Cassidy's Run by David Wise Read Free Book Online Page A

store the gas and reduces the danger to pilots and troops who must handle it. Moscow also wanted to know if the scientists at Edgewood might be working on newer and even deadlier forms of nerve gas. At a meeting in May 1965, Danilin asked Cassidy to find out the formula for the version of VX produced in the Edgewood lab. He gave Cassidy a hollow battery as a concealment device, as well as a specially treated sheet of carbon paper for secret writing. The carbon would enable Cassidy to send a message to the Russians on what appeared to be a blank piece of paper.
    As it turned out, in asking Cassidy for information about binary weapons, the GRU was inquiring into matters at the cutting edge of American nerve-gas technology. According to William C. Dee, a veteran official at Edgewood, Ben Witten, chief of organic research at the facility, came up with the concept of a binary system in 1957. In a test chamber at Edgewood, and in field tests of VX at Dugway, it worked. 9
    Saul Hormats, however, stopped the development of binary weapons in the 1960s. “It was put on ice by me for two reasons,” he said. “So that other countries wouldn’t get it. I didn’t want third-world nations making them in a barn in the boondocks. And second, it had no military value whatsoever. With the straight GB you had more agent in the shell; it is more efficient than the binary. The binary shell is a base ejection shell, which means the nerve gas shoots out the back of the shell and goes up in the air. With unitary munition it bursts right on the target. It is a different kind of shell, and it works better.”
    The United States did not begin production of binary artillery shells until 1985, almost two decades later. By the late 1980s, 155 mm binary shells containing sarin were being produced, Dee said, each containing 6.5 pounds of the gas.
    “I was furious when Reagan revived binary weapons,” said Hormats. But by that time, of course, he had retired and left Edgewood.
    In March 1966, Danilin gave Cassidy a rollover camera, a spy gadget developed by the Soviets to copy documents that was a kind of predecessor of today’s handheld scanners. “The camera was about the size of a pack of cigarettes,” Cassidy recalled, “but not as thick.” Cassidy simply rolled the camera over the document, and it automatically took a picture. He could capture an entire page in three passes of the camera. Cassidy did not have to extract the film. “I would give the whole camera to the Soviets and exchange it for a new one.” Over time, the GRU gave Cassidy three rollover cameras.
    FBI technicians examined these cameras, and one detail bothered Charlie Bevels. “They all had high serial numbers,” he recalled. “I wondered: Who else has these things?”
    An indication of the GRU’s trust in Cassidy was the fact that Danilin did not interrogate him on where or when he was able to use the rollover camera without being seen. At one point, Danilin did suggest that Cassidy take the material into the men’s room to copy it. That was not an option, Cassidy explained; there were no doors on the stalls at Edgewood. “I could have taken the documents to my car,” he said. “But they didn’t ask, and I didn’t explain.”
    The documents that Cassidy photographed and passed to Danilin were selected by army intelligence and approved at the highest echelon of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    One of those who ended up clearing the “feed,” as counterintelligence agents call such material, was Tom O’Laughlin, a former FBI agent who by 1962 had moved over to the Pentagon, as the direct result of a diktat by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. According to Bevels, O’Laughlin ran afoul of Hoover’s edict that FBI agents had to meet strict weight standards. “Hoover had a physical and found that his weight was higher than the Metropolitan Life standard,” Bevels said. “He went on a diet and felt so good he decided everyone would have to do it. . . .