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

[Tom] had a lot of trouble making weight.”
    The problem with the feed, of course, was the need to balance Cassidy’s credibility with the requirements of secrecy. These contradictory demands could never be completely reconciled. As in every such operation, some secrets had to be given away in order to protect the double agent. Officials in Washington were thus passing secret information to the Soviets, the disclosure of which by anyone else could have resulted in a long prison term for violation of the federal espionage laws.
    The difficult balancing act often led to tensions between the FBI and the Joint Chiefs. The bureau wanted to keep the Russians convinced by passing significant documents, but the Pentagon was reluctant to part with its classified secrets.
    Bevels recalled the conflict. “It was hard to get the military to give us stuff. Sometimes we wanted to put classification stamps on documents that weren’t classified, and we had trouble getting clearances from the military even to do that.”
    The meetings with Danilin almost always took place in the parking lot of a bowling alley in Springfield, Virginia, a Washington suburb. There, Cassidy passed the documents that he had photographed.
    “We would meet at nine P.M. , always on a Saturday night. I suppose this is when America is out partying and has its guard down.”
    Danilin, overjoyed to have a mole inside Edgewood, urged Cassidy to obtain everything he could on the nerve-gas program. He emphasized he wanted as much as possible about the chemical formulas and the makeup of the binary system. “He would say, ‘Find me anything you can on binary.’ He wanted information on all the nerve gases. He asked about VX. He asked about sarin. He asked about GD—‘Get everything you can about it.’ ”
    After two years, and with the Russians well hooked and pushing for every scrap Cassidy could provide, the counterintelligence agents in the FBI decided the moment they were waiting for had arrived. Danilin and the GRU trusted Cassidy.
    It was time for the deception.

C H A P T E R: 6
    THE DECEPTION
    Joe Cassidy was a plainspoken man, not by nature guileful. But the FBI agents who originally recruited him had unexpected good fortune; the modest master sergeant possessed the one quality that would carry him through. Joe Cassidy was a natural actor.
    And that quality was precisely what the FBI was counting on as the bureau and intelligence officials in the Defense Department began planning the deception late in 1965.
    In intelligence operations, deception material is also known as disinformation. Ironically, the very word
disinformation,
although adopted by U.S. counterintelligence, appears to have originated with the Russian word
dezinformatsiya.
¹
    In 1959, the KGB created a disinformation department known as Department D, part of the First Chief Directorate (FCD), headed by General Ivan I. Agayants. Its duties included fabricating documents and planting false intelligence to confuse and mislead foreign governments.
    In the Pentagon, an elaborate machinery existed to create and approve disinformation. False information was controlled by a whole series of secret boards under J-3, the operations umbrella of the Joint Chiefs. The FBI’s requests for deception material dealing with nerve gas were referred to one arm of J-3, the United States Evaluation Board (USEB), a little-known interagency intelligence committee. Its members were the heads of the intelligence organizations of the military services, along with representatives from the FBI and the CIA.
    The USEB was the first panel to rule on any deception operation that involved the military. After the USEB, the proposal moved over to another unit under J-3, the Special Assistant for Clandestine and Special Activity (SACSA). After SACSA approved the plan, since SHOCKER was an army project, it was sent to the army’s deputy chief of staff for operations (DCSOPS, pronounced “dess-ops”). Finally, after DCSOPS