Cassidy's Run (11 page)

Lopez continued to service the drops in Florida. On the night of September 10, 1972, Joe Cassidy left a rock at a new drop site at Anvil Street and Twenty-sixth Avenue North, in St. Petersburg. The film contained one document stamped
SECRET
and several marked with lower classifications. The document stamped
SECRET
must have pleased Danilin because it was the first to deal with nuclear weapons. Dated February 1, 1972, it was entitled “Operational Feasibility in Mating Nuclear Bombs to Aircraft.” A March 1971 document marked
CONFIDENTIAL
was headed “General Flag Officer Staffing in OJCS and JCS Activities.”

The factory of the Morgan Yacht Company overlooked the drop site, and O’Flaherty and his agents, having obtained permission from the owner, were waiting on scaffolds along the windows inside. “Lopez arrives at 9:27
P.M.
in a white Pontiac with black hardtop, with his wife and son,” O’Flaherty said. The car parked at the corner. Lopez got out, knelt at the stop sign, and picked up the hollow rock. He returned to the car, and they drove off.

Nearly two months later, on November 2, Cassidy received a letter from Danilin. The paper inside appeared blank, as usual. When he developed the secret writing and showed it to the FBI, the message was unnerving. Danilin asked
by name
for specific U.S. military documents that he wanted. How could the GRU have obtained such a shopping list of secret documents? The implication was both obvious and scary: Moscow had a genuine mole buried somewhere in the American military, perhaps one who had access to an index or list of classified material but not to the actual documents.

One document Danilin requested was entitled “Vol. II - Joint Strategic Objectives Plan for Fiscal Year 1975-1982 (USOPFY 75-82).” Danilin also asked Cassidy for data on the yield and number of warheads of Minuteman III and Poseidon missiles.

Then in December, five days before Christmas, Cassidy put down another rock at the street sign by the marina along Bay Shore Drive. Inside was film of four documents marked
SECRET
and of others with lower classification stamps. The document marked
SECRET
, although not the one Danilin had requested, was dated September 19, 1972, and was called “Nuclear Capabilities Reporting, JCS message No. 5252.”

At 9:22
P.M.
, a yellow compact with Florida plates cruised by the drop site. Four minutes later, Lopez was seen alone nearby, walking south on Bay Shore Drive. At the street sign, he picked up the rock, put it in a camera case, and strolled away. Lopez had checked into the St. Petersburg Hilton the day before at dawn. He checked out the next day and took a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C.

The next drop in St. Petersburg took place on April 1, 1973. The Russians had approved a new drop site in a quiet residential area at Eighty-ninth Avenue North and Fifth Street North. Casing the area, O’Flaherty saw that it was next to a construction site. The builder, Aaron Applefield, allowed the FBI to use the model home on the site as a lookout post. Fred and Pearl Redfield, an elderly couple whose home overlooked the drop site, also allowed the FBI to use their house. An agent loitered on the street in a phone booth.

Cassidy put down his hollow rock at 9
P.M.
It contained photographs of three documents stamped
SECRET
and of several others marked with lower classifications. At 9:33
P.M.
, the waiting agents spotted Lopez driving alone near the drop site in a yellow late-model Fiat. A moment later, Lopez, with his German shepherd on a leash, approached the corner, doing his best to look like a neighborhood resident out walking his dog. He picked up the rock, got back in the Fiat, and took off.

Lopez then drove to Washington. Again not wanting to alarm the spy, the FBI did not tail the car but instead set up a “picket surveillance,” with agents stationed along his likely route.

This was the last drop and pickup in Florida. One month earlier, Cassidy, at age fifty-two, with thirty years in the service, had retired from the army. That did not discourage the Soviets, who were making plans to use their mole in a new capacity.
WALLFLOWER
had left the military but not his life as a spy.

In Austin, the
PALMETTO
case took a bizarre and astonishing twist. Flores had done his job so well that Lopez tried to recruit him.

“He came by one night and pitched me in my living room in Texas. He wanted to recruit me. He said, ‘I have friends in Mexico that work for another government. I told them about you, and they are very interested.’ He asked to take a photograph of me ‘to show to my friends.’ I said sure, so he took a photograph of me.

“He said, ‘They won’t come here, you have to go to Mexico.’ ”

Headquarters debated the risks of letting Flores travel to Mexico. “Finally, the bureau said, ‘No, don’t go. You know too much about the technical side.’ The cameras we used in Austin that worked through the pinpricks in the ceiling were the same kind that were used by NASA in the moon landing. We got the cameras from NASA. The bureau didn’t want the Soviets to know we had that technology. They were concerned I might be invited to Nicaragua or the Soviet Union and given sodium Pentothal.”

There was another reason that the FBI declined to let Flores go to Mexico. “If we operate outside the U.S., we are going to have to let the CIA know about it. The bureau did not want to involve the CIA.”

In the summer of 1974, the Lopezes left their books and furniture with Flores and went off to Europe. “They visited the Soviet Union,” Flores said. “They told friends they had been all over Europe. It was a cover story. We think he spent the summer in Moscow.”

That autumn, Flores prepared to end his undercover role and transfer to the bureau’s Los Angeles division. The
PALMETTO
assignment, and the pretense, had not been easy on his wife. He had already followed Lopez to two cities. “I thought I had done enough. I wanted my son to get into first grade in California and not be uprooted again.”

Flores told Lopez he and his family were moving away. “Gilberto was already thinking about leaving Austin. When we were saying good-bye, he said he had applied to the University of Minnesota. He said he might become a professor.”

C H A P T E R: 13

IXORA

When Cassidy, still
on active duty, had met with Mikhail Danilin in Washington in July 1971, the microdot inside the hollow rock that he retrieved at his drop site contained an extraordinary set of instructions. Cassidy was ordered, if he detected military preparations for war, to call a telephone number in New York City.

The instructions also provided the “parol,” or recognition dialogue, that Cassidy was to speak to the man who answered the telephone. The microdot gave the man’s name as Edmund Freundlich, and his address as Apartment 1A, 2770 Kingsbridge Terrace, Bronx, NY, 10463.

The FBI quickly verified that this was in fact the name and address of the man in apartment 1A. Clearly, Edmund Freundlich was a Soviet “sleeper agent,” a faceless spy among the millions of people in New York City, whose job was to serve as a sort of one-man early-warning system in the event of a planned nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. A sleeper agent is a long-term spy planted inside an enemy country with orders to engage in a minimal amount of espionage activities, or none at all, so that he can be activated primarily in case of war or an emergency.

While no target was specified, the primary concern of the Russians was obviously to obtain advance news of an attack against the Soviet Union. A warning call that the United States was mobilizing against some other country would certainly have been of interest to the Soviets as well. But whatever other duties may have been assigned to him by Moscow, Edmund Freundlich’s most important job was to wait for the phone call that might mark the start of World War III.

If Freundlich ever received a phone call alerting the Soviets to a nuclear attack, the conversation would be cryptic and the meaning indecipherable to anyone who overheard it. On the microdot Cassidy got from Danilin, he was told that if he had to make the call, he was to go to a pay phone, dial the number, and inquire about an order for books.

Cassidy was instructed to say, “Mr. Freundlich? That’s [
sic
] Rex, how about my order for [a number indicating a future date] books?”¹ The number given would signify the number of days until the attack and would depend on the circumstances. In the microdot, Cassidy was given an example of three numbers: 11, 22, and 55. The numbers were to be understood as single digits; thus 11 would mean one day, 22 two days, and so on. For example, if Cassidy called on October 10 and believed an attack was to be launched on October 12, he was to say, “That’s Rex, how about my order for twenty-two books?” Freundlich was to respond, “For twenty-two it’s okay.” After that, Cassidy was instructed by the Soviets to “just hang up the receiver.” He was to follow up with a letter, which would appear to be a business letter confirming his book order, but on the back of the letter, using secret writing, he was directed to provide details of the U.S. plan of attack.²

There was only one problem with the instructions Cassidy received on the microdot. The phone number he had been given by the Russians was wrong: The last two digits were transposed. Cassidy had been told to call a number ending with 2835. But when the FBI looked up Edmund Freundlich in the Bronx telephone book, it found that his number ended with 2853.

One would suppose that with the warning of a possible nuclear Armageddon depending on Joe Cassidy, the GRU would have made sure that the telephone number he had been given was correct. But the devil is in the details, and things often go wrong in the spy business, as in any other human endeavor. This, however, was a wrong number to end all wrong numbers.

To the bureau, the fact that the GRU had provided the true name and address of its sleeper in New York was seen as further evidence that Moscow completely trusted Joe Cassidy. For the Soviets to share this information with Cassidy was an extraordinary expression of confidence in him.

Operation
SHOCKER
had now flushed three illegals: Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, his wife, Alicia Lopez, and Edmund Freundlich.

The FBI opened a new case file on Edmund Freundlich. At the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, Gene Peterson gave him his own code name:
IXORA
. Ixora is a tropical plant that Peterson had cultivated in his garden in Tampa, where he worked for the FBI before coming to Washington. “It’s also called the iron bush, because the trunk would get a black mold on it,” he said. “It has beautiful red flowers. It only blossoms on second-year wood. When you trim it, you have to know it won’t bloom until two years later. It’s like forsythia that way.”³

A reclusive, fifty-two-year-old bachelor, Freundlich seemed an unlikely spy. He appeared to have few friends and to live a drab, colorless existence. But perhaps that is precisely why he was chosen for his role—a gray man who blended almost invisibly into the background.

Edmund Freundlich, according to records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, was born in Vienna on April 14, 1919. The family name means “friendly” in German, an dispronounced “Froyndlish.”

In March 1938 Hitler’s army marched into Austria and the country was annexed as part of the Third Reich. On August 14, five months after the Anschluss, Freundlich, then nineteen, entered Switzerland at Diepoldsau, just across the Rhine from Austria, as a refugee from the Nazis. Freundlich spent the war in refugee camps in Switzerland. According to records of the Swiss police in the canton of Saint Gallen, he spent time in a camp at Schönengrund, near Appenzell, and for four years, from February 1940, he was in a camp at Diepoldsau. The police files show that from November 13, 1944, until April 20, 1945, he was at the immigrant work camp at Zurich-Seebach. He left Switzerland and returned to Austria on August 29, 1945.

But the bare-bones records of the Swiss police do not tell the whole story. Two of Edmund Freundlich’s brothers also made their way to Switzerland in 1939 and later to the Dominican Republic. His brother Oswald emigrated to New York in 1951 and went into business chartering cargo ships.

According to Oswald’s son, Robert, Edmund’s mother, Anna, was a Catholic who converted to Judaism when she married his father, Wilhelm. “Wilhelm was abusive and gambled away his wife’s small business. Anna and Wilhelm tried to enter Switzerland at some point but were turned back. I’m not sure if they were stopped at the border or got in and were turned back and went to occupied France. We found their names on the train list, the trains that went to Auschwitz.”

Edmund’s brother Oswald was also sent to the refugee camp in Switzerland at Schönengrund, where he met his future wife, Gina. A Swiss guard, later honored in Israel for his actions, forged documents and saved Gina and her entire family, as well as other refugees who lacked required papers and would otherwise have been shipped back to Germany and the death camps. “After the war,” Robert recalled, “Edmund had a complete breakdown and was institutionalized in Austria, for up to a year. I visited him in 1964. He worked in the Austrian equivalent of our social security. That was the first time I ever met him. It was an overwhelming experience, he looked so much like my dad, it was stunning.”

Sponsored by his brother, on April 16, 1968, Edmund Freundlich was admitted to the United States on an immigrant visa, after swearing he would not engage in “espionage . . . or in other activities subversive to the national security.” On his visa application, he listed his address as Kirchberggasse 24, Vienna, and his occupation as office worker. His decision to leave Austria for America puzzled Robert’s wife, Jill. “For many years he didn’t want to come here,” she said. “Then, suddenly, he wanted to come.” What his family did not know, of course, was that he had been recruited by Soviet intelligence and was to work as a spy in New York.

Jill was fond of Uncle Edmund. “He had almost a childlike quality, he gave very thoughtful, wonderful presents to the children. He was good-looking, tall, he had a poet’s face, sandy hair. He was almost six feet tall. He lived in Kingsbridge Terrace, in a very poor neighborhood, mainly Hispanic. He lived in a hovel. His apartment was small and dirty. He kept every piece of paper, newspapers piled floor to ceiling.

“He never married. He never brought a date to family gatherings. He did not seem interested in material things. He was into natural things and holistic medicine. He was a lovely, sweet, genuinely nice person. A good-hearted person. If you didn’t get onto politics, anything controversial, he was lovely.

“He had a healthy distrust of the government and was pro-Russia. He hated the way the Americans treated the Indians, pushed them off their land and was still treating them badly. He talked openly about liking the Russians. There would be political debates. Robert would argue with him.”

Robert Freundlich confirmed that he got into political arguments with his uncle. “He was not so much pro-Russian as anti-U.S. A highly neurotic man. It was extremely difficult to have rational discussions with him.”

A year after Edmund arrived in the United States, he went to work at Pergamon Press, in Elmsford, New York, near Tarrytown, at a salary of $13,000 a year. He commuted by bus each weekday.

This may not have been a random choice of an employer. The man who owned Pergamon Press, Robert Maxwell, born Ian Ludwik Hoch in Czechoslovakia, also fled the Nazis in 1939 and built a publishing empire in Britain and the United States, acquiring the Mirror Group in London, the New York
Daily News,
and the American publishing company Macmillan, in addition to Pergamon. Maxwell was close to the Soviets, and a number of his executives at Pergamon were also from Eastern Europe. Whether Maxwell had any knowledge that he had a Russian spy on his payroll is unknown, but, whether by chance or not, Freundlich obtained work with the one publisher in the United States who maintained friendly relations with the Soviets during the cold war.
⁴

Laszlo Straka was president of the publishing house in 1971, when Cassidy was given his microdot instructions. He said Maxwell started the press in the late 1950s as a subsidiary of the British parent company of the same name. Born in Hungary, Straka spent his whole career working for the Maxwell interests.

“We were a scientific-technical publisher, and the American branch also published some journals,” Straka recalled. “Edmund Freundlich was a low-level employee. He actually worked for a separate company, also headquartered at Pergamon, with the same phone number, called Maxwell Scientific International, which bought and sold back issues of scientific journals. It was run by Dr. Edward Gray, originally Ed Grunberg, a Romanian Jew. It was Dr. Gray, now dead, who hired Edmund Freundlich.

“He worked as a cataloguer of the scientific journals. So he was in the records ends of things. He always carried around his lunch in a little brown bag. I knew he was from Europe. A quiet sort of man, kept to himself.”

Straka confirmed that Maxwell had strong links to the Russians. “The English Pergamon did a fair amount of Soviet translations, and Maxwell considered himself a sort of ambassador to the Soviets and visited Russia frequently. We distributed Soviet scientific journals in the U.S.”
⁵

Robert Miranda, a former vice president of Pergamon, also remembered Freundlich. “He was a sort of a recluse type of a guy, very smart but a loner. He collected all kinds of material, he was a continuous collector of junk. I wondered if it had to do with his years in the camps.”

Lori Miranda, Robert Miranda’s daughter, worked directly with Freundlich. “I worked for the microfilm department, and Eddie worked with back issues. We all sat in the same room. The thing I remember most about him, he was a pack rat. The microfilm used to come in little square boxes. Every once in a while I gave him the boxes, and he was very excited. Offbeat, but a nice guy.

“One time he drew a picture of a thumb and put it on the wall and wrote, ‘Press here.’ People would come over and press it. It was a joke. Eddie enjoyed that.”

Freundlich was placed under surveillance by the FBI, and his apartment was wiretapped. His own brother had trouble feigning interest in Edmund’s life. The FBI listened to Edmund on the telephone, talking on and on to his brother, and Oswald would start to snore.

Donald F. Lord, a former FBI agent and one of many assigned to watch
IXORA
, said the bureau discreetly moved into Freundlich’s apartment house. “We had an apartment in the same building. He was on the ground floor. We were on the third floor. But we could see him from the window when he went out and walked across the courtyard. It was frustrating. He didn’t do anything. He would just ride the subway or walk around the Bronx.”

Charles T. Weis, who headed the bureau’s GRU squad in New York, remembered the lookout post because he had lugged a spare bedroom set from his house and wrestled it into the Bronx apartment with the help of another FBI agent.

“We had spot surveillance on
IXORA
because he was so predictable,” Weis said. “Initially we were on him all the time. It wasn’t necessary to maintain continuous surveillance once we established a pattern—what time he went to work and when he came home and what he did on weekends.

“We could see whatever he did, which wasn’t very much. He was a real lost soul.”

Edgar Dade formed much the same impression of
IXORA
. “He was a strange bird, pale complexion, frail, you would never think he was a spy. You would never think he was anything.”

Dade did remember one incident. Late at night, Freundlich left his apartment and took a trip by subway to Manhattan. “I was on the surveillance,” Dade said. “It was difficult because the train was almost empty.” Dade watched as Freundlich got off in midtown and went to the main post office, where he mailed a letter. “In Soviet intelligence procedure, that was considered a safer way to mail a letter,” Dade said. The probable reason, he explained, is that if a spy is seen dropping a letter in a mailbox, it can be retrieved by a counterintelligence agency more easily than if it is mixed in with thousands of letters at a central post office. “He was definitely doing something,” Dade added. “You don’t normally go all the way downtown from the Bronx at night by subway to mail a letter.” Freundlich often traveled around New York City, mostly by subway, and some of his trips—such as his late-night excursion to the main post office—appeared to be related to an intelligence purpose.