David Wise: Cassidy's Run

Minnesota was experiencing freak weather conditions that week. The day after the fatal crash, tornadoes ripped through Crow Wing, Wadena, and Otter Tail counties in central Minnesota, injuring seventeen persons. Some of the worst damage occurred in Brainerd, about a hundred miles from the crash site.

The exact cause of the crash may never be known. The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates most aviation accidents, has no record of the crash. Betty Scott, an NTSB spokesperson, said that in 1977 the NTSB did not investigate crashes of planes flying on government business, although it sometimes does today. “Even though the plane was owned by an individual, if it was on official business, it would not be in our system.”

Otto later rose to associate director of the FBI, then the number-two position in the bureau, and for nearly six months in 1987 he served as acting director after FBI chief William H. Webster left to head the CIA.

FBI agents are rarely killed in the line of duty. The Tribune story noted that the last two agents to die on duty had also been stationed in Minneapolis—Ron Williams and Jack Coler, killed in 1975 at Wounded Knee.

1. Mrs. Pullman never lived in the house. She sold the ornate mansion in 1913 soon after it was completed; a few months later it was sold again, this time to the czarist government. It did not become an embassy until the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933.

Cassidy would have preferred a more exciting code name, but he had no choice; WALLFLOWER it was. Most FBI code names for individuals are chosen at random and have no special meaning.

Although the public was generally unaware of it, the army in those years operated its own nuclear power plants, including a plant at Fort Belvoir, used for research and training as well as to generate electricity. The Army Corps of Engineers built the plants in the early 1950s, mostly to provide power to military bases in remote areas. In addition to the plants at Belvoir, Idaho Falls, and Fort Greeley, Alaska, the army also ran a nuclear plant for the air force in Sundance, Wyoming, and one in Greenland, nine hundred miles from the North Pole. By 1973, the army was out of the nuclear power business, and the plants had been shut down.

Polikarpov, in this first request, asked for information about nuclear power, a much less sensitive topic than, for example, nuclear weapons. Often, an officer of the GRU or the KGB made an initial request for something even more innocuous—perhaps an unclassified telephone book or manual. If the potential recruit provided it, the officer would ratchet up a notch and ask for a more important document. From there, the officer might ask for secret information and offer to pay for it. Polikarpov was more or less following the traditional script.

Under government rules, the FBI was allowed to use the Soviet money it received in this manner to pay the actual costs of the double-agent operation. Any amount over that had to be turned over to the Treasury. One of the ironies of the espionage activities of the cold war is that the Russians actually ended up paying part of the cost of their own deception in SHOCKER. The money flowed both ways, of course; during those years, hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to sources who were actually working for the KGB or the GRU, or equally for both sides.

The code name changed over the years, partly for reasons of security but also to distinguish various phases of the case. The operation’s first code name was CHOWLINE. Later, both the FBI and the army used the code name ZYRKSEEZ (the phonetic spelling of Xerxes, the Persian king who ruled in the fifth century B.C.).By 1971, the code name SHOCKER had been adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the same year the FBI chose the code name PALMETTO for the University of Minnesota professor in what became the final stage of the long-running affair. Also in 1971, the FBI coined the code word IXORA for a startling offshoot of the case. To avoid unnecessary confusion, the operation is generally referred to here as SHOCKER, the name used at the highest level of the Pentagon, although it was not a cryptonym used by the FBI.

There are some nuances and differences among the various terms. Not every double-agent operation, for example, involves transmitting false information to an adversary service.

S-2 was in charge of counterintelligence against the KGB in Washington. S-1, known informally as “Deep Snow,” handled Soviet cases of especial sensitivity. All three squads were supervised by Ludwig W. R. Oberndorf, “Obie” to all in the bureau.

Of all of Cassidy’s Russian case officers, Danilin was the only one actually entitled to call himself “Mike,” since his first name, Mikhail, is the Russian equivalent of Michael.

Something went terribly wrong at Dugway during a nerve-gas test on March 14, 1968. Some 6,400 sheep were killed in two Utah valleys, apparently by a cloud of VX. Although the army has never officially taken responsibility for the sheep kill, it has skirted close to an admission. A month after the sheep died, the army said evidence “points to the Army’s involvement.” In January 1998, Colonel John Como, Dugway’s commander, said that a test of “a lethal chemical agent at Dugway… may have contributed to the deaths of the sheep.” Despite the army’s half denials, the government compensated the ranchers for their lost animals.

Atropine, a derivative of the deadly belladonna plant, is a principal antidote to nerve gas. Belladonna, which means “beautiful lady” in Italian, is a highly poisonous plant of the nightshade family with purple or red flowers. Another antidote is 2-PAM, pralidoxime chloride, one of a class of chemicals known as oximes that restore the normal action of cholinesterase. 2-PAM, however, is ineffective against soman (GD) after two minutes. Both atropine and 2-PAM, along with an injector, are contained in the MARK-I kits provided to U.S. troops.

The army’s chilling official description of sarin goes on to warn:

Symptoms of overexposure may occur within minutes or hours, depending upon dose. They include: miosis (constriction of pupils) and visual effects, headaches and pressure sensation, runny nose and nasal congestion, salivation, tightness in the chest, nausea, vomiting, giddiness, anxiety, difficulty in thinking and sleeping, nightmares, muscle twitches, tremors, weakness, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, involuntary urination and defecation. With severe exposure symptoms progress to convulsions and respiratory failure.

Scientists express the degree of deadliness of a nerve gas with the term LD (for lethal dose) 50, meaning the amount that will kill 50 percent of those exposed to it. The smaller the amount needed to reach LD50, the stronger the agent. For VX absorbed through the skin, the LD50 is ten milligrams for a 154-pound man. For skin exposure to soman, the LD50 is 350 milligrams.

In addition, the army in the mid-1960s had a wide variety of weapons capable of delivering both GB and VX, including 105 mm howitzers, 105 mm rocket launchers, and Honest John and Sergeant missiles. The air force had thousand-pound bombs containing 198 gallons of GB.