Cassidy's Run (21 page)

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
PAL
METTO
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.”

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Williams and Jack Coler, another FBI agent, had both been killed in a June 1975 shootout at the Oglala Sioux reservation, the scene of a seventy-one-day siege in 1973 by supporters of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Dozens of AIM activists shot at the agents’ car; one, Leonard Peltier, was convicted and sentenced to life. His conviction became a cause célèbre for Robert Redford and other supporters, including the Dalai Lama, who argued that Peltier deserved a new trial.
   
2. Minnesota was experiencing freak weather conditions that week. The day after the fatal crash, tornadoes ripped through Crow Wing, Wadena, and Otter Tail counties in central Minnesota, injuring seventeen persons. Some of the worst damage occurred in Brainerd, about a hundred miles from the crash site.
   
3. The exact cause of the crash may never be known. The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates most aviation accidents, has no record of the crash. Betty Scott, an NTSB spokesperson, said that in 1977 the NTSB did not investigate crashes of planes flying on government business, although it sometimes does today. “Even though the plane was owned by an individual, if it was on official business, it would not be in our system.”
   
4. Otto later rose to associate director of the FBI, then the number-two position in the bureau, and for nearly six months in 1987 he served as acting director after FBI chief William H. Webster left to head the CIA.
   
5. FBI agents are rarely killed in the line of duty. The
   Tribune
   story noted that the last two agents to die on duty had also been stationed in Minneapolis—Ron Williams and Jack Coler, killed in 1975 at Wounded Knee.
   

CHAPTER 2

1. Mrs. Pullman never lived in the house. She sold the ornate mansion in 1913 soon after it was completed; a few months later it was sold again, this time to the czarist government. It did not become an embassy until the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933.
   
2. Cassidy would have preferred a more exciting code name, but he had no choice;
   WALLFLOWER
   it was. Most FBI code names for individuals are chosen at random and have no special meaning.
   
3. Although the public was generally unaware of it, the army in those years operated its own nuclear power plants, including a plant at Fort Belvoir, used for research and training as well as to generate electricity. The Army Corps of Engineers built the plants in the early 1950s, mostly to provide power to military bases in remote areas. In addition to the plants at Belvoir, Idaho Falls, and Fort Greeley, Alaska, the army also ran a nuclear plant for the air force in Sundance, Wyoming, and one in Greenland, nine hundred miles from the North Pole. By 1973, the army was out of the nuclear power business, and the plants had been shut down.
   
4. Polikarpov, in this first request, asked for information about nuclear power, a much less sensitive topic than, for example, nuclear weapons. Often, an officer of the GRU or the KGB made an initial request for something even more innocuous—perhaps an unclassified telephone book or manual. If the potential recruit provided it, the officer would ratchet up a notch and ask for a more important document. From there, the officer might ask for secret information and offer to pay for it. Polikarpov was more or less following the traditional script.
   
5. Under government rules, the FBI was allowed to use the Soviet money it received in this manner to pay the actual costs of the double-agent operation. Any amount over that had to be turned over to the Treasury. One of the ironies of the espionage activities of the cold war is that the Russians actually ended up paying part of the cost of their own deception in
   SHOCKER.
   The money flowed both ways, of course; during those years, hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to sources who were actually working for the KGB or the GRU, or equally for both sides.
   

CHAPTER 3

1. The code name changed over the years, partly for reasons of security but also to distinguish various phases of the case. The operation’s first code name was
   CHOWLINE.
   Later, both the FBI and the army used the code name
   ZYRKSEEZ
   (the phonetic spelling of Xerxes, the Persian king who ruled in the fifth century
   B.C.
   ).By 1971, the code name
   SHOCKER
   had been adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the same year the FBI chose the code name
   PALMETTO
   for the University of Minnesota professor in what became the final stage of the long-running affair. Also in 1971, the FBI coined the code word
   IXORA
   for a startling offshoot of the case. To avoid unnecessary confusion, the operation is generally referred to here as
   SHOCKER
   , the name used at the highest level of the Pentagon, although it was not a cryptonym used by the FBI.
   
2. There are some nuances and differences among the various terms. Not every double-agent operation, for example, involves transmitting false information to an adversary service.
   
3. S-2 was in charge of counterintelligence against the KGB in Washington. S-1, known informally as “Deep Snow,” handled Soviet cases of especial sensitivity. All three squads were supervised by Ludwig W. R. Oberndorf, “Obie” to all in the bureau.
   

CHAPTER 5

1. Of all of Cassidy’s Russian case officers, Danilin was the only one actually entitled to call himself “Mike,” since his first name, Mikhail, is the Russian equivalent of Michael.
   
2. Something went terribly wrong at Dugway during a nerve-gas test on March 14, 1968. Some 6,400 sheep were killed in two Utah valleys, apparently by a cloud of VX. Although the army has never officially taken responsibility for the sheep kill, it has skirted close to an admission. A month after the sheep died, the army said evidence “points to the Army’s involvement.” In January 1998, Colonel John Como, Dugway’s commander, said that a test of “a lethal chemical agent at Dugway . . . may have contributed to the deaths of the sheep.” Despite the army’s half denials, the government compensated the ranchers for their lost animals.
   
3. Atropine, a derivative of the deadly belladonna plant, is a principal antidote to nerve gas. Belladonna, which means “beautiful lady” in Italian, is a highly poisonous plant of the nightshade family with purple or red flowers. Another antidote is 2-PAM, pralidoxime chloride, one of a class of chemicals known as oximes that restore the normal action of cholinesterase. 2-PAM, however, is ineffective against soman (GD) after two minutes. Both atropine and 2-PAM, along with an injector, are contained in the MARK-I kits provided to U.S. troops.
   
4. The army’s chilling official description of sarin goes on to warn:
   Symptoms of overexposure may occur within minutes or hours, depending upon dose. They include: miosis (constriction of pupils) and visual effects, headaches and pressure sensation, runny nose and nasal congestion, salivation, tightness in the chest, nausea, vomiting, giddiness, anxiety, difficulty in thinking and sleeping, nightmares, muscle twitches, tremors, weakness, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, involuntary urination and defecation. With severe exposure symptoms progress to convulsions and respiratory failure.
   
5. Scientists express the degree of deadliness of a nerve gas with the term
   LD
   (for lethal dose)
   50,
   meaning the amount that will kill 50 percent of those exposed to it. The smaller the amount needed to reach LD50, the stronger the agent. For VX absorbed through the skin, the LD50 is ten milligrams for a 154-pound man. For skin exposure to soman, the LD50 is 350 milligrams.
   
6. In addition, the army in the mid-1960s had a wide variety of weapons capable of delivering both GB and VX, including 105 mm howitzers, 105 mm rocket launchers, and Honest John and Sergeant missiles. The air force had thousand-pound bombs containing 198 gallons of GB.
   
7. Phosgene chokes its victims and can cause death by asphyxiation. It was also rumored among the scientists at Edgewood that GC was a code sometimes used in military medical records for gonorrhea.
   
8. Iraqi scientists working for Saddam Hussein reportedly developed a nerve gas that is an analogue of GH, using isobutyl alcohol.
   
9. The precise way that binary nerve-gas weapons work is classified, but scientists familiar with them said that as the shell is fired, the contents push back in what is called a setback. The setback ruptures the disk that keeps the two chemicals apart. The rotation of the shell in the air mixes the two components. By the time the shell nears the target, the chemicals have mixed and produced nerve gas.
   

CHAPTER 6

1. The FBI’s official intelligence glossary defines disinformation as “carefully contrived misinformation prepared by an intelligence service for the purpose of misleading, deluding, disrupting, or undermining confidence in individuals, organizations, or governments.” Leo D. Carl,
   The International Dictionary of
   Intelligence
   (McLean, Va.: International Defense Consultant Services, 1990), p. 110.
   
2. The Department of Defense has declined to make any comment about Operation
   SHOCKER.
   For four years, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), in Fort Meade, Maryland, insisted in response to several Freedom of Information Act requests by the author that it had “no record” of Operation
   SHOCKER
   under that or any of the several other code names used for the operation over more than two decades. As far as the army was concerned, it never existed. At the author’s behest, Kenneth H. Bacon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, asked the secretary of the army, Togo D. West, Jr., whether any information about the operation could be released. West ordered a review. On May 27, 1997, Bacon responded to the author, saying that the files had indeed been located but remained classified and would not be released. When subsequently pressed, Bacon said, “There is a security issue here.” He declined to elaborate.
   
3. Strecker was assigned from 1965 to 1968 to the army’s Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI, but often called just ACSI and referred to in-house as “ohax-see” or “ax-see”). His successor was Taro Yoshihashi.
   

CHAPTER 7

1. In 1985, Polyakov was betrayed to the KGB by the CIA’s Aldrich H. Ames, and three years later he was executed.
   
2. Although Danilin did not explain why the microdots were in plain text and the SW encoded, the logic was not hard to follow. If one of the hollow rocks left for Cassidy was somehow found-by a child playing, for example-the finder would not see the microdot, and the piece of paper would appear blank. Encoding the text of the SW provided another layer of security.
   
3. The dictionary had 413 pages set in two columns of type. The Soviets instructed Cassidy that the first three digits indicated the page number, always between 100 and 413, the fourth digit indicated the column, and the last two digits indicated the placement of the word.
   
4. Now, however, the code became a little more complicated. Because the fourth digit of his birth date was number 5, the number given to Cassidy always had a 5, 6, or 7 as the fourth digit, so that the sum when added to 5 would indicate column one or two. For example, one actual message Cassidy received contained the number 135685, which, added to his birth date, produced 198205, which meant the word “last.” The next number was 249692, which, added to his birth date, resulted in 312212, which led to the word “Saturday.” The message also included 152685, which, when added to his birth date, produced 215205, indicating the word “March.” Thus the numbers were part of a message scheduling a meeting in New York City for the last Saturday in March, 1975. The code was laborious to translate, but it worked.
   
5. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, 94th Congress, vol. 1, “Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents,” p. 19. The dart, which the CIA preferred to call “a nondiscernible microbioinoculator,” was fired by a noiseless dart gun, accurate up to 250 feet. The victim would feel nothing when struck, and no trace of the microscopic dart would be found through any later medical examination of the dead person. The agency also stockpiled cobra venom.
   
6. Charles L. Hatheway, “Toxigenic
   Clostridia,
   ”
   Clinical Microbiology Reviews
   3 (January 1990): 71.
   
7. Whether the information about ricin was passed to the Soviets, either in the deception phase of
   SHOCKER
   or in a separate, parallel counterintelligence operation, is not clear. In 1985, Vitaly S. Yurchenko, a senior KGB official, told the CIA about Special Lab 100, a laboratory in Moscow where KGB scientists developed and tested poisons for operational use. The Russians may have thus extracted ricin on their own.
   

CHAPTER 8

1. Formerly Stalingrad, the river port city was devastated in World War II, but the surrender of Hitler’s forces there in 1943 was the turning point for the Soviet army, which then went on the offensive along the eastern front.
   
2. In both the United States and Russia, the chemists in the pilot plants typically worked with small quantities and attempted to devise the processes that would take place in a full-scale plant. In a full-scale production plant, chemical engineers turned out nerve gas by the hundreds of pounds or tons. At Edgewood, nerve gases were tested initially in a process laboratory, even before the work moved to a pilot plant.
   
3. Pinacolyl alcohol combined with methyl phosphonofluoridate creates soman, or pinacolyl methyl phosphonofluoridate. The second chemical component of soman is identical to that used in sarin; only the alcohol is different.
   
4. Mirzayanov’s theory about why the fish died might be correct, but full-scale production of soman had not yet begun in 1965, the year the fish kill occurred. The electrolysis plant that was needed to produce the necessary pinacolyl alcohol was still under construction at the time, and major production of soman at Volgograd did not begin until 1968.
   

CHAPTER 9

1. In May 1961, John M. Doar, an official of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was on the scene in Montgomery when the Freedom Riders were beaten with baseball bats and lead pipes at the Greyhound bus station. Doar also went to St. Jude’s to investigate the threats against the hospital. Sister Miriam greatly admired Doar “because he protected St. Jude’s. John spent part of one night by the switchboard with me listening to the threats. He had a set of earphones and could listen to the calls coming in.” In 1974, Doar was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Richard Nixon.