Cassidy's Run by David Wise

Author:David Wise [Wise, David ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375505362
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R: 14

THE BIG APPLE

In June 1973, four months after he retired from the army, Cassidy got a letter from his Soviet controllers instructing him to purchase a shortwave radio.

“Buy a new Zenith Royal 7000 radio,” the message said. “Do it outside your home city and without registering your name. Pay in cash.”

Cassidy acted on his instructions. “I bought the radio for around two hundred and fifty dollars, a Zenith Royal 7000 Trans-Oceanic,” he said. “I still have it.” The Russians provided him with certain times and frequencies to listen to Radio Moscow on the mornings of the first and third Mondays of each month. The messages were transmitted in Morse code, in a cipher keyed to the same miniature dictionary, The Universal Webster, that Cassidy had been given by the Soviets nearly seven years earlier. He used the dictionary to decipher the coded messages.

In early September, Mikhail Danilin left Washington for the last time. Cassidy was told in the June letter that his next personal meeting, with a new “Mike,” was to take place in December in New York City where Russian intelligence officers worked under diplomatic cover at the Soviet mission to the United Nations and in the UN secretariat. “Return in your package both special cameras unless you have a new job with an access to classified documents,” the instructions continued. “Your messages to me are okay but in the future try to leave larger margins on both sides on the top and at the bottom of the sheets you are writing on. . . . Do not forget to steam my letter before developing.”

Finally, the letter asked Cassidy to brush up on his cryptography. It included sixteen six-digit groups containing a coded test message. “To refresh your skill in reading my coded messages try to work out this one,” the letter said.

A few days before Christmas, Cassidy drove north from Florida to keep the rendezvous with the Russians. “I had to drive,” he recalled. “If I flew, it would look funny going through security with a hollow rock full of film.”¹ The fake rock, it had also occurred to him, might look to security like a good place to hide drugs. Aside from Cassidy’s concerns about airport security, he was going to need a car in New York to go to all the drop, signal, and meeting sites specified by the Russians. In the end, however, O’Flaherty decided to transport the rock north.

In New York, Cassidy checked into a motel in Howard Beach, Queens, which, to the vast embarrassment of both Cassidy and the bureau, turned out to be a hot-sheet motel, whose patrons used it for quickie sex. Next day, WALLFLOWER moved to the Hilton near John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Meanwhile, O’Flaherty flew to New York from Tampa, carrying a gym bag with the hollow rock, which contained the two small cameras and films of secret documents that Cassidy had photographed before he retired. O’Flaherty, with his FBI credentials, would have no trouble going through security.

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