Cassidy's Run (3 page)

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.

He was born on June25,1920, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the third of five children.His father was a foreman at the electric company.“My mother died from TB when I was about three years old,”Cassidyre counted.“My youngest sister, Maxine, died, I’m told, shortly after birth. I do not remember my mother or my young sister.I faintly recall being at the grave site at the burial of my mother, and some one gave each of us a ring.”

His father, suddenly a widower and unable to care for the children, placed Cassidy and an older brother and sister in the Home for the Friendless. Cassidy’s younger sister, Shirley, was taken in by a childless couple.

Cassidy and his siblings hated the orphanage. “My breakfast every morning all those years consisted of a bowl of milk with pieces of bread broken into it.” It wasn’t enough for a growing boy. He supplemented his diet by scavenging for scraps, even garbage. “I can remember finding discarded orange peels which I washed off and ate. I was hungry much of the time.”

Two stern overseers, Miss Moon and Miss Richardson, ran the orphanage. “We were given chores to do, and one of mine was to make beds. I would leave breakfast early, and on the way to the dorm I’d pass a cabinet where food was kept. The keys were almost always left in the lock. I would sneak in there and find something to eat.” Cassidy was so little at the time that he had to stand on a stool to reach the forbidden food.

“One morning, I took a banana. I had eaten about half of it when Miss Moon entered the dorm. I shoved the banana under the mattress. She came over to me and sat down, and the half-eaten banana squished through the peel and then through the metal springs and plopped on the floor. Miss Moon heard the banana fall and really gave me hell. And from then on, the keys were never left in the lock.”

The Home for the Friendless was a frugal place, and its officialdom had calculated that the orphans’ shoes would wear out more slowly if they were worn only in winter. “During the summers, we were made to go barefoot, which I hated. I was always stubbing my big toe. To this day I don’t like to go barefoot except in the shower or to bed.”

About the only happy moments for Cassidy were on Sundays, when his father visited. His father brought a bag of candy, but he was required to hand it over to Miss Moon or Miss Richardson, who divided it up among the children. Cassidy and his brother and sister complained to their father that they had little enough to eat, as it was. But there was no place to hide from the formidable Miss Moon, since any one coming to see the orphans was restricted to a community visiting area. “My Dad’s solution was to bring the Sunday funnies, and with me on his lap and my brother and sister beside me, he would open the paper in front of him and read us the funnies while we hid behind the paper and ate the candy.”

After five years in the orphanage, Cassidy and his siblings got a reprieve. His brother, Robert, was about to become a teenager, which meant he was too old for the Home for the Friendless. “My Dad persuaded his mother, who lived in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to come to Erie and provide a home for us.”

To Cassidy, by now age eight, his grandmother was like an angel of deliverance. No more sodden bread for breakfast, no more orange peels. “There was plenty of love and togetherness. We all finally got to know each other. In the orphanage, my sister lived with the girls, my brother was with the older boys, separated from me. We would see each other from time to time, but it wasn’t family.” At long last, in his grandmother’s house, Cassidy could enjoy a normal childhood.

For a boy who had literally been starved for years, the corner grocery store was nirvana. “We found out that the grocery store carried a running tab for families in the neighborhood. My Dad paid the bill every two weeks on payday. Well, I thought this was great—on the way to school in the morning I would stop in and get a dozen chocolate cookies. Next time, it was two bananas, or an orange and two apples.” The boy, still psychologically conditioned by his years in the orphanage, worried that someone might examine the grocery bill and confront him. But his father never said a word.

As a teenager growing up during the Depression years, Cassidy got into the usual boyhood mischief, none of it serious. When he was fourteen, his father remarried, and his grandmother moved to her own apartment. A year later, while in the ninth grade, Cassidy asked his father if he could quit school. “He finally agreed if I had a job.” Cassidy found one at four dollars a week, working for the Mehler Beverage Company up to sixty-five hours a week as a helper on a soft-drink truck.

Cassidy’s hometown, although the third-largest city in Pennsylvania, had none of the historic importance and social distinction of Philadelphia and none of the wealth and power of Pittsburgh. Situated on Lake Erie, in the far northwest corner of the state, Erie was geographically cut off from the rest of Pennsylvania. It was an industrial town with harsh, frigid winters that brought huge snowdrifts and that seemed to last half the year.

But if life in Erie was lackluster, and the hours on the job long, anything was an improvement over the orphanage. And Cassidy soon found work much flashier than hauling root beer. His best friend, Ray Dailey, knew Jack Parris, who owned a local nightclub. Although Prohibition had been repealed two years earlier, admittance to the Parris Social and Athletic Club was speakeasy style. “To enter you rang a bell at the top of the stairs, and an eight-inch slot would open, and a buzzer was pressed to let you in.

“They had slot machines, and pool tables in the rear, up over the Richmond Brothers clothier on State Street, and we went there often to shoot pool. Then we got to watching the floor show on Saturday nights. Soon it evolved to helping out at the bar when they were very busy. Washing glasses, et cetera. One night I was asked by a patron to fix a couple of Tom Collinses, and before long I was a regular bartender.

“Jack was quite an entrepreneur. He was raised in a poor Italian family and soon not only owned the club but a model and hobby supply store, which I ran for a while, and a neon-sign company. We became good friends, and a lot of times he would give me his Packard to drive some of the showgirls home.”

For a sixteen year old, tooling down State Street with showgirls in a fancy car was a definite step up from hauling soft drinks. But Cassidy did not entirely neglect the spiritual. “Although my family was Presbyterian, and we went to Presbyterian Sunday school, all my friends were Catholic. On Saturday night, we’d tend bar, work all night, and then go to mass. We ran two floor shows, the last one at two
A.M.
We’d close at five-thirty, wash glasses, and straighten up the place. We would leave the bar at five forty-five, run over to the cathedral a few blocks away for six o’clock mass, and then back to Clark’s restaurant for breakfast on Jack’s tab. I’ve gone to Catholic church ever since.”

By now, Cassidy had a steady girl, Ray Dailey’s sister, Pat. “We always bought the five-cent new song list each week, and we listened to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade together on the radio.

“These were Depression days. Wages were low, but we could buy ground beef four pounds for a quarter. My grandmother helped me buy a car for thirty-five dollars. Gas was seven or eight cents a gallon, and they cleaned your windshield and checked your oil and tires.”

When Cassidy was eighteen, he found work at Erie Forge and Steel Company as a laborer, laying railroad ties. It was tough work, but soon the war in Europe brought better jobs at higher wages. Cassidy was offered a job as third helper on the open-hearth furnace. Wearing dark glasses and long-sleeved wool shirts to protect themselves from the intense heat, the helpers shoveled sand into the furnace, to repair holes caused by the extremely high temperatures.

“There were about five guys in a circle, taking turns,” Cassidy recalled. When the furnace’s hydraulic doors opened, a machine called a charger fed scrap metal into the flames. “What comes out is molten steel.”

After a few months, Cassidy was promoted to second helper. He still had to shovel sand into the furnace, but now he also got to tap it out. “When it’s time to tap it out, you open up the back of the furnace. You poke an air hose into the back of the furnace until the molten metal starts to pour. The crane operator takes the ladle and pours it into an ingot, about fifteen feet by six feet.”

It was hard work, but by now Cassidy was a rugged, handsome young adult. After Pearl Harbor, the steel plant was working overtime, and Cassidy’s friends were going off to war. Because his job was considered essential to the war effort, there was little chance he would be drafted. But Cassidy chafed to join up.

“By late 1942, most of my buddies were in the service, and one of my best friends had already been killed. I told the personnel office I’d like not to be exempt from military service at my next call-up. They honored my request, and I was drafted in February 1943.” Private Cassidy reported to Fort Lee, in Petersburg, Virginia, for basic training, and then was selected to attend school to become a drill instructor.

He rose rapidly through the ranks, and after a year he was promoted to first sergeant, skipping several grades. Cassidy also got engaged to Pat Dailey, but he did not often go home to Erie to see her, because of the expense and lack of leave time.

Hilda Marie Prince, a young woman from Petersburg who worked in the PX, noticed the good-looking sergeant. When Cassidy’s grandmother died in the late summer of 1943, Prince heard about it and urged Cassidy to stop by before he left on emergency leave for the funeral.

He did. “She had a bag of food for me to take on the trip.” Cassidy was touched by the gesture. When he returned, they dated and were married after the war. “Eleven months later, we had a daughter, Shelby Jean.” But Cassidy’s marriage to Hilda went rapidly downhill. “As I look back now, I do believe she saw me as a ticket out of the burg-Petersburg, that is—because the marriage was a bust right from the start.”

In 1947, Cassidy was transferred to the First Cavalry Division in Japan and detailed to the 302d Reconnaissance Company. His wife and daughter remained in the states. After a year, he was shipped back to Fort Lee, where he remained until 1952, when he was assigned to the Far East Command. The Korean War was under way, and Cassidy, again without his wife, was sent to Japan, expecting he would end up in Korea. Instead, he was detached from his unit and assigned to Kokura, Japan, as an administrator in the office that identified the remains of GIs killed in action and shipped them home for burial. It was a grim but fortunate assignment for Cassidy; almost everyone in his old outfit was killed in the war.

A year later, the army allowed dependents to join their spouses in Japan. Hilda and Shelby Jean arrived in Kokura. Hilda was finally out of Petersburg, but she was unhappy in Japan. She wanted to return home but took a job in the PX and stayed on until Cassidy’s tour ended in 1955. They returned to the states and bought a home in the Strawberry Hill section of Alexandria, Virginia. That December, a son, Barry J., was born into their cheerless marriage.

Cassidy was assigned to a clerical job in the adjutant general’s office at nearby Fort Belvoir. It was dreary work, and when Cassidy heard of an opening at the base’s nuclear field office, he applied and was accepted. The office supervised a school for nuclear power plant operators, as well as the Belvoir power plant itself.

In April 1959, Cassidy earned a high-school general-equivalency degree, twenty-four years after he had dropped out of the ninth grade. Four months later, he was called in for the interview that was to change his life forever.

Joe Cassidy, nightclub bartender, steelworker, and career army man, unexpectedly metamorphosed into
WALLFLOWER
, a neophyte spy and counterespionage agent for the FBI, working against the highly trained, professional officers of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie. On the face of it, the match seemed unequal.

Could an amateur such as Cassidy really be expected to fool the Russians? If the Soviets ever discovered the truth, they might retaliate against him. He was playing a potentially dangerous game; if he lost, he realized, he might just end up dead.

C H A P T E R: 5

RECONTACT

When Cassidy left
for Korea in September 1960, he told the second “Mike” that he expected to return in December 1961. But he did not make it back until February 1962.

The FBI, anxious to keep Cassidy in play against the Soviets, wanted him near Washington. The arrangements were made quietly. Much later, Cassidy was told that his records had been flagged; he was not to be given new assignments by the army in the usual manner. Cassidy received orders to report from Korea to the Maryland Air National Guard office at Edgewood Arsenal, on the Chesapeake Bay, fourteen miles east of Baltimore.

Cassidy landed in San Francisco and took a bus across the country. He had hoped the time away might improve relations with his wife. It did not. “When I got back to Alexandria, I called my wife, and she picked me up. At the house, I said, ‘I’ve been assigned to Edgewood.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re going to be assigned there by yourself. I’m not going with you.’ So I slept on the couch that night.”

Angered and disappointed but not entirely surprised by the final breakup of his family, Cassidy reported to Edgewood. After he found a furnished apartment, he drove to Newport News, Virginia, to get his teenage daughter, who was living with an uncle. His son, now six, stayed with his mother.

As soon as Cassidy and his daughter were settled in at Edgewood, he got in touch with the FBI. His bureau handlers fretted that the army’s delay in returning him to the states might have spooked the Russians. Although it was two months later than planned, the FBI decided to have Cassidy follow his instructions for recontacting the GRU. There was little else the bureau could do.

Cassidy drove from Edgewood and crushed the crayon in front of the photography store in downtown Washington. The next day, as instructed, with pipe in mouth and book in hand, he strolled along a residential street in Maryland. But no Soviet spy appeared to inquire about the nearest movie theater.

For several months, until May or June, Cassidy dutifully crushed crayons in front of the photo store on the designated days and walked the specified street with pipe and book.

Nothing happened.

“The bureau tried different ways to recontact the Soviets,” Cassidy said. “They put up an index card at the Y saying, ‘Lost watch,’ and it gave my name and phone number at Edgewood. There was no response.”

Finally, in August 1963, the FBI tried a risky and unorthodox ploy. “Don Gruentzel came up with the idea. I met him in Washington one day. He wrote a note that said, ‘I’m back from Korea’ and gave the telephone number of my office at Edgewood. It said, ‘I’m the person you were involved with at Belvoir.’ We got in his car and drove to Sixteenth Street, across from the Russian embassy. There were some kids, maybe ten or twelve years old, playing on the street. He called one over and gave him the note and told him to deliver it to the embassy and give it to whoever came to the door. Don gave him fifty cents. I said, ‘Maybe you should have given him the fifty cents when he came back.’

“From where we were parked, we were in a position to see what happened. We watched the kid deliver the note. The person who opened the door didn’t look around. He took the note and went inside.”

Not many days afterward, Cassidy was in his office in Edgewood when he received a phone call. “It was a foreigner, speaking very slow in a low voice. . . . He said he was glad I had returned from Korea, and he arranged a time and place for a meet, near Greenbelt, Maryland.”
WALL
FLOWER
was back in business.

The meeting took place on September 19. This time, neither Polikarpov nor Fursa appeared. A third Russian, Boris G. Kolodjazhnyi, showed up. He was listed as first secretary of the Soviet embassy, but to Cassidy, predictably, he introduced himself as Mike.

Cassidy’s assignment to the National Guard was of little interest to Kolodjazhnyi. But the GRU officer was well aware of the main activity at Edgewood, the army’s chemical-warfare center.

There, in the laboratories at Edgewood, army scientists operating under the tightest secrecy experimented with and developed the nerve gases that were the most lethal agents in the nation’s controversial arsenal of chemical weapons.

The Russians now believed they were close to achieving one of their prime objectives: penetrating a major U.S. defense activity. From their perspective, Cassidy’s new assignment proved that even a noncommissioned officer was worth recruiting, because he might, in time, have access to information of enormous value. The GRU man pressed Cassidy. “He knew what was at Edgewood. He wanted to know about the chemical center. I told him I didn’t know anything.”

The bureau set out to remedy the problem. It began orchestrating Cassidy’s transfer to the nerve-gas laboratory, a process that took several months.

In October, Cassidy met again with the GRU. This time, yet another officer showed up. His name was Mikhail I. Danilin, and he was to become Cassidy’s principal Russian handler. The fourth Mike served as Cassidy’s Soviet control for eight years, longer than any of the others. On the State Department diplomatic list, he appeared as an attaché in the cultural section and later as an embassy third secretary. As was the case with his predecessors, he was an officer of the GRU.¹

At six foot one, Danilin was a big man, as tall as Cassidy. He was softspoken, quiet, handsome, and dark haired. He, too, pressed Cassidy for everything he could learn about nerve gas. They met again three times in the spring of 1964.

As Cassidy recalled it, the strings for his move to the nerve-gas laboratory were pulled by Special Agent James F. “Jimmy” Morrissey, who later succeeded Don Gruentzel as his case agent. A short, clever Boston Irishman, Morrissey was a leprechaun with a law degree, a fanatic Red Sox fan, and a man of great charm, with a natural talent for counterintelligence.

“Morrissey brought a guy from army personnel to talk to me,” Cassidy said. Soon after, Cassidy was recommended for promotion, and on June 10 he moved into a slot in the Weapons Development and Engineering Laboratories (WDEL) at Edgewood, known as “Weedle.” The companion lab at Edgewood, the Defense Development and Engineering Laboratories (DDEL), was called “Deedle.”

In October, Danilin met again with Cassidy. The GRU officer was, of course, delighted to hear that Cassidy had been transferred to the weapons lab. Cassidy was where the Russians wanted him. Danilin asked where Cassidy worked in the lab and what documents he saw. He bombarded Cassidy with all sorts of questions about nerve gas. “He was interested in formulas and method of delivery,” Cassidy said. Danilin also inquired about incapacitants developed at Edgewood—such as BZ, which can cause disorientation and temporary paralysis—and riot-control agents such as CS. His main interest, however, as might be expected, was in nerve gas.

Cassidy was not a scientist—he had never even gone to college—but one of his jobs at the weapons laboratory was to file the documents produced by the chemists and engineers.

The Strangelovian world in which Cassidy now found himself was one that operated in deepest secrecy, with almost no public knowledge of its existence. Nerve gases are among the more horrible weapons ever developed, no less deadly than nuclear bombs and biological agents such as anthrax, Ebola virus, or the bubonic plague. A tiny drop of nerve gas, inhaled or in contact with the skin, can kill almost instantly.

Closely related to common insecticides, nerve gases were unknown until the approach of World War II. Appropriately, they were first developed by the Nazis. In 1936, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, a chemist with I. G. Farbenindustrie in Germany, had discovered the first nerve gas by accident while researching compounds to kill insects. He synthesized an organophosphorous ester known as tabun, or GA.

Soon, Schrader and Nazi scientists were developing far more powerful nerve gases: sarin, also known as GB, which Schrader discovered in 1938, and soman, known as GD. The Nazis built a nerve-gas production plant in Breslau, disguising its output under the code name Trilon, a popular soap. At the end of the war, the Soviets captured German stocks of nerve gas, dismantled the plant in Breslau, and transported it back to the Soviet Union. U.S. Army intelligence found Dr. Schrader, however, and obtained the nerve-gas formulas from him. As a result, American scientists, too, were able to replicate tabun, sarin, and soman. In the 1950s, British and American scientists developed another powerful nerve gas, VX.

By the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had extensive chemical- and biological-warfare (CBW) programs, which were important targets for intelligence operations. Edgewood was a prime objective for the Soviets, as were Fort Detrick, Maryland, the government’s center for germ-warfare research, and Dugway Proving Grounds, a huge restricted area sixty miles southwest of Salt Lake City that tested both chemical and biological weapons.²

Sarin, soman, and VX remain the world’s three principal nerve gases today. All three work by inhibiting the action of cholinesterase, a key enzyme that controls the body’s nervous system, including breathing, brain function, and muscle movement.

Cholinesterase neutralizes the buildup of acetylcholine, a nerve-impulse transmitter, in the body. Acetylcholine must be present for an impulse, or message, to jump from one nerve ending to the next. This is how humans are able to think, breathe, and move.

But when nerve gas inhibits the production of cholinesterase, nothing neutralizes the acetylcholine, and the nervous system in effect runs on fast-forward, spinning wildly out of control. As one government official put it, “All three nerve gases work by making people forget to breathe.” The respiratory muscles convulse, and death follows, generally from asphyxiation.³

The term
nerve gas
is a misnomer, since the chemicals are actually liquids delivered in a fine mist by an aerosol spray. Sarin has perhaps become the best known nerve gas, in part because it was used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subways during the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, killing twelve persons and injuring five thousand. (Two months later, the cult leader, Shoko Asahara, was captured and charged in the attack along with forty of his followers.)

All nerve gases are organophosphorous compounds. Although they are lethal, they have different properties and varying degrees of effectiveness. Some, for example, require smaller doses than others to kill people. Some nerve gases penetrate clothing better than others. Scientists also speak of “persistent” or “nonpersistent” agents. That is, some more-volatile gases, such as sarin, evaporate quickly and are considered nonpersistent. Others, such as VX, evaporate much more slowly and can remain in an area, still deadly, for a week or two.

Sarin (GB) is a colorless, odorless liquid. A 1996 Material Safety Data Sheet issued by the army’s Chemical and Biological Defense Command at Edgewood states that “effective dosages for vapor are for exposure durations of 2-10 minutes.”
⁴
Soman (GD) is described as a “colorless liquid with a fruity odor. With impurities, amber or dark brown with oil of camphor odor.” Like sarin, it can kill in two to ten minutes. VX is odorless, but, unlike sarin and soman, it is viscous, with the consistency of motor oil. It can be colorless or slightly yellowish. One drop on the skin kills. The army’s safety-data sheet warns: “Death usually occurs within 15 minutes after absorption of a fatal dosage.”
⁵

Bernard Zeffert, a former chemist at Edgewood, perfected VX for the army. “We got VX from the Brits who created it,” he said. “When people in the process lab were gearing up for production of VX, they got poor results.” Zeffert and Jefferson C. Davis, Jr., tackled the problem. “We conducted an experiment and published a paper, in-house only, on the bond energies of phosphorus and sulphur.”

As a result of their work, Zeffert and Davis received the patent, along with the army, for a link in the process of making a precursor of VX. Davis, who had a master’s degree in chemistry when he entered the army in 1954, was sent to Edgewood. In his early twenties, he suddenly found himself making nerve gas. “Among the GIs there was a sort of black humor about it,” Davis recalled. “We’ll do what the army wants for two years.”

The scientists on the permanent staff of Edgewood Arsenal had a pleasant life. Their laboratories were located on a scenic, wooded peninsula that stretches into the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, south of Havre de Grace. They lived in nearby towns like Bel Air, comfortable suburbs of Baltimore. They married, raised children, and went to work in their labs, making some of the deadliest concoctions known to humankind. Few would admit to any qualms about their work. Like some nuclear scientists, many found justification in the fact that the Soviet Union also had chemical and biological weapons. Soviet scientists thought much the same way.

“By and large, it was a ‘we better keep up’ kind of mentality,” recalled Davis, later the chairman of the chemistry department at the University of South Florida. “We had a sense of duty at the time.” But Davis said his own views changed. “The more you learn, the more you wonder about the saneness of it all. I think later a lot of people were not happy that that sort of stuff should be developed or used. I feel we should destroy the reserves of nerve gas and never use it.” But the disenchantment Davis felt later was not typical. Many of the scientists at Edgewood argued that using nerve gas was actually a more humane and sure way to kill enemy soldiers than leaving them bleeding to death on a battlefield.

When the Edgewood scientists retired, many continued to live around Bel Air as they slipped into their seventies and eighties. They remained a close-knit group.

Benjamin L. Harris had been technical director of the army’s chemical labs for eleven years when he left Edgewood in 1981. The retired nerve-gas scientists, he said, formed a club called the GOBs, for Good Old Boys. In the early 1990s “the Good Old Boys still met in Edgewood every Friday at Vitali’s restaurant, in a motel at the junction of Route 24 and I-95.” By 1997, their ranks had dwindled to four. “Now they meet at Denny’s, across the road.”