Booknotes

Mr. DAVID WISE (Author, "Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over
Nerve Gas"): Joe Cassidy was a very ordinary American from a
blue-collar background in Erie, Pennsylvania. He dropped out of high
school, joined the Army and when the FBI recruited him for this spy
operation, he suddenly found himself a secret weapon in the Cold War
without any training.

LAMB: And what was that?

Mr. WISE: Well, his job was to pass what turned out to be 45,000
pages of secret documents to the Russians, all under the control of
the FBI. Joe Cassidy pretended to be a traitor for 21 years. There
he is. And he pretended to be an Aldrich Ames, if you will, for 21
years. It was a remarkable bit of acting and the Russians believed
it.

LAMB: What kind of a guy was he?

Mr. WISE: Well, I think he's a--very down-to-earth, plain, simple
but highly intelligent. The one quality he had that made him perfect
for this job was that he's--he was an excellent actor, a natural
actor. And he has a lot of intellectual curiosity. He was able to
play the role of a traitor so convincingly that the Russians never
tumbled to the fact that he was or the whole operation would have
blown up and his own safety could have been in danger.

LAMB: What years was he in the Army?

Mr. WISE: Well, let me--let me try to set the stage a little bit for
you more generally and then answer that. As you know, I've been
writing about espionage for more than three decades. This was, I
think without doubt, the most extraordinary case I've ever uncovered.
And not a word of it has been made public until now. The--when I say
it was extraordinary, it was extraordinary to a great extent because
of Joe Cassidy, who is the hero in the book and the main character in
the book. But it was extraordinary as well because it went on for
such an astonishing length of time, 23 years, that made it the
longest-running spy case in the entire history of the Cold War.

Unusual as well because one of the things that Cassidy gave to the
Russians was a--deliberately gave, with the approval of the US
government, was a formula for nerve gas, which was designed to mislead
the Soviets; a very deadly formula. And in addition to that, the--two
FBI agents were killed in this case and the true purpose of their
mission was covered up un--until now. And a University of Minnesota
professor turned out to be a spy in this case. And finally, my
favorite spy in the whole business was--the Russians sent a man, code
name Exora, to New York City to live a very anonymous life. And his
main job--in the event he learned of a nuclear attack planned by the
United States, if he learned that through Joe Cassidy, was to climb up
on a huge rock in Central Park, at 68th Street and 5th Avenue, and
with a trick radio signal the Russians a warning.

So this is a very large canvas of which Joe Cassidy was the central
figure. He joined the Army during World War II. He had been working
in a steel mill in Erie, Pennsylvania. So it was about 1943.

LAMB: So how many total years was he in the Army?

Mr. WISE: Well, he stayed in the Army till 1973. So it was a
30-year career. He became a--the highest non-commissioned officer
that you can.

LAMB: Is he still alive?

Mr. WISE: Yes, he is. He's 79 years old. He'll be 80 in June--on
the 25th of June. And he's alive and well. And, of course, so is his
wife Marie, who helped him in this project.

LAMB: Just to divert a moment, his wife Marie was a nun for how many
years?

Mr. WISE: She was a nun for over 20 years and that is certainly one
of my favorite stories in the book, the fact that she was a nun
because there she is in her nun's habit as a--a--sister in the
Vencencian Order from Pittsburgh. And when Joe met her in 1968, he
had no idea of her background. And on their first date, he took her
to the Playboy Club, which was a big mistake for a former nun. But
she had not wanted to tell him that--that she had been in a convent.
And Joe claims that he was there at the Playboy Club not to ogle the
waitresses but simply because at $1.50 for an Army sergeant in 1968,
this was a bargain to get dinner at the Playboy Club.

Well, nor did she know, of course, that he was a spy. And when the
FBI began to try to check her out--because Joe Cassidy, being a double
agent, as the term of art is called, had to tell the FBI that he was
seriously seeing a young woman. And they began to try to check her
out. They couldn't find a trace of her and they were alarmed. There
was a suspicion perhaps she was a--a Russian spy sent to spy on Joe
Cassidy, what is known in the trade as a swallow.

And the FBI was quite alarmed until they finally r--learned the fact
that she had a different name and had, as a nun, of course--Sister
Marianne Joseph--and had been living in a convent for 20 years. So
that--for part of that time. So that--that explained why they
couldn't find any trace of her. She, in turn, of course, knew nothing
about this man whom she was about to marry, that he was a spy--an
American spy.

And it was only after their marriage that the FBI rang the doorbell
and Special Agent James Marsy said, `There's something I have to tell
you about your husband.'

LAMB: This is what book for you?

Mr. WISE: This is number 12.

LAMB: When did you write your first one?

Mr. WISE: In 1962.

LAMB: And that name was?

Mr. WISE: It was called "The U-2 Affair." My co-author was Tom Ross.
We were a couple of young reporters here in Washington and, you know,
I'm an old police reporter and I looked at the shooting down of
France's Gary Powers in his U-2 on May Day, 1960, and I said, `There
has to be a coincidence that this is 10 days before the summit meeting
with Eisenhower and Khrushchev.' And so on that premise, we began to
dig into this flight and--and--and wrote our first book.

LAMB: First book I can remember reading was "The Invisible
Government."

Mr. WISE: Yes.

LAMB: Also with Tom Ross.

Mr. WISE: That became--that Tom Ross--that became the number one
best-seller in the country, thanks very much to the CIA, which tried
to stop the book. And when they tried to stop the book and they
approached Random House, my publisher, to try to do that, of course,
Bennett Cerf, who was then the head of Random House and a wonderful,
funny man, as you may recall, he said to the CIA, `Well, look, we will
sell you the first printing,' as they were asking to keep it out of
the bookstores. `But I have to tell you, we're going to go back to
press and we're going to do another printing and another printing and
another printing.'

LAMB: What was it about?

Mr. WISE: "The Invisible Government" was the first look at the
intelligence agencies of the United States. Up until that time--it's
hard to remember, but people barely knew there was a CIA and what it
did and what these other agencies, like the National Security Agency
did. Of course, people knew about the FBI but not about the dozen or
so other agencies that are involved in intelligence. And so the book
was--was greeted with quite a bit of interest at that time. It was on
the best-seller list for 22 weeks.

LAMB: How long were you a reporter?

Mr. WISE: Well, I worked for the New York Herald Tribune for 15
years, until the paper departed, except in Paris, where it still lives
on. And that was in 1966. I'd already started writing books before
that time.

LAMB: And have you made a living, basically, out of these books over
the years?

Mr. WISE: My wife occasionally raises that same question, but yes, I
have.

LAMB: Where do you live?

Mr. WISE: In Washington, DC. Right in town.

LAMB: And where did you get the first inkling that you had a book
called "Cassidy's Run"?

Mr. WISE: Well, I didn't know then it was going to be called
"Cassidy's Run," Brian, for a very simple reason, what--which was I
didn't yet know the name of the spy who was at the center of this
whole drama, Joe Cassidy.

I learned nine years ago from a source in the intelligence business
some fragments of this story, some bits and pieces. And the source
did not know the whole story by any means, but just enough that I was
totally intrigued to learn more. I had to know more. And that was
the challenge, because the files were, and are, still locked up in the
government's--in--inside the government, inside the FBI and inside the
Pentagon.

So it was a great challenge. It took me five years before I even
could determine the name Joe Cassidy. Up until that time, no one,
even my friends in the intelligence business, wouldn't divulge that
name, for understandable reasons. He'd been a double agent. He was
at some risk of his life.

Finally, in 1996, I was able to find him. And I went to see him and
he turned out to be very open, ready now, finally, at the age of--at
that time, probably 75 or 6, to tell his story.

LAMB: Was he allowed to?

Mr. WISE: That wasn't a question I raised. All I know is that he's
talked to me for many, many days and hours and weeks to tell his part
of the story. Of course, he didn't know the entire story. He was one
piece of it.

LAMB: Did he have to get permission to talk?

Mr. WISE: Well, I don't think he did. I don't think he did. There
were people in--involved in this who--who wouldn't talk to me because
they felt it was all secret. But there were other people who felt it
was time for the story to come out. After all, the Cold War has been
over for almost a decade. These events are long past and there were
people, especially I think in the FBI and elsewhere in the government,
who felt that this story, while it had some--some minuses, also had
many pluses and that it was time to get it out. And that's--I think,
was the motivation of people talking to me.

LAMB: What's the first thing they did when they--and--and who asked
Sergeant Cassidy to be a spy?

Mr. WISE: Well--well, Joe Cassidy was--had decided to re-up and stay
in the Army after World War II, and in 1959, he was called in with a
bunch of other non-commissioned officers to a library at Ft. Belvoir,
I believe, where he was stationed at that time.

LAMB: Right here.

Mr. WISE: Right near Washington. And he was--there was a lot of
buzz in the room. People thought, `Has there been a security lapse?
Why are all of us being called in this--some kind of special meeting?'
And one by one, they went in and they talked. And when his turn came,
there were two men in--in suits, civilians, sitting in there, which
was very unusual in itself. And they didn't identify themselves and
they started asking him some questions. And one of the questions they
asked was, `Do you ever play volleyball?' That's a funny way for what
became a lifetime of work for Joe Cassidy began. He said, `Well,
yeah. Sure. As a matter of fact, our team, you know, the 2nd
Battalion, whatever, had--was pretty good at it. And we used to win
cases of Coca-Cola.'

And so he said, `Sure.' They said, `Well, would you be willing to play
volleyball over at the Y, a block from the White House in Washington
every Thursday night?' And he said, `Well, sure. I guess'--you know,
this is the Army, Uncle Sam and you do what you're asked to do. So he
said he was willing to do it. And they said, `Well, you may be
approached by someone with a foreign accent. You know, just go and
work out and after your workout, put your uniform back on and sit out
on the steps of the Y.'

Well, Joe Cassidy did that and he did it for six months. And the
reason the FBI had put him there was that they knew, of course, that a
Soviet intelligence officer, a man named Boris Polikarpov, had played
at the Y, played volleyball and was quite good at it, in fact, and he
was known to play there on Thursday nights. And after six months, one
night in the summer, Joe Cassidy was sitting out on the steps when
Polikarpov emerged and, of course, noticed the uniform and said, `Have
you had dinner?'

Well, they played on the same team. They knew each other now but
didn't really know each other. And Joe said, `No. No, I haven't had
dinner.' And they went off and had dinner, what became a series of
dinners, some seafood dinners along the Potomac on Maine Avenue. And
gradually, the man revealed that he was a Russian. Not at first. And
he asked for very innocuous things at first, which is how they're
trained to do to try to cultivate a source.

But he was well aware that being inside the military, Joe Cassidy had
the potential of being a mole inside the United States military for
the Soviet Union. Mr. Polikarpov--Commander Polikarpov--was a--was
representing the GRU, which is not quite as well known as the KGB.
But the GRU is the military intelligence and it operates on a parallel
level with the KGB at that time, which was the civilian spy agency,
and then mostly after a lot of the same things. But, of course,
particularly military information.

LAMB: So this was 1959.

Mr. WISE: That's right.

LAMB: And how--and eventually the name Mike came into this.

Mr. WISE: Well, all of the Russians, for reasons best known to
themselves, identified themselves as Mike. So there were a series of
Mikes. There were, in fact, nine Mikes.

LAMB: Over how many years?

Mr. WISE: Twenty-one years.

LAMB: Nine different people.

Mr. WISE: That's right.

LAMB: They call--all call themselves Mike.

Mr. WISE: But the--but the one man who was entitled to call himself
Mike was Mikhail Danilin, who was a good-looking young man
representing the GRU. And he twice came to the United States to
handle Joe Cassidy for the So--for Soviet intelligence. They did send
a total of 10 people in connection with this case. They must have
regarded it very seriously. But Danilin was the main handler. And,
of course, the FBI was able to identify all 10 of those people.

LAMB: So when did the real information start being exchanged?

Mr. WISE: Well, almost immediately. After a period of several
months had gone by and--and Cassidy had been, they thought, brought
in--and you see, what--what's very important here, if I may digress
just a little bit, is that people walk in all the time to embassies
and say--people walk in--Russians walk into the American Embassy
overseas or vice versa and they say, you know, `I have information for
sale.'

Well, very often, that's a--a volunteer who really isn't a spy and
he's trying to penetrate the other service. And so there's always a
big question. For example, when Aldrich Ames walked into the Soviet
Embassy in--in downtown Washington and said, you know, `I have
information of value,' well, it turned out he had information of
enormous value.

But the Russians would have to ask themselves, `Well, is he real or is
he a dangle?' And so volunteers are often looked at very, very
carefully as potential plants. But in this case, the Russians felt
they had found Cassidy. I mean, here was this soldier who was playing
volleyball and then sitting out on the steps and resting afterward and
paying no attention to the--to the Russian spy who was on the team.

And the Russians felt they had found him, that--they didn't realize he
was a dangle who had been put in his way very deliberately by the FBI.
It was very clever really and it worked. Because with the assurance
that they had found him, they never worried very much that he had been
planted on them. It never occurred to them that someone playing
volleyball at the Y might be, in fact, a double agent.

LAMB: Were we doing the same thing in Russia at the same time?

Mr. WISE: Well, that's another book. I mean, I think the--the
double agent game has gone on--went on all through the Cold War and
it's probably going on even today.

LAMB: What are microdots, hollow rocks, rollover cameras and special
pencil lead?

Mr. WISE: Well, the book, of course, has all the spy stuff which,
you know, is--a lot of people are fas--it's the James Bond stuff and
people are--are fascinated with that. You see, if you're a spy--and
Joe Cassidy they thought was a spy for the Russians--they couldn't
just call him up from their embassy, for example, and say, you know,
`Well, Mr. Cassidy, today, you know, we like you to steal certain
document, leave here,' you know, `and we will pick up. Or you can
come to embassy.'

No, the communication has to be in a way that it can't be detected so
the telephone isn't used at all, ever, period. Personal meetings do
take place but very carefully choreographed and orchestrated. What
the Russians favor and have favored over the years, and still favor,
are things called dead drops, which are hiding places. It can be a
place like a squirrel might like, a hollow of a tree, or a--a loose
brick in a wall and there's a little space behind it.

It--it's usually outdoors and it can be anything like that, where
there's room to hide something--film or microfilm or documents. And
the spy--let's say in this case, Joe Cassidy, would go to that dead
drop and they taught him how to make fake rocks. In fact, Mr.
Cassidy--Sergeant Cassidy made one for me o--out of papier-mache. He
showed me how it's done. And it looks absolutely realistic. Then he
would roll it in the dirt to--to look like a rock, to pick up some
dirt. And it was kind of gray looking to begin with. And the inside
would be completely hollow. And in there, he would have some
ti--ordinary tinfoil that you would buy at the supermarket.

And inside the tinfoil, he would wrap the film of the documents he had
secretly photographed on behalf of the Russians. All was under the
control of the FBI and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The
Russians would then pick up this--this--these films and they would
develop them and they would think they had the secret documents.
They--indeed, many of them were marked `secret,' even `top secret.'

But they'd all been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as OK to
give to the Russians for one reason or another. In this game you have
to give away some secrets in order to establish credibility and to
obtain secrets. That's the name of the counterintelligence game.

LAMB: But you make the point in the book that if one of us were to
give the same secrets away to the Russians, we could be arrested. But
under this format, the sergeant giving away real secrets...

Mr. WISE: Right. He had the approval of the highest level of
the--of the Pentagon...

LAMB: ...of course, was illegal.

Mr. WISE: ...and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for each of these
documents that he gave away. But to answer your question, they gave
him--they communicated with him mostly through hollow rocks and they,
in turn, would leave a hollow rock for him to pick up. And inside
that hollow rock would be microdots. Now microdots are no bigger than
a period in one of the sentences in my book. And so you're not going
to find them if you open up a rock and find, let's say, a matchbook
in--inside the hollow rock.

And in that matchbook, Cassidy would be told to look under the letter
A, for example. And that right under that letter, there would be a
microdot and a little slit in the matchbook cover. And they gave him
a microdot reader so that he could read these--and--and magnify the
messages which would tell him where the dead drops would be for the
next several months, when the next personal meeting would take place
with a Soviet agent and so on. Those--those--that was how he got his
instructions, on microdots.

They also communicated with him later on through Morse code, from
Radio Moscow with six-digit code groups that he would have to decipher
with the help of a tiny little dictionary. So the pencil lead you
asked about. That was a chemical. He would crush the lead and--and
try to dissolve it. It was--didn't work too well actually. But he
would use it for secret writing. There was a lot of secret writing
which are kind of like what we did as kids with lemon juice. You
know, you would--it would look like a blank sheet of paper but treated
with the white--with the right chemicals, the message would appear.

LAMB: What about a rollover camera? What's that?

Mr. WISE: Yeah. The rollover camera was something the Russians
invented so that Joe Cassidy, although he sometimes used a
conventional camera, could take this special camera they had rigged
up--it was very small, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes as I
recall. And he could roll it over a document to which he would have
access. And he would roll it over in three places so that it would
scan and photograph that document. He wouldn't have to manipulate the
camera. It was just automatic. And then he would turn over the whole
camera, which was very small, inside one of these hollow rocks, and
they'd give him a new one the next time he picked up a hollow rock.

LAMB: How--did--microdots, hollow rocks, rollover cameras, special
pencil lead. Jump from '59 to 2000. What do they use today or do
they use these same kind of things today in intelligence gathering?

Mr. WISE: Well, as a matter of fact, a lot of this business hasn't
changed. I mean, we all enjoy the James Bond movie and--and the--Q,
who--the gadgetmeister, who recently died, in the movie, at
least--movie version, and a lot of exotic weaponry and so on. Well,
there is some of that. But for this kind of operation, where a--an
intelligence service believes they have a--an agent working for them,
a mole inside the United State government, the communication today--my
guess is it goes on exactly the same way. It's not high tech but it
works.

LAMB: You--you have a story in the book--this is out of context of
what we're talking about...

Mr. WISE: Right.

LAMB: ...where the guy's walking down the street in London?

Mr. WISE: Yeah.

LAMB: With the umbrella?

Mr. WISE: Yes. I tell that story to indicate that the KGB did, at
least an--and--and Soviet intelligence did, at least 15, 20 years ago,
engage in assassination. And the umbrella man was a man who had been
working for Bulgarian intelligence and he came up behind a man named
Georgie Markov and it was either on Waterloo Bridge or on the Strand
nearby, and he poked Markov with this umbrella in his thigh. And the
umbrella tip, with the help of the KGB, who had given this technique
to the Bulgarian service, contained a capsule of--of a highly
poisonous substance called Ricin, which is a--a derivative of the
castor bean plant. Any of us who's ever had castor oil probably knows
it's very toxic, but this stuff kills and kills very quickly. And
that--that story took place around 1977.

LAMB: But you indicated that maybe some of these secrets that were
passed on would have led to the production of this from us to--to the
Russians?

Mr. WISE: Well, as a matter of fact, Ricin was a secret that was
passed on, not as part of this operation, but by the people at
Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, which is where the nerve gas that is
at the heart of this story, was developed and where Joe Cassidy, of
course, was stationed in the 1960s. That's what made him of such
enormous interest to the Soviet intelligence.

LAMB: Where is Edgewood?

Mr. WISE: Well, it's northeast of Baltimore. It's part of the
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where they test missiles and ordnance. But
it's a huge complex of laboratories where America's nerve gas was
developed. You know, that nerve gas was originally captured, some of
it--the early versions of it were captured from the Nazis at the end
of World War II. A gas called sarin and to tell--to show you how
little things have changed in the spy business, the sarin gas was used
in Tokyo five years ago in the terrible attack in the Tokyo subways by
the--by the--a Japanese cult.

LAMB: Have you been to Edgewood?

Mr. WISE: Well, I have been to a lot of places in connection with
this book. I have not personally toured the laboratories. They--for
one thing, they are no longer producing nerve gas as such in Edgewood.
They are still doing defensive research. I don't think an outsider
would be a popular figure inside a secret nerve gas laboratory.

LAMB: Who's the fellow named Hormatz?

Mr. WISE: Well, Saul Hormatz was--some people call the father of the
nerve gas program, a sort of--of Edward Teller of nerve gas. And he
was a--in charge of things at Edgewood Arsenal for many, many years.
And then after he left the government, he became an opponent of nerve
gas. And many of his colleagues turned against him for breaking
ranks. But Hormatz felt that this material is so deadly and
so--and--and can kill civilians that it should be--it should not be
used and, indeed, is not effective militarily.

LAMB: Who are the Good Old Boys?

Mr. WISE: Well, the Good Old Boys were a group--dwindling
now--of--of nerve gas scientists. They all live up around Belleair,
which is a suburb of Baltimore, near the old laboratories. And the
Good Old Boys were nerve gas scientists who used to gather once a
month and swap stories about the nerve gas business. Just like, you
know, when Mr. de Tocqueville said, `We're all great joiners in
America and everyone has to have a club,' including the nerve gas
scientists.

LAMB: Did you meet with them?

Mr. WISE: I have spoken with several of the Good Old Boys, yes.

LAMB: How long did Sergeant Cassidy live around Edgewood?

Mr. WISE: Well, he was there from 1962 until 1969. And it was
during that period at Edgewood, where he had complete access for most
of that period to the chemical weapons laboratory, to the nerve gas
formulas--and there it is. He--he--everything crossed his desk,
because as a non-commissioned officer, he was in charge of filing and
dealing with all of this material. So he was quite convincing, that
he had access to the material and the Russians, of course, wanted it.
And it was during this period that the deception phase of this whole
operation took place. That's the most sensitive and delicate phase
that even some of my best sources were very edgy and wary about
discussing with me.

LAMB: What's that mean, deception?

Mr. WISE: Well, you see, in every double agent case, where the
double agent is built--built up by passing real secrets, there's a
terrible temptation to slip deceptive material in--bad in with the
good in order to deceive the opposition intelligence service; to slip
a mickey, in effect, in with these good documents. And the decision
was made and approved again at the highest level of the government,
of--of the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to give the Soviets a
nerve gas formula called GJ, which was part of the G series, like
sarin--it was called GB and so on, some of it was GD.

And this was invented and we're going to call it GJ. And it, indeed,
was a very deadly nerve gas developed in the labs at Edgewood. But
American scientists had found it to be unstable and couldn't be
weaponized, could not be stored in a weapon because it would lose its
toxicity. It was very volatile. It wouldn't stay useful as a deadly
nerve gas. And so the decision was made, you know, `We're not going
to put this stuff in weapons.'

But someone thought, `Let's give it to the Russians.' The purpose was
to try to mislead them, and--and as it's been explained to me at
least, to try to lead the Russians down the garden path, make them
spend a lot of time, money and resources trying to replicate a nerve
gas that in the end wouldn't be useful to them.

LAMB: Do we have nerve gas today?

Mr. WISE: Well, under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the
United States Senate ratified in 1997, we're supposed to be
destroying--in the process of destroying our stocks of nerve gas.
We're no longer producing nerve gas as we were very actively in the
1960s and again in the 1980s.

LAMB: Have we ever used it in war?

Mr. WISE: We have not.

LAMB: Do the Russians have nerve gas?

Mr. WISE: Well, yes, of course. In fact, a lot of my book discusses
the Russian nerve gas program. There is a scientist whom I
interviewed both in Moscow and here, because he's now here, who was
arrested by the KGB. His name is Vil Mirzayanov. And he revealed
that the Russians had developed a very deadly nerve gas, 10 times more
powerful than anything in the United States arsenal, called Novichok.

Now Novichok has never been acknowledged by the Soviets. As--and
there's Vil Mirzayanov--he was arrested by the KGB for talking about
Novichok, which has never been acknowledged by the Soviets to be in
their arsenal of nerve gas. And they've never listed it under the
Chemical Weapons Treaty, which, of course, they also signed.

LAMB: Where do they make it?

Mr. WISE: Well, the Soviet nerve gas establishment was in two
places, as I discuss in the book. The central laboratory, where
Mr.--Mr. Mirzayanov worked, was in Moscow itself. And the plants for
large-scale production--because laboratories just produce the pilot
amount--small amounts of nerve gas, and then it goes to the big
industrial plants which are all along the Volga in three separate
locations. And there are also some testing facilities there as well.

LAMB: The Palmettos.

Mr. WISE: Yes.

LAMB: Who are they? Who were they?

Mr. WISE: Well, I mentioned the University of Minnesota professor
and that's who one of the Palmettos eventually became. The best way I
can explain the Palmettos is to tell you that in 1971, after Joe
Cassidy had been transferred from Edgewood Arsenal, where--the
nerve--the nerve gas center, to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, a
transfer that created a whole new phase of this case--the Palmetto
phase. Because the Russians were restricted to 25-mile radius
traveling outside of their embassy in Washington, the Russians could
not follow Joe Cassidy to Florida.

And the FBI believed--correctly, as it turned out--that the Russians
would have to surface an illegal. Now an illegal agent is someone who
doesn't operate under embassy cover. He's not, you know, Boris
Ivanov, who's the first secretary of the embassy, posing--you know,
posing as a--as a diplomat, who's really a KGB or GRU agent.

No. The illegals could be anyone. They are people without benefit of
embassy cover. They could be your next-door neighbor. I'm not really
suggesting that, but it could be anyone. In fact, the Russians have
very successfully planted people in our society, some of whom have
taken the names of real Americans, so there could be a Brian Lamb
walking around somewhere, you know, using your name and identity,
who's actually a Soviet illegal, or today, a Russian illegal. And
this is still going on.

In 1971, in March, Joe Cassidy put down a hollow rock at the base of a
little palm tree, and there it is--and--or at least, there he is
putting down a similar...

LAMB: It said this is in '72. This is a simi--similar kind of
action.

Mr. WISE: A similar thing a year later. And he put this rock down
at the base of the palm tree, and the FBI was waiting in a condominium
apartment overlooking the scene with their cameras going. They didn't
know who was going to show up or whether anyone would show up, but
someone was supposed to under the plan, and they knew it wouldn't be a
Soviet diplomat. Their hope was--was that it would be an illegal.

Well, one of the FBI agents had a nightscope, and he was looking
through the nightscope and he said to Jack O'Flaherty, the agent in
charge down there of this operation--he said, `I see a hand.' That was
the first appearance of the man who became known as Palmetto, and that
hand was groping through the bushes, trying to reach the rock without
showing his face and his body, but he couldn't reach the rock. It was
just out of reach. So he had to come around--to the great relief of
the FBI--had to come around the bushes and the palm tree and show
himself. And they got a good look at him and they got pictures of
him, but they didn't know who he was, and they didn't know how they
were going to find out who he was, because they were very reluctant to
put any agents on the street to tail whoever showed up. They didn't
want to blow the whole operation out of the water by making the
Russian spy aware that the FBI knew about him.

So they were cursing their luck when the man with the rock started
walking off out of camera view, and then they got a terrific break,
because a few minutes later, a Volkswagen drew up to the palm tree, to
the street in front of the palm tree, and the man, who was dressed in
white slacks, hopped out--he was very visible in the night--he hopped
out and lay down a supermarket shopping bag or ordinary brown paper
bag at the base of the palm tree. He had forgotten to put his signal
down, which would indicate he had cleared the drop--very, very poor
tradecraft. Well, now the FBI had a license plate, and the license
plate was traced to a rental agency, during the night, in Miami, where
the FBI got a second incredible break.

Gilberto Lopez--code name now Palmetto, which was his FBI code
name--Gilberto Lopez Arrivas, who was celebrating his 28th birthday,
had rented the car under his true name. The FBI was able to pick up
his trail--again, they didn't want to be in too close to him--but they
found out that he had taken a Trailways bus and they traced him to
Houston, and they determined he'd gotten on a plane to Mexico City.
Gilberto Lopez was, and is, a Mexican national who was at that time
studying as a student in Salt Lake. The Russians had brought him
in--infiltrated him into this country as a student. And he showed up
six more times in St. Petersburg, Florida, at these drop sites,
different drop sites, to pick up documents fro--secret documents, some
of them top secret, from Joe Cassidy, and often he appeared--on four
of those occasions, he appeared with his--with his wife, and I think
on three of those occasions, he appeared--there--there they are--with
his wife and his two-year-old son.

LAMB: Who was Emilio Flores?

Mr. WISE: Well, the FBI was anxious to learn more about Gilberto
Lopez, who, incidentally, now I can tell you is a member of congress
in Mexico, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, which, as we speak has
not yet been noticed by anyone, but that may change shortly. Mr.--Mr.
Lopez was living in Salt Lake with his wife, as a young student,
getting his PhD, and at the--the University of Utah. And the FBI was
anxious to learn more about him. Well, how are they going to do that?

They decided the best way to do that was to get someone who was fluent
in Spanish, who worked for the FBI, and infiltrate him, try to
penetrate Mr. Lopez's immediate circle and get to know him. And so
they found an agent in Miami named Aurelio Flores, who was a young
agent, about the same age as Gilberto Lopez, who had a young child,
like Lopez, and they said, `We're transferring you to Salt Lake City
if you're willing to do this undercover work, and you will enroll as a
fellow student at the University of Utah,' and he did.

But the way he was able to--to get to know Lopez was dropping off--he
made certain that he dropped off his child at the same day-care
center, and one day he blocked Lopez's car with his own car, and so
that Lopez would have to wait a moment for him to c--for Aurelio
Flores, the FBI man, to come and move his car so that he could get
out, and Flores came along and he said, `Oh, dispensar mi.' `Excuse
me,' you know, `I didn't mean to--to lock you in this way,' and he
moved his car and they became buddies, very close friends, to the
point where the FBI man was baby-sitting Lopez's child, and Lopez at
one point got to know Aurelio Flores so well that he actually tried to
recruit him as a Soviet spy.

LAMB: The--the FBI put little tiny cameras in the apartment. How did
they do that, and how--how small were the cameras?

Mr. WISE: Well, after--after--they didn't do that in Salt Lake,
although they--they wiretapped his telephone, but after Lopez decided
to transfer--he had a Ford Foundation grant, this Russian spy, and
decided to continue his studies in--at the University of Texas, so he
moved to Austin, and...

LAMB: Well, let me just stop you.

Mr. WISE: Yeah.

LAMB: You mean the Ford Foundation was funding a Russian spy from
Mexico in this country?

Mr. WISE: They didn't know it, of course. As far as they knew, he
was a promising young student. And he was at the University of Texas
now, and Aurelio Flores, his great friend and baby-sitter from Salt
Lake, had said, `You know, I'm not too happy here in Salt Lake. I
think I'll transfer over to University of Texas, too,' and I think
Lopez encouraged him to do that, so there was no suspicion. And
Flores then--therefore, was on the scene again in Austin, and it was
in Austin that the FBI found a crawl space over Lopez's apartment, and
they were able to gain access to that crawl space--crawl space, and
they used a camera--they made a--they drilled a little pinhole in the
ceiling, and they used a camera of the crawl space, a camera that
they'd gotten from NASA, I believe. The technology was such that it
was a very small camera, very concealable, and could operate through a
very small opening in the ceiling.

And so they had the house bugged, wiretapped and videotaped. They
could actually see Lopez taking--getting Morse code instructions, I
think from Havana--maybe directly from Moscow in some cases--getting
his own instructions by Morse code and with his earphones on.

LAMB: Eventually--and you mentioned this in your earlier
remarks--there were two FBI men that were killed...

Mr. WISE: Yes.

LAMB: ...in relationship to this man, Flores.

Mr. WISE: Yes.

LAMB: How did that happen?

Mr. WISE: Well, in 1976, Mr. Lopez became Professor Lopez, and he
and his wife moved to Minnesota, where he got a teaching position at
the University of Minnesota, as an assistant professor in the Chicano
studies department. And there at the university, the FBI, of course,
resumed its surveillance of him, trying to see whether he would again
engage in the kind of activities that he engaged in in Tampa, and they
were hopeful that perhaps--of course, Joe Cassidy by now was out of
the picture, he was not in Minnesota. They were hoping, perhaps, he
would be picking up materials from some other source, so that was the
purpose of the surveillance at that time.

LAMB: But how were Mike Kirkland and Agent Basford killed?

Mr. WISE: Well, I had to set the stage here in--in Minnesota,
because there was a young agent named Mark Kirkland, who was assigned
to this case, and there he is with his fiancee at that time, Julie,
and Mark Kirkland--whom he then married and they were raising a
family; they had two small children--and this became his case. He was
young and enthusiastic and very anxious to try to catch Lopez and his
wife in some espionage activity. They knew that he was a Russian spy,
and so Kirkland grew a beard and began to mingle--pretend to be a
student. And one of the photographs in there actually shows him with
the beard, posing as a student at the University of Minnesota, so that
he could get closer to--to Professor Lopez. And the FBI also
succeeded in placing an undercover agent, a woman, in--you won't find
that, an--a picture of her, because she has to remain in that unknown
capacity--but she was actually in--in the class with one of the
students of Lopez when she was working for the FBI.

And one of the ways that--that the FBI tracks people in cases of this
sort, and in criminal cases as well, is aerial surveillance. In
August of 1977, late August, Lopez and his wife and their children
headed north toward the Canadian border for what was ostensibly a
camping trip. The FBI suspected he was on his way over the border,
perhaps to do something in Canada, where he had lived previously
before coming to the United States. There's a great temptation on the
part of the Soviets to send spies in over the Canadian border, which
they've often done, because it's such a porous borer--border and--and
relatively easy for people to go back and forth.

So the--Mark Kirkland went up in an FBI surveillance plane, which was
piloted by Special Agent Trenwith Basford, who was getting ready to
retire, but was a very experienced pilot, and also--not just a pilot,
but a special agent in the FBI--and they tracked the--they tracked the
Lopez family as it was driving north, and when they--Lopezes stopped
for the night, the plane would land and then it would take off the
next morning. Well, on August 25th, 1977, up near Chisholm, the--in
northern Minnesota, in the lake country--they ran into--their little
Cessna ran into a terrible rainstorm, and they tried--the pilot tried
to land on Dewey Lake, which was one of the smaller lakes in the lake
country of northern Minnesota, and he crashed. And that cost the life
of both of the agents. They both had children--in the case of Mark
Kirkland, very young children--and so there is Julie Kirkland with
Kenneth and Christopher, two very young children.

LAMB: How old--how long ago was this picture taken?

Mr. WISE: Well, that was taken around 1977, early '78.

LAMB: So they're all grown now.

Mr. WISE: Yes, they are. But one of the reasons that I have that
picture in the book and--and talk so much about Mark Kirkland is that
I wanted people to know that the Cold War was not just a video game,
and we're not talking here about Nintendo. This is--this is--this
cost lives, and in this case in--this operation cost the lives of two
FBI agents. Now the--the real purpose of their mission was never
admitted--and revealed for the first time in--in the book--because
even their wives were not told, for many, many years, that they were
on an important national security case, that--that they were trailing
a spy when their plane went down. And what the public and press were
told was something quite different at that time.

LAMB: Who--who likes what you're doing here, and who doesn't--other
than people who read your books?

Mr. WISE: Well--well, I don't think the--that the GRU is going to
like it, because it makes clear that for 23 years, they thought they
had a mole inside the United States government, who was, in fact,
working for the FBI at all times. So they can't be happy with that.

LAMB: Did they know it at the time?

Mr. WISE: No.

LAMB: They have--I mean, is this--the book the first time that the
GRU will find out that this Sergeant Cassidy was a mole for us?

Mr. WISE: Well, I--I would like to think so, but that's not the
case, because they--they already had a strong suspicion because in
1978, Phil Parker, the FB mi--FBI man in charge of this case at
headquarters, flew out--and there's Phil Parker with a very
un--unregulation handlebar moustache, which he insisted on using in
the FBI despite regulations. Phil Parker flew out and confronted
Lopez and his wife, the Palmettos and, indeed, got them to--got the
husband to confess that he had been working for the Soviet Union. So
the--the hope was on the part of Parker and the FBI, that the two
Mexicans, the illegals, husband and wife, could be arrested.

They weren't. The Justice Department refused to allow the arrest of
the two spies. Therefore, there are people formerly in the Justice
Department, and maybe some still there, who will not be very happy
with this story. Although they had some arguments on their side
that--very complicated but--legal situation that led them to come down
on the decision not to arrest.

LAMB: You say you did 450 interviews with 200 people?

Mr. WISE: Yes.

LAMB: How many different places in the world did you have to go
to--to do that?

Mr. WISE: Well, I went to--to Moscow, of course, in 1993, and I
traveled fairly extensively around this country, spent a lot of time
down in the St. Petersburg-Tampa area, of course, where a lot of this
action took place, and in New York and around Washington. But the
Moscow trip was--the purpose there was I was being stonewalled by the
Pentagon. I applied under the Freedom of Information Act--now we hear
wonderful things about the Freedom of Information Act; FOIA, as it's
called. I've never found it all that useful, because as a writer of
books, you put a request in, as I did in this case, and by the time
you get any information, it's five or six years later, because there's
so many requests, and the book by that time has been published, and
I'm talking here to Brian Lamb, and--and the information, when it
comes in, is of some interest, but no--not applicable to--to the book.

In this case, I never even got to that stage of getting documents, you
know, five or six years later. I may yet get some, but the Army--I
submitted the request to Army intelligence and to the FBI, and the
Army wrote back and said--this thing was called Operation Shocker by
the Joint Chiefs; that was what they called it--had a bunch of
different code names because code names changed to try to protect the
operation. The Army wrote back and said, `We have no record of this
case.' So I wrote back and said, `Well, now, come on fellas, you've
got to have a record.' This went on for 23 years. It was the most
important counterintelligence case in the history of the United States
government, the longest-running, certainly, and there's no way that
you don't have a record of it. So they said they had no record of it.

The--I then started dealing directly with some officials at the
Pentagon, and I talked to a colonel, and I said, `I'm not getting
anywhere with the Freedom of Information Act,' and I said--I talked to
a colonel and I would like to bring this up to the level of the
Secretary of the Army to see whether the files can be found and
whether I could have access to the files of the case. The colonel
said to me--on the phone, after we'd gotten to know each other a
little bit--one day he said to me on the phone, `You know, after you
first called me and made this request to try to move up the line to
get these documents,' he said the colonel came down Ft. Meade, which
is were Army intelligence command is located, and he said, `Don't talk
to David Wise about this case.' So I said, `Wait a minute. Am I
missing something here? You're telling me that the Army sent a
colonel down to tell you not to talk to me about the case that they
say doesn't exist?' And he said, `You've got it. You've got it
right.'

Well, ultimately, through the could of--good offices of Ken Bacon, the
Pentagon spokesman--Secretary Cohen's spokesman--Togo West, who was
then the secretary of the Army, agreed to review the files to see
what, if anything, could be released to me. Months went by, and then
I got word back that, yes, I was right, there was such a file, they'd
found it, and no, I couldn't have it. It was classified. It was
secret.

LAMB: One little item about to your Moscow trip that popped
out--there are no telephone books in Moscow?

Mr. WISE: Oh, yeah, well, that was the problem. You see, I was
looking for Mikhail Danilin, as I mentioned, the one Mike who--who had
the right to call himself Mike, because his name was Michael in
Russian--Mikhail, like Gorbachev. And Mikhail Danilin was,
presumably, I hoped, still alive and--and well and maybe living in
Moscow, because like a lot of our spooks, when they retire, they, you
know, continue to live in northern Virginia or around Washington,
because that's where they've lived all their lives. And I was hoping
that it would--the same would be true and I might be able to find Mike
Danilin in Moscow, in that area. But there are no phone books, so you
can't just look him up. There's a number you can call, so--like an
information operator, and I asked for Mikhail Danilin, and there was
about 100 of them in Moscow, and of course, none of them were the
right one, anyway. I started calling them, and none of them were
going to say...

LAMB: You speak Russian?

Mr. WISE: I speak a little, but I had someone to help me do that, do
the phone calls, a translator. And finally, I was able to find
someone who actually had known Danilin when he was stationed in the
embassy in Washington, and that person was able to--was willing to
contact Danilin on my behalf. Now my intermediary didn't know his
phone number, but he knew people who knew them, and that's kind of the
way the phone numbers are exchanged in Moscow. You have to, you know,
call Boris, who might know Michael, who might know Sergei, and--and
you know, this sort of phone chain, and finally he was able to locate
Danilin, whom he knew, and said, you know, `David Wise is here in
Washington, he is trying to research an old case and--and would you
speak with him?'

And Danilin said that he was still working for the GRU, and therefore,
he could not possibly speak with me. He did say that. And then he
also said--being a professional spy, he said, `Of course, it wasn't my
case.' Well, of course, I knew better. I knew that he was the chief
handler of Joe Cassidy, and it was very much his case. But that was
the position he took. So I left Moscow quite disappointed. I never
actually sat down with Danilin.

LAMB: Where are you from, originally?

Mr. WISE: I grew up in New York and went to Columbia College and
became a newspaper man, a reporter on the late, great New York Herald
Tribune, and then came to Washington after eight years of doing that.

LAMB: And do you have a family here?

Mr. WISE: Yes, I do. All my family is here, and my wife and two
sons.

LAMB: You've thanked your brother.

Mr. WISE: Yes, he's up in New York. He stayed in New York.

LAMB: What'd he do for you in this--this story?

Mr. WISE: And I should say, I have one son who's now living in
Arizona, but he had been here until quite recently.

LAMB: But your brother, what did he do for your book?

Mr. WISE: Well, one of the things he did was that--a wonderful spy
in New York, the sleeper agent, who's named Exora, code named Exora by
the FBI--this is the man whose job was to climb up on the rock in
Central Park if Joe Cassidy telephoned a planned nuclear attack, a
warning of nuclear attack to him, and radio the Russians from this
high--it's really not a rock, it's like a small mountain. You can
walk by 68th Street and 5th Avenue and see it right there.

LAMB: Here he is, the picture of Mr. Freundlich.

Mr. WISE: Edmund Freundlich, aka Exora. And what my brother did was
that when Exora was infiltrated--penetrated this country as a refugee
from Austria, ostensibly, but actually working for the Soviet
intelligence--he got a job, and the job he got was working for Robert
Maxwell, the famous publisher, late publisher, who died mysteriously
off his yacht a few years ago. And he worked for Robert Maxwell for a
publishing company that Maxwell had in Tarrytown, New York, called
Pergamon Press. So I can't do everything, although I try, and I asked
my brother if he'd be kind enough to try to locate for me some of the
former officials of Pergamon Press, officials and directors, to see
whether they remembered this sleeper agent, Exora, although whom they
knew as Edmund Freundlich, and sure enough, he did find me two former
directors, officials of Pergamon Press, which is now defunct, as far
as I know. I hope I'm saying that correctly and if not, we'll hear
from them. But they did remember Edmund Freundlich, and told me quite
a bit about him. He lived an incredibly anonymous life, a gray man
keeping as low a profile as possible so that nobody would take notice
of him.

LAMB: People are going to have to read the book to find out more
about Exora. Here is the cover of the book: "The Secret Spy War Over
Nerve Gas: Cassidy's Run." Our guest, David Wise. We thank you very
much.

Mr. WISE: Thank you.

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