Cassidy's Run Read online

  For Polikarpov, a trained intelligence officer, the familiar espionage dance had begun. The casual encounter, a friendly dinner, and the Russian, with luck, might gradually be able to develop the American sergeant into a paid source, a spy for Moscow. Polikarpov had already known how long Cassidy had been playing at the Y. He had watched him since he had first showed up in March and had noticed him in uniform before. Although Cassidy was only a noncommissioned officer, there was no telling what information he might have access to or might be able to obtain in the future. It was entirely possible that the big, amiable sergeant, if handled carefully, might be recruited as an agent in place—a mole inside the United States Army.

  The thought was surely exciting to the GRU officer, for a good recruitment might bring a medal; it would certainly be a giant step toward a promotion. His superiors would be pleased.

  Above all, this recruitment would be safe. Cassidy was no walk-in, a volunteer spy who had showed up unannounced at the embassy or the consulate, offering his services in return for money. The GRU was well aware that the United States military and the FBI often sent such wouldbe double agents. The Russians were always extremely wary of these bogus volunteers, suspecting, often rightly, that they were really working for American intelligence.

  But here the shoe was on the other foot. It was Polikarpov who had spotted Cassidy as a possible developmental. The big sergeant seemed a simple man who enjoyed sports and a good meal. The GRU officer could hardly wait until next Thursday; he would invite the sergeant to dinner again.

  The next morning, Cassidy drove alone to a fried-chicken restaurant on U.S. Route 1 and Kings Highway, a few miles north of Fort Belvoir. He met there with two agents of the FBI. He reported the approach by the volleyball player and their dinner together. Those were the words that, for many months, the FBI agents had been hoping they would hear.

  Inside the intelligence division of the FBI, the news was electric. Polikarpov had made contact. WALLFLOWER was operational.²

  The genial sergeant was, in the jargon of the spy world, a dangle. He had been carefully selected by the bureau and army intelligence and put in the way of Boris Polikarpov. Much like a metal lure flashed to a bluefish in the surf or a delicately tied mayfly presented to a trout in a mountain stream, Joe Cassidy had been sent to play volleyball at the YMCA, where, from its surveillance, the FBI knew that Polikarpov played on Thursday evenings. Now, after five months, Polikarpov had taken the bait.

  The following Thursday, Cassidy lounged on the steps outside the Y again. Years later, he remembered those first contacts with clarity. “I always made a point to get out front of the Y ahead of him,” he said, “so he’d see me in uniform when he came out.” On this second Thursday, Polikarpov greeted Cassidy and asked if he had a car.

  Cassidy’s blue Buick was parked nearby, and he offered his friend a ride.“We went in my car to a different restaurant,”Cassidy recalled. Dinners with Polikarpov soon became a regular Thursday-night event. “A number of times we went to the Old English Raw Bar along the Potomac. He liked oysters on the half shell.” During their second dinner together, Polikarpov introduced himself simply as“Mike.”He didnot reveal that he was a Russian or that he worked at the embassy.Cassidy didnot press him.

  In the course of their early conversations, Polikarpov asked Cassidy casually whether he was married, where he lived, how long he had been in the army, and where he was assigned. At the time, Cassidy and his wife lived in Alexandria, not far from his job at Fort Belvoir. Cassidy explained that he worked in the nuclear power area; his job was to help train operators for the army’s nuclear power plants at Belvoir, Idaho Falls, and in Alaska.³

  Occasionally, Cassidy asked a question, but “Mike” seldom answered. “When I would ask questions he would answer with a question.”

  Russians like to drink, and Cassidy felt he had to keep up. “Polikarpov was drinking vodka on the rocks. I was drinking bourbon and ginger ale. Some nights we would not break up until around two A.M. Although I watched my drinking, I felt I had to play the game.

  “Sometimes with a glow on, he would have me drop him off in locations in Washington that I was not familiar with, like Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I would have a job trying to find the Fourteenth Street bridge. I would get home, grab a few hours sleep, then go off to work.”

  Polikarpov, like a skilled spy, was proceeding slowly. He knew it was important to cultivate a source gradually. But after several dinners, it was time for the first move.

  “One night we were eating, and he said, ‘Joe, can you do me a favor?’ I said, ‘If I can.’ ”

  Polikarpov took the plunge. “We’re interested in some nuclear power information,” he said.

  “I don’t know what country you’re from,” Cassidy replied, “but I’m loyal to my country. I would never do anything to hurt my country.”

  “No, this is peaceful,” Polikarpov protested. “We in Russia have some—”

  “Oh, you’re from Russia?”

  Polikarpov nodded. “We have some desolate areas,” he continued, “where we would like to get power. I’ll pay you for the information.” Polikarpov paused. “Joe, I don’t want you to do anything improper.” But it was terrible, the Russian went on, that there were people in his country who had no electricity. All he was asking Cassidy to do was to help him help his people obtain basic necessities.4

  Cassidy waited a long moment, as though he were turning the matter over in his mind. “OK,” he finally replied. “Since I consider you my friend, I will try to help you, within limits. As long as it’s peaceful, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Mike” then asked Cassidy to meet him with the documents a few days later at 10 A.M. on a residential street just off Route 1, half a mile north of the sprawling Belvoir military complex.

  “Don’t wear your uniform,” the Russian said.

  “I have to,” Cassidy replied, “I’m working.”

  Then wear an overcoat, Polikarpov instructed him. Cassidy said he would but pointed out that the coat would be olive drab and would still bear his sergeant’s stripes.

  Before the scheduled meeting with Polikarpov, Cassidy joined two of his FBI handlers at the chicken restaurant on Route 1. The agents handed him documents that had been cleared to be given to the GRU officer.

  At the rendezvous with the Russian, Cassidy produced the material. “I have to have it back,” he warned.

  “No problem,” Polikarpov said, “I’ll have it back this afternoon.” Around 3 P.M., they met again, and Polikarpov, having had time to photograph the documents, gave them back to the sergeant.

  Later, Cassidy met the FBI men again at the restaurant, returned the documents to them, and was debriefed. The same procedure was followed in a subsequent series of meetings. Polikarpov pressed for any and all information Cassidy could get on nuclear power. In each case, Polikarpov took the documents from Cassidy in the morning and, like clockwork, returned them in the afternoon so that Cassidy could supposedly slip them back into the army’s files.

  No money changed hands at the first rendezvous, but Polikarpov paid Cassidy for the documents he brought to their later meetings. Cassidy turned the money over to the FBI agents.5

  In March 1960, Polikarpov handed Cassidy off to a second “Mike,” who took over the meetings. Polikarpov and Cassidy continued to play volleyball at the Y on Thursday evenings. The FBI identified WALLFLOWER’s new control as Gennady Dimitrievich Fursa, another GRU officer, who was listed simply as an “attaché” in the political section of the Soviet embassy. But Fursa missed two meetings, and the FBI had Cassidy express his concern to Polikarpov at one of their volleyball games.

  Although Cassidy continued to pass documents to the Russians under the FBI’s guidance, he was distracted in 1960 by personal problems. “My marriage was souring,” he said. One of his army buddies, also a noncommissioned officer, was put on orders for Korea. “It gave me an idea: Why not me, too? This may be the way to save the marriage. My marriage vow was
very important to me. I felt I had to try to make it work. Maybe if we were separated for a while things might be different. Maybe a year away from home might patch things up.”

  WALLFLOWER’s plan to leave the United States for an overseas post dismayed the FBI, but the bureau had little choice but to go along with Cassidy’s wishes. The human factor was central to the success of any espionage operation; it could not be ignored. Cassidy clearly wanted to get away from Washington for a time. The army and FBI approved his transfer to Korea.

  Before he left in September 1960, the Russians gave him recontact instructions for his return. That was welcome news to the FBI, since it meant the operation might not be over after all.

  “I was told to take a red crayon and crush it on the sidewalk in front of a photography store in Washington,” Cassidy recalled. “And the next day I was to walk with a pipe in my mouth and a book in my hand on a residential street in Maryland, and someone would come up to me with a code phrase. The contact would ask, was a certain movie house nearby? Cassidy was to give a prearranged reply.

  WALLFLOWER memorized his instructions. He would see, when he came back from Korea, whether his wife, or the Russians, were waiting for him.

  C H A P T E R: 3

  WALLFLOWER

  When Joe Cassidy began his dealings with the Russians in the late summer of 1959, it was still the era of tailfins and jukeboxes, the last decade of a Main Street and Norman Rockwell America. Microchips, MTV, and the Internet were light-years away.

  It was the height of the cold war. A little more than a decade earlier, on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill had delivered his famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” he warned. “Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.”

  At home, the 1950s had seen the rise and fall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Although he ultimately self-destructed, the legacy of suspicion he sowed by exploiting a supposed communist menace at home influenced domestic politics and American foreign policy for decades. Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. Schoolchildren hid under desks during air-raid drills as protection against a feared nuclear Armageddon. More than 100,000 citizens built fallout shelters and stocked them with water, canned food, and flashlights.

  Abroad, the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala and attempted unsuccessfully to unseat President Sukarno in Indonesia. The Soviets, meanwhile, crushed the revolt in Hungary, maintaining their grip on Eastern Europe.

  It was a time of spies, of secret battles fought in the shadows, and not only in distant places such as Vienna and Berlin. The American public read about a series of sensational Soviet espionage cases in the United States itself, including the arrest, conviction, and execution of the “atom spies,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  In this cold war environment, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was not content merely to detect and catch Soviet spies; when possible, it tried to run agents against them. Thus, in 1958, the FBI and the army began planning what eventually became known as Operation SHOCKER.¹

  In those years, the FBI had a classified program known as DESECO, for Develop Selected Contacts. The purpose was to develop sources who could provide information about the targets of the KGB, the GRU, and other East-bloc intelligence services.

  According to Charles Bevels, an FBI agent who ran SHOCKER for several years, the case originated under the DESECO program. “The FBI interest,” Bevels said, “was to identify the contacts made by the Soviets. If we could turn the contacts around to work for us, that was to our advantage. But, in addition, under the program certain people were selected to be put into contact with the Russians.”

  Because the double agent passes genuine classified information, even though the documents have been cleared for that purpose, his handlers want some benefit in return. One reason for transmitting real secrets, of course, is to convince the opposition that the agent is trustworthy. In turn, that opens up the possibility of a grand deception, of eventually slipping in bogus documents, false information designed to mislead and confuse an adversary government.

  Inside American intelligence agencies, operations of this kind are known variously as deception, double-agent, or counterespionage operations.² In the1990s, the FBI’s National Security Division, in its internal documents, more often used the term “perception management” to describe these operations.But this latest term of art boils down to the same thing as its predecessors—tricking an adversary into believing false information by persuading it that a source is selling America’s secrets.

  The central purpose of Operation SHOCKER was to build up to a major deception of the Soviet Union. In addition, SHOCKER had several other objectives: to learn the identities of the GRU’s officers in the United States; to discover how it recruited Americans as agents, and how it ran them; and, by the questions the Russians asked of the source, to learn what gaps existed in the Soviets’ knowledge of the American military.

  The FBI also hoped that the operation might flush out Soviet “illegals”—spies operating without benefit of diplomatic cover. Intelligence officers working out of the Soviet embassy in Washington, the Soviet mission to the United Nations in New York, or UN headquarters, could be watched and their contacts sometimes identified. Illegals, by contrast, are normally almost impossible to detect, since they can be anywhere and blend in with the general population. But an illegal put in contact with WALLFLOWER might be spotted and identified.

  From the FBI’s perspective, there was one other fringe benefit to the operation. The GRU agents occupied with running an agent under FBI control had less time to spot and recruit real spies.

  According to Phillip A. Parker, a former senior FBI counterintelligence official who played a key role in Operation SHOCKER, another advantage the bureau gained from a counterespionage operation, even if the Russians eventually caught on, was that “dangles . . . make them suspicious of the real guys—the real walk-ins.”

  Every double-agent operation, however, carries within it a risk. For the most part, real secrets are given away to the opposition, information that could prove harmful to the United States. Ideally, a delicate balance is maintained between the risks and the benefits.

  In Operation SHOCKER, the FBI was responsible for all operational aspects. Together with the army, the FBI screened and selected a military man to be dangled to the Russians. The bureau ran the agent. The army provided the agent as well as the “feed”—the classified materials to be released. Within the Pentagon, an elaborate system of secret panels reviewed the feed. Ultimately, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the documents given to the Russians. The entire procedure was supersensitive and highly secret.

  After months of planning, and a good deal of pulling and hauling between the bureau and army intelligence, the FBI was ready to move. Early in 1959, Joe Cassidy was told by his commanding officer at Belvoir to report to a meeting at the post library.

  “When I got up there, there were twenty-five to thirty other top-grade sergeants, and I thought, What’s going on here? Somebody said, ‘I think it’s a security problem.’ We were called in one by one. There were two civilians there.

  “They asked me how long I’d been in the army, what my name was, where I worked. Just general things like that.” Cassidy was puzzled by the odd interview.

  “About two days later, I was told to report to the intelligence office. The same two civilians were there.” As Cassidy later found out, the two men across the table were Donald A. Gruentzel and John Buckley, both special agents of the FBI. Gruentzel, the lead agent, was a stocky, sandy-haired Midwesterner known around the bureau as “Gruntz” or “Madman,” the latter sobriquet a tribute to his aggressive driving style.

  Gruentzel has been credited by his counterintelligence colleagues with creating Operation SHOCKER and recruiting Joe Cassidy as its star actor. Gruentzel was not a man who talked
much about himself, but he was respected as a very tough agent. He earned a law degree at Creighton University, in Omaha, and had joined the bureau in 1951. His father had worked in a restaurant, and Gruentzel loved to cook. “Nothing fancy,” said one FBI man, “Gruntz was a meat-and-potatoes man. He could cook dinner for two dozen people or fifty people.”

  Like Charlie Bevels, Gruentzel and Buckley worked out of the FBI’s Washington field office on the S-3 squad, the counterintelligence unit that monitored the GRU.³

  Cassidy was puzzled at first by their questions. “They started asking had I ever played volleyball.” The FBI, as it turned out, had come to the right man. “In my early days as a first sergeant at Fort Lee, Virginia,” Cassidy recalled, “my Company E would play A Company in volleyball. We played for a case of Coke for every three games won. A Company ended up owing us some fifteen hundred cases of Coke.”

  The FBI men asked Cassidy if he would mind playing volleyball at 6 P.M.every Thursday at the Y in Washington. “I said, No, I wouldn’t mind. At that time they revealed who they were. It was clear I was being dangled. I knew I was bait, but I didn’t know for what purpose or what country was the target. I was excited about it.

  “They told me I was to linger after playing and see what happened. They said, ‘You might be approached by someone with a foreign accent.’ I asked, What am I supposed to do then? Just go along with it, they said. And go in uniform. They gave me the code name WALLFLOWER.”

  In this almost casual way, Joe Cassidy, with no previous training in intelligence or espionage, was launched on a career as a spy. He had no way to know that it was to become his life’s work.

  C H A P T E R: 4

  ORANGE PEELS FOR BREAKFAST

  Joe Cassidy’s earliest memories are of the orphanage to which he was sent at age three, an institution with the grim, Dickensian name of the Home for the Friendless.