David Wise: Cassidy's Run

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Washington Post, July 31, 1997, p. A13.