for the United States.¹
TOPHAT told John Mabey that he had trained a GRU agent whom the FBI had persuaded to cooperate, and who provided leads that enabled the bureau to arrest a GRU team of illegals, Robert K. Baltch and his wife, Joy Ann. The couple had taken the identities of a Roman Catholic priest from Amsterdam, New York, and a housewife in Norwalk, Connecticut, neither of whom were aware that their identities had been stolen by Russian spies. Jimmy Morrissey handled the Baltch case. It was only after completing the assignment that Morrissey was able to take over as case agent for Joe Cassidy.
Polyakov had also provided leads that led the FBI to investigate Herbert W. Boeckenhaupt, a young air force sergeant who repaired code machines for the Strategic Air Command. Boeckenhaupt was meeting secretly with a GRU officer in Washington.
The FBI’s counterintelligence agents customarily worked several cases at a time. The Boeckenhaupt case was also assigned to Morrissey, who by then was simultaneously juggling the Cassidy operation. On Halloween of 1966, the FBI arrested Boeckenhaupt in California. He was charged with betraying the Strategic Air Command’s codes to the Soviets, convicted in May 1967, and sentenced to thirty years.
During the summer of 1966, the GRU informed Cassidy that they would communicate with him from then on in encoded SW, as well as in plain text on microdots. A six-digit numerical code, he was told, was to be keyed to a dictionary and concealed on pages of SW. The coded messages would back up the microdots.²
In August, Cassidy picked up a hollow rock containing a rollover camera, a microdot, and a three-by-four-inch miniature dictionary. Entitled
The Universal Webster,
it was part of a series called Langenscheidt’s Universal Dictionaries, published by Barnes and Noble.
Cassidy explained how the code worked. “Each six-digit group led to a word. Suppose I got a message with the number 243124. I would go to page 243, then to the first column because of the 1, then to the twenty-fourth word on the page. The word might be
meet,
the first word in a message that said, ‘Meet me at Springfield bowling alley nine o’clock Saturday ten October.’ ”³
In March 1967, Cassidy recovered another rock containing an addition to the code, a numerical key designed to make the code a bit more difficult to crack. “To each group I would add 062520, my birthday. The sum would then work with the dictionary the same way.” 4
Although the deception phase of Operation SHOCKER was designed primarily to persuade Moscow that American scientists had developed the nerve gas GJ in binary form, there is evidence that documents dealing with deadly biological weapons were passed to the Soviets as well.
Charles Bevels, who succeeded Morrissey as WALLFLOWER’S case agent, said an army scientist at Fort Detrick had worked on a biological agent called Strain X that became part of the deception operation. “Joe passed the biological information. His job at Edgewood was administrative, he had no technical knowledge. His story [to the Russians] was that he came across this report at Edgewood.”
Although Bevels could not recall the nature of the disease or toxin labeled Strain X, another former FBI man, John J. O’Flaherty, who later followed Bevels as Cassidy’s case agent, said that among the materials passed to the GRU by WALLFLOWER were documents dealing with “botulinum toxin type E.” In all likelihood, this was Strain X.
Toxins are poisons produced by some microorganisms and plants; snake venom is also considered a toxin. The CIA used shellfish toxin for the tiny poison darts developed by its technical experts to kill human targets, although CIA director William E. Colby testified to the Senate intelligence committee in 1975 that “I do not know of any actual use.” 5
Because toxins are so lethal, they are attractive to biological-warfare scientists around the globe. Botulinum toxin, produced
TOPHAT told John Mabey that he had trained a GRU agent whom the FBI had persuaded to cooperate, and who provided leads that enabled the bureau to arrest a GRU team of illegals, Robert K. Baltch and his wife, Joy Ann. The couple had taken the identities of a Roman Catholic priest from Amsterdam, New York, and a housewife in Norwalk, Connecticut, neither of whom were aware that their identities had been stolen by Russian spies. Jimmy Morrissey handled the Baltch case. It was only after completing the assignment that Morrissey was able to take over as case agent for Joe Cassidy.
Polyakov had also provided leads that led the FBI to investigate Herbert W. Boeckenhaupt, a young air force sergeant who repaired code machines for the Strategic Air Command. Boeckenhaupt was meeting secretly with a GRU officer in Washington.
The FBI’s counterintelligence agents customarily worked several cases at a time. The Boeckenhaupt case was also assigned to Morrissey, who by then was simultaneously juggling the Cassidy operation. On Halloween of 1966, the FBI arrested Boeckenhaupt in California. He was charged with betraying the Strategic Air Command’s codes to the Soviets, convicted in May 1967, and sentenced to thirty years.
During the summer of 1966, the GRU informed Cassidy that they would communicate with him from then on in encoded SW, as well as in plain text on microdots. A six-digit numerical code, he was told, was to be keyed to a dictionary and concealed on pages of SW. The coded messages would back up the microdots.²
In August, Cassidy picked up a hollow rock containing a rollover camera, a microdot, and a three-by-four-inch miniature dictionary. Entitled
The Universal Webster,
it was part of a series called Langenscheidt’s Universal Dictionaries, published by Barnes and Noble.
Cassidy explained how the code worked. “Each six-digit group led to a word. Suppose I got a message with the number 243124. I would go to page 243, then to the first column because of the 1, then to the twenty-fourth word on the page. The word might be
meet,
the first word in a message that said, ‘Meet me at Springfield bowling alley nine o’clock Saturday ten October.’ ”³
In March 1967, Cassidy recovered another rock containing an addition to the code, a numerical key designed to make the code a bit more difficult to crack. “To each group I would add 062520, my birthday. The sum would then work with the dictionary the same way.” 4
Although the deception phase of Operation SHOCKER was designed primarily to persuade Moscow that American scientists had developed the nerve gas GJ in binary form, there is evidence that documents dealing with deadly biological weapons were passed to the Soviets as well.
Charles Bevels, who succeeded Morrissey as WALLFLOWER’S case agent, said an army scientist at Fort Detrick had worked on a biological agent called Strain X that became part of the deception operation. “Joe passed the biological information. His job at Edgewood was administrative, he had no technical knowledge. His story [to the Russians] was that he came across this report at Edgewood.”
Although Bevels could not recall the nature of the disease or toxin labeled Strain X, another former FBI man, John J. O’Flaherty, who later followed Bevels as Cassidy’s case agent, said that among the materials passed to the GRU by WALLFLOWER were documents dealing with “botulinum toxin type E.” In all likelihood, this was Strain X.
Toxins are poisons produced by some microorganisms and plants; snake venom is also considered a toxin. The CIA used shellfish toxin for the tiny poison darts developed by its technical experts to kill human targets, although CIA director William E. Colby testified to the Senate intelligence committee in 1975 that “I do not know of any actual use.” 5
Because toxins are so lethal, they are attractive to biological-warfare scientists around the globe. Botulinum toxin, produced
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