Cassidy's Run

Starred review from February 28, 2000
This is a remarkable true-life espionage thriller. For 21 years, beginning in 1959, plainspoken, modest U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Cassidy successfully pretended to be a money-grubbing traitor to his country. In the eyes of his Soviet handlers, he was a mole planted deep inside the U.S. defense establishment. In fact, he was passing along secret nerve-gas formulas and military data--some of it genuine, some fake--to the Russians with the aim of sidetracking their chemical warfare program. Cassidy, now retired, was the star player in Operation Shocker, a top-secret FBI/Defense Department project that cost the lives of two FBI agents, flushed out 10 Communist spies and revealed the lengths to which Soviet intelligence would go to penetrate America's defenses. Wise (The Spy Who Got Away) takes readers deep inside the U.S. nerve-gas program, founded on the ashes of the Third Reich when U.S. Army intelligence obtained from ex-Nazi scientists the formulas for lethal agents like sarin. Wise also interviewed Vil Mirzayanov, a senior chemist who worked for three decades in the Soviet nerve-gas program, and who was arrested in 1992 for telling the world that the U.S.S.R. had developed Novichok, a nerve gas capable of killing millions of people instantly. Although both the U.S. and Russia have pledged to dispose of their chemical weapons, Wise reports that the Russians still possess Novichok. His taut narrative is full of bizarre twists and James Bond echoes--coded Soviet messages on microdots left inside hollow artificial rocks; a Russian sleeper agent in the Bronx, awaiting the signal for nuclear Armageddon; Cassidy's marriage to an ex-nun who conceals her past from him (and vice versa). To say this book would make a terrific movie in no way diminishes its value as an investigative scoop.

January 1, 2000
In 1959, at the height of the Cold War, the FBI decided to dangle a prospect in front of a Soviet embassy employee named Polikarpov. Polikarpov, a GRU officer, took the bait and enlisted Sergeant Joseph Cassidy as a for-cash agent. Their relationship continued for 23 years, during which the double agent solicited information that netted ten other Soviet spies and funneled an enormous mass of true, false, misleading, and trivial intelligence eastward. Much of the intelligence concerned the nerve gas research and production facility at Edgewood Arsenal and may have led the Soviets into expensive and dangerous blind alleys. Wise (The Invisible Government) tells this important history richly; details of the operation, especially the capture and release of two Mexican nationals who were confessed spies, make an interesting account of a U.S. intelligence success not previously publicized. Recommended for public libraries.--Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2000
Experienced espionage author Wise reveals an unusual double agent run by the FBI against Soviet military intelligence. The double agent, an army sergeant named Joseph Cassidy, was operational from 1959 to the early 1980s. To convince the Soviets he was their bona fide mole, Cassidy was instructed to pass genuine information about lethal nerve agents; the payoff, thought the FBI, was uncovering the Soviet espionage network that supported Cassidy. Uncovering the network furnishes the secret-agent thrills in this work. But the risk of the operation was the Soviets' being able to profit from the dope they were being fed, which Wise indicates possibly occurred in their development of a super nerve gas they called "Novichok." Perhaps that explains the U.S. Army's rejection of Wise's inquiries about the Cassidy operation. Less reticent, FBI veterans (and Cassidy himself) disclosed to Wise the paraphernalia of spycraft (surveillance, dead drops, etc.) used in the course of unmasking one Gilberto Lopez (now a politician in Mexico) and one Edmund Freundlich, a "sleeper" agent. Quality cloak-and-dagger history. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)