Abstract
Although he was used to mislead the Soviets, Lopez says his spying helped to keep the “equilibrium.”
Cassidy's run describes one night in a St. Petersburg, Florida park in April 1972, when FBI agents watched as a Mexican couple, Gilberto Lopez y Rivas and Alicia Castellanos Lopez, retrieved classified U.S. military documents hidden in a hollow “stone.” The stone had been put there by an FBI double agent posing as a Soviet spy.
This incident was just one of a series of drops and pickups in a long-running counterespionage operation, during which U.S. intelligence passed thousands of pages of documents about U.S. military activities—some real and some false—to the Soviets.
Gilberto Lopez y Rivas at his campaign headquarters in Mexico City.
From 1971 until their abrupt return to Mexico in 1978, the Lopezes—code-named “Palmettos” by the fbi— worked as couriers for the Soviet military agency, the “gru.” Their job was to retrieve documents at drop sites in several U.S. cities and ferry the information to their Soviet handlers. During that time, the fbi monitored nearly every aspect of the couple's lives— wiretapping their homes and placing hidden cameras in their offices. Fbi agents also posed as their friends.
Wise describes the Palmettos as the “first illegal [agents] ever surfaced by a double-agent operation of the fbi.” Determined to make the most of the discovery, the fbi undertook a mammoth surveillance operation involving dozens of agents across the country who trailed the Lopezes from Utah to Texas to Minnesota, where the couple eventually settled in 1976, when Gil-berto Lopez took a job as professor of Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota. The fbi hoped that the Lopezes would lead the bureau to other spies and expose hidden details of the Soviet espionage apparatus.
In the end, the fbi's hard work was to little avail. The Lopezes never revealed their accomplices, and in 1978, when the fbi finally confronted them and obtained a confession, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Justice officials argued that the case would be thrown out of court because the wiretaps and unauthorized entries into the couple's homes had violated their civil rights.
Soon after their confrontation with the fbi, the Lopezes fled to Mexico.
According to Wise, the Justice Department's decision came as a huge blow to the fbi, which had spent millions of dollars and lost two agents in a plane crash during the course of the surveillance operation. Wise sympathizes with the bureau: “The bottom line was that the government permitted two Soviet spies to escape.”
From spy to congressman
While researching his book in the early 1990s, Wise called Gilberto Lopez, who at that time was working at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, and asked him if he would agree to be interviewed. Lopez declined.
Curious to know his side of the story, I contacted Lopez through a mutual acquaintance. During our initial phone conversation, Lopez told me that he was reluctant to talk to journalists from the United States because “they do not understand what the Cold War was about.” Besides, he said, they usually just wanted information about his Soviet contacts and other spies. “Not a single individual involved in our espionage efforts was discovered by the FBI. We never told anyone what we were doing, and we didn't give names to the FBI when they questioned us. I am not going to begin now.”
After I assured Lopez that I was only interested in hearing his perspective of the events recounted in the book, he agreed to meet me. Currently a member of the lower house of Congress and a leading member of the congressional body that in 1996 held peace negotiations with the Zapatista rebels in the state of Chiapas, Lopez was running to head one of the 12 “delegations”—or boroughs—that make up Mexico's Federal District. We met at his campaign headquarters in early June. Despite the revelations published in Wise's book and the minor scandal it caused in Mexico, Lopez easily won the election in July.
“You know,” he told me during our meeting, “when the leaders of my party [Mexico's leftist opposition party, the PRD] asked me to run for this seat, I told them that maybe it wasn't such a good idea because of all the uproar about my Soviet espionage activities. They said that it wasn't a problem, and that it could even work to my benefit.”
Young revolutionary
“As a youth I was involved in various revolutionary organizations in Mexico,” Lopez told me. “I was first recruited by Mexico's communist youth organization in the early 1960s, when I was about 17. At that time, all the activities of the communist opposition were clandestine. The party was illegal, persecuted. A short time later, I joined the 23 de Mayo, which was an organization devoted to armed revolution in Mexico. This was during the years following the Cuban revolution, and there was a tremendous idealism among the youth.”
His revolutionary activities soon brought Lopez—and his wife, Alicia— into contact with the GRU. Throughout the 1960s, he says, their collaboration with Soviet intelligence gradually expanded. “We were part of a chain of people that connected the GRU to the United States by way of Mexico. We worked on ideas about how Mexicans working for the GRU could enter the United States and what type of work they might do.” In 1968, the GRU asked Lopez if he would work for the agency in the United States. “It was perfect. I had already decided to do my graduate work on the situation of Chicanos in the United States.”
In 1969, Lopez and his wife went to Cuba for training. But before the couple left Mexico, they participated in massive student demonstrations in Mexico City that coincided with the Mexico City Olympic games. On October 2, 1968, while thousands of anti-government demonstrators filled Mexico City's main plaza, paramilitary troops from the so-called Batallón Olimpia, regular military troops, and members of the secret police surrounded the plaza and opened fire on the demonstrators. According to some estimates, more than 300 people were killed during the attack, although the Mexican government officially recognizes only 32 deaths. “I was there with my wife when they machine-gunned us that day,” says Lopez. “We were lucky to survive.”
Lopez later learned that around the time of the massacre, an FBI double agent was in Mexico City posing as a tourist who had come to watch the Olympics. The agent, Joe Cassidy, had been sent there by the GRU on a mission unrelated to Lopez's work.
Although the two did not cross paths that day, Cassidy and Lopez would soon find themselves entangled in a covert FBI espionage operation. It was Cassidy who would plant the hollow rock at the drop site in St. Petersburg four years later.
“A great deception”
According to Lopez, when he received Wise's call in 1993 asking about his run-in with the FBI 15 years earlier, he was shocked. “It had been so many years, and my wife and I had tried to leave that entire period behind us. Then one day a gringo calls me asking about what happened with the FBI in such and such year. For us it was like a bomb—a bomb that could potentially threaten everything we had built since that time. So we decided not to talk.”
April 1, 1972: A concealed FBI camera captures Cassidy placing a hollow rock in a St. Petersburg, Florida park. The Lopezes, with baby son in tow, are seen 20 minutes later approaching the drop site and retrieving the rock.
Lopez says that he first learned about David Wise in the 1960s, when he read Wise's book The Invisible Government, one of the first detailed accounts of the CIA, which Wise co-wrote with Thomas B. Ross. (Concerned about some of the book's revelations, then-CIA director John McCone unsuccessfully attempted to block its publication in 1964. McCone's actions helped bring attention to the book, which subsequently spent several weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.)
“The Invisible Government was a crucial book when it first came out,” Lopez told me. “So I had classified Wise as a critical writer, one of the few journalists in the United States willing to challenge his government. But when I got that phone call from him, I was so shaken up that I didn't connect the caller to the Wise I knew.”
Lopez was again taken by surprise when the book was published and news about it reached Mexico. He claims that Wise never mentioned that he was going to write a book. “For me, the book was a great deception. I had considered Wise a progressive, but then he publishes this book that reveals a lot about our lives, and we never knew about it.”
When he read Cassidy's Run, Lopez says, he was upset by what he claims are the book's numerous misrepresentations and false assumptions. Although Lopez concedes that his refusal to talk with Wise is partly to blame for some of the book's alleged mistakes, he thinks that Wise gave too much credit to the FBI's version of events and ignored—or failed to fully explore—accounts offered by Lopez's friends and colleagues.
Says Lopez, “The book projects a distorted picture of me and my family. It doesn't situate the characters in their correct dimension, nor in their ideological and political context. Instead, it makes us look like mercenaries. For example, Wise unquestioningly swallows a story from Aurelio Flores [an FBI agent who for several years posed as Lopez's friend] that I used to always talk about Stalin, communism, the Soviet Union. But this is absolutely false, and the proof of this is that when he spoke to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota, they told him that I always spoke about my work in Chi-cano studies. They didn't say anything about Stalin or the Soviet Union.”
In the book, Wise portrays Lopez as a misguided leftist intellectual with a deep hatred of the United States. He surmises that the “driving force behind [Lopez's] decision to engage in clandestine work for the GRU was his outrage over the treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States.” But most people who support Chicanos, Wise continues, “do not act on their views by becoming spies against the United States.”
According to Lopez, there are a number of problems with this characterization. First, he says he has always been an enemy of the government of the United States, not its people. And his view of the U.S. government is not based solely on the mistreatment of Chicanos.
“We wanted revolution in Latin America and Mexico, and the United States was seen as the biggest obstacle to our success. It was the era of Vietnam, of U.S. aggression toward Cuba, and of continuing North American imperialism against us in Mexico. The logic of the time was simple—the enemy of our enemy is our friend. We were interested in damaging the military capability of the United States, and that is why we worked for Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, and not for the KGB.”
Another problem with Cassidy's Run, says Lopez, is that the author naïvely presumes that Mexicans should somehow feel an allegiance to the United States. “I don't know if people in your country can understand this,” he told me, “but I was a patriotic Mexican communist…. There was a time not too long ago when many Mexicans would have considered it an honor to be recruited by the GRU.”
Clean trajectory
Lopez alleges that most of the FBI claims in the book about him and his wife are simply lies, and he highlights those of agent Flores as being the most damaging. As an example, he points to Flores's claim that Lopez told both men's children to “get a pencil and stick it into the blue eyes of the gringos.” Says Lopez, “That is a despicable lie. To begin with, I am not capable of educating my children with that kind of hatred. All you have to do is look at my children now. One is completing his master's in Latin American studies, and the other is preparing to be a lawyer. I could not have two kids like mine—two excellent muchachos per-redistas [PRD kids] of the opposition party, of the left—if I had brought them up in that way.”
Lopez also contests the FBI claim that he received large sums of money for his GRU work—the bureau says that the Lopezes deposited $8,000-10,000 in their bank accounts after each pickup. “To think that we put money in our accounts related to our spy work—that is absurd. It is elemental in that line of work that your bank accounts correspond directly to what you earn legally…. We did get some money from the GRU, but that went toward financing the work, and it was not the huge sums the FBI claims. I challenge them to prove it, to show their evidence.”
He adds: “We didn't do our [GRU] work for the money. We did it for ideological convictions that my wife and I have maintained to this day. We have never changed our trajectory, our ideas. We have worked for revolutions in Central America—in El Salvador, Nicaragua. I was an adviser to the San-dinista government in Nicaragua, to the EZLN [Mexico's Zapatista rebels]. My trajectory has been a clean one, transparent. You can accuse me of being a communist, a subversive, and you'll be right. But you can't accuse me of being a mercenary, a thief, or some other type of criminal.”
David Wise responds
I asked David Wise for his comments on Lopez's version of events. He wrote: “Gilberto Lopez confirms the disclosure in Cassidy's Run that he was a spy for the Soviet Union. He also confirms that he was paid for his espionage, although he does not say how much. The book discusses some of his political motives and does not say that he spied primarily for money. Although he says he acted as a ‘patriotic Mexican,’ it should be noted that he was not spying for his own country, Mexico, but for Moscow.”
I asked Lopez why the FBI would fabricate so many details in its testimony to Wise if it already had an airtight case against him and his wife. “Well, I was their enemy—and perhaps I still am—and one can't expect less of such adversaries…. Perhaps it is because they wanted to project a perverse image of someone who was acting against U.S. intelligence. They were trying, as they always do, to portray the enemies of the United States, the communists, as mercenaries—which is what they want us to be. And, well, in the end [as Wise's book demonstrates] they succeeded.”
I also asked Lopez how he felt about having been used in a double agent operation that involved passing deceptive nerve gas information to the Soviets. “It was all a game of the superpowers,” he said. “In the end, I think that all this espionage helped to keep war between the superpowers from breaking out.”
But what, I asked, about the stockpiles of the nerve gas Novichok that still remain in Russia today, a probable legacy of the deception operation? “I think we can all agree that this needs to be well controlled and that there should be a set of rules to guarantee the safety of those materials. In general, however, espionage was a way to maintain equilibrium in many cases.”
Were he and his wife thinking about “strategic equilibrium” when they began their espionage career? “Yes, it was one of our rationales. We thought that we were helping to serve the cause of peace, of revolution, of keeping a threatening superpower in check.”
Lopez says that Cassidy's Run does demonstrate one estimable quality of the U.S. government—that alleged spies are not simply “disappeared,” and even are allowed to go free if their rights have been violated.
“It is easy to be against the government of the United States because of what it has done to Mexico—more than one hundred military incursions into our territory, the exploitation of Chicanos throughout history, the expropriation of about half our land, invasions in 1914 and 1916. All of this you can look at through the light of history, and even today you can see the North American domination of our economy and our military.
“On the other hand, one also has to admire the United States for the simple fact that some individuals involved in espionage for the Soviets were freed because the FBI had violated their civil and human rights. I admire the Justice Department for that.”