Cassidy's Run

by David Wise

  The USEB was the first panel to rule on any deception operation that involved the military. After the USEB, the proposal moved over to another unit under J-3, the Special Assistant for Clandestine and Special Activity (SACSA). After SACSA approved the plan, since SHOCKER was an army project, it was sent to the army’s deputy chief of staff for operations (DCSOPS, pronounced “dess-ops”). Finally, after DCSOPS signed off on the proposal, it moved to the army’s Office of the Chief of Research and Development (OCRD), which prepared the feed for the FBI.²

  At FBI headquarters, the deception operation was supervised by Eugene C. Peterson, a veteran counterintelligence agent in the Soviet section. A big, burly, professional counterspy, Peterson had the face of a boxer—a broad pug nose with a horizontal scar between intent blue eyes, a face with a lot of miles on it. In the course of his twenty-eight-year career with the FBI, he worked on most of the major Soviet cases of the cold war.

  Despite his tough-looking exterior, Peterson was an affable, pleasant man from Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his father drove a laundry truck and his mother worked as the firm’s bookkeeper. Peterson enlisted in the army air corps out of high school, then graduated from Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen in 1951 and joined the FBI. He began his counterintelligence career in Puerto Rico in 1960. Four years later, Peterson was transferred to headquarters to work against Soviet spies. He rose to chief of the Soviet section in 1976.

  Although an elaborate structure of Pentagon boards and committees had approved SHOCKER, the actual control of the operation rested in the hands of a small number of people—Peterson at FBI headquarters, successive case agents at the Washington field office, and across the Potomac in the Pentagon, Taro Yoshihashi, the army’s top counterespionage expert. A quiet, self-effacing man who worked deep in the intelligence bureaucracy, Yoshihashi was a double-agent specialist and thus the FBI’s point of contact inside the Defense Department.

  Born in Hollywood, California, to a Japanese-American family, Yoshihashi earned a degree in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and joined the army in 1942, not long before the rest of his family was evacuated to a relocation camp in Cody, Wyoming. Assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, Yoshihashi maintained files on all Japanese Army units with the help of MAGIC, the decrypted messages obtained after the United States broke the Japanese code.

  After the war, the army sent him to investigate the biologicalwarfare experiments conducted by the Japanese against civilians in Manchuria. He was assigned to the Pentagon in 1968. As a double-agent specialist, Yoshihashi was also the army’s representative on the staff of USEB.

  As in the case of many obscure government panels, USEB’s staff really ran it. “In the five years I was there,” Yoshihashi recalled, “the principals at USEB only met once, in January of 1972. The meeting was in the basement of the Pentagon in one of the J-3 offices.” James J. Angleton, the CIA’s controversial chief of counterintelligence, showed up for the rare meeting. Angleton, who trusted no one, had nearly destroyed the CIA trying to unearth moles who he was convinced were burrowing away inside the agency.

  At the meeting, he was true to form. “Angleton was the agency representative. At one point he said, ‘I have a lot of interesting information I could give you, but I’m not sure about your security here.’ I thought, what a lot of b.s.”

  Although the CIA, through its membership on USEB, was aware of the nerve-gas deception, it exercised no operational control. In the jargon of the intelligence world, Cassidy was the FBI’s “asset,” not the CIA’s, nor the army’s.

  “The army’s role was merely providing support,” Yoshihashi noted. “It was a bureau operation. I would get requests from Gene Peterson.

  “The bureau would bring in documents from Edgewood and say can we release these? Gene or the bureau’s liaison agent would bring the documents over to the Pentagon. Then I would go to DCSOPS for approval. In some cases, I would make a recommendation that material should not be released. Most of the documents that we approved, except for the deception, were true information.”

  Yoshihashi and Peterson, while responsible along with a few other officials for managing the operation, did not deal directly with Cassidy. That was the job of the case agents in the field. And during the deception phase of SHOCKER, that meant Jimmy Morrissey.

  In the fall of 1964, a major shift of positions had occurred in the FBI’s Washington field office. Ludwig Oberndorf, the counterintelligence chief, was assigned to headquarters. Special Agent William J. Lander took over S-3, the GRU squad. At the same time, Donald Gruentzel, who had been Cassidy’s case agent, was promoted to supervisor of S-2, the KGB squad. It thus fell to Jimmy Morrissey to run Cassidy during the most sensitive phase of the operation.

  In its final form, the plan was, in a sense, a triple deception. “There were G-series gases up to letter H,” Yoshihashi said. “The deception was to say we now have GJ. It was fictitious.” Secondly, the claim of a new and powerful GJ nerve gas might lead Moscow to conclude, by implication, that the Edgewood scientists had also created a nerve gas labeled GI. The third aspect of the deception was that the bogus documents to be passed to Moscow by Cassidy were also to reveal that GJ existed in binary form.

  The decision to tell the Soviet Union about a breakthrough nerve gas designated GJ had a grain of truth embedded within it, since the Edgewood scientists had in fact tried to do so and failed. The effort had taken place, but the results disclosed to the GRU were false.

  Most former officials privy to the deception declined to discuss it. One ex-FBI agent familiar with Operation SHOCKER, however, agreed to talk about the deception, the most sensitive phase of the long-running case, on the condition that he not be named. “We had spent a lot of money, and we thought, hell, make them do it. It was hoped the operation would lead the Soviets in turn to spend time and resources on trying to develop the same weapons system, in binary form. It was a ‘we tried and couldn’t so let’s make them spend money on it’ attitude.”

  The FBI’s files confirm this purpose. In December 1965, FBI headquarters informed the Washington field office that the deception operation had been authorized based on material developed by the army. The deception would involve a lethal chemical agent, many times more effective than any then available. For #8220;technical” reasons, it was said, the United States had decided not to deploy this weapon but would pass the information to the Soviet Union in a controlled manner. The objective was to cause the Soviets to conduct extensive research and to commit money, personnel, training, and material to replicate or defend against a chemical agent that the United States had not actually produced and therefore had no intention of using.

  Another former FBI official, who also insisted on anonymity, was willing, cautiously, to describe the nerve gas that the Soviets were led to believe had been developed. “It was very unstable and could not be stored, so it could not be put in a weapon. It would not maintain its toxicity. And there was no antidote for it. So the idea was, we give it to the Soviets, they make it, and then discover it’s unstable and no antidote exists, so it can’t be used. Because how would they protect their own troops?”

  Now the double-agent operation had escalated into a risky, highstakes gamble. For at its core, the deception over nerve gas was designed to mislead Moscow into believing that the United States was ahead in the chemical-warfare arms race.

  Any deception operation carries with it a risk. The documents passed by Cassidy to Mikhail Danilin contained enough true information mixed in with the false to get the Russians to believe all of it. The risk was that Soviet scientists might find the true information valuable and use it to make breakthroughs that had eluded America’s scientists.

  The Joint Chiefs, the army, and the FBI agents who actually ran the operation knew and weighed the danger. But they also knew that the Soviets were already engaged in full-scale research and production of nerve gases. The competition between the two countries t
o develop newer and more lethal nerve gases was already a reality. Because of that, the officials in Washington reasoned, it was worth the risk to try to lead the Soviets down an expensive false trail.

  Another ex-FBI official said the scientists had reassured the bureau that the formula could safely be passed. “We were assured it wouldn’t work,” he said. “So it sounds great and looks great, but it will break down at the end. It was made in the lab but never put into production.” Had the bureau considered the risks? “Yes,” he replied, “they did, but since they were assured it wouldn’t work, they felt it would be OK.”

  One of those who worried about where the operation might lead was Henry Anthony Strecker, who served in a senior post in army intelligence at the time.³

  The whole business made Harry Strecker nervous. “I remember sitting in on a bureau briefing with Gene Peterson where they talked about an operation out of Edgewood,” he said. “We called it spiel material, which means ‘play’ material. I remember a nerve gas we didn’t make. Someone at the briefing expressed concern that if we drove the Soviets to looking into a bogus formula, is there a legitimate concern we might drive them to a breakthrough we don’t want them to have?”

  C H A P T E R: 7

  WASHINGTON GAME

  Early in 1966, Cassidy began passing the false information about nerve gas to Mikhail Danilin. From the Soviet embassy in Washington, the disturbing intelligence about GJ, the powerful new chemical weapon developed by the United States, was relayed to Moscow.

  The deception phase of Operation SHOCKER continued for three and a half years, until July 1969. Throughout this period, the GRU pressed for more information about the new nerve gas, and Cassidy obliged with more documents—some real, some fake.

  Cassidy’s importance to the Russians had suddenly increased spectacularly. New, more secure arrangements were needed to pass the vital film coming out of Edgewood and to transmit instructions to the sergeant. In March 1966, Danilin unveiled to Cassidy two kinds of spy paraphernalia that were to be used for communication between them.

  First, he introduced Cassidy to microdots—tiny, circular specks of film on which vast amounts of data could be reduced to a size no bigger than a printed period. He was to receive future instructions on microdots, Danilin explained. To enable Cassidy to enlarge the microdots to make them legible, Danilin gave him a portable microdot reader.

  At the same meeting, Danilin gave Cassidy a short course on how to make an artificial, hollow rock. From that time on, Danilin said, the GRU’s microdots and the rollover cameras from Cassidy were to be exchanged inside fake rocks. The rocks, he explained, needed to be so realistic-looking that they could safely be left in a park, in the woods, or even on a street.

  “He told me how to take the rollover camera and wrap it in waxpaper, then tinfoil over that, and then cover it with plaster of paris. Plaster of paris is a gray powder.You add water and mix it in a bucket,and it has the consistency of dough or Spackle.You mold it around the tinfoil and let it harden.It made a coatinga bout aquarter of an inch thick.It would dry in an hour.Sometimes I’d rubsand or dirt in it.The rocks were light gray, or darker.”Cassidy quickly became expert at fashioning the phony rocks. Toany casual observer, they were in distinguishable from real ones.

  Now the meetings and exchanges of material between Danilin and Cassidy began to follow a set procedure, a sort of espionage ballet. The choreography seldom varied.

  “First I would go to a drop site and leave my rock, with the rollover camera inside. The drop sites were listed in the instructions. A lot of them were near Burke, Virginia,” a Washington suburb. Cassidy then drove to a designated point in nearby Springfield. While he was en route, a Soviet retrieved Cassidy’s rock. In Springfield, “ ‘Mike’ would be waiting on the street. Or I would park and walk a block to where he was waiting. Then he would get in my car and we’d drive to the parking lot of the bowling alley. Always at nine P.M. At the personal meetings, nothing would pass. We’d part around eleven.”

  This way, the Russians reasoned, if something went wrong and the FBI swooped down on the parking lot, neither man had any documents. They were just two people chatting by a bowling alley. At the meetings, Danilin discussed the previous batch of material Cassidy had provided and what he might be looking for next. “When we left the bowling alley we’d drive in my car to wherever he said, and I would drop him off. It was always different from where I picked him up but always in Springfield.”

  Cassidy then drove to a prearranged spot to pick up a fake rock that Danilin had left for him before their personal meeting. Inside were instructions in secret writing, a microdot, and cash. The instructions listed more drop and pickup sites and the dates of future meetings.

  “The next day I would give the rock to the FBI.” Although Cassidy had the portable microdot reader, it was much easier for the FBI to blow up the microdot in its laboratory and relay Moscow’s instructions to Cassidy. Neither Cassidy nor the FBI would easily have found a microdot inside a rock, but Cassidy was always told where to look. Those instructions came on what appeared to be a blank sheet of paper with secret writing, or SW as it is known in the espionage trade. Cassidy then steamed the sheet of paper and the message became visible.

  Usually, the microdot was tucked away in a slit in a matchbook cover that was placed inside the rock. One matchbook had a picture of a Mississippi River paddle steamer; the SW instructions told Cassidy to look under a particular section of the paddle wheel.

  In addition to enlarging the microdots to full-page size, the FBI photographed the entire contents of every rock retrieved by Cassidy, including the cash. These were all recorded on eight-by-ten color prints.

  The bureau watched most of Cassidy’s meetings with Danilin, and it kept the Russian’s apartment under surveillance. The FBI also tried to follow and photograph Danilin when he cleared drop sites, but that was extremely difficult in the remote, wooded areas of northern Virginia favored by the Soviets. The Russians chose such isolated areas because it was fairly easy to spot anyone who might be following them. Normally, a Soviet agent also had a partner watching his back.

  “Physical surveillance of Soviets at a drop was almost impossible,” Charlie Bevels said. “They were aware of it, and they ran countersurveillance. Once Danilin was scheduled to clear a drop in a very dark, rural area. The lab wanted to use infrared film to get a picture of him clearing the drop. I said no. Because when you use an infrared flashbulb, if you are looking straight at it, you can see it go off. I didn’t want to take the chance.”

  On another occasion, the bureau was frustrated in its surveillance efforts by the unexpected. “I remember one personal meeting they had at the Rose Hill shopping center in northern Virginia, off Franconia Road,” Bevels said. “We had cameras, and we were in a house that the owners left at our request. We assured them that the house will not be disturbed, there would be no shooting. We had given them twenty-five dollars; go out to dinner, we’ll be here a couple of hours. But at Rose Hill some guy in a huge tractor trailer, Interstate Movers was their name, parked it right in our way. We couldn’t see anything.”

  The GRU understood that Cassidy was not passing secret documents for ideological reasons. As far as the Soviets knew, he was betraying his country for dollars. Since Cassidy never split open the rocks before handing them over to the FBI, he never knew exactly how much money they held. But according to Charlie Bevels, “the rocks often contained ten thousand dollars at a time, usually in a little Baggie, rolled up inside the rocks. Sometimes there was more than that.”

  But at the meetings with Danilin, Cassidy, playing his role, continually pressed for more money. If the Soviets tended to think of Americans as greedy and materialistic, then he would meet their expectations. “I was always crying for money. I have a teenage daughter, child-support payments for my wife, I have to buy food, clothes, insurance. The piddling amounts you’re giving me aren’t worth the chance I’m taking.”

  Despite Cassidy’s complaints
to the Soviets that he was being underpaid, the money was rolling in, albeit into the FBI’s coffers to finance the operation. With the GRU paying Cassidy tens of thousands of dollars, the Russians worried that he might display his new wealth conspicuously. His Soviet handlers warned him to spend money carefully and to avoid buying anything that would attract attention.

  Intelligence work is highly compartmentalized. Although Taro Yoshihashi monitored the operation from the Pentagon and was deeply involved in the feed, he never met Joe Cassidy, though he admired him from afar.

  “I felt Cassidy was one of the most competent double agents we ever had,” Yoshihashi said. “For example, when he bought a freezer, he said to the Soviets, ‘I have enough cash now to buy this, but I did a down payment just like everybody else.’ ”

  When Cassidy needed to write to the GRU, he was instructed to use the special carbon paper he had been given earlier. He recalled how it worked: “The carbon was reddish but dark, it looked normal except for the red color. I would take a sheet of ordinary paper and make a pencil mark to show the writing will be on that side. I would put the special carbon on top of the paper, another paper on top of the carbon, and clip the three together. Then I would take a pencil and write the message. It left no visible marks on the bottom sheet. I’d give the top sheet to my FBI handler and save the carbon paper to use again. I was left with a blank sheet of paper with the invisible writing. I would put that sheet with the secret writing in the rock.”

  Cassidy used this method to confirm a meeting date or a drop site or to answer requests from Danilin. “Sometimes he would ask whether I could get him something, and I would respond in a letter that I could or could not, or I was still looking for it. Sometimes I wrote to say a drop site they proposed was no good, it was in an area where there were too many people around.”