Cassidy's Run (14 page)

Cassidy then picked up his rock at a dead drop in Brooklyn, left a signal in Manhattan, and returned to the kitchen table at O’Flaherty’s mother’s house, where the rock was broken open. For the first time, it contained two microdots, because the message from the Soviets was longer than usual. It directed Cassidy not only to spy on additional military bases but to try to obtain emergency planning documents from city, county, or state offices.

Although there had still been no discussion of the “new code” that Likhachev had mentioned, the secret writing in the rock instructed Cassidy to travel to a location in the Bronx for a meeting on the first Saturday after he received a Morse transmission with twenty groups or to go to a dead drop in the Bronx for a pickup if he received a coded radio message with twenty-four five-digit groups.

In April, Cassidy was back in the New York area, this time to leave a rock at a drop site in suburban Yonkers with more reports on military bases. The FBI had seen Likhachev moving around New York several times with Vladimir Vybornov, who was listed as a “public relations officer” at the Soviet UN mission. His wife, Aleksandra Vybornova, also worked in the public relations office. The bureau predicted that Vybornov would turn out to be the new Mike, and it was right.

On April 10, FBI agents watched Vybornov fill a dead drop near Pinebrook Boulevard in New Rochelle, in Westchester County. He was accompanied by a woman, believed to be Aleksandra. Cassidy cleared the drop, left a piece of yellow tape on a lamp pole at 201st Street in Manhattan, and traveled to Rockaway Point. There was no meeting this time with Vybornov, but instructions on a microdot inside another A&P matchbook told him to prepare for a meeting with the new Mike in October.

Cassidy’s report to the FBI of his first meeting with Vybornov, on October 9, 1976, was detailed and meticulous, as usual. At 2
P.M
., he left his rock at the base of a street sign at Palmer Avenue in the Bronx. The rock contained a report of his reconnaissance of military bases in Georgia.

He then drove around to kill time before the meeting. “I parked the car just off Gun Hill Road . . . at approximately 1552 hours. I waited in the car until 1557 hours and I then walked to the spot arriving at 1600 hours.” Cassidy pretended to be waiting for a bus. “I noticed a person in dark clothes w/umbrella at the corner of NW Fenton and Gun Hill. . . . This person stopped in front of me and as I looked at him he asked me about a drive-in and when I responded he smiled and said ‘Hi I’m another Mike.’ We shook hands.”

As they strolled along the street, the sixth Mike talked about the wet weather and wanted to know where Cassidy had parked; he had not brought his own car, he said, because of the rain. The new Mike not only had a halting command of English, but it was soon apparent he was not cut out for a career in espionage. Vybornov, it became clear, wanted to break all the spy rules because of the inclement weather.

He asked Cassidy to drive back to the drop site at Palmer Avenue, retrieve the rock he had just left there for Vybornov, and bring it directly to the Russian. They would then simply exchange rocks in Cassidy’s car. This was an unprecedented request, a total departure from spy etiquette. It flouted the GRU’s elaborate procedure for using dead drops to avoid risks. But first, Vybornov had a lot of questions. As they continued walking, he asked if the microdots were legible. Cassidy said they were OK. He then told Cassidy to be sure to keep the secret writing paper wet when he developed it. That puzzled Cassidy, who explained that he dipped the paper in acetone, but after steaming it the sheet dried out rapidly. There was no way to keep it wet. Vybornov did not respond and Cassidy concluded that the Russian was in over his head.

The new Mike then grilled Cassidy closely about his children and household, apparently to reassure Moscow that his family, friends, and neighbors remained unaware of his espionage activities. “He said, ‘Do you hear from your son and daughter?’ I told him I hadn’t heard from my son since he graduated from high school. ‘How about your daughter?’ ” She was busy with a new career in nursing in Alexandria, Cassidy replied. “He asked if I received correspondence from friends and relatives. I said very seldom. He said, ‘Do they visit you?’ I said we have very few houseguests.”

Vybornov persisted, Cassidy’s report to the FBI continued. “He said, ‘What kind of a house do you have, something like this?’ and he pointed to a two- or three-story rowhouse we were just passing. I said no, Mike, and smiled. ‘We don’t have houses like that in Florida. I live in a house all by itself and on one floor.’

“He said, ‘Does your wife know anything about this?’ I said, ‘No, nothing and I want it kept that way.’ He asked if neighbors were friends of mine. I said a few of them were. He said do they visit? I said I’m not on a social basis with neighbors. We speak when we see each other during the day and that’s about it.

“He asked how finances were and I told him not so good. He said there was $4,200 in my package and . . . he hoped this would help.” Cassidy, who always complained he needed more money, replied, “But Mike, I’m missing the big paydays.”

He reminded Vybornov that he had provided the name of Nicky, the sergeant at Edgewood, but had not been paid for that. “I missed the payday on Nicky,” Cassidy protested. Vybornov adopted a sheepish expression as though he agreed.

Vybornov, Cassidy reported to the FBI, then pressed for a document outlining a plan for industrial mobilization in an emergency that Cassidy had said he had access to at a local university. “We are very much interested in it. We would very much like to have that but not if you have to expose yourself. Do not take and reproduce if you must give your identity. Do not give name, address, phone number—nothing. It’s not worth it to us, but get it if you can.”

As they walked along Eastchester Road toward Gun Hill Road, they were nearing the drop site. “He said he would walk very slowly up this road and that I was to get the car, pick up my package, and then pick him up . . . about five blocks away. . . . I told him I would be back in six or seven minutes.”

Cassidy retrieved his rock, got in his car, cruised along Eastchester, and spotted Vybornov in the middle of the block. “As I pulled to the curb he came over and got in. I pulled my rock from my jacket pocket and gave it to him. . . . He pulled his from his raincoat pocket.” There was no need to put tape on the light pole, Vybornov said, “because I already know you have [the rock].” It was the only time that Cassidy and a Russian had simply handed the rocks to each other.

“He had opened the door and was getting out. I noticed he had left his umbrella in the car in his haste to leave and I hollered and opened the door and extended it to him. He made several stabs at it before he caught the handle. . . . To me he lost his composure—seemed he was very anxious for us to separate and me to get the hell out of there.”
WALLFLOWER
gunned his car and took off.

Inside the rock handed to Cassidy was a message in secret writing. It provided his schedule for 1977, called for drops and meetings in April and October, and gave the dates and times of the radio transmissions he was to receive. It asked him to provide the industrial-mobilization plan, and to reconnoiter a nuclear-ammunition depot at the air force base in Charleston.

The message also instructed Cassidy, in case the Soviets should ever lose contact with him, to go to New York City on the last Saturday of January, April, July, and October and wait, pipe in mouth in front of the antiques store in Brooklyn at 4
P.M
., holding the usual book-sized package with yellow wrapping. If contact was not reestablished, he was to try again the next day.

In Cassidy’s appraisal to the FBI of the meeting, it was plain that he had been underwhelmed by Vybornov. “He seemed to have his game plan and stuck with it. This did not include any comments or discussion from me—just answer the questions. He was far from being polished like, say, Mike #1. He had hard features and could pass for alongshoreman or a lumberjack. He wanted to dominate the meeting—and did—and was very confident, bold, hard as a rock, until he started out of the car when he seemed to lose all his composure in attempting to grab the umbrella.”

Cassidy kept his cool at his meetings with the Russians, and he did this time as well, despite Vybornov changing the procedures and peppering him with questions. But he found each encounter with the Soviets nerve-racking. “I was always on pins and needles worrying that I was going to blow it,” Cassidy confessed. “I was worried I would contradict myself or make a mistake and blow the thing apart.” Cassidy was on edge even though the Russians never indicated the slightest suspicion that he was anything but a genuine mole.

“I felt they trusted me and believed me,” he said. “I had a job to do and I wanted to do it.”

Marie Cassidy remembered that her husband usually had trouble sleeping before a meet. “He had sleepless nights, plenty of that, and stomach problems. He would eat very little before he’d go.” The former nun said she had no appetite on those nights either.

“I was worried about the danger,” she said. “I could see how nervous he was before a meeting. There were middle-of-the-night meetings. So I burnt my candle and prayed.”

C H A P T E R: 16

THE PROFESSOR

In 1976, Gilberto
Lopez y Rivas, busy as he had been with his espionage activities, finally received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah.¹ By then, he was back in Mexico City, where he had been working as a researcher at an anthropological institute. But he did not remain there, as Robert Schamay, who had been the FBI case agent in Salt Lake City, learned in October.

“I was out hunting on a mountain in southern Utah in October of 1976, and a game warden knocked on the trailer. He said I had a phone call. I come off the mountain and find a pay phone in a little dinky town, and it’s Gene Peterson. I have to be in Minnesota as soon as possible.”

Peterson, by now Soviet section chief at FBI headquarters, was continuing to supervise the spy case. He ordered Schamay to cut short his hunting trip and get moving. “Next morning,” Schamay recalled, “I was off the mountain, back home in Salt Lake, packing, and on Monday I’m on a plane to Minneapolis.”

Two years before, while still a student in Austin, Lopez had told Aurelio Flores that he might be moving to Minnesota. Headquarters had plucked Schamay off the mountain because the bureau had learned that the
PALMETTO
s had in fact surfaced there. Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, Soviet spy, was now an assistant professor of Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota. Professor Lopez had the distinction, in all likelihood, of being the first Russian spy ever to become a member of the faculty of that institution. The university, of course, knew nothing of his other, secret life.

Manuel Guerrero had brought Lopez to Minneapolis. Guerrero, then chairman of the university’s Department of Chicano Studies, was short one professor for the fall semester. “We advertised in the
Chronicle of
Higher Education,
” Guerrero said. Lopez had answered the ad and traveled to Minneapolis for a job interview. “I hired him,” Guerrero continued. “He was hired on the basis both of his résumé and the interview. Gilberto was a very amicable, social person. He made a lot of friendships.”

Lopez, his wife, and their children settled into faculty housing off Fourth Street, on the ground floor of a two-story garden apartment. The FBI wiretapped the place; it did not attempt to install room bugs as it had done in Austin.

Alfredo Gonzales, a colleague in the Chicano studies department, recalled that while Lopez served on the faculty, a Spanish club made a film called
Minnesotanos Mexicanos
. “It was a documentary of Mexican Americans in Minnesota, and he is shown in the film twice. He is tall, very thin, and slender, with dark brown hair, light skin. A European type, not Indian. He had a strong voice, a heavy accent but good English. I knew him socially, but he never once mentioned his political views. He never discussed politics. He had strong views on the historical treatment of Chicanos. He never mentioned the Soviet Union. He loved to talk about opera, and art, and history.”

The university offered Chicano studies as a major for undergraduate students. The faculty taught a wide variety of courses dealing with the history and social status of Mexican Americans, bilingual education, and the Spanish language. The university bulletin for the summer of 1977, for example, lists a typical course taught by Professor Lopez. Entitled Chicano History, it offered four degree credits and covered “Mexican American history, including such areas as migration, labor movements, Chicanos in agriculture, the ‘pachuco’ phenomenon, border conflict, and regional history.”²

The FBI watched Lopez and listened to his telephone conversations to try to determine whether he was still servicing dead drops for the GRU while exploring Chicano history for his unsuspecting students. The bureau’s counterintelligence agents hoped that Lopez would lead them to one or more Soviet spies.

After Robert Schamay flew in from Utah, he remained in Minnesota for three months. His primary task was to brief Mark Kirkland, who had been assigned as the case agent by the Minneapolis office. “Mark had the ticket on it,” Schamay said. “He was a nice, hardworking kid from Salt Lake, anxious to do a good job.”

Around the same time, Charles W. Elmore, a thirty-one-year-old FBI agent in New York, asked his fellow agent Jim Lancaster about the
PAL
METTO
case. Elmore was from the West Coast and wanted badly to get back there. Perhaps, he thought, if he volunteered to go out to Minnesota to help on the
PALMETTO
case, he would be rewarded with his office of preference. A quiet, good-looking man, Elmore was single and had no ties to New York. More important, he was fluent in Spanish. He won a transfer to Minneapolis and went to work translating the wiretaps of the Lopezes’ apartment.

Back in Washington, Phil Parker had been transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington field office early in 1976. He had been head of S-3, the GRU squad in the field office. Now Parker was determined to do something about the
PALMETTO
s. At headquarters he became the case supervisor and the major player in the events that unfolded.

“It had been my squad’s case,” he said. “I had participated in surveillance of several of the meetings between
WALLFLOWER
and the Russians. Both stationary and rolling surveillances”—meaning stakeouts in a building, or cars driving around in the area.

At headquarters, Parker was assigned to the Soviet section of Division 5, the intelligence division.³ He was forty years old. A tall, handsome Virginian, Parker defied the conventional straight-arrow appearance long adhered to by FBI agents, a code that had been strictly enforced by J. Edgar Hoover and lingered on even after his death. Parker sported a handlebar mustache that made him look like an old-fashioned movie villain or a bartender in a Wild West saloon, for which he took a great deal of good-natured ribbing from his less flamboyant colleagues. When it came to counterintelligence work, however, Parker was all business.

He had not set out in life to become a counterspy. In fact, Parker might never have joined the FBI had the pay been better for high-school teachers. He was born in Chesapeake, Virginia, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. His father had been a radio operator on merchant ships, and his mother worked as a printer. Parker attended public schools, went to college for a while, and in 1955 joined the air force, which sent him to Syracuse University to study Russian.

The air force then assigned Parker to England in an intelligence job, where he met his future wife, Jill, an attractive Englishwoman from Bedford. After returning to the states, Parker finished college, and then earned a master’s degree in Russian at Indiana University. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Leningrad, and five other cities.

Back home, Parker taught Spanish and Russian at a local high school and coached junior-varsity football. Parker enjoyed teaching but was trying to support his now-growing family on $5,500 a year. In 1965, at age twenty-nine, he applied for a job at the FBI.

The bureau sent him to its training base at Quantico, Virginia, to learn to shoot, then to the Seattle office, and then to language school in Monterey to study Bulgarian. In 1967, he was assigned to the Washington field office, where he acquired the basics of counterintelligence work and followed Bulgarian spies around the capital. Three years later, Parker moved to the GRU squad.

“The GRU was our main target,” Parker recalled. “We also handled some Polish and East German cases. We worked out of the Old Post Office building. The squad had great morale. We turned some Soviets. Our job was to identify which ones were intelligence officers.” In 1973, Parker was promoted to head of the squad. Three years later, he was transferred to headquarters.

“When I went to headquarters,” he said, “my sole goal was to close this case with an arrest.”

The FBI had
sent Mark Kirkland to the Minneapolis division in June 1973. He was twenty-eight. It was there that he began flying with Tren Basford on aerial surveillances. Kirkland and his wife, Julie, moved into their farmhouse in Minnetonka and started a family. Their first son, Kenneth, was born in 1974, and a second son, Christopher, was born in 1976, the same year that Mark was handed his first big case—the
PAL
METTO
file.

From an early age, Kirkland’s ambition was to be an FBI agent. He was born into a Mormon family on August 8, 1944, and grew up in Centerville, Utah, north of Salt Lake City. “Centerville was a very small town, but he was kind of a rebel,” Julie Kirkland said. “He had a motorcycle and bleached his hair white once.” He went to high school in nearby Bountiful, and then struck out on his own.

“He was only eighteen or nineteen when he left to be an FBI clerk. His parents were very unhappy that he was leaving town. He couldn’t wait to get out of Centerville.”

Kirkland moved to Los Angeles, enrolled in California State University, and began working for the FBI in the spring of 1964. He was tall, dark-haired, handsome, and single. Two years later, he married a young woman who also worked as a clerk in the bureau. They had a daughter, Kristin. Kirkland and his best friend at the FBI, Ron Williams, had both joined the army reserve, and they each did a three-year hitch in Germany, where Mark worked in intelligence. Kirkland returned to the states and to the FBI in the summer of 1969. Soon afterward, his youthful marriage ended in divorce.

A year later, Julia Searle, who had grown up in Venice, California, graduated from high school there and landed a clerical job at the FBI in Los Angeles while attending college at night. She was eighteen, with dancing eyes, a pug nose, and long brown hair. Kirkland was eight years her senior. He worked the night shift, on a different floor, but they met, early in 1971, and began dating. Mark and his friends called her Julie.

That same year Kirkland graduated from Cal State, and the following January he and Julie were wed at the Mormon temple in Los Angeles. Three months later, at age twenty-seven, he was appointed a special agent of the FBI.

Julie Kirkland’s parents were both teachers. Her father had a doctorate from UCLA and taught theology at Santa Monica City College; her mother gave private lessons in piano and music theory. Like Mark, Julie came from a Mormon background.

Three months after their marriage, the FBI sent Kirkland to Oklahoma City, for what the bureau calls a “first office” assignment. Less than a year later, he was assigned to Minneapolis.

Julie Kirkland soon became aware that her husband was working on a big case, although she did not know its nature, or the code name
PAL
METTO
. Mark said little about the case. But he grew the scraggly beard and long hair, and Julie realized he was operating undercover. Having worked for the FBI herself, she was able to put some of the pieces together. “I knew the name Lopez, I knew they were at the university, and Mark had installed the equipment, the cameras, and listening devices, and I knew they were monitoring from a nearby apartment. Mark didn’t come home and blab, but I had held a top-secret clearance, after all, and it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what was going on.”

One of Kirkland’s first moves was to try to place informants close to the
PALMETTO
s. The Kirklands had become friendly with a family that lived in the neighborhood, and Mark recruited the woman as an FBI source. At his request, she enrolled in one of Lopez’s courses.

“I just knew him as a student,” said the woman, who asked not to be named. “I talked to him a couple of times after class and at student-teacher conferences. It was a course in Chicano studies, and he definitely felt Chicanos were mistreated. He talked about the plight of the Mexican peasants and the ones that came as migrant workers. He was focusing on low wages, poor housing. I wrote reports to Mark on Lopez once a week or more. Mark had wanted me to arrange to baby-sit for Lopez, who had both children with him. I was planning to tell him I was in dire straits in the hopes he would say ‘We need a baby-sitter.’ ”

The bureau’s other undercover source was a man also enrolled as a student. Both were designated “134s,” which in the jargon of the FBI means informants. Kirkland himself mixed with students on the campus to gather intelligence on Lopez. Despite the blanket coverage, however, including the wiretaps and physical surveillance, the FBI never detected Lopez servicing any dead drops in Minnesota or contacting the Soviets.

As the months slipped by, Julie Kirkland became increasingly concerned about her husband’s assignment. This was a spy case, and it very likely involved the Russians. She worried about Mark’s safety.

“I remember confronting him and saying, ‘You obviously are trying to unravel something.’ He said, ‘For your own good, Julie, let’s not talk too much about it.’ He said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, it’s better if you don’t know anything.’

“Mark had gone to Washington for the case, and he told me that the information had gone to Attorney General Griffin Bell.

“Right before he died I’d gotten pretty insistent. I didn’t think it was good for our relationship for Mark to be so deep in a secret life that I wasn’t part of. How long would he stay in espionage work? It gave him the thrill he liked, but it wasn’t good for family life.

“On the day he left, he thought the Lopezes were going over the border into Canada. He didn’t say what the bureau suspected the Lopezes were planning to do in Canada. I had two babies and I really didn’t want to know.

“I was concerned about his flying all the time. He flew a lot with Tren Basford, but Mark was not trained as a copilot. Mark talked Tren into delaying his retirement so the plane would be available. It was Tren’s private plane.”

And then it was Tuesday, August 23, and Mark Kirkland kissed Julie good-bye on the forehead and told her not to worry.

Two decades after
the Cessna went down in Dewey Lake, Julie Kirkland still felt the pain of her husband’s death. She had remarried and her two sons were grown men now. But the shadow was always there, even when the days were bright.