Cassidy's Run (18 page)

C H A P T E R: 19

THE TURNING OF IXORA

By late June
1978, the FBI had been watching Edmund Freundlich, code name
IXORA
, the GRU sleeper agent in New York, for almost seven years.

Now that the
PALMETTOS
had flown back to Mexico, it was possible that the GRU damage assessment would affect
IXORA
. Although Moscow could not be sure how its operations had been penetrated, it might well choose to play it safe and cut its losses.
IXORA
could be pulled out of New York.

If the bureau was to make a move, the timf to act might rapidly be running out. The decision was made to approach
IXORA
and try to turn him into a double agent for the United States. That delicate mission was assigned to Special Agent James Kehoe and two other counterintelligence agents in New York City, Jack Lowe and Dan LeSaffre.

In attempting to turn
IXORA
, however, the bureau was taking a risk. If Freundlich chose to tell his Soviet handlers of the approach, his information would point to Joe Cassidy, who had been told to call Freundlich in case of war. It was possible, of course, that real Russian spies inside the U.S. government had also been instructed to call Freundlich if they detected military preparations for an attack, and in that case the GRU would not be sure that Cassidy was the problem. But, combined with the bureau’s approach to the
PALMETTOS
, any tip by
IXORA
to the GRU would certainly have removed any lingering doubt about Cassidy’s real allegiance.

James Kehoe, the case agent for the
IXORA
operation, was a tall, bespectacled New Yorker, gray haired and balding, and considerably older than the other two agents assigned to make the approach. A Fordham graduate, Kehoe was a veteran counterintelligence agent who had participated in the capture of Rudolf Abel, a KGB colonel who had slipped into the United States as an illegal. Abel, who had posed as a struggling artist in Brooklyn, had been convicted and sent to prison but had been traded in 1962 for the CIA’s U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.

Kehoe’s partner, Jack Lowe, had known Powers. Lowe, a big man, blond and heavyset, had grown up in Norton, Virginia, where the U-2 pilot’s father was a cobbler. Lowe had joined the bureau in 1972 and had been assigned to foreign counterintelligence in New York. As it turned out, one of the first drops Lowe covered was Joe Cassidy putting down a hollow rock.

Dan LeSaffre, the third agent, was six foot three and 210 pounds, an athlete and college baseball player from Methuen, Massachusetts. He graduated from Bridgewater State College, south of Boston, joined the bureau in 1972, and had been working in foreign counterintelligence in New York for two years. With LeSaffre at the wheel, the three agents drove to Broadway near West 230th Street, where Freundlich’s car pool usually dropped him off, a few blocks from his apartment.

The three agents, all fairly big men, got out and surrounded
IXORA
at 5:30
P.M.
They flashed their credentials.

“We want to talk to you,” Kehoe said. “We need you to come to our office so we can talk privately.”

Freundlich looked scared to death. “He volunteered to come with us,” Lowe said, “but we were helping him volunteer. We had hold of his arm and were moving him toward the car. In the car, he was visibly shaken. Taking deep breaths, swallowing, hands shaking. He had that ‘Oh shit’ look. A lot of this was fear of the unknown—what’s going to happen to me? When you are doing something over the years, you know it’s wrong and that one day the knock may come on the door.” For
IXORA,
it had come.

“He thought it was like what he had experienced in Europe. It took us a while to explain to him that we weren’t going to kill him. We weren’t going to harm him. We just wanted his cooperation.”

The FBI men drove Freundlich to the bureau’s office in Manhattan at 201 East Sixty-ninth Street. For maximum psychological effect, they took him upstairs to the offices of the special agent in charge. “We took him to the executive conference room outside the SAC’s office, a very official-looking place. We began to talk to him. There was no video, no tape running.”

The counterintelligence men knew this game very well.
IXORA
was trapped and fearful. “He is wondering was he caught because of something he did?” The agents painted a grim picture for Freundlich: The Soviets would never trust him now; they might even assassinate him.

Then the agents offered
IXORA
a lifeline. “Part of the conversation was to put him at ease, to show him there was a way out,” Lowe said. “We’ll protect you. There is a way out. We need to know the details.”

As the evening wore on, gradually
IXORA
began to cooperate. “He said he had done some things for the Soviets, but not bad things. The turning took several months. It was a slow process over time—he did not tell us everything all at once.”

Freundlich revealed astonishing details. If he received a warning that a nuclear attack was imminent, he was to flash the word to the Russians from a vantage point in the very heart of New York City.

“He was given a radio that worked and played music,” Lowe said. But it was no ordinary radio. “When he got a call warning of military preparations, then he was to go to Sixty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Just inside the wall of Central Park, there was this huge rock. He was to climb up on the rock, take out the radio, and open the back.”¹

Under the rear panel of the special radio were buttons that activated a tiny transmitter concealed inside. It broadcast to the Soviet mission to the United Nations a few blocks away on East Sixty-seventh Street between Third and Lexington avenues. “He had a choice of one of five buttons. He would push the button that matched the number in the parol.”

The radio buttons were in sequence, numbered 11, 22, 33, 44, and 55. If, for example, Joe Cassidy placed an order for twenty-two books, as he did early in May 1972, Freundlich would push the 22 button on the radio. Since the double-digit numbers signified single digits, his call warned of a military action in two days.²

IXORA
was instructed to back up the signal he transmitted by placing a message in a dead drop. He could not show the radio to the FBI, because he no longer had it; he had returned it to the Soviets at their request.

The radio and the signal procedure posed some intriguing questions for the FBI’s counterintelligence analysts. Was there an unknown number of real Russian spies out there? Or were there other sentinels in the United States like
IXORA,
with the identical mission, each outfitted with the same type of radio?

“We think
IXORA
was set up just for Joe,” said one FBI man. The bureau’s experts speculated that the Soviets would not have risked having other agents telephone
IXORA
, for fear that if Freundlich or one of the other agents was detected, the entire network of spies would be jeopardized. Yet
IXORA
had received a cryptic call in December 1971 that might have been some sort of warning, though
IXORA
never knew the identity of the person who telephoned him.

Former agent Robert Loughney believed there had to be other
IXORAS
as well. “Our theory is
IXORA
was one of several people,” he said. “You have to assume they were not putting all their money on one horse.”

Jack Lowe agreed. “There might be other
IXORAS
. We did not know of any others, but based on our knowledge of their operations we had to think there would be.”

While it might seem incredible that there was a spy with
IXORA’S
singular mission, living inconspicuously in New York City during the cold war and simply waiting for the telephone to ring, it was not really surprising in retrospect. “It was at a time,” Lowe noted, “when the Soviet Union was deathly afraid of attack by the U.S.”

The initial questioning of Edmund Freundlich at the FBI office in Manhattan lasted for almost four hours. “We took him back home around eleven
P.M.
,” Lowe recalled.

Now that
IXORA
had begun to talk, the FBI met with him almost continuously. “There were three and a half months of very intensive discussions,” Lowe said. “We were trying to see him every other day.” Little by little, Freundlich’s motivation for becoming a spy, and the details of his recruitment, emerged. It was in Switzerland that he had first come to the attention of Russian intelligence.

“In the Swiss camps,” Jack Lowe said, “one person he met gave his name to the Russians and said, ‘This man might be of help to you.’ He [
IXORA
] was easily manipulated, and found it hard to say no to people who asked him for favors.

“When he returned to Vienna at the end of the war, the Soviets came to him and said, ‘We’d like you to deliver some letters, little things we can’t do for ourselves.’ He was receptive because the Communists had been kind to him. They paid him. And a big point in their favor—they weren’t Nazis.”

Freundlich was given espionage training before he came to America in 1968, and he also told the FBI he received additional training in the United States. He was shown how to leave signals, such as chalk marks on telephone poles, and how to fill and empty dead drops. He also had some minimal training in photography.

Before he left Vienna, he was given a tie by his Soviet handler in Austria. “He was to show up here wearing the tie, at one of the meeting sites,” Dan LeSaffre said. “That was the parol.”

Freundlich was not taken again to FBI headquarters in Manhattan, Lowe said. “We went to restaurants to meet him. . . . We went up to West Point one summer day and walked through the museum. We found a German restaurant nearby.

“We took a long weekend trip to Boston and toured Boston with him, solidifying the relationship.” All the while,
IXORA
was revealing more. “He identified to us close to fifty dead drops, locations, and meeting sites. Mostly in the Bronx, some in Brooklyn. He showed us the signal sites.”

In addition to waiting for a warning telephone call,
IXORA
also acted as a cutout, a conduit for letters. He told the FBI that when letters arrived at his apartment with a certain return address or other indicator, he delivered them to dead drops. In the jargon of Soviet intelligence, he was serving as a “dead letter box.”

One meeting site in front of a theater in Brooklyn was what the Soviets called
IXORA’S
“constant condition site”—a location where a spy was instructed to show up, usually once a year, to indicate he was still alive and well.³ The FBI encouraged Freundlich to continue to go to the site, though now the bureau would be watching. “In his case, he was to go to the site on Thanksgiving Day and simply stand there for about ten minutes,” Lowe said. “A GRU guy would drive by and recognize him. To verify he was OK.” The bureau assumed that the Russians had chosen Thanksgiving Day on the theory that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents would be home eating turkey.

It fell to Dan LeSaffre, as one of the younger agents, to work on the holiday. “I covered the constant-condition site on several Thanksgivings because I was single at the time. We used a fixed location site, a Port Authority police office, catty-corner from the theater. A Jewish deli was open, and I went for corned beef or a hot dog. That was my Thanksgiving dinner.”

In late July or early August 1978, about two months after the first approach to
IXORA
, the FBI was able, with his help, to establish the identity of Freundlich’s GRU control. His name was Nikolai I. Alenochkin, and he was a Soviet intelligence officer undercover as first secretary and later counselor of the Soviet mission to the United Nations.

Alenochkin was identified through a photo lineup, Lowe said. The FBI agents met with
IXORA
in an Old Europe-style restaurant near his apartment and showed him a series of photographs. The bureau knew who the likely GRU illegal-support officers in the UN mission were.

Freundlich pointed to Alenochkin’s photo. He had, as it turned out, met him twice. “Alenochkin came to his house one night, and they went into the bathroom to talk and sat on the side of the tub with the water running in the tub and the sink.”

IXORA
said he had also met Alenochkin at the constant-condition site in 1975 or 1976. Freundlich said he had not been active for two years and that it was at Alenochkin’s request that he had returned the radio to the Russians. His only assignment now was to appear in front of the theater every Thanksgiving Day.

Sheila W. Horan, then a young counterintelligence agent in New York, worked on the
IXORA
case and got to know Freundlich. “Jim, Dan, and I took him to dinner several times. Not interviewing him, just talking about his past. We wanted to maintain the relationship. He, Freundlich, liked Jim very much.

“He was the ultimate Caspar Milquetoast. He had no friends, just his brother and his nephew. He had no outside interests whatsoever. Work and home, that was it. The perfect spy. He was not vulnerable to anything. Nobody would look at him twice.” She paused and added, “He was a nice guy.”
⁴

Within a few months, after giving Freundlich a polygraph test, the FBI was satisfied that
IXORA
had been turned. He did not ask to be paid in his new role as an American agent. “He lived very frugally,” Lowe said. “We’d slip him small amounts of money for expenses.”

By early fall, the agents offered no objections when
IXORA
said he planned to visit London. When he returned, he proudly presented two souvenir nail clippers to Lowe and LeSaffre. “On the handle of the nail clipper there is the insignia of the Queen’s Guards. He brought one to me and one to Dan. By which time he had told us a great deal.”

Unknown to his family and to the Russians, “Uncle Eddie,” the nondescript loner who commuted each workday to his low-level job at Pergamon Press, and who seemed to have no friends and no life, had just switched sides in the cold war. It was a triumph of quiet counterintelligence work by Kehoe, Lowe, and LeSaffre.