Free Cassidy's Run by David Wise

by
Clostridium
botulinum
bacteria, is among the world’s deadliest poisons. It can result in paralysis and death.
    Stephen Prior, president and CEO of DynPort, a company in Reston, Virginia, that produces all the vaccines for the Defense Department to counter a potential germ-warfare attack, explained that botulinum bacteria “can elicit seven different toxins, A through G. The strains of
Clostridium botulinum
were isolated by various scientists. Each strain produces one or more toxins.”
    Scientists at Fort Detrick concentrated on the Hall strain of botulinum (named after the scientist who first isolated it), since it produces large amounts of Type A toxin, which is one of the most lethal forms of botulinum. “In animal studies,” Prior said, “type E is one of the more potent toxins but less potent than type A.”
    Type E was discovered as the cause of two serious outbreaks of botulism in 1934, one in New York State that was traced to canned herring from Germany, and the other in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, also due to fish. 6 Type E is most often found lurking in the soils of Alaska, northern Europe, and Japan.
    According to Benjamin Harris, Edgewood’s former technical director, the formula for yet another deadly toxin may also have been passed to the Russians. Asked whether he was aware of any deception operations during his years at Edgewood, Harris replied, “I know they were engaged in that as a matter of course. I was aware of one incident where we were asked by the intelligence people to supply information on a toxin that was not a good candidate for use as a weapon.
    “It was ricin. It was considered a toxin because it was produced by a living organism, the castor-bean plant. We did not consider it a good candidate because it was difficult to come by in large quantities and had not been synthesized at that time.” Harris was never told in so many words to what use the information was put, but he said his impression was that it was passed to the Soviets.
    The Edgewood scientists did not consider ricin a good weapon, but the KGB did. During the evening rush hour on September 7, 1978, Georgi I. Markov, a Bulgarian émigré, writer, and opponent of the Soviet-backed regime in Sofia, was walking in London when a man jabbed him in the back of his right thigh with the sharp tip of an umbrella. Mumbling an apology, the man disappeared into the crowds. Four days later, Markov was dead, the victim of a tiny metal pellet containing ricin toxin.
    After the collapse of communism, the new government of Bulgaria admitted that its spy agency had been responsible for the famed “poison umbrella” murder of Markov. More details were provided by General Oleg Kalugin, the former chief of counterintelligence for the KGB, who said that General Sergei Mikhailovich Golubev, of the KGB’s Directorate K, was dispatched to Sofia, along with a second officer, to advise the Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), the Bulgarian secret service, on the hit. In Sofia, the ricin was tried on a horse, which died, and a prisoner, who did not, because the pellet failed to release the toxin. The KGB also provided the umbrella and the poison pellet that were used to kill Markov. It is at least possible, therefore, that the umbrella attack employed the formula that Benjamin Harris believed had been passed to the Soviets. 7
    Early in 1967, as Cassidy recalls it, two unusual events occurred on one night when he met with Danilin at the bowling-alley parking lot. When Cassidy picked up Danilin, a second man was with him. “This was the only time there were two men, and there was no explanation of why a second person.” In the parking lot, “Mike asked, ‘What did you put in the rock?’ ” Cassidy briefed the GRU man on the latest batch of documents he had copied with his rollover camera.
    “And then he briefed me on what they wanted me to look for. And the three of us got in my car, a blue Oldsmobile, and drove off to a residential area nearby. Mike