Abstract
In April 1968 Edmund Freundlich, a solitary, 58-year-old office worker from Vienna, Austria, arrived in the United States to begin his new career as a “sleeper agent” for the Soviet Union's military intelligence agency, the “gru.” His principal task was simply to lie low in New York City and wait for a phone call from a Soviet informant planted in the U.S. defense establishment. The call—if it ever came— would alert Freundlich that the United States was on the brink of attacking the Soviet Union. Once “activated,” he was to climb a large rock in Central Park and transmit a radio signal to the Soviet mission at the United Nations.
Freundlich's activities are recounted in the recent book Cassidy's Run (Random House), intelligence writer David Wise's account of a previously secret U.S. nerve gas deception operation that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Wise describes Freundlich as the gru's “one-man early-warning system” that World War III was about to begin.
Edmund Freundlich, the Soviet's one-man early warning system.
The fbi first learned about Freundlich in 1971 through a double agent, Joe Cassidy, a U.S. Army sergeant based at the Edgewood Arsenal military base near Baltimore. Cassidy, who had been working as an agent in a joint FBI-Army Intelligence counterespionage case since 1959, periodically received instructions from his Russian handlers on microdots hidden inside hollow rocks placed at various drop sites around the United States.
Cassidy was instructed by his Soviet handlers to call Freundlich—code-named “Ixora” by the FBI—if he learned that the United States was preparing for war. The fbi, anxious to learn how the reclusive Austrian immigrant communicated with his Soviet controls, told Cassidy to call Freundlich and deliver his warning. It was May 1972, and U.S. forces worldwide had recently been placed on alert because of events in Vietnam and the outbreak of hostilities between India and Pakistan. Although Cassidy was specifically instructed to call only in the event that the United States was preparing an attack, the FBI decided that the state of alert was an adequate pretext.
It was an extremely risky decision. What if the Soviets interpreted the call as a warning that the United States was preparing a nuclear strike? Wise writes, “One might conjure up a scenario out of Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets, panicked and persuaded that the United States was about to initiate a nuclear war, launch a preemptive first strike.”
But it seems that Freundlich was the one who panicked. For reasons never made clear to the FBI, he did not make the radio transmission to the Soviets, although he apparently left a report at a “dead drop” site somewhere in the Bronx soon after receiving Cassidy s message. The FBI never discovered the contents of this report, nor the Soviets' reaction to it. A suspenseful and chilling anecdote in the annals of Cold War espionage, Ixora's case plays only a minor role in Cassidy's Run. The central character in Wise's narrative is Sergeant Cassidy, a soft-spoken noncommissioned officer chosen by the fbi because of his ability to play volleyball. Code-named “Wallflower,” Cassidy was to be the main protagonist in what became the longest running U.S. counterintelli-gence operation of the Cold War, “Operation Shocker.”
The initial target of the operation was Boris Polikarpov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Washington who doubled as a gru intelligence agent. Because Polikarpov was an avid volleyball player, the fbi “dangled” Cassidy at the Thursday night matches at the ymca where the Russian played. Polikarpov took the bait.
By the time Cassidy retired from his espionage career in 1980, more than 20 years later, he had passed several thousand pages of carefully vetted classified documents—some real, some false—to his Soviet handlers. The subject of many of these documents—and the principal element of the FBI-Army Intelligence deception scheme—was a highly toxic binary nerve gas called GJ.
In the following article, “Polyakov's Run,” Raymond Garthoff, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former cia analyst, recounts Wise's tale of the nerve gas deception and the impact this operation had in the Soviet Union. According to Garthoff, however, U.S. intelligence was not satisfied with feeding misleading information about chemical agents to the Soviets. The agencies also wanted to deceive the Soviets into believing that although the United States had publicly renounced bioweapons and concluded the Biological Weapons Convention, it had an ambitious secret biological weapons program.
One of the principal figures in this deception operation was Col. Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet military intelligence agent who—under the code name “Top Hat”—worked as a double agent for the FBI during the 1960s and 1970s. His story takes off where Cassidy's ends.
As Garthoff points out, decisions to undertake Cold War intelligence operations like those of Ixora, Wallflower, and Top Hat were often made without considering the broader strategic ramifications these operations could have. In both Cassidy's and Polyakov's cases, the operations backfired.
At least one mystery remains in this tangled plot of double agents, deadly weapons, and misguided espionage operations. In the case of the nerve gas deception, Wise explains that the intent was to encourage the Soviet Union to waste time and resources on an apparently useless weapon. He also briefly describes an incident in which Cassidy is believed to have passed on information about a type of bo-tulinum toxin called “Strain X,” which scientists had discarded as a potential weapon. But according to Garthoff, aside from this incident there is little evidence pointing to a biological weapons deception similar to the nerve gas operation. What then did U.S. intelligence chiefs think they would achieve by persuading the Soviet Union that the United States was violating the Biological Weapons Convention?
As Wise recounts in his book, Operation Shocker had successful aspects. The purpose of posing Cassidy as a double agent was not only to feed disinformation to the Soviets, but also to try to flush out other spies and surface so-called “illegal agents” who worked without diplomatic cover and were nearly impossible to track. Cas-sidy exposed 10 Soviet intelligence agents and revealed the identities of three illegals working for the GRU—Edmund Freundlich and a Mexican couple studying in the United States, Gilberto Lopez y Rivas and Alicia Castellanos Lopez.
Author Wise called Gilberto Lopez to try to get his side of the story, but Lopez refused to talk. Through a mutual acquaintance in Mexico, I was able to contact Lopez. Initially reticent, Lopez, now a member of Mexico's lower house of Congress, agreed to meet me. In late June, I spoke with him at his campaign headquarters in Mexico City. His story begins on page 41.