Cassidy's Run

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by David Wise


  Marie Cassidy remembered that her husband usually had trouble sleeping before a meet. “He had sleepless nights, plenty of that, and stomach problems. He would eat very little before he’d go.” The former nun said she had no appetite on those nights either.

  “I was worried about the danger,” she said. “I could see how nervous he was before a meeting. There were middle-of-the-night meetings. So I burnt my candle and prayed.”

  C H A P T E R: 16

  THE PROFESSOR

  In 1976, Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, busy as he had been with his espionage activities, finally received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah.¹ By then, he was back in Mexico City, where he had been working as a researcher at an anthropological institute. But he did not remain there, as Robert Schamay, who had been the FBI case agent in Salt Lake City, learned in October.

  “I was out hunting on a mountain in southern Utah in October of 1976, and a game warden knocked on the trailer. He said I had a phone call. I come off the mountain and find a pay phone in a little dinky town, and it’s Gene Peterson. I have to be in Minnesota as soon as possible.”

  Peterson, by now Soviet section chief at FBI headquarters, was continuing to supervise the spy case. He ordered Schamay to cut short his hunting trip and get moving. “Next morning,” Schamay recalled, “I was off the mountain, back home in Salt Lake, packing, and on Monday I’m on a plane to Minneapolis.”

  Two years before, while still a student in Austin, Lopez had told Aurelio Flores that he might be moving to Minnesota. Headquarters had plucked Schamay off the mountain because the bureau had learned that the PALMETTOs had in fact surfaced there. Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, Soviet spy, was now an assistant professor of Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota. Professor Lopez had the distinction, in all likelihood, of being the first Russian spy ever to become a member of the faculty of that institution. The university, of course, knew nothing of his other, secret life.

  Manuel Guerrero had brought Lopez to Minneapolis. Guerrero, then chairman of the university’s Department of Chicano Studies, was short one professor for the fall semester. “We advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education,” Guerrero said. Lopez had answered the ad and traveled to Minneapolis for a job interview. “I hired him,” Guerrero continued. “He was hired on the basis both of his résumé and the interview. Gilberto was a very amicable, social person. He made a lot of friendships.”

  Lopez, his wife, and their children settled into faculty housing off Fourth Street, on the ground floor of a two-story garden apartment. The FBI wiretapped the place; it did not attempt to install room bugs as it had done in Austin.

  Alfredo Gonzales, a colleague in the Chicano studies department, recalled that while Lopez served on the faculty, a Spanish club made a film called Minnesotanos Mexicanos. “It was a documentary of Mexican Americans in Minnesota, and he is shown in the film twice. He is tall, very thin, and slender, with dark brown hair, light skin. A European type, not Indian. He had a strong voice, a heavy accent but good English. I knew him socially, but he never once mentioned his political views. He never discussed politics. He had strong views on the historical treatment of Chicanos. He never mentioned the Soviet Union. He loved to talk about opera, and art, and history.”

  The university offered Chicano studies as a major for undergraduate students. The faculty taught a wide variety of courses dealing with the history and social status of Mexican Americans, bilingual education, and the Spanish language. The university bulletin for the summer of 1977, for example, lists a typical course taught by Professor Lopez. Entitled Chicano History, it offered four degree credits and covered “Mexican American history, including such areas as migration, labor movements, Chicanos in agriculture, the ‘pachuco’ phenomenon, border conflict, and regional history.”²

  The FBI watched Lopez and listened to his telephone conversations to try to determine whether he was still servicing dead drops for the GRU while exploring Chicano history for his unsuspecting students. The bureau’s counterintelligence agents hoped that Lopez would lead them to one or more Soviet spies.

  After Robert Schamay flew in from Utah, he remained in Minnesota for three months. His primary task was to brief Mark Kirkland, who had been assigned as the case agent by the Minneapolis office. “Mark had the ticket on it,” Schamay said. “He was a nice, hardworking kid from Salt Lake, anxious to do a good job.”

  Around the same time, Charles W. Elmore, a thirty-one-year-old FBI agent in New York, asked his fellow agent Jim Lancaster about the PALMETTO case. Elmore was from the West Coast and wanted badly to get back there. Perhaps, he thought, if he volunteered to go out to Minnesota to help on the PALMETTO case, he would be rewarded with his office of preference. A quiet, good-looking man, Elmore was single and had no ties to New York. More important, he was fluent in Spanish. He won a transfer to Minneapolis and went to work translating the wiretaps of the Lopezes’ apartment.

  Back in Washington, Phil Parker had been transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington field office early in 1976. He had been head of S-3, the GRU squad in the field office. Now Parker was determined to do something about the PALMETTOs. At headquarters he became the case supervisor and the major player in the events that unfolded.

  “It had been my squad’s case,” he said. “I had participated in surveillance of several of the meetings between WALLFLOWER and the Russians. Both stationary and rolling surveillances”—meaning stakeouts in a building, or cars driving around in the area.

  At headquarters, Parker was assigned to the Soviet section of Division 5, the intelligence division.³ He was forty years old. A tall, handsome Virginian, Parker defied the conventional straight-arrow appearance long adhered to by FBI agents, a code that had been strictly enforced by J. Edgar Hoover and lingered on even after his death. Parker sported a handlebar mustache that made him look like an old-fashioned movie villain or a bartender in a Wild West saloon, for which he took a great deal of good-natured ribbing from his less flamboyant colleagues. When it came to counterintelligence work, however, Parker was all business.

  He had not set out in life to become a counterspy. In fact, Parker might never have joined the FBI had the pay been better for high-school teachers. He was born in Chesapeake, Virginia, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. His father had been a radio operator on merchant ships, and his mother worked as a printer. Parker attended public schools, went to college for a while, and in 1955 joined the air force, which sent him to Syracuse University to study Russian.

  The air force then assigned Parker to England in an intelligence job, where he met his future wife, Jill, an attractive Englishwoman from Bedford. After returning to the states, Parker finished college, and then earned a master’s degree in Russian at Indiana University. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, and five other cities.

  Back home, Parker taught Spanish and Russian at a local high school and coached junior-varsity football. Parker enjoyed teaching but was trying to support his now-growing family on $5,500 a year. In 1965, at age twenty-nine, he applied for a job at the FBI.

  The bureau sent him to its training base at Quantico, Virginia, to learn to shoot, then to the Seattle office, and then to language school in Monterey to study Bulgarian. In 1967, he was assigned to the Washington field office, where he acquired the basics of counterintelligence work and followed Bulgarian spies around the capital. Three years later, Parker moved to the GRU squad.

  “The GRU was our main target,” Parker recalled. “We also handled some Polish and East German cases. We worked out of the Old Post Office building. The squad had great morale. We turned some Soviets. Our job was to identify which ones were intelligence officers.” In 1973, Parker was promoted to head of the squad. Three years later, he was transferred to headquarters.

  “When I went to headquarters,” he said, “my sole goal was to close this case with an arrest.”

  The FBI had sent Mark Kirkland to the Minneapolis division in June 1973. He was twenty-eigh
t. It was there that he began flying with Tren Basford on aerial surveillances. Kirkland and his wife, Julie, moved into their farmhouse in Minnetonka and started a family. Their first son, Kenneth, was born in 1974, and a second son, Christopher, was born in 1976, the same year that Mark was handed his first big case—the PALMETTO file.

  From an early age, Kirkland’s ambition was to be an FBI agent. He was born into a Mormon family on August 8, 1944, and grew up in Centerville, Utah, north of Salt Lake City. “Centerville was a very small town, but he was kind of a rebel,” Julie Kirkland said. “He had a motorcycle and bleached his hair white once.” He went to high school in nearby Bountiful, and then struck out on his own.

  “He was only eighteen or nineteen when he left to be an FBI clerk. His parents were very unhappy that he was leaving town. He couldn’t wait to get out of Centerville.”

  Kirkland moved to Los Angeles, enrolled in California State University, and began working for the FBI in the spring of 1964. He was tall, dark-haired, handsome, and single. Two years later, he married a young woman who also worked as a clerk in the bureau. They had a daughter, Kristin. Kirkland and his best friend at the FBI, Ron Williams, had both joined the army reserve, and they each did a three-year hitch in Germany, where Mark worked in intelligence. Kirkland returned to the states and to the FBI in the summer of 1969. Soon afterward, his youthful marriage ended in divorce.

  A year later, Julia Searle, who had grown up in Venice, California, graduated from high school there and landed a clerical job at the FBI in Los Angeles while attending college at night. She was eighteen, with dancing eyes, a pug nose, and long brown hair. Kirkland was eight years her senior. He worked the night shift, on a different floor, but they met, early in 1971, and began dating. Mark and his friends called her Julie.

  That same year Kirkland graduated from Cal State, and the following January he and Julie were wed at the Mormon temple in Los Angeles. Three months later, at age twenty-seven, he was appointed a special agent of the FBI.

  Julie Kirkland’s parents were both teachers. Her father had a doctorate from UCLA and taught theology at Santa Monica City College; her mother gave private lessons in piano and music theory. Like Mark, Julie came from a Mormon background.

  Three months after their marriage, the FBI sent Kirkland to Oklahoma City, for what the bureau calls a “first office” assignment. Less than a year later, he was assigned to Minneapolis.

  Julie Kirkland soon became aware that her husband was working on a big case, although she did not know its nature, or the code name PALMETTO. Mark said little about the case. But he grew the scraggly beard and long hair, and Julie realized he was operating undercover. Having worked for the FBI herself, she was able to put some of the pieces together. “I knew the name Lopez, I knew they were at the university, and Mark had installed the equipment, the cameras, and listening devices, and I knew they were monitoring from a nearby apartment. Mark didn’t come home and blab, but I had held a top-secret clearance, after all, and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what was going on.”

  One of Kirkland’s first moves was to try to place informants close to the PALMETTOs. The Kirklands had become friendly with a family that lived in the neighborhood, and Mark recruited the woman as an FBI source. At his request, she enrolled in one of Lopez’s courses.

  “I just knew him as a student,” said the woman, who asked not to be named. “I talked to him a couple of times after class and at student-teacher conferences. It was a course in Chicano studies, and he definitely felt Chicanos were mistreated. He talked about the plight of the Mexican peasants and the ones that came as migrant workers. He was focusing on low wages, poor housing. I wrote reports to Mark on Lopez once a week or more. Mark had wanted me to arrange to baby-sit for Lopez, who had both children with him. I was planning to tell him I was in dire straits in the hopes he would say ‘We need a baby-sitter.’ ”

  The bureau’s other undercover source was a man also enrolled as a student. Both were designated “134s,” which in the jargon of the FBI means informants. Kirkland himself mixed with students on the campus to gather intelligence on Lopez. Despite the blanket coverage, however, including the wiretaps and physical surveillance, the FBI never detected Lopez servicing any dead drops in Minnesota or contacting the Soviets.

  As the months slipped by, Julie Kirkland became increasingly concerned about her husband’s assignment. This was a spy case, and it very likely involved the Russians. She worried about Mark’s safety.

  “I remember confronting him and saying, ‘You obviously are trying to unravel something.’ He said, ‘For your own good, Julie, let’s not talk too much about it.’ He said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, it’s better if you don’t know anything.’

  “Mark had gone to Washington for the case, and he told me that the information had gone to Attorney General Griffin Bell.

  “Right before he died I’d gotten pretty insistent. I didn’t think it was good for our relationship for Mark to be so deep in a secret life that I wasn’t part of. How long would he stay in espionage work? It gave him the thrill he liked, but it wasn’t good for family life.

  “On the day he left, he thought the Lopezes were going over the border into Canada. He didn’t say what the bureau suspected the Lopezes were planning to do in Canada. I had two babies and I really didn’t want to know.

  “I was concerned about his flying all the time. He flew a lot with Tren Basford, but Mark was not trained as a copilot. Mark talked Tren into delaying his retirement so the plane would be available. It was Tren’s private plane.”

  And then it was Tuesday, August 23, and Mark Kirkland kissed Julie good-bye on the forehead and told her not to worry.

  Two decades after the Cessna went down in Dewey Lake, Julie Kirkland still felt the pain of her husband’s death. She had remarried and her two sons were grown men now. But the shadow was always there, even when the days were bright.

  “We have a very nice life,” she said. “But we can never replace what Mark was to us. You don’t forget.”

  Soon after her husband’s death, Julie Kirkland sat down to write a private account of all that had happened. As if entered in a diary, she recalled her feelings in the days before Mark’s death, and afterward. “Ever since Ron Williams, Mark’s best friend, was killed last year I’ve taken to worrying and being fearful for Mark,” she wrote. “He has been working undercover and I know so little about his daily activities any more. I’m insecure about it.

  “We had an argument the morning he left. . . . I feel bad about it now, I wish I hadn’t been upset. We smoothed it over though and I hugged him a lot. Kenny was so sweet—hugged Daddy a lot, too. I still worried—mostly I think because I don’t understand the case—Top Secret. I hated us not sharing. . . .

  “The days were sweet with the babies. I’m used to being on my own with them. Mark is gone a lot and me and the little boys are great buddies.

  “I planted flowers around the front of the house. Just took care of the boys and home. Mark called every night.”

  Then came the entry for August 25. She wrote of her growing fear that night, and her call to the FBI operator, who sounded odd and obviously knew more than she was saying. “The minutes ticked by like hours. I was cold and nervous. I began praying, but nothing helped. . . . Mark always called me from the field.”

  “Sometime between 11–12 I heard cars in the drive, not one, but several. I was panicky. My heart sank. I pleaded with God to stop this from happening, to please, please not take my husband from me. But I knew it was happening.”

  Then came the knock on the door that, at first, she could not bring herself to answer. She sat on the top step of the stairs, knowing what it was, and finally forced herself to go down and answer the door.

  When she received the horrific news from John Shimota and the other FBI men, she wrote, “I kept saying over and over ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true.’ ‘What about our boys? Won’t they ever know their father?’ . . . I was shaking all o
ver. Very cold still. My teeth chattered.

  “Then John said Tren was gone, too.”

  The next few days were a blur. Her father, neighbors, people from church came to comfort her. A close friend, Barbara Olsen, took care of the boys. She slept little.

  Alone at the funeral home by Mark’s coffin, she looked at her husband for the last time. “By the side of his casket I promised him I would raise good men he would be proud of. And I will.”

  Then she kissed him good-bye.

  The next day she took Mark Kirkland home to Utah. At the graveside, “I thought Mark would have loved this day. It was a breathtaking day, blue skies, wispy clouds, pleasant temperature, breezy.” They buried him next to his father, below the mountain in Centerville where he had spent his childhood.

  Back in Minnetonka, Julie finished writing.

  We are alone now—me and Kenny and Chris. In a big old antique house in Minnesota. What happened to the dream we started only five and a half years ago? I don’t know why this happened. I do know we will be OK. And Kenny and Chris will be good men someday. They are such perfect little boys already.

  I had the FBI insignia carved on Mark’s gravestone. I want anyone who sees it to know how much he loved America and believed in what he was doing.

  He died being an FBI agent—what he always wanted to be. He died serving others. I wanted him to be remembered as a husband, father, and an FBI agent.

  —Sept. 1977

  Julie Kirkland

  C H A P T E R: 17

  SHOW TIME

  For Phil Parker, the tragic death of the two agents was a severe emotional blow. He felt a personal responsibility, asking himself over and over whether he might have been able to act sooner and do more to bring about an arrest. Had he done so, he thought, the accident might never have happened.

  Parker had flown to Minneapolis several times to confer with Kirkland. The two had become good friends, a bond strengthened by their shared determination to roll up the PALMETTOS.

 

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