Authors: David Wise
Tags: #History, #Military, #Biological & Chemical Warfare, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Fiction
While researching this book, the author discovered that Lopez was working at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in San Angel, a section of Mexico City. At the time, his wife, Alicia, was teaching in the anthropology department of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in nearby Ixtapalapa.
In a telephone conversation, Lopez was asked whether he would be willing to be interviewed. From his reaction, it was clear that the call came as a big surprise. “Well,” he said carefully, “I have to consider my position here and that of my wife.”
5
It was pointed out that Lopez was safely in Mexico and could talk about whatever he had done if he wished. Besides, the cold war was over. Lopez said he would meet with the author if he came to Mexico, but he was not promising an interview. Soon afterward, Manuel Guerrero called the author from Minnesota. Lopez, he said, had thought about the request and definitely would not agree to an interview.
In 1997, Lopez was elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Mexican Congress. As a PRD congressman, Lopez became the spokesperson, and for a time the head, of the congressional commission attempting to mediate the conflict in Chiapas, where Zapatista rebels took up arms in 1994, calling for more democracy and Indian rights.
In the summer of 1998, Lopez accused President Ernesto Zedillo of escalating the Chiapas conflict and preparing to crush the rebels militarily. The federal and state governments, he said, “displace the Chiapas indigenous people from their communities, they massacre them; they pursue them; they torture them, and they jail them.”
6
In July, when two U.S. diplomats were detained by suspicious villagers in Chiapas, Lopez called their presence “open meddling” in Mexican affairs.
7
Until the publication of this book, Lopez’s previous secret life as a Soviet spy was undisclosed. His term as a member of the Chamber of Deputies is up in 2000.
Early in May
1981, Freundlich, having cooperated with the FBI for three years, was asked by the bureau to approach his Soviet control, Nikolai Alenochkin. From the unexpected contact by the illegal, Alenochkin would immediately surmise that
IXORA
had been compromised.
Dan LeSaffre was
IXORA’S
case agent when the bureau orchestrated the approach. “Our objective was to get rid of Alenochkin,” he said. “Once he’s been approached by
IXORA
, he has to report it.” And once he reported the contact, he might be sent back to Moscow.
“We did not expect to turn Alenochkin, a heavy-duty GRU man,” said the FBI’s Jack Lowe. “But it might cast a shadow on Alenochkin with his own people. It makes them rethink all the cases and freeze other operations.”
Alenochkin was serving his third tour in the United States. He had handled
IXORA
in the 1970s and had returned to New York a little over a year earlier. The FBI believed he was the deputy resident of the GRU station inside the Soviet mission.
When an approach of this sort took place, LeSaffre said, the Soviet officer “would often go under ‘house arrest.’ . . . He would never be alone. There would always be someone with him, even to drive to the office.”
From the bureau’s point of view, there was a logical reason to disrupt the GRU’s operations and attempt to force Alenochkin’s departure from New York. True, he would simply be replaced. “But when you start replacing officers they are usually not as good,” LeSaffre explained. “When you get rid of a top-grade officer like Alenochkin, you may get a lesser one in his place.”
For the encounter with Alenochkin, Edmund Freundlich wore a tiny recorder for two reasons: so that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents could gauge Alenochkin’s reaction and to make sure that
IXORA
followed instructions and did not try to deceive the bureau.
The ploy succeeded. Alenochkin, who normally could have been expected to remain in Manhattan another two or three years, was abruptly recalled to Moscow on August 7, a little more than a month after
IXORA
approached him.
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Edmund Freundlich died
in New York at age seventy-one on the day after Christmas 1990. His nephew, Robert, lived in a New York City suburb with his wife, Jill. They were flabbergasted to learn from the author that Uncle Edmund had been a Russian spy.
“I had a sense he had in some way been active pursuing his communist leanings,” Robert said. “But I didn’t know it involved doing anything that remotely approached espionage.”
Jill Freundlich could scarcely believe that this kindly, avuncular man had a secret life. “Everybody loved Uncle Eddie,” she said. “I have two children and there are several others in the family. He loved children.”
When Jill and Robert Freundlich cleaned out Edmund’s apartment, they kept few of his possessions. “There were many letters signed ‘Amigo,’ Edmund’s unknown friend, that Robert found . . . ,” Jill said, “but he threw them away.”
There was one keepsake she recalled, however, that perhaps, in retrospect, revealed something of the inner life of the man who had survived the Nazis, then toiled at a nondescript job for Robert Maxwell while living a double life as a spy for Moscow, waiting for the telephone call that might signal nuclear Armageddon.
“He had his mother’s notebook,” Jill remembered, “with a four-leaf clover in it.”
Mikhail Danilin was
still working for the GRU in Moscow as late as 1993. According to a friend, he had broken a leg and then was hospitalized with a heart attack late that year. In 1994, he died in Moscow.
Boris Libman, who ran the soman plant for the Soviets after he was let out of prison, emigrated to the United States in 1990 and eight years later was living quietly in an East Coast city.
9
Vil Mirzayanov, too, came to the United States in 1995, after all charges against him were dropped. He was admitted under a law that assists Soviet scientists in emigrating. His wife and sons joined him, but the marriage broke up. In December 1997, Mirzayanov married Gale Colby, the activist from Princeton who had rallied to his cause.
Robert Schamay, the FBI man who was pulled off the mountain to go to Minnesota in 1976, was shot during a bank robbery in Salt Lake City in 1982.
10
Schamay recovered from his wound and retired to the Sun Belt seven years later.
Charles Elmore, the young FBI agent who had translated the
PAL
METTO
wiretaps in Minneapolis, won his desired transfer to California after the Lopezes fled to Mexico. On August 9, 1979, he had just begun work for the day in the small resident agency in El Centro, California, 110 miles east of San Diego, when James Maloney, an employee of the federal job-training program, walked into the office with a shotgun and killed Elmore and a second FBI agent, Robert Porter, then shot and killed himself. Maloney had been arrested and questioned by the FBI seven years earlier after an anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco.
11
Jack Lowe, one of the FBI agents who had helped to turn
IXORA
, was working at bureau headquarters in the 1990s. On his desk he kept a small gift, a memento to which no one paid any particular attention, a nail clipper bearing the insignia of the Queen’s Guards.
Phil Parker retired to his native Virginia, where he worked as a security consultant. Joe Cassidy’s case agents, Jack O’Flaherty, Charlie Bevels, Jimmy Morrissey, and Donald Gruentzel, have al lretired.O’Flaherty lived not far from the Cassidys, and their families remained close over the years.
Joe and Marie
Cassidy retired anonymously to the Sun Belt, revealing to no one their double lives. They did not tell their friends and family; even Cassidy’s own son and daughter knew nothing of his years as a spy. To their neighbors, the Cassidys seemed a typical older couple. Marie remained active in dancing and theatrics in the pleasant community where they lived, and Joe, to those who knew him, appeared to be a genial, retired army sergeant, just another ordinary American content to live out his golden years peacefully in the sunshine.
Julie Kirkland remarried and built a new life for herself in the far West. But she has never forgotten her years with Mark. Their sons are grown men now.
The government never formally acknowledged to her that Mark Kirkland died while working on an espionage case for the FBI. In April 1991, however, the bureau held a ceremony at its new Minneapolis field office at which both Kirkland and Tren Basford were given official recognition for their service. Julie and her children were there, along with Tish Basford and her son and granddaughter.
At the ceremony, a wall was unveiled in which the names of the two agents, and other FBI agents who had died in the line of duty, are inscribed. On behalf of Mark, Julie Kirkland received the FBI’s purple cross, which the bureau gives to the families of fallen agents, and a citation. The citation did not say anything about national security or espionage, but she was told the truth informally. That day, Julie Kirkland said, “was the first I got the name of the case-
PALMETTO
. Dennis Conway told me.”
The purple cross rests in a walnut box. The medal is a five-pointed gold cross that surrounds a medallion with a purple star at its center. It hangs below a white ribbon with a purple center stripe. Officially, the medal is known as the FBI Memorial Star.
A brass plate on the box bears these engraved words: “In memory of Mark A. Kirkland, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice. In honor of Special Agent Kirkland who lost his life in a plane crash in Dewey Lake, Minnesota, on August 25, 1977, while conducting an aerial surveillance for the FBI in connection with a highly sensitive matter. Mr. Kirkland’s performance in this case was in the highest traditions of the Bureau and this special acknowledgment is presented in his memory. William S. Sessions, Director, April 26, 1991.”
Julie Kirkland treasures the purple cross. She keeps it in a place of honor, on a shelf in the dining room of her home.
“I think I’ll give it to my son Kenny,” she said. “It means a lot to him. He was only three, but he remembers his father.”
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9