Cassidy's Run

by David Wise

  Flores was accepted by the university and arrived on campus in January 1972. Lopez, he discovered, was an avid badminton player, and Flores briefly considered approaching him as a fellow enthusiast. He decided there was a better way.

  The PALMETTOS had enrolled their two-year-old son, Nayar, at a Montessori school day-care center not far from the university. Flores did the same with his son.

  “The first time I went to the day-care center, I parked behind his car and locked him in. So he had to wait until I left to get out.”

  In the parking lot, Flores apologized in Spanish for blocking Lopez.

  “Dispénsame,” Flores said, excusing himself. “I’ll get out of your way.”

  “No problem,” Lopez replied. He seemed pleased to meet another Spanish-speaking parent.

  In the days that followed, as they both visited the day-care center, Flores gradually got to know Lopez. “We had to wait for the children, and I introduced myself.”

  Soon, they became friends. Flores was patient. Lopez liked to talk politics, and Flores made a point of being a good listener. “I listened to his ideas on Marxism and Stalin. He was an admirer of Stalin.

  “One day [the PALMETTOS] were going to a function at the anthropology department. There were poetry readings for visiting scholars, that sort of thing. They asked me to baby-sit.”

  Headquarters could scarcely have expected Flores to get any closer to the target. It might have been unprecedented in the annals of espionage: A Russian spy had unknowingly asked an FBI agent to baby-sit for him.

  Whenever Lopez planned to travel to Mexico, or to Florida to service one of Cassidy’s drops, he told Flores that he was getting ready to take a trip. Of course, from the wiretaps on his apartment, the FBI usually knew that.

  Although Flores had not worked undercover before, he proved to be ingenious and creative. One night, Flores and his wife invited Gilberto and Alicia to their home. “I had him over to dinner and saved all the glasses so we had a full set of prints from him and from her. We loaded the plates into the dishwasher, but they didn’t notice we didn’t put the glasses in. We got very good prints.”

  Lopez and his wife had very different personalities, Flores recalled. “She was a good swimmer; he was afraid of the water. So sometimes I could get her at the deep end of the pool and talk to her alone. He would stay in the shallow end. She spoke French, some German. She had traveled through France and had lived with a family in France. She was quite a linguist.

  “He was more gregarious, talkative, would have made a hell of a salesman. Go right up to you at a party and start talking. She was more the quiet, intellectual one.” But Alicia made one basic conviction clear, Flores said. “She hated Americans.”

  Similarly, Lopez trusted Flores only because of his Mexican background. “Once Gilberto told the two kids, mine and his, that they must always be friends and not fight. He said to them, ‘You must get a pencil and stick it into the blue eyes of the gringos.’ ”

  Lopez was paid well for his espionage work. “The Soviets were paying him in cash every time he made a pickup. We had access to his bank accounts. After each visit to a drop site in Florida he would make a deposit in his bank account. They would pay him between eight thousand and twelve thousand dollars per drop.” Out of the total, however, Lopez had to pay his tuition and travel expenses.

  From the wiretaps, the FBI learned that Lopez was planning to move with his family to Austin in 1972. The Mexican had received a Ford Foundation grant to study anthropology at the University of Texas.

  Lopez broke the news to Flores, though he did not realize, of course, that his good friend already knew it.

  “I said, ‘Great, good luck.’Then I said, ‘I’m not that happy here myself.’ ” Flores had previously mentioned to Lopez that he had grown up in Texas. “He said, ‘Maybe you need a change. Maybe you should transfer, too. I’ll call you when I get over there.’ So when he called, I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to go over there, too.’ ”

  Flores applied on his own to the University of Texas and again was accepted as a graduate student in geography. He moved to Austin in 1972.

  The FBI had no difficulty gaining access to the duplex the PALMETTOS rented in Austin. “While I was still in Salt Lake,” Flores said, “Gilberto sent me a key to his place in Austin.”

  For the drop on the night of Saturday, April 1, 1972, Cassidy had selected and Danilin had agreed to a site in central St. Petersburg, a popular trysting place bordered by Straub Park and the North Yacht Basin. The FBI took up positions nearby, ready to photograph whoever appeared. At 9 P.M., Cassidy placed his rock at the base of a metal pole of a street sign at the intersection of Bay Shore Drive Northeast and Fifth Avenue Northeast.

  Inside were films of seven documents stamped SECRET, and others marked with the lower classifications of CONFIDENTIAL and FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. One of the documents labeled SECRET, dated December 23, 1971, again related to the pullout of American forces from Vietnam and was entitled “Letter of Instruction for the Tenth Incremental Redeployment of U.S. Army Forces from RVN.”

  The pickup proved to be another family affair. At 9:20 P.M., FBI agents spotted Gilberto Lopez and his wife walking near the drop site. Lopez was carrying his son in a backpack. They stopped at the street sign, and Alicia Lopez put down a black-and-white-striped plastic shopping bag.

  Looking like an ordinary couple fussing with their baby carrier, Alicia helped take the backpack from Gilberto. He then kneeled as though adjusting the backpack, and as he did so he reached down, picked up the hollow rock, and slipped it into the shopping bag. Then he helped arrange the carrier on Alicia’s back. They walked off, Gilberto smiling and carrying the plastic bag. To any passersby, the episode would have looked innocuous. The FBI captured the whole scene on film.

  Mission accomplished, the Lopezes returned to their downtown hotel, the Sorrento, for the night. But Lopez, despite the smooth performance, had a touch of television’s Maxwell Smart in his spying activities. Once again, he forgot to leave the troublesome paper bag. At 9:52 P.M., he returned to the drop site and remedied his error.

  The next day dawned warm, and O’Flaherty spent most of his Easter Sunday morning in a stiflingly hot panel truck, watching the hotel. The Lopezes left, and O’Flaherty followed them to the train station.

  “They got on a train to Washington. I gave the ticket agent a hundred dollars in exchange for the bills they gave the ticket taker, as evidence, in case we could trace the serial numbers. We assumed he was on his way to make his drop to Danilin.”

  When Lopez returned to Salt Lake City, the FBI learned he was planning to take a brief trip to Mexico. “There was some indication he might clear a drop on the way,” Schamay said. “In May, we mounted a massive surveillance which started in Salt Lake. We used planes, campers, motorcycles. He drove into Arizona and then through New Mexico. We used a lot of people. We had people at all the exits from the city. First to pick him up leaving was the motorcycle, a special agent dressed like a typical biker. We had other FBI men dressed like cowboys.”

  To avoid detection, the bureau switched vehicles and people. “The motorcycle went into a pickup truck, then, when day light came, we used the airplane.” The surveillance ended at El Paso, as Lopez crossed the border into Mexico. But the results of the enormous surveillance were disappointing to the FBI.“We never saw him do anything,” Schamay said.

  In July, Cassidy traveled to Washington once more to meet with Danilin in Springfield. In the hollow rock at the pickup site, Cassidy received twelve thousand dollars and new rollover cameras, photographic equipment, and film. Concealed in the rock as well were capsules containing the same organic chemical compound that was in the special pencil lead that Cassidy had struggled to crush. The capsules, the Soviets hoped, would prove easier to dissolve in water.

  At their meeting, Danilin pressed Cassidy to provide more TOP SECRET documents, especially “like you gave last September.” But, all in all, fr
om the Soviet point of view, matters were progressing smoothly; there had now been four successful drops in Florida, the secret documents were flowing, and, through Cassidy, Moscow had achieved another intelligence coup. It had penetrated a vital American military center, the United States Strike Command.

  When the PALMETTOS went to Austin, the FBI moved its entire surveillance operation. Even before the Lopezes arrived in Austin, the FBI had cased the house they had rented. The couple was moving into one half of a duplex. The bureau discovered that there was a crawl space over both sides of the duplex. Carroll T. Allen, an FBI technical expert at headquarters, was dispatched from Washington to install video cameras in the crawl space and prepare the house electronically before the PALMETTOS moved in. The rooms were bugged, the telephones tapped.

  Allen worked in the hot, cramped crawl space of the duplex to install the miniature concealed cameras, which were so small that they operated through two tiny pinholes drilled into the ceiling. “They put in two video cameras,” Charlie Bevels said, “one over the top of his [Lopez’s] desk, and one from the side.”

  The sophisticated cameras worked, allowing the FBI to watch the Lopezes inside their home. “Lopez had a secret cache where he kept his espionage paraphernalia, microdot reader, and other material,” Bevels said. “So we could see him on video taking out his materials.”

  The video camera sent back live pictures to a duplex the FBI had rented about five hundred yards away, where the bureau’s technicians had all of their equipment. Through the video, the FBI watched Lopez put on a headset and listen to radio signals. The National Security Agency (NSA), the nation’s global electronic-eavesdropping arm, had been picking up the encoded signals for a long time but had not known to whom they were being sent.

  Then Lopez made a grievous operational error. A former senior FBI official familiar with the case explained what happened. “He took off a headset to say something to his wife, and we heard five-digit coded roadcasts from Moscow or Havana coming through the headset. And we were able to match them with the shortwave broadcasts we had suspected were directed to him. If he had never taken the headset off, we never could have confirmed it.”

  The headset figured in another incident that took place when Flores was baby-sitting for Lopez’s son, Nayar. What happened proved that even the most careful spy cannot protect himself against the unexpected. “One time I had the TV on at my apartment,” Flores recounted, “watching a war movie, just Nayar, my son, and myself, in the middle of the afternoon. Gilberto’s little boy didn’t talk much. In the movie, a ship was sinking, a torpedo hit it or something, and a radioman puts on a headset and starts sending an SOS. The little boy jumps up, runs to the TV, points at it, and says, ‘Papa, Papa!’ ”

  When the Lopezes left Austin for two weeks on a trip, the FBI entered the duplex and removed his shortwave radio, which was of East German make. The radio was sent to headquarters, taken apart, and analyzed. “We got back in before he returned and it would be missed,” Flores recalled. “So we knew what frequencies he would receive. Later, the Soviets modified the radio and made it digital. We could not hear the signals, but we were getting them from NSA. Our equipment read it as good as his did.”

  Although the FBI could watch Lopez receiving radio signals, they could not read the content of the encoded messages. Determined to decode the encrypted signals, the FBI again waited until the Lopezes were away on a trip. Using the door key that Lopez had sent to Flores, FBI agents entered the apartment and copied the “one-time pads” containing the random numbers that Lopez used to decode his radio signals.5 Now the FBI was able to decipher and read all of PALMETTO’S messages.

  “He would burn the pages of the one-time pads after using them,” Flores said. But destroying the pages no longer made any difference; the FBI had them.

  Lopez received a wide variety of encoded messages from the Russians. Flores recalled, “Some Soviet agents were being thrown out of England, and he would get a message, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in no danger.’ Some were, ‘Cancel plan A, we are doing plan B.’ He would be told to go to Mexico or Florida. And some were personal messages, ‘Congratulations on your son’s birthday,’ or your birthday. Or, ‘We are very happy with what you’re doing. You’re doing a marvelous job for us.’ The messages were brief.”

  The video camera enabled the FBI to read some of the messages at the very moment that Lopez decoded them. “When he wrote something on his notepad, we could see it,” Flores said. The camera also revealed the tensions in the Lopez household. All was not harmonious on the domestic front, according to Charlie Bevels. “At one point she [Mrs. Lopez] had a gun and pointed it at him and told him to quit bugging her. She was going to blow his head off.”

  After some months, Lopez and his family moved out of the duplex and into a single-family house in another section of Austin. The couple also acquired a large, unfriendly dog, Flores recalled. “They bought this big black female dog, a German shepherd, named Brea, which means black tarin Spanish. A big vicious dog, barked a lot. I became friends with the dog. I made sure I played with the dog and fed the dog, so if they [FBI technicians] needed to go in, I could go in. But when the PALMETTOS went on a trip, they took the dog with them, so that problem did not come up.”

  Lopez continued to service the drops in Florida. On the night of September 10, 1972, Joe Cassidy left a rock at a new drop site at Anvil Street and Twenty-sixth Avenue North, in St. Petersburg. The film contained one document stamped SECRET and several marked with lower classifications. The document stamped SECRET must have pleased Danilin because it was the first to deal with nuclear weapons. Dated February 1, 1972, it was entitled “Operational Feasibility in Mating Nuclear Bombs to Aircraft.” A March 1971 document marked CONFIDENTIAL was headed “General Flag Officer Staffing in OJCS and JCS Activities.”

  The factory of the Morgan Yacht Company overlooked the drop site, and O’Flaherty and his agents, having obtained permission from the owner, were waiting on scaffolds along the windows inside. “Lopez arrives at 9:27 P.M. in a white Pontiac with black hardtop, with his wife and son,” O’Flaherty said. The car parked at the corner. Lopez got out, knelt at the stop sign, and picked up the hollow rock. He returned to the car, and they drove off.

  Nearly two months later, on November 2, Cassidy received a letter from Danilin. The paper inside appeared blank, as usual. When he developed the secret writing and showed it to the FBI, the message was unnerving. Danilin asked by name for specific U.S. military documents that he wanted. How could the GRU have obtained such a shopping list of secret documents? The implication was both obvious and scary: Moscow had a genuine mole buried somewhere in the American military, perhaps one who had access to an index or list of classified material but not to the actual documents.

  One document Danilin requested was entitled “Vol. II - Joint Strategic Objectives Plan for Fiscal Year 1975-1982 (USOPFY 75-82).” Danilin also asked Cassidy for data on the yield and number of warheads of Minuteman III and Poseidon missiles.

  Then in December, five days before Christmas, Cassidy put down another rock at the street sign by the marina along Bay Shore Drive. Inside was film of four documents marked SECRET and of others with lower classification stamps. The document marked SECRET, although not the one Danilin had requested, was dated September 19, 1972, and was called “Nuclear Capabilities Reporting, JCS message No. 5252.”

  At 9:22 P.M., a yellow compact with Florida plates cruised by the drop site. Four minutes later, Lopez was seen alone nearby, walking south on Bay Shore Drive. At the street sign, he picked up the rock, put it in a camera case, and strolled away. Lopez had checked into the St. Petersburg Hilton the day before at dawn. He checked out the next day and took a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C.

  The next drop in St. Petersburg took place on April 1, 1973. The Russians had approved a new drop site in a quiet residential area at Eighty-ninth Avenue North and Fifth Street North. Casing the area, O’Flaherty saw that it was next to a construction site. Th
e builder, Aaron Applefield, allowed the FBI to use the model home on the site as a lookout post. Fred and Pearl Redfield, an elderly couple whose home overlooked the drop site, also allowed the FBI to use their house. An agent loitered on the street in a phone booth.

  Cassidy put down his hollow rock at 9 P.M. It contained photographs of three documents stamped SECRET and of several others marked with lower classifications. At 9:33 P.M., the waiting agents spotted Lopez driving alone near the drop site in a yellow late-model Fiat. A moment later, Lopez, with his German shepherd on a leash, approached the corner, doing his best to look like a neighborhood resident out walking his dog. He picked up the rock, got back in the Fiat, and took off.

  Lopez then drove to Washington. Again not wanting to alarm the spy, the FBI did not tail the car but instead set up a “picket surveillance,” with agents stationed along his likely route.

  This was the last drop and pickup in Florida. One month earlier, Cassidy, at age fifty-two, with thirty years in the service, had retired from the army. That did not discourage the Soviets, who were making plans to use their mole in a new capacity. WALLFLOWER had left the military but not his life as a spy.

  In Austin, the PALMETTO case took a bizarre and astonishing twist. Flores had done his job so well that Lopez tried to recruit him.

  “He came by one night and pitched me in my living room in Texas. He wanted to recruit me. He said, ‘I have friends in Mexico that work for another government. I told them about you, and they are very interested.’ He asked to take a photograph of me ‘to show to my friends.’ I said sure, so he took a photograph of me.

  “He said, ‘They won’t come here, you have to go to Mexico.’ ”

  Headquarters debated the risks of letting Flores travel to Mexico. “Finally, the bureau said, ‘No, don’t go. You know too much about the technical side.’ The cameras we used in Austin that worked through the pinpricks in the ceiling were the same kind that were used by NASA in the moon landing. We got the cameras from NASA. The bureau didn’t want the Soviets to know we had that technology. They were concerned I might be invited to Nicaragua or the Soviet Union and given sodium Pentothal.”