by David Wise
Vil Mirzayanov said that both the Soviet version of VX, known as Agent 33, and binary weapons, such as Novichok, “were developed in response to American programs and Soviet intelligence. I sometimes saw intelligence information, sourced to American sources but not to individuals. No other country had nerve-gas research. We even knew what chemicals were developed in what laboratories.
“In 1965, when I started at the research institute, there was no talk of binary weapons. In the early seventies, work began here on binary. I think we saw some intelligence information.” Some of that information could have come from the Joint Chiefs via Operation SHOCKER. Data about GJ—the nerve gas pursued but never attained as a weapon by American scientists—was passed to the GRU between 1966 and 1969; the formula supposedly would have produced a result in binary form.
Mirzayanov said that in the early 1960s, the Soviets obtained VX from the United States through intelligence and had synthesized it in Volgograd by 1963. “The people who did it got the Lenin Prize. Leonid Zaharovich Soborovsky was one, and a woman named Ia Danilovna Shilakova. She was the first to synthesize Agent 33. We know the formula for VX, but the Americans don’t know our Agent 33 formula. Agent 33 is a binary weapon, a combination of two chemicals.”
One reason that Mirzayanov risked all by going public, he said, was that the Soviets had concealed Novichok from the world. In September 1992, negotiations were completed in Geneva on the Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires participating countries to declare and then destroy all chemical-warfare stocks. The United States and Russia have signed and ratified the treaty. But as Mirzayanov noted, Novichok was not listed by Russia among the types of nerve gas it possessed.
Five years after signing the treaty, Moscow had still not acknowledged Novichok in its inventory of nerve gases. In 1998, however, a senior U.S. arms-control official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of Novichok. Although both sides have pledged to dispose of their chemical weapons, and began to do so after signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Russians still possess the unacknowledged super nerve gas—a weapon that, if ever produced in sufficient quantities, could be used to instantly kill millions of Americans.
Until Vil Mirzayanov spoke out, however, no one knew that the Soviets had developed Novichok. He was convinced that the reason the Russian government wanted to keep the existence of the powerful nerve gas secret was to avoid having to destroy it under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
On January 24, 1994, the closed trial of Mirzayanov began in Moscow City Court. He was charged with revealing state secrets. At the time that Mirzayanov went public, however, the laws dealing with chemical weapons were themselves secret. Mirzayanov and his lawyer argued that under Russia’s new constitution, a person could not be convicted on the basis of secret laws.
Mirzayanov told the author that he was charged with violating part 1, the state secrets section, of article 75 of Russia’s criminal code. “There is a top-secret list of what constitutes state secrets,” Mirzayanov related. “As soon as you are put in prison, you are told there is such a list. I was shown the list once, so was my lawyer, but we were only allowed to keep it for one day and not copy it.” It was, he said, “just like Kafka.”
The scientist refused to participate in or testify at a secret trial. Predictably, three days later, Mirzayanov was arrested again and held for almost a month, this time at Matrosskaya Tishina, a maximum-security prison in Moscow.
U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering issued a statement in support of Mirzayanov, protesting that “someone could be either prosecuted or persecuted for telling the truth about an activity which is contrary to a treaty obligation of a foreign government.”
Around the world, human-rights activists rallied to Mirzayanov’s cause. Their efforts were spurred in the United States by two determined women in Princeton, New Jersey, environmental activists Gale M. Colby and Irene Goldman, who bombarded opinion leaders, journalists, members of Congress and others with faxes and updates on the Mirzayanov case.
Then in February, a month after the trial began, Mirzayanov was among the first persons to be freed from prison under a new habeas corpus law. He went home to Nuria and his sons, but the charges were not dropped. Finally, on March 11, Russia’s chief prosecutor closed the case for what a spokesperson said was lack of evidence.
Mirzayanov was free. But the Russians still had Novichok.
C H A P T E R: 21
CASSIDY’S RUN
In many ways, Operation SHOCKER was a microcosm of the cold war. Like so much that happened during that unique and dangerous period, it was conducted in secret. It ran for twenty-three years, which made it the longest espionage operation of its kind in the history of the cold war. It was marked by success, failure, triumph, and tragedy.
SHOCKER was a classic illustration of how the cold war was fought by the intelligence agencies of the two sides, largely unseen by the public. For more than four decades, the often dangerous games of espionage were played in the shadows. The opposing armies clashed in a silent war known only to the combatants.
Operation SHOCKER and the two cases it spawned, PALMETTO and IXORA, demonstrated both the lengths to which Soviet intelligence went to seek to penetrate America’s defenses and the efforts of the FBI’s counterintelligence agents to contain the threat and protect the nation’s security. In the process, both sides experienced gains and losses.
SHOCKER, as this book has revealed, cost the lives of two FBI agents. It may arguably have placed the lives of many more Americans at risk by providing Soviet scientists with the formula for a secret, albeit unstable, nerve gas—information that might have proved useful or spurred the Russians to accomplish a breakthrough in that deadly field.
At the same time, SHOCKER achieved many of its intelligence goals. Ten Soviet spies were identified, including three illegals: the PALMETTOS and IXORA.¹ The surfacing of the illegals, rare in the annals of espionage, alone justified the lengthy counterintelligence operation, at least in the view of the FBI agents who ran it.
By the questions the Soviets put to WALLFLOWER, the FBI and the Pentagon discovered a good deal about what the Russians knew and did not know about American military strength and secrets. The United States also learned more about how the Soviets recruited and ran American agents and more about their tradecraft techniques as well, from hollow rocks, new chemicals for secret writing, and rollover cameras, to codes and communications.
In addition, the six Soviets sent to handle Joe Cassidy were kept busy running a controlled source, which left them less time to recruit and run real spies. From defectors and Soviet scientists now in America, the FBI obtained fragmentary feedback indicating that the Russians had wasted time and money trying to replicate or counter GJ, the nerve-gas formula fed to them by Joe Cassidy. But as Vil Mirzayanov disclosed, they also developed Novichok.
Operation SHOCKER was only one skirmish in a much larger war. Both superpowers were secretly working at full tilt to develop hideous nerve-gas weapons. If the sarin and VX brewed in the labs of Edgewood or the soman and Novichok produced in the plants along the Volga had ever been unleashed in war, millions of people might have perished. Few Americans or Russians knew about the secret research conducted and the nerve-gas weapons produced in their respective countries.
During the cold war, the world lived with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The essential insanity of the period was captured by a single, familiar acronym: The nuclear strategy of the United States, mirrored by that of the Soviets, was officially called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
As the cold war has receded into history, the nuclear danger has diminished but by no means disappeared. Today, there is increased concern over the threat of biological and chemical warfare.The 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subways and the emergence of terrorism at home—including the bombings of the WorldTrade Center in NewYork and the federal building in Oklahoma City—have led to greater public awareness that the new peril might come
not from the atom but from weapons of all kinds, including a droplet of nervegas or a microscopic anthrax spore.
The vulnerability of American civilians and the nation’s military forces to chemical and biological warfare has become a politically volatile issue. Gulf War syndrome, the unexplained illness that has struck thousands of U.S. troops who served in the 1991 war against Iraq, is blamed by many veterans and at least some experts on exposure to nerve gas. After years of denials, the Pentagon admitted in 1996 that American troops might have been exposed to nerve gas when combat engineers blew up an ammunition dump at Khamisiyah in southern Iraq in March 1991.²
The political sensitivity of anything to do with nerve gas might explain why the Pentagon has refused to make any information available about Operation SHOCKER. The Defense Department, it can be assumed safely, does not want to explain why it approved passing any data about nerve gas to the Russians, especially information about a nerve gas for which there is no known antidote, even though the gas was never perfected and put into production.
One of the army intelligence agents who worked on Operation SHOCKER for many years had a son who served in the Gulf War. He spoke about the risks of the deception phase of Operation SHOCKER but would not allow his name to be used. Even so, he was extremely reticent and guarded in his comments, until suddenly he blurted out, “Wouldn’t it be a shame if you killed your kid because of something stupid you did twenty years ago?”
Behind his comment were presumptions that the information passed from Edgewood to Moscow in some way enhanced the Soviet nerve-gas program and that the Russians in turn helped Saddam Hussein to acquire chemical weapons. But the extent of such aid is uncertain. Vil Mirzayanov has asserted that the Soviets gave Iraq Agent 33 and perhaps other chemical weapons, although he also said he was sure that Novichok was not sent to Iraq.
Some of the people involved in the Iraqi chemical-weapons program did study in the Soviet Union. For example, Dr. Emad el-Ani, a leading Iraqi chemical-weapons expert, studied at the Timoshenko Defense Academy, the Soviet chemical-warfare school in Moscow. And in 1995, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had blocked an attempt by Lieutenant General Anatoly Kuntsevich, former deputy chief of Soviet chemical-weapons forces, to sell five tons of nerve-gas components to Syria. The FSB reportedly concluded that the chemicals were really destined for Iraq.
According to American officials, there is little evidence that Iraq received significant assistance from the Soviets in procuring or producing its supplies of nerve gas. One high-level U.S. arms-control official said that Saddam Hussein obtained the equipment he needed to manufacture nerve gas mostly from Western European companies. The chemicals themselves, such as ordinary alcohol and organophosphate compounds, are easily available. “It is probably not beyond the ability of a reasonable Ph.D. in organic chemistry to mix the stuff together,” the official said. “It’s not clear they would need help from the Soviets.”
A CIA official cautioned that the agency had only fragmentary information on possible Soviet help to Iraq’s nerve-gas production and added, “By the mid-nineteen eighties, they [the Iraqis] had pretty much indigenous capability. They did not have to go outside.”
Charles A. Duelfer, the deputy chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which was created after the Gulf War to search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said, “We have no firm evidence that there was direct Soviet involvement in the Iraqi chemical program. . . . Which is not to say it didn’t happen, but we haven’t seen any direct evidence.”
Few of the scientists on either side seemed to have many regrets about their role in developing nerve gas; Vil Mirzayanov and Saul Hormats were the exception, not the rule. “Millions of civilians will die if nerve gas is used,” Hormats, the former director of development at Edgewood, said in an interview with the author. “We would kill a whole generation of babies.” Hormats worked at Edgewood for thirty-seven years, and his views changed only gradually. “Had we gone to war with the Soviets in the nineteen fifties, CW would have been a decisive weapon,” he said. “We would have won more battles, and less of our soldiers would have become casualties. My responsibility was to help our army fight the war with minimum casualties and the greatest chance of success. As for morality, is it more moral to kill a soldier, to disembowel him and leave him to die, or to have him take a whiff of gas and die in five minutes? Which is more moral? The immorality—and half a dozen generals would say same thing—is the sons of bitches who get us into war, not how the war is fought.”
By the early 1980s, however, Hormats’s opinion of nerve gas had changed sharply. “Because by then it was a war against civilians, the Soviet army would not be harmed. They had masks and protective gear. CW would not contribute to our winning the war. A chemical war in the fifties was moral; a chemical war in the eighties would have had no effect on winning the war and would only have harmed civilians.”
Hormats, white haired and in his mid-eighties when interviewed, had lost none of his intellectual vigor. “War is a failure of democracy and of government,” he said. “We ought to worry more about getting into wars, not how we fight them.”
It is easy and even fashionable to say with the benefit of hindsight that the cold war was a useless conflict or that intelligence operations such as SHOCKER ultimately had no impact on the outcome. But those arguments overlook an essential truth. One does not have to resort to Reaganesque rhetoric about evil empires to understand that there is a critical difference between democratic institutions and totalitarian governments.
Indeed, the history of the twentieth century is the history of the battle between democracy and dictatorship, between governments, however imperfect, where the people rule and governments of the right or left whose rulers crush freedom to maintain their power. The cold war was a part of that larger conflict. It was fought, to a considerable extent, by the intelligence agencies on both sides. The men and women who carried out these operations believed they were doing what was right in that time and place.
Looking back, few regret the effort. Colin T. Thompson participated in the hidden war for several decades, mostly in Asia, as a clandestine officer of the CIA. He is a thoughtful man, far from a gung-ho defender of all of the agency’s schemes and operations. But, reflecting on the cold war years, he asked: “What were we supposed to do? Let the Soviets take over the world?”
That same conviction—that somehow the battle needed to be fought, even if the victories were few and limited—motivated men such as Phil Parker, Jack O’Flaherty, Gene Peterson, Charlie Bevels, Jimmy Morrissey, Mark Kirkland, Tren Basford, and the other FBI agents who participated over the years in Operation SHOCKER.
But the central figure, upon whom the entire operation depended, was Joseph Edward Cassidy, a plain American soldier, who saw his duty and performed it without question even as it took over, and at times could have endangered, his life. None of the frustrations of the operation—the escape of the PALMETTOS, or the risky decision to pass information about nerve gas to the Russians—in any way detracts from his own service.
For twenty-one years, Cassidy successfully pretended to be a traitor to his country, an Aldrich Ames inside the United States Army. He played his extraordinary role to perfection and never once slipped up to betray his true loyalty. In an age of few heroes, Joe Cassidy was a genuine American hero.
“Cassidy,” Phil Parker said, “had a good run.”
During the life of the operation, more than 4,500 pages of classified documents, all cleared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were passed to the Soviets in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One former bureau official with knowledge of the case said the Russians paid their “agent” more than $200,000. The FBI would not divulge the overall cost of the operation.
Gilberto Lopez y Rivas and his wife resumed their academic careers after their precipitous return to Mexico in 1978. Their past remained a secret. But some of Lopez’s former colleagues at the University of Minnesota later h
eard additional shards of information about the pair.
The story that Lopez was only helping the Cubans circulated after he left the campus, but Professor Rolando Hinojosa-Smith learned something more when he ran into Lopez at a conference in Mexico. “I went to teach creative writing at the University of the Americas in Puebla in the late seventies. He came down to see me because I was chairman of department, and he had left all of a sudden, and he apologized. But he said he can’t come back to us. I said, ‘Well, you broke a contract but that’s not irreparable, it was only a summer course.’ He said it was impossible for him to come back. He said, ‘I’m a member of the Communist Party.’ ”
In the 1980s, Lopez gained media attention in Mexico as a firebrand anti-American activist. In May 1983, for example, after the murder of navy Lieutenant Commander Albert Schaufelberger, an American military official, in El Salvador, Lopez led a street demonstration of four thousand people that blocked rush-hour traffic in Mexico City for hours.
“The death of the North American is the natural result of U.S. intervention in the country,” Lopez declared. “Latin American nations have the right to assassinate those people who meddle in internal affairs in a direct manner.” The marchers outside the American embassy chanted: “If you don’t want to die, leave Salvador.”³
By the 1990s, Lopez had become prominent in Mexican politics as a leading member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the main opposition party of the left in Mexico.
In late March 1991, Lopez was in Moscow again, this time as a participant in a three-day conference on “Lenin and the 20th Century.” Although the Soviet Union was only nine months away from collapse, Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported the event in familiar phrases, referring to Lenin as “our great compatriot.”4