by David Wise
The radio buttons were in sequence, numbered 11, 22, 33, 44, and 55. If, for example, Joe Cassidy placed an order for twenty-two books, as he did early in May 1972, Freundlich would push the 22 button on the radio. Since the double-digit numbers signified single digits, his call warned of a military action in two days.²
IXORA was instructed to back up the signal he transmitted by placing a message in a dead drop. He could not show the radio to the FBI, because he no longer had it; he had returned it to the Soviets at their request.
The radio and the signal procedure posed some intriguing questions for the FBI’s counterintelligence analysts. Was there an unknown number of real Russian spies out there? Or were there other sentinels in the United States like IXORA, with the identical mission, each outfitted with the same type of radio?
“We think IXORA was set up just for Joe,” said one FBI man. The bureau’s experts speculated that the Soviets would not have risked having other agents telephone IXORA, for fear that if Freundlich or one of the other agents was detected, the entire network of spies would be jeopardized. Yet IXORA had received a cryptic call in December 1971 that might have been some sort of warning, though IXORA never knew the identity of the person who telephoned him.
Former agent Robert Loughney believed there had to be other IXORAS as well. “Our theory is IXORA was one of several people,” he said. “You have to assume they were not putting all their money on one horse.”
Jack Lowe agreed. “There might be other IXORAS. We did not know of any others, but based on our knowledge of their operations we had to think there would be.”
While it might seem incredible that there was a spy with IXORA’S singular mission, living inconspicuously in New York City during the cold war and simply waiting for the telephone to ring, it was not really surprising in retrospect. “It was at a time,” Lowe noted, “when the Soviet Union was deathly afraid of attack by the U.S.”
The initial questioning of Edmund Freundlich at the FBI office in Manhattan lasted for almost four hours. “We took him back home around eleven P.M.,” Lowe recalled.
Now that IXORA had begun to talk, the FBI met with him almost continuously. “There were three and a half months of very intensive discussions,” Lowe said. “We were trying to see him every other day.” Little by little, Freundlich’s motivation for becoming a spy, and the details of his recruitment, emerged. It was in Switzerland that he had first come to the attention of Russian intelligence.
“In the Swiss camps,” Jack Lowe said, “one person he met gave his name to the Russians and said, ‘This man might be of help to you.’ He [IXORA] was easily manipulated, and found it hard to say no to people who asked him for favors.
“When he returned to Vienna at the end of the war, the Soviets came to him and said, ‘We’d like you to deliver some letters, little things we can’t do for ourselves.’ He was receptive because the Communists had been kind to him. They paid him. And a big point in their favor—they weren’t Nazis.”
Freundlich was given espionage training before he came to America in 1968, and he also told the FBI he received additional training in the United States. He was shown how to leave signals, such as chalk marks on telephone poles, and how to fill and empty dead drops. He also had some minimal training in photography.
Before he left Vienna, he was given a tie by his Soviet handler in Austria. “He was to show up here wearing the tie, at one of the meeting sites,” Dan LeSaffre said. “That was the parol.”
Freundlich was not taken again to FBI headquarters in Manhattan, Lowe said. “We went to restaurants to meet him. . . . We went up to West Point one summer day and walked through the museum. We found a German restaurant nearby.
“We took a long weekend trip to Boston and toured Boston with him, solidifying the relationship.” All the while, IXORA was revealing more. “He identified to us close to fifty dead drops, locations, and meeting sites. Mostly in the Bronx, some in Brooklyn. He showed us the signal sites.”
In addition to waiting for a warning telephone call, IXORA also acted as a cutout, a conduit for letters. He told the FBI that when letters arrived at his apartment with a certain return address or other indicator, he delivered them to dead drops. In the jargon of Soviet intelligence, he was serving as a “dead letter box.”
One meeting site in front of a theater in Brooklyn was what the Soviets called IXORA’S “constant condition site”—a location where a spy was instructed to show up, usually once a year, to indicate he was still alive and well.³ The FBI encouraged Freundlich to continue to go to the site, though now the bureau would be watching. “In his case, he was to go to the site on Thanksgiving Day and simply stand there for about ten minutes,” Lowe said. “A GRU guy would drive by and recognize him. To verify he was OK.” The bureau assumed that the Russians had chosen Thanksgiving Day on the theory that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents would be home eating turkey.
It fell to Dan LeSaffre, as one of the younger agents, to work on the holiday. “I covered the constant-condition site on several Thanksgivings because I was single at the time. We used a fixed location site, a Port Authority police office, catty-corner from the theater. A Jewish deli was open, and I went for corned beef or a hot dog. That was my Thanksgiving dinner.”
In late July or early August 1978, about two months after the first approach to IXORA, the FBI was able, with his help, to establish the identity of Freundlich’s GRU control. His name was Nikolai I. Alenochkin, and he was a Soviet intelligence officer undercover as first secretary and later counselor of the Soviet mission to the United Nations.
Alenochkin was identified through a photo lineup, Lowe said. The FBI agents met with IXORA in an Old Europe-style restaurant near his apartment and showed him a series of photographs. The bureau knew who the likely GRU illegal-support officers in the UN mission were.
Freundlich pointed to Alenochkin’s photo. He had, as it turned out, met him twice. “Alenochkin came to his house one night, and they went into the bathroom to talk and sat on the side of the tub with the water running in the tub and the sink.”
IXORA said he had also met Alenochkin at the constant-condition site in 1975 or 1976. Freundlich said he had not been active for two years and that it was at Alenochkin’s request that he had returned the radio to the Russians. His only assignment now was to appear in front of the theater every Thanksgiving Day.
Sheila W. Horan, then a young counterintelligence agent in New York, worked on the IXORA case and got to know Freundlich. “Jim, Dan, and I took him to dinner several times. Not interviewing him, just talking about his past. We wanted to maintain the relationship. He, Freundlich, liked Jim very much.
“He was the ultimate Caspar Milquetoast. He had no friends, just his brother and his nephew. He had no outside interests whatsoever. Work and home, that was it. The perfect spy. He was not vulnerable to anything. Nobody would look at him twice.” She paused and added, “He was a nice guy.”4
Within a few months, after giving Freundlich a polygraph test, the FBI was satisfied that IXORA had been turned. He did not ask to be paid in his new role as an American agent. “He lived very frugally,” Lowe said. “We’d slip him small amounts of money for expenses.”
By early fall, the agents offered no objections when IXORA said he planned to visit London. When he returned, he proudly presented two souvenir nail clippers to Lowe and LeSaffre. “On the handle of the nail clipper there is the insignia of the Queen’s Guards. He brought one to me and one to Dan. By which time he had told us a great deal.”
Unknown to his family and to the Russians, “Uncle Eddie,” the nondescript loner who commuted each workday to his low-level job at Pergamon Press, and who seemed to have no friends and no life, had just switched sides in the cold war. It was a triumph of quiet counterintelligence work by Kehoe, Lowe, and LeSaffre.
Without Joe Cassidy, of course, IXORA would never have surfaced. IXORA was an almost invisible man, an unremarkable man who would never be noticed in a crowd, who h
ad escaped the Nazis, and whose mission in life was to climb up on a rock in Central Park and, if that dreadful day ever came, signal the start of World War III.
The GRU had all but dropped him, but the FBI had one more mission in mind for IXORA.
C H A P T E R: 20
MOSCOW: A DEADLY SECRET
They came for Vil Mirzayanov early on the morning of October 22, 1992.
At 7:30 A.M., the agents from the successor to the KGB’s internalsecurity arm closed in on his fourth-floor apartment at 14 Ulitsa Stalevarov in Moscow. The two-room flat was not far from the nerve-gas laboratory where he had worked, at the State Scientific Research Institute on the Shosse Entuziastov.
Mirzayanov let the men in only after they threatened to break down the door. His sons, Iskandar, twelve, and Sultan, four, were too young really to understand, but his wife, Nuria, a thin, dark-haired poetess, understood all too well. The Soviet Union had collapsed almost ten months before, but some things, including the dreaded knock on the door by the secret police, did not appear to have changed.
They arrested Mirzayanov and took him to Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison, where the interrogations began. A short, bespectacled man, whose mild exterior masked a tough, inner strength, Mirzayanov was a fifty-seven-year-old physical chemist who had worked in the top-secret Soviet nerve-gas program for almost three decades. As a senior researcher, he had been involved directly in the development in Moscow of the nerve gases that were tested and produced in the plants and military sites along the Volga basin. His specialty was mass spectrometry.
In October 1993, Mirzayanov, although no longer in prison, was awaiting trial on charges of having revealed state secrets. If convicted, he faced a sentence of up to eight years. He was taking an additional risk by agreeing to a series of interviews with the author, in which he talked in detail about Russia’s chemical weapons and the history of its nerve-gas program.
In the late 1970s, Mirzayanov said, he began to have pangs of conscience. “It occurred to me I was engaged in a criminal enterprise. I had participated in the development of weapons of mass destruction. When I came to this conclusion, my work in the research institute became a struggle with myself.” Although he had harbored these misgivings for years, it was not until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and relaxed some of the authoritarian controls of the Soviet state that he felt he could speak out.
“It was only during perestroika that I could share my views with other people. My wife knew, of course, but if I spoke to anyone else, the KGB might hear. So it was inside myself. I felt I was a member of a criminal gang and I didn’t want to do this.” Then in October 1991, Mirzayanov boldly went public in Kuranty, a Moscow daily.
In his brief but extraordinary article, Mirzayanov said not much had really changed; the KGB still controlled people in defense installations, telephones were bugged, dissenters destroyed or fired. “My own secret research institute in the center of Moscow has been poisoning people for decades by its harmful emissions,” he wrote.
Even as the nations of the world were completing work on a treaty banning chemical weapons, the article continued, Viktor Petronin, the institute’s chief, told his staff that “capitalism did not change, we have the same potential enemy, and that our civic duty is to consolidate the country’s defense power.”
Then, obliquely, and with no details, Mirzayanov dropped his bombshell: “The development of a novel chemical weapon was in full swing, the agent was tested on an open range in the most environmentally dangerous area.” He added, “So the question is, why are they trying to deceive the West?”
Amazingly, there was no public reaction by the Soviet government. But in January 1992, only days after the collapse of the Communist state, Mirzayanov was fired by the research institute. His older son, not understanding, taunted him. Why didn’t he go to work like other people? Their income cut off, the family was barely able to scrape by. Mirzayanov had a small pension, and his wife earned a little from writing. A Norwegian humanitarian organization contributed forty dollars a month, and the Carvallo Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave him a modest grant in recognition of his moral courage.
Perhaps his background explains Mirzayanov’s willingness to take on the establishment at the cost of his career. He was a Tatar, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim minority that historically has had troubled relations with Russia. In the thirteenth century, the Tatars mixed with the Mongol forces of Genghis Khan, and their very name became synonymous with the invading hordes. Mirzayanov grew up on the European side of the Ural Mountains and moved to Moscow as a young man. He studied chemistry and began work in the nerve gas program when he was thirty.
A month before his arrest, Mirzayanov and Lev Fedorov, a physical chemist, courageously coauthored a revealing article in Moscow News that elaborated on what Mirzayanov had hinted at a year earlier. As far back as 1987, the Soviet Union claimed to have halted all production of nerve gas, they wrote. But Soviet scientists, they continued, had developed in binary form the world’s most powerful nerve gas, which Mirzayanov later identified as Novichok, or “newcomer.”
Mirzayanov knew a great deal about the super nerve gas; his last job had been to measure air and soil samples around the research laboratory to see whether enough chemicals had escaped to enable the CIA or other foreign intelligence services to detect the presence of the new gas.
In the Moscow interviews with the author, Mirzayanov said that Novichok was“eight, may be ten times more toxic”than any nerve gas in the U.S. arsenal. Russia’s total stockpile of nerve gases, which the government had officially declared at forty thousand metric tons—the world’s largest—could cause devastation equal to that of a major nuclear attack. “Tens of millions could be killed by the entire inventory,”he said.
Although he estimated that “probably less than a thousand tons” of Novichok had been produced, “theoretically several hundred thousand people could be killed” by even that amount of the deadly new gas, “if people have no protection and are out in the open. Even if they only breathe fumes they may not die but there could be terrible consequences. Nerve gas can cause mutations in the next generation and in future generations after that.”
According to Mirzayanov, the super nerve gas was developed in 1973 by Pyotr Petrovich Kirpichev, a Soviet scientist at the research institute’s branch at Shikhany, near Volsk. “The binary form was developed in Moscow, the substance itself was done in Shikhany,” he said. Two years later, Kirpichev was joined in his research by Vladimir Uglev, who helped to perfect Novichok.
“Uglev claims the binary form of the gas can be produced in a garage,” Mirzayanov said. “He exaggerates a little, but it is basically true.”
Some of Novichok’s properties cannot be measured, Mirzayanov said, at least by anyone who wants to live to tell about it. “In pure form the binary gas is colorless, and since it is lethal you would not want to taste or smell it.” Was Novichok odorless? Mirzayanov was asked. “If you smell it you’re dead,” he replied, “so no one knows if it smells. It is basically invisible.”
The effect of Novichok on humans was described chillingly by one victim, Andrei Zheleznyakov, a Soviet scientist exposed to only a residue of the gas in an accident in the spring of 1987 in the same Moscow laboratory where Mirzayanov worked. The two scientists were friends.
Zheleznyakov was a member of a select and secret group that tested Novichok at the institute. His job was to blend two components of the nerve gas and measure the temperature of the end product. The higher the temperature during the blending process, the more toxic the nerve gas. The test equipment was housed inside a fume cabinet to protect the scientists working outside it.
One morning in May, Zheleznyakov switched on the fume cabinet as usual, and something went wrong. He later described what happened in an interview with New Times, a Moscow magazine. “I saw rings before my eyes—red, orange. Bells were ringing inside my head, I choked.” Gripped by fear, “I sat down, and told the guys: I think it
has got me.” His chief told him to go home and lie down, he would feel better. “They assigned me an escort, and we walked past a few bus stops. We were passing the church near Ilich Square when suddenly I saw the church lighting up and falling apart. I remember nothing else.”
Mirzayanov provided additional details. When the accident occurred, he said, Zheleznyakov’s chief “told him he was drunk and to go home and did not call an ambulance. They took him to the square and dropped him there. He fell on the street, a friend brought him back, and then they called an ambulance.”
Zheleznyakov was taken to the hospital by KGB agents, who told physicians that he had been poisoned by eating bad sausage. The KGB agents made the doctors sign a pledge never to talk about the case. Zheleznyakov was kept in strict isolation. His heart was barely beating, and the level of cholinesterase in his bloodstream was close to zero.
After he had spent eighteen days in intensive care, the doctors managed to save his life. But he was left totally disabled, diagnosed with, among other illnesses, cirrhosis of the liver, toxic hepatitis, and epilepsy. In July 1992, he died.
Unlike his doomed colleague, Vil Mirzayanov did not work on the final, binary form of Novichok, but he participated in the development of A-230, one of the precursor chemicals of the powerful new nerve gas. The initial tests of Novichok, he said, were carried out at Shikhany and in Nukus, Uzbekistan, eighty miles south of the Aral Sea. The final military tests were conducted between 1986 and 1989 in Nukus, he added.
Without access to the top-secret archives of the Soviet nerve-gas program, it is not possible to know whether the nerve-gas formulas passed to the Russians by Operation SHOCKER led, directly or indirectly, to the development of Novichok. But there is evidence that information obtained by Soviet intelligence about the American nerve-gas program did influence Moscow’s own decisions and efforts.