Cassidy's Run

by David Wise

  On March 9, 1966, Boris Libman was convicted of negligence and sentenced to two years in a prison labor camp in nearby Volsky. At the time, he was forty-three years old. He was stripped of his military medals and fined ten thousand new rubles, which was ten times the value of his Lenin Prize and the equivalent of two years’ salary. Six other officials of the chemical plant were convicted and fined but not sent to prison.

  In an interview with the author in Moscow in 1993, Vil Mirzayanov, a scientist who worked for years in the Soviet nerve-gas program, blamed the fish kill on the chemical plant. “Boris Libman was chief engineer of the Volgograd plant in charge of soman production. Some of the soman toxins polluted the Volga, and the fish went belly-up. [Aleksei] Kosygin, then the prime minister, ordered someone be made an example, and Libman became the scapegoat.”4

  In the prison camp, Libman worked first as a foreman of a construction crew, building houses. After some months, he was allowed to work in a chemical plant during the day, developing phospho-organic stabilizers for rubber. To do so, he left the prison during the day but had to be back inside by 10 P.M. Any later than that would be considered an escape, and five more years would be added to his sentence.

  Although sentenced to two years, Libman was let out after one year because nobody else could start up production of soman at the Volgograd works. The soman production plant opened, with Libman back on the job, in 1968.

  In 1972, Libman was transferred to Novocheboksarsk to oversee the full-scale production of VX. The Soviets, however, were not content with mass production of soman, sarin, and VX. Two scientists, Pyotr Petrovich Kirpichev and Vladimir Uglev, were working at Shikhany 1 on a new nerve gas, the like of which the world had never seen before.

  Whether the formula for GJ that was passed to Moscow in Operation SHOCKER inspired this Soviet effort may never be known without access to the closed archives of the GRU. But in 1973, Kirpichev and Uglev perfected the new substance, said to be eight to ten times more powerful than any nerve gas then in existence.

  Its name, which means “newcomer” in Russian, was Novichok.

  C H A P T E R: 9

  THE NUN

  In 1968, Joe Cassidy was living in an apartment building on Moravia Road in Baltimore and commuting to his job at Edgewood Arsenal. He noticed the attractive high-school teacher who lived in an apartment one floor above him, but they had only a nodding acquaintance.

  Marie Krstyen in turn was aware of the tall, good-looking sergeant. Occasionally, she glanced out the window and watched him play catch with his son, Barry, who lived with his mother in Alexandria but visited on weekends.

  Early in March of that year, the wife of another tenant in the building left in a huff, after stripping the apartment clean. The distraught husband was wandering the hall. Marie Krstyen and Cassidy took pity on the fellow and tried to calm him down. The wandering wife returned in a few days, and Marie and Cassidy started dating. She was forty and had never married; Cassidy was forty-seven.

  “On the first date, he took me to the Playboy Club,” she recalled. Krstyen was not sure that his choice was such a great idea, but Cassidy, a member, was fond of the prix fixe menu; drinks were only $1.50, as was dinner. On his sergeant’s salary, he considered the place a bargain. As the waitresses in their brief, cottontail outfits ministered to the couple, Cassidy began probing to find out more about his new friend’s background. For Krstyen, it was a turnoff.

  “He kept asking a lot of personal questions,” she said. “I didn’t like that at all.”

  Marie Krstyen, of course, had no way of knowing why her date was asking so many questions. In part, Cassidy grilled her out of normal curiosity. However, while he did not need the FBI’s permission to see a woman, he was aware that the bureau would want to know as much as possible about anyone he was dating. If it turned serious, he knew, they would have to do a background check.

  Despite getting off on the wrong foot that first evening, Cassidy soon recovered and made a decided impression on his schoolmarm neighbor. “He swept me off my feet,” she said. “There was something about him that got me. He seemed a very loyal and truthful guy. He seemed genuine.” Since Cassidy was living a double life and pretending to the Russians that he was a money-grubbing traitor, he was anything but genuine. But Marie Krstyen had fallen in love.

  “He had good manners, he always greeted people, he was a perfect gentleman. Everybody called him the Sarge, and everybody loved him. I was teaching at night, and Joe always checked to make sure I got home.

  “I usually went to his place for dinner, because he did the cooking. In the latter part of April, at dinner at his apartment, he presented me with an engagement ring. He just floored me. But I did accept it, and I’d had nothing to drink.”

  Cassidy remembers the scene about the same way, with one nuance. Marie, he said, had hesitated. “She sat there looking at the ring. But finally, she said, ‘Yes.’ I put it on her finger. The next day her students whispered, ‘Miss Krstyen’s engaged.’ It went around like wildfire.

  “Within a few days I told the bureau I was going to get married. I had already told them I was dating her. So in March the bureau had started checking her out.”

  What happened next alarmed the FBI and dismayed Cassidy as well. “Marie had mentioned she came up from Atlanta. And I knew she was a teacher, but anything else I didn’t know. So I told the bureau she was from Atlanta, and they couldn’t find any trace of her.

  “So I queried her some more, what did you do in Atlanta? And finally she said she came from Montgomery, from Alabama.” Still, the FBI could not find any trace of Krstyen. And why had she changed her story? She seemed to have materialized in Baltimore out of thin air without any past history. Yet that was impossible. Could Krstyen be a Soviet swallow? That was the term that Russian intelligence used for a female agent dispatched to seduce a male target. Perhaps the innocent-looking schoolteacher was actually a Russian working for the GRU, sent to check up on Cassidy’s bona fides.

  Finally, the FBI solved the mystery. For twenty years, Marie Elizabeth Krstyen had been Sister Miriam Joseph of the Vincentian Sisters of Charity. For part of the time, she had lived behind the walls of a convent. Small wonder that the FBI had trouble with its background check.

  Cassidy was relieved at the news, although slightly embarrassed that he had taken an ex-nun to the Playboy Club. But he wondered why Krstyen had not revealed her previous life.

  “I never told him I had been a nun,” she said, “because I wanted him to be himself. I didn’t want him to act different.”

  But Cassidy had not revealed his secret either. “I never told her about my other life,” he said.

  In a sort of gift-of-the-magi, O. Henry twist, Marie Krstyen née Sister Miriam Joseph, and Joe Cassidy, aka WALLFLOWER, had concealed their secrets from each other. Even as their wedding date approached, Cassidy was still not authorized by the FBI to tell her the truth. She did not yet know the extent to which her own life was to change when she married a spy.

  But why had Krstyen told Cassidy she had come up from Atlanta? “I did say Atlanta,” she recalled, “but all I meant was I changed planes in Atlanta. I had come from Montgomery. I did spend about a week in Atlanta with friends.”

  Marie’s father, John Krstyen, was born in Czechoslovakia and came to America as a child of ten. Her grandfather was Hungarian; later, she wondered if her Eastern European family background had added to the FBI’s concern when the bureau finally figured out who she was.

  Marie Krstyen was born on March 20, 1927, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where her father worked for Bethlehem Steel, fixing machinery. Her mother, Mary Kondash, was the daughter of a local businessman. “Our family was Catholic, my mother converted when we were small. I went to a parochial school, and I wanted to be a teacher, so the nuns said, ‘Join the convent.’ It was a way of getting a college education.”

  She had entered the convent, which was in Pittsburgh, at age eighteen. Even early on, there were harbingers of her
eventual decision to return to the secular life. Sister Miriam alone would not bow her head during prayer before mealtime and was admonished by the nuns. She was told she was too proud, and was not showing the proper degree of humility. “But I felt humility is truth. And if my feelings were the truth, then why should I bow my head? I consider religion very personal, between you and your God.”

  For any infractions of the rules, the nuns were forced to kneel at the crucifix in front of some three hundred other nuns in the cafeteria and eat their meals on their knees. Independent-minded, and a touch rebellious, Sister Miriam questioned the practice. She was required to eat several meals on her knees, however, for minor transgressions.

  But her goal of a college education was met. “The Vincentian Sisters sent me to Duquesne University, which is also in Pittsburgh, in 1947.” The sisters ran schools and hospitals. Sister Miriam taught school and later transferred to hospital work. She was sent by the order to a rural area of southwest Missouri, where she worked in the local hospital and attended Saint Louis University in the summers, earning a master’s degree in hospital administration.

  In 1958, she was transferred to Saint Jude’s Hospital in Montgomery, where she found herself in the midst of the turmoil over civil rights. “All the black patients were sent to Saint Jude’s,” she said. “Because of that, there were phone threats to blow up the hospital. Martin Luther King came to the hospital several times and visited patients who had been beaten during civil-rights demonstrations, and some white demonstrators. I would meet him at the door.”¹

  In the spring of 1965, Sister Miriam Joseph turned thirty-eight. “I wanted to get back into teaching. I asked to change from hospital work and was turned down; they said they would have to train someone else. So in January I left the order.” After her brief stopover in Atlanta, she arrived in Baltimore, where her sister Helen lived, and found work as a teacher.

  In the spring of 1968, Cassidy’s divorce became final. Krstyen and Cassidy set their wedding date for the third week in June, but an obstacle arose. “I was marrying a divorced man and had problems with the church,” Krstyen recalled. “I went to different priests. It would have been over a thousand dollars to get an annulment. I’d never been married, and I said to the first priest, he [Cassidy] has nothing to do with this. But I was told, ‘You can’t receive the sacraments.’ ”

  To be told she could not receive communion and the other rites of the Roman Catholic church was not acceptable to the former Sister Miriam Joseph. Joe and Marie were married in June as scheduled, but it was three years before the issue of the sacraments was resolved. “I finally found a priest who said, ‘You go right ahead.’ To me, religion is more than some rules a priest makes up. To me, religion is my relationship with God. I go with a peaceful heart and mind to the sacraments.”

  The wedding took place in the chapel at Edgewood Arsenal. The chaplain who officiated was a Protestant, but he performed a Catholic service. Jimmy Morrissey and his wife attended the wedding, Marie recalled, “but I didn’t know who they were.”

  The bride was in for a shock. “One day shortly after the marriage,” she said, “Morrissey shows up at the apartment and flashes his badge. He said, ‘Your husband is involved in secret work for the United States, working with the FBI and the military.’ He didn’t give any details. He said, ‘There are times when he will have to go out for the whole evening or overnight.’ ”

  When Morrissey had left, Marie turned to her husband.

  “You never told me you were involved in anything like this,” she said. “Now I understand why you were asking all those questions about me.” Cassidy, her “truthful guy,” could only smile and shrug.

  After the initial astonishment had worn off, Marie began to worry. “I did not resent the fact that it had been kept secret. I knew there was a reason it had been kept secret. But I had some questions. Was it dangerous? The question was running through my own mind, but I did not press Joe about it. I figured it would become clear in time.”

  Jimmy Morrissey became a familiar figure in their marriage. Cassidy shielded his wife from much of his activities, but the nature of his mission gradually became clear to her. “I realized it was spy work,” she said. “I figured it out. I knew about double agents. I read about them in a spy novel or saw a movie. I figured he was a ‘good’ spy. But Morrissey never mentioned the country. I didn’t know the country was Russia until Joe told me that the FBI had worried I was a plant.”

  One way or another Marie was drawn into her husband’s intelligence work. “Once in the early 1970s,” Cassidy said, “we were leaving Petersburg, Virginia, and I had to go somewhere, to a picnic grove, so I could get a shortwave transmission from Moscow. She walked Beau, our silver poodle, and kept watch while I got the transmission.”

  Cassidy could hardly have concealed his secret life from Marie. Although for the most part he used the rollover cameras to photograph the documents he passed to the Russians, on instructions from the Soviets he also bought a camera and a tripod to copy material. At times, Marie saw Cassidy taking pictures of documents or steaming letters on the stove to develop secret writing.

  Marie made sure that the spy paraphernalia was kept out of view. “We kept the equipment in the guest room,” she said. “I always made sure the tripod and camera and radio were hidden when we had guests.”

  Marie Cassidy did not have to wait very long to learn whether her husband’s espionage work might be dangerous. In October 1968, only four months into their marriage, Cassidy received a microdot instructing him to travel abroad—something that had never happened before. He was to go to Mexico City for a meeting. The instructions gave the date and the time of night that he was to be on a certain street. He was not asked to bring any documents.

  It was an alarming turn of events, for both Cassidy and the FBI. It was not clear why the Soviets wanted to meet Cassidy outside the United States. For the first time, WALLFLOWER might be in real danger.

  C H A P T E R: 10

  “THEY MIGHT SHOOT ME”

  The KGB was responsible for counterintelligence within the Soviet military, including the GRU. So it was not unreasonable to believe that if Moscow had somehow discovered that Cassidy was an American spy, he could be targeted.

  As the poison-umbrella attack on Georgi Markov demonstrated, the KGB had the capability to assassinate its enemies or to provide its allies with the means to do so. In the 1950s and 1960s, the KGB carried out a number of hits, some successful.¹

  In 1954, for example, Nikolai Y. Khokhlov was dispatched to Frankfurt to assassinate the leader of an anti-Soviet exile group. He was armed with a noiseless gun disguised as a cigarette pack that fired bullets laced with potassium cyanide. Instead of carrying out the hit, Khokhlov defected. But in 1957, Moscow sent Bogdan Stashynsky, who later described himself as a professional killer for the KGB, to liquidate Lev Rebet, a Ukrainian exile leader in Munich. He murdered Rebet with a special gun that fired a spray of prussic acid, the liquid form of cyanide. Two years later, with an improved model of the vapor gun, he assassinated Stefan Bandera, another Ukrainian exile leader in Munich. Stashynsky later fled to West Germany and was convicted of the murders and sentenced to eight years in prison.

  In 1964, the KGB attacked Horst Schwirkmann, a wiretap expert for West German intelligence who had been sent to Moscow to debug Bonn’s embassy there. After completing his assignment, Schwirkmann visited the famous Zagorsk Monastery, an hour northeast of Moscow. He stopped to admire a painting of the Resurrection. A middleaged man who had been kneeling and praying by it arose and stood politely behind Schwirkmann, who suddenly felt what seemed like ice water on his left buttock. Within seconds, the West German technician was in agonizing pain, and his skin had blistered. Hospitalized and given intensive medical treatment, he almost lost his left leg but survived. U.S. physicians determined he had been sprayed with deadly nitrogen mustard gas.

  Within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign-intelligence arm, the assassination u
nit was first the ninth, then the thirteenth department. In 1965, Peter Deriabin, a KGB defector, testified to a Senate committee, “The thirteenth department is responsible for assassination and terror. This department is called the department of wet affairs, or in Russian Mokrie Dela. . . . Mokrie means ‘wet,’ and in this case mokrie means ‘blood wet.’ ”

  During the time that Cassidy was working as a double against the Russians, then, the KGB was capable of assassinating its enemies, although it may have later abandoned the practice. In 1989, Victor Gundarev, a KGB colonel who had defected in Greece three years earlier, told the author, “Yes, they had Mokrie Dela. I don’t know a single case in the last fifteen years or more. But there is risk.” Because of the perceived risk, however remote today, most Soviet and Russian defectors in the United States, including Victor Gundarev, live under assumed names in the CIA’s equivalent of the Justice Department’s witness-protection program.²

  The risk was much greater, of course, during the height of the cold war, when Cassidy was instructed to go to Mexico. At the time, the summer Olympic games were under way in Mexico City, and there were no flights or hotel rooms available; the city was completely booked.

  Cassidy kissed his bride good-bye but said very little about why he was leaving the country. “Just that it was involved in that work,” Marie remembered.

  From Baltimore, Cassidy flew to Dallas, rented a car, and drove to Brownsville, on the Mexican border, hoping to catch a flight from there. He went to a travel agency. “There were no flights to Mexico City, but I was told to keep checking,” Cassidy recalled. “I kept checking for several days and finally decided I would have to drive.”

  Having heard stories of bandidos waylaying travelers, Cassidy was not thrilled about the prospect of driving. “The next day the travel agency called and said they had a flight from Matamoros, Mexico, just over the border from Brownsville.” Cassidy turned in the rental car, hailed a cab, took it over the bridge to the dusty, decrepit airport in Matamoros, and caught his flight.