American scientists, too, were able to replicate tabun, sarin, and soman. In the 1950s, British and American scientists developed another powerful nerve gas, VX.

By the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had extensive chemical- and biological-warfare (CBW) programs, which were important targets for intelligence operations. Edgewood was a prime objective for the Soviets, as were Fort Detrick, Maryland, the government’s center for germ-warfare research, and Dugway Proving Grounds, a huge restricted area sixty miles southwest of Salt Lake City that tested both chemical and biological weapons.[2]

Sarin, soman, and VX remain the world’s three principal nerve gases today. All three work by inhibiting the action of cholinesterase, a key enzyme that controls the body’s nervous system, including breathing, brain function, and muscle movement.

Cholinesterase neutralizes the buildup of acetylcholine, a nerve-impulse transmitter, in the body. Acetylcholine must be present for an impulse, or message, to jump from one nerve ending to the next. This is how humans are able to think, breathe, and move.

But when nerve gas inhibits the production of cholinesterase, nothing neutralizes the acetylcholine, and the nervous system in effect runs on fast-forward, spinning wildly out of control. As one government official put it, “All three nerve gases work by making people forget to breathe.” The respiratory muscles convulse, and death follows, generally from asphyxiation.[3]

The term nerve gas is a misnomer, since the chemicals are actually liquids delivered in a fine mist by an aerosol spray. Sarin has perhaps become the best known nerve gas, in part because it was used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subways during the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, killing twelve persons and injuring five thousand. (Two months later, the cult leader, Shoko Asahara, was captured and charged in the attack along with forty of his followers.)

All nerve gases are organophosphorous compounds. Although they are lethal, they have different properties and varying degrees of effectiveness. Some, for example, require smaller doses than others to kill people. Some nerve gases penetrate clothing better than others. Scientists also speak of “persistent” or “nonpersistent” agents. That is, some more-volatile gases, such as sarin, evaporate quickly and are considered nonpersistent. Others, such as VX, evaporate much more slowly and can remain in an area, still deadly, for a week or two.

Sarin (GB) is a colorless, odorless liquid. A 1996 Material Safety Data Sheet issued by the army’s Chemical and Biological Defense Command at Edgewood states that “effective dosages for vapor are for exposure durations of 2-10 minutes.”[4] Soman (GD) is described as a “colorless liquid with a fruity odor. With impurities, amber or dark brown with oil of camphor odor.” Like sarin, it can kill in two to ten minutes. VX is odorless, but, unlike sarin and soman, it is viscous, with the consistency of motor oil. It can be colorless or slightly yellowish. One drop on the skin kills. The army’s safety-data sheet warns: “Death usually occurs within 15 minutes after absorption of a fatal dosage.”[5]

Bernard Zeffert, a former chemist at Edgewood, perfected VX for the army. “We got VX from the Brits who created it,” he said. “When people in the process lab were gearing up for production of VX, they got poor results.” Zeffert and Jefferson C. Davis, Jr., tackled the problem. “We conducted an experiment and published a paper, in-house only, on the bond energies of phosphorus and sulphur.”

As a result of their work, Zeffert and Davis received the patent, along with the army, for a link in the process of making a precursor of VX. Davis, who had a master’s degree in chemistry when he entered the army in 1954, was sent to Edgewood. In his early twenties, he suddenly found himself making nerve gas. “Among the GIs there was a sort of black humor about it,” Davis recalled. “We’ll do what the army wants for two years.”

The scientists on the permanent staff of Edgewood Arsenal had a pleasant life. Their laboratories were located on a scenic, wooded peninsula that stretches into the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, south of Havre de Grace. They lived in nearby towns like Bel Air, comfortable suburbs of Baltimore. They married, raised children, and went to work in their labs, making some of the deadliest concoctions known to humankind. Few would admit to any qualms about their work. Like some nuclear scientists, many found justification in the fact that the Soviet Union also had chemical and biological weapons. Soviet scientists thought much the same way.

“By and large, it was a ‘we better keep up’ kind of mentality,” recalled Davis, later the chairman of the chemistry department at the University of South Florida. “We had a sense of duty at the time.” But Davis said his own views changed. “The more you learn, the more you wonder about the saneness of it all. I think later a lot of people were not happy that that sort of stuff should be developed or used. I feel we should destroy the reserves of nerve gas and never use it.” But the disenchantment Davis felt later was not typical. Many of the scientists at Edgewood argued that using nerve gas was actually a more humane and sure way to kill enemy soldiers than leaving them bleeding to death on a battlefield.

When the Edgewood scientists retired, many continued to live around Bel Air as they slipped into their seventies and eighties. They remained a close-knit group.

Benjamin L. Harris had been technical director of the army’s chemical labs for eleven years when he left Edgewood in 1981. The retired nerve-gas scientists, he said, formed a club called the GOBs, for Good Old Boys. In the early 1990s “the Good Old Boys still met in Edgewood every Friday at Vitali’s restaurant, in a motel at the junction of Route 24 and I-95.” By 1997, their ranks had dwindled to four. “Now they meet at Denny’s, across the road.”

Not all the ex-scientists at Edgewood joined the GOBs. Saul Hormats was definitely not a member of the club. White-haired and bespectacled, in his mid-eighties when interviewed for this book, Hormats was a maverick who had broken with his fellow scientists and publicly opposed the development and use of nerve gas. Born in Troy, New York, he grew up in Baltimore, earned a chemical-engineering degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1931, and three years later started at Edgewood. He worked there for thirty-seven years, serving as deputy director and then director of development, before he retired in 1972. Not one given to false modesty, he described himself as “the godfather of chemical warfare in the United States.”

Hormats explained how Edgewood was organized into a research group, which worked on the nerve gases, and a development section, which designed a production facility. “Production plants were scattered around the country, one at Pine Bluffs, Arkansas, for example.

“We ran toxicity tests on animals—mostly mice and dogs. It was done by our medical division. We had to make damn sure the stuff was stable, effective, not flammable, et cetera. It was then put into a one-fifty-five-millimeter shell, and sometimes an eight-inch shell, or a four-point-two mortar shell. All with GB.”[6]

Just to the north of Edgewood Arsenal is the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a weapons-test area. “Aberdeen would take a shell and fire it to see the trajectory, strictly for munitions testing. Target effects were all done at Dugway,” said Hormats.

At Edgewood, the scientists concentrated primarily on sarin (GB). But they progressed to more compounds designated with letters of the alphabet, beyond GA (tabun) and GB. They skipped over GC, for fear that it might be confused with phosgene (CG), an older poison gas used widely in World War I.[7]

The Edgewood chemists also experimented with soman (GD), and conducted research on a nerve gas designated only as GE, an ethyl version of sarin. They experimented as well with cyclo sarin (GF), a colorless, odorless nerve gas that is apparently as lethal as its cousins. According to Jeff Smart, Edgewood’s official historian, “We only standardized GB. We decided to declare it the main agent and produce it on a large scale.” Although no one at Edgewood would confirm it, there is some evidence that the scientists also may have conducted research into GH, a nerve gas that combines an organophosphorous compound with isopentyl alcohol.[8]

The chemists at Edgewood were not content with this research. They strove at great length and at considerable expense to develop an even more powerful nerve gas. In the end, however, the technical problems they encountered were insurmountable. But this failure was to become the core of Operation SHOCKER.

From the questions the GRU asked Cassidy, it was clear the Soviets were anxious to know which nerve gases were being produced and put into weapons. Had the United States decided to choose one of the three gases, or was it developing more than one?

The GRU was also eager to discover whether the United States was developing a binary system to deliver nerve gases. In a binary system, the chemicals that combine to form nerve gas are kept separate—in two compartments in an artillery shell, for example—and mix only on approach to a target. A binary system is a much safer way to store the gas and reduces the danger to pilots and troops who must handle it. Moscow also wanted to know if the scientists at Edgewood might be working on newer and even deadlier forms of nerve gas. At a meeting in May 1965, Danilin asked Cassidy to find out the formula for the version of VX produced in the Edgewood lab. He gave Cassidy a hollow battery as a concealment device, as well as a specially treated sheet of carbon paper for secret writing. The carbon would enable Cassidy to send a message to the Russians on what appeared to be a blank piece of paper.

As it turned out, in asking Cassidy for information about binary weapons, the GRU was inquiring into matters at the cutting edge of American nerve-gas technology. According to William C. Dee, a veteran official at Edgewood, Ben Witten, chief of organic research at the facility, came up with the concept of a binary system in 1957. In a test chamber at Edgewood, and in field tests of VX at Dugway, it worked.[9]

Saul Hormats, however, stopped the development of binary weapons in the 1960s. “It was put on ice by me for two reasons,” he said. “So that other countries wouldn’t get it. I didn’t want third-world nations making them in a barn in the boondocks. And second, it had no military value whatsoever. With the straight GB you had more agent in the shell; it is more efficient than the binary. The binary shell is a base ejection shell, which means the nerve gas shoots out the back of the shell and goes up in the air. With unitary munition it bursts right on the target. It is a different kind of shell, and it works better.”

The United States did not begin production of binary artillery shells until 1985, almost two decades later. By the late 1980s, 155 mm binary shells containing sarin were being produced, Dee said, each containing 6.5 pounds of the gas.

“I was furious when Reagan revived binary weapons,” said Hormats. But by that time, of course, he had retired and left Edgewood.

In March 1966, Danilin gave Cassidy a rollover camera, a spy gadget developed by the Soviets to copy documents that was a kind of predecessor of today’s handheld scanners. “The camera was about the size of a pack of cigarettes,” Cassidy recalled, “but not as thick.” Cassidy simply rolled the camera over the document, and it automatically took a picture. He could capture an entire page in three passes of the camera. Cassidy did not have to extract the film. “I would give the whole camera to the Soviets and exchange it for a new one.” Over time, the GRU gave Cassidy three rollover cameras.

FBI technicians examined these cameras, and one detail bothered Charlie Bevels. “They all had high serial numbers,” he recalled. “I wondered: Who else has these things?”

An indication of the GRU’s trust in Cassidy was the fact that Danilin did not interrogate him on where or when he was able to use the rollover camera without being seen. At one point, Danilin did suggest that Cassidy take the material into the men’s room to copy it. That was not an option, Cassidy explained; there were no doors on the stalls at Edgewood. “I could have taken the documents to my car,” he said. “But they didn’t ask, and I didn’t explain.”

The documents that Cassidy photographed and passed to Danilin were selected by army intelligence and approved at the highest echelon of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One of those who ended up clearing the “feed,” as counterintelligence agents call such material, was Tom O’Laughlin, a former FBI agent who by 1962 had moved over to the Pentagon, as the direct result of a diktat by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. According to Bevels, O’Laughlin ran afoul of Hoover’s edict that FBI agents had to meet strict weight standards. “Hoover had a physical and found that his weight was higher than the Metropolitan Life standard,” Bevels said. “He went on a diet and felt so good he decided everyone would have to do it…. [Tom] had a lot of trouble making weight.”

The problem with the feed, of course, was the need to balance Cassidy’s credibility with the requirements of secrecy. These contradictory demands could never be completely reconciled. As in every such operation, some secrets had to be given away in order to protect the double agent. Officials in Washington were thus passing secret information to the Soviets, the disclosure of which by anyone else could have resulted in a long prison term for violation of the federal espionage laws.

The difficult balancing act often led to tensions between the FBI and the Joint Chiefs. The bureau wanted to keep the Russians convinced by passing significant documents, but the Pentagon was reluctant to part with its classified secrets.

Bevels recalled the conflict. “It was hard to get the military to give us stuff. Sometimes we wanted to put classification stamps on documents that weren’t classified, and we had trouble getting clearances from the military even to do that.”

The meetings with Danilin almost always took place in the parking lot of a bowling alley in Springfield, Virginia, a Washington suburb. There, Cassidy passed the documents that he had photographed.

“We would meet at nine P.M., always on a Saturday night. I suppose this is when America is out partying and has its guard down.”

Danilin, overjoyed to have a mole inside Edgewood, urged Cassidy to obtain everything he could on the nerve-gas program. He emphasized he wanted as much as possible about the chemical formulas and the makeup of the binary system. “He would say, ‘Find me anything you can on binary.’ He wanted information on all the nerve gases. He asked about VX. He asked about sarin. He asked about GD—‘Get everything you can about it.’”

After two years, and with the Russians well hooked and pushing for every scrap Cassidy could provide, the counterintelligence agents in the FBI decided the moment they were waiting for had arrived. Danilin and the GRU trusted Cassidy.

It was time for the deception.