Free Cassidy's Run by David Wise Page A

motioned me to stop and to get out of the car, which was unusual, because normally only he got out of the car. The normal thing was, after a meeting, I would drop him off and I would stay in the car. So all three of us got out, near a streetlight.
    “Joe,” Danilin said, “this is my friend Mike, he’s a real good guy, and he’ll take good care of you.”
    Cassidy was startled by what happened next. “[Danilin] gave me a bear hug and released me and held my head in both hands and kissed me on the cheek.
    “And he said, ‘I’ll never see you again.’ It was dark, but from the streetlight I could see tears welling up in his eyes and slowly making their way down his cheek. It was a very emotional scene, and I was truly taken aback by it.”
    To the FBI, Danilin’s tears were further evidence that the GRU man completely trusted WALLFLOWER . Danilin was parting sorrowfully from a revered and valuable agent. And if the Soviets believed in Cassidy, they might also believe in the bogus nerve-gas formula he had given them.

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    AND THE VOLGA TURNED WHITE
    The Soviet nerve-gas program—the equivalent of Edgewood Arsenal, Dugway, and the other facilities in the United States—was run in secret laboratories in Moscow and in equally guarded test sites and production plants located along a five-hundred-mile stretch of the Volga River.
    In Moscow, research and development was conducted at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, at 23 Shosse Entuziastov, four and a half miles due east of the Kremlin, not far from Izmailovo Park, the site of the capital’s popular flea market. There, scientists experimented with sarin, soman, and VX and sought to create newer and deadlier forms of nerve gas as well. Some 350 miles to the east, the test sites and plants stretched almost in a straight line from north to south along the Volga River basin. In the north, in the Chuvash republic, some of the formulas created in the labs in Moscow were produced in a plant in Novocheboksarsk, a suburb of Cheboksary, the capital of the region.
    About 250 miles to the south, near the city of Volsk in the Saratov region, were two Shikhany military sites where Soviet nerve gases were developed and tested. Finally, another 250 miles south in Volgograd was the Kirov Chemical Works, known as Khimprom, a major production site. Part of the facility was the Nazi nerve-gas plant captured by the Soviet army after World War II and brought back to Russia. The Moscow research institute also had a branch in Volgograd.¹
    In 1949, Boris Libman, a twenty-seven-year-old Latvian-born physical chemist and chemical engineer, began work at the pilot plant in Volgograd, in the section where nerve gases were produced and tested in small amounts.² At the Volgograd plant, Libman’s work soon caught the attention of his superiors and by 1958—the year that Operation SHOCKER was created—he was named chief engineer. In 1960, he received the Lenin Prize for his work on both sarin and soman. The prize came with ten thousand rubles, a significant sum at the time.
    Volgograd began producing sarin (GB) in the pilot plant in 1949 and went into large-scale production in 1959. It also began turning out small amounts of soman (GD) in the late fifties.
    As the Soviet scientists attempted to divine what the United States was doing in its nerve-gas research and production, some of the information filtering to Libman and the officials at Volgograd had been gleaned by the espionage operations of the GRU. The intelligence data flowed to Volgograd from the Moscow research institute, which in turn received it from an arm of Soviet intelligence with the cover name of the Institute of Medical Statistics.
    Additional intelligence information was provided to Volgograd directly by the chemical-intelligence unit of the GRU. The unit passed along data about U.S. research on binary nerve-gas weapons and about BZ, the incapacitant developed at