In From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, popularized SMERSH as “the official murder organization of the Soviet government.” In fact, during World War II, the Soviet army did have special units called SMERSH to spy on the armed forces, liquidate disloyal elements, and track down Nazi agents.
The KGB went out of existence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In Russia, the spy organization split into two principal parts: The Russian foreign intelligence service, the old First Chief Directorate, became the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (SVR), which carries out espionage abroad. The Federal Security Service (FSK, later the FSB) became the successor to the KGB’s internal-security and counterintelligence departments.
Although the FBI sometimes conducts surveillances abroad in espionage cases, if it informs the local intelligence service, the risk of a leak increases. If it does not do so, and the foreign government discovers it, there may be unpleasant diplomatic repercussions. Moreover, the CIA is unhappy when the FBI operates in foreign countries, since foreign-intelligence operations are primarily its responsibility.
In recognition of his service, the Soviet government awarded a lifetime pension to his widow and money to his children, Oleg, the future spy, and his sister, Neonila, until they completed their educations. Likhachev’s father-in-law, Ivan A. Likhachev, was a major player in the industrial development of the Soviet Union and ran the Stalin automobile factory for years. He was familiar with American automobile production and design, having toured all the major auto plants in the United States during the early 1930s. He had even worked at Ford plants in the United States for two years.
CHAPTER 11
Cassidy had thirty days’ leave every year and could get away almost any time, but the Soviets may have reasoned that it would look normal for him to travel around holidays.
TP stood for “Tampa.” He was also given another coded designation, TP510-OA. The last two letters stood for “operational asset.”
Xerxes, the Persian king, was only indirectly the source of the code name. Peterson rode into headquarters every day with an FBI agent whose initials were F.X. and whose nickname was Xerxes. The name popped into Peterson’s head as he was casting about for a new cryptonym. Although Peterson had his own reasons for the phonetic variation, the FBI sometimes deliberately skews code words to give them added security. A mole inside the FBI who overheard the code name ZYRKSEEZ for example, would very likely look in files under the letter X and not find it.
CHAPTER 12
It was in October 1968, while Lopez worked for the Olympic Committee, that Cassidy attended the games in Mexico City and waited in vain in the barrio for the Soviet contact who never came.
Mexico: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1971; 3d ed., 1979. The title translates as The Chicanos: An Exploited National Minority. Lopez has also been published in English. See The Chicanos: Life and Struggles of the Mexican Minority in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
Although PALMETTO was the FBI code name for the Lopez phase of the operation, the term was used interchangeably to refer to the case, to Lopez himself, or in plural form to Lopez and his wife, Alicia.
Tetrahydroxyquinone is an organic compound used in chemistry as a titration indicator to detect the presence of barium and other substances.
One-time pads, usually no bigger than a postage stamp, are printed on nitrated cellulose, which burns instantly. A spy receiving a message in encoded five-digit groups first subtracts the random numbers on the one-time pad and then converts the resulting total into words from a matrix containing the letters of the alphabet. Each page is used only once and burned. Since only two copies of the pad exist, one in Moscow and one in the possession of the spy, the codes are virtually unbreakable.
CHAPTER 13
Whoever wrote the parol probably did not know English very well and used “That’s Rex” instead of “This is Rex. . . .”
The letter would almost certainly arrive after the attack had begun, making it only marginally useful. In a bizarre touch, if the date of the likely attack was more than a week in the future, Cassidy was instructed only to mail a letter to Freundlich rather than use the telephone at all. To the FBI, the Soviet plan did not make a lot of sense. Apparently, the GRU had much more faith in the postal service than do most Americans.
Ixora, often grown in greenhouses, is named after the Hindu deity Isvara.
Maxwell’s financial empire was collapsing at the time of his mysterious death in November 1991. Maxwell, sixty-eight, disappeared during the night from his hundred-foot yacht in the Atlantic, near the Canary Islands. His body was found hours later, floating in the sea. Although Spanish authorities said Maxwell had died of a heart attack, his death was ruled a suicide by Lloyd’s of London, which refused to pay his insurance. To support its conclusion, Lloyd’s noted that Maxwell had asked his private jet to circle the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, on November 4, the last full day of his life, as though in a final salute.
On November 14, 1991, shortly after Maxwell’s death, The Times of London reported that the British Foreign Office was investigating allegations that the Soviet Communist Party had aided Pergamon Press financially by placing it in the category of “friendly firms” that were given priority in settling Soviet debts.
DEFCON stands for “defense condition.” There are five categories of alerts. The lower the number, the greater the level of readiness. For example, DEFCON 5 is the normal state of alert; DEFCON 2 means war is imminent; and DEFCON 1 means hostilities have begun. On May 8, when U.S. forces went to DEFCON 4, the Pacific Command was already at DEFCON 3 because of the Vietnam War.
If officials at headquarters did weigh the risk, they did not communicate this to the Tampa office, according to Jack O’Flaherty.
CHAPTER 14
At the time, Americans were just becoming accustomed to security precautions at domestic airports. Six months earlier, on December 15, 1972, the FAA had imposed the rule that all passengers and carry-on baggage be screened by metal detectors and X-ray machines or searched by hand.
On the face of it, the parol seemed fairly wacky, since both Maryland cities were more than two hundred miles away. Perhaps Danilin, being unfamiliar with the geography of New York, simply stuck to locations he knew. On the other hand, in the unlikely event that the Soviet spy went up to the wrong person—not too many people would be walking around Brooklyn with a pipe and a yellow package—whoever was approached would certainly not recommend a movie theater in Rockville. Conversely, in the one-in-a-million chance that a real stranger came up to Cassidy and asked directions to a drive-in theater, his reply would be so baffling that there certainly would be no danger of Cassidy mistaking the person for his Soviet contact.
CHAPTER 15
At the time of the Pentagon ceremony the former U.S. commander in Vietnam was suffering from lung cancer, but it would not be diagnosed for another two months. He underwent surgery in June to remove his left lung but died on September 4, 1974, at age fifty-nine.
CHAPTER 16
The title of his dissertation was “Conquest and Resistance: The Origin of the Chicano National Minority in the Nineteenth Century (A Marxist View).”
“ Pachuco is a term for a cool guy, a Mexican American in the 1940s who wore zoot suits and was considered a hipster,” according to Lisa Navarrete, director of public information for the National Council of La Raza.
In 1993, the intelligence division was renamed the national security division.
CHAPTER 17
The Washington Post, July 31, 1997, p. A13.
There was reason to believe that the material passed to the Soviets by Joe Cassidy was not legally declassified. “If we did declassify a document passed to the Soviets,” said one former counterintelligence official, “we would have to declassify every copy and every other document like it. If the Soviets ever managed to obtain a second copy stamped ‘declassified,’ they’d know we were playing games.”
Even two decades later, with the cold war over, the two Justice Department attorneys were not eager to talk about the PALMETTO case. Martin refused to comment. Tafe, still a lawyer in the internal-security section, declined to speak on the record.
Under the 1972 Supreme Court ruling outlawing capital punishment, there was no death penalty for espionage from that year until 1994, when Congress, in the wake of the Aldrich Ames spy case, restored the penalty if certain criteria were met. (The Supreme Court restored capital punishment in the states in 1976.) Had the Lopezes been convicted of espionage in 1978, they could have been sentenced to a prison term of any number of years or life, but they would not have faced the death penalty.
The espionage statutes generally bar disclosure not of “classified information” but of “information relating to the national defense.” Since 1951, documents have been classified by presidential executive orders, not by law. In practice, since the 1960s, the Justice Department has generally taken the position that data must be classified at the level of secret or above to fall within the definition of “national defense” information. But the statute does not require that the documents be classified. Under the language of the espionage laws, therefore, even if the material left in the rocks had technically been “declassified,” that would not necessarily bar the prosecution of a person who retrieved it and passed it to a foreign power.
The official report that Parker filed afterward, known as a 302 report, summarized the interview: “RIVAS was shown photographs of both he and his wife engaged in espionage activities. . . . Upon viewing the photographs he stated, ‘You have all of the evidence.’ RIVAS further admitted that he was a Soviet agent. . . . RIVAS said he decided to work actively against the United States at a very young age. He explained that he could have become a terrorist or do nothing to help his country. But he decided to work for the Soviets in order to make a positive effort.”
The requirement that the FISA court approve break-ins to conduct physical searches in foreign-intelligence cases, except in places such as embassies, was added to the law by Congress in 1994, following the arrest of CIA mole Aldrich Ames. Beginning in June 1993, the FBI wiretapped Ames’s home with a FISA court warrant. On October 9, again with a FISA warrant, bureau agents entered his house to bug the rooms while the Ameses were out of town attending a wedding in Pensacola, Florida. During the same entry, the FBI also searched the premises and downloaded his computer without a warrant, acting on the authority of Attorney General Janet Reno. Had the case gone to trial, Ames’s lawyer, Plato Cacheris, was prepared to test the warrantless search. Ames, however, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, and there was no court case.
Robert L. Keuch, a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division during the PALMETTO investigation, says he would take that view. “Once you’ve made a pinhole, I think you’ve entered.”
Both were convicted and fined for violating the civil rights of the persons whose homes were searched; they were pardoned by President Reagan in April 1981.
Humphrey and Truong were convicted of spying for Vietnam. They were each sentenced to fifteen years.
CHAPTER 18
When the CIA began losing agents inside the Soviet Union in 1985, for example, the agency first grasped at the possibility that poor tradecraft by the agents or a code break explained the losses. Only much later did the CIA face up to the probability that there was a mole within, a Russian spy who turned out to be Aldrich Ames. Partly because of the institutional reluctance to think the unthinkable, it took nine years to catch him.
The entertainer, then twenty-six, was billed as Kathie Lee Johnson at the time.
This time Cassidy did not conceal the rock at a drop site, since his instructions did not specify one.
Both the KGB and the GRU recalled anyone who had been pitched by a Western intelligence service, in order to remove the officer from any temptation. Failure to report a pitch was regarded as a very serious offense.
CHAPTER 19
The rock, as big as a house, is located to the north of a playground in an area of the park known as “The Dene,” a British term for a dune or sandy area near the seashore. The rustic shelter that sits atop the rock formation now was not there at the time that IXORA was active.
IXORA told the FBI that he had once sent a signal from the Central Park rock, but that he could not remember the date or the circumstances. Oddly, and for reasons IXORA never explained, he did not transmit from the rock after he received the warning call from Cassidy in May 1972; the watching FBI agents saw him go straight to a dead drop. After Freundlich began cooperating with the FBI in 1978, he was not asked why he had failed to go to the rock; the bureau did not want to compromise Operation SHOCKER by revealing to IXORA that it knew about the call.
The procedure is also known within Soviet intelligence as giving “a sign of life.”
Twenty years later, Sheila Horan, in Nairobi and wearing a white hard hat, became a familiar face to television viewers all over the world as head of the FBI team that investigated the August 7, 1998, terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
CHAPTER 21
The ten spies were the six Soviets who handled Joe Cassidy, IXORA’S control, and the three illegals. The six Soviet handlers were Boris M. Polikarpov, Gennady Dimitrievich Fursa, Boris G. Kolodjazhnyi, Mikhail I. Danilin, Oleg Ivanovich Likhachev, and Vladimir Vybornov. The seventh Soviet spy was Nikolai I. Alenochkin, IXORA’s handler. The three illegals were Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, and his wife, Alicia Lopez, the PALMETTOS ; and Edmund Freundlich, IXORA.
A CIA report released in 1997 provided further details; the munitions stored at the site included 122 mm “binary sarin” rockets “filled with a mixture of GB and GF.”
“Leader of Protest March Calls U.S. Adviser’s Death ‘Logical,’ ” United Press International, May 27, 1983. Schaufelberger, thirty-three, of San Diego, was one of six members of a group assigned to El Salvador to coordinate military aid. He was shot in the head four times while waiting in a car for a friend on a college campus in San Salvador.
The newspaper’s account mentioned Lopez as one of four notable foreign speakers.
More recently, word filtered back to FBI headquarters in Washington that Gilberto and Alicia Lopez had divorced.
Associated Press, June 11, 1998.
The Houston Chronicle, July 31, 1998, p. A28.
The approach to Alenochkin was one of the last moves in Operation SHOCKER , which ran from its beginnings in 1958 until 1981, when Alenochkin was contacted by IXORA and Danilin left Canada. Within that time frame, Cassidy’s own role extended almost twenty-one years, from the day he was dangled to the GRU in March 1959 at the YMCA in Washington until his final telephone call to the Soviet mission in New York in October 1979.
His son, Michael, had preceded him. Because the family is Jewish, Michael, who is also a chemist, received permission to leave the Soviet Union for Israel. From there, he made his way to the United States. Libman then came to visit his son and received permission from the immigration authorities to stay.
Schamay and another FBI agent were depositing some evidence money in the bank, when the bank robber made the mistake of getting in line behind them. Schamay was shot in the shoulder but helped to subdue the man, Robert James Anderson, who was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years for attempted bank robbery and ten years for assault on a federal officer with a deadly weapon.
Elmore thus became the third FBI agent to be killed, at least indirectly, in Operation SHOCKER ; he had volunteered to go to Minnesota to work on the PALMETTO case as a way to get back to the West Coast.