Operation Shocker (nonfiction)

Operation Shocker was a 23-year counterintelligence operation run by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation against the Soviet Union. The operation involved the fake defection in place of a US Army sergeant based in Washington, D.C. who, in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades, provided information to the GRU as agreed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This included over 4,000 documents on a new nerve gas the US believed unweaponizable, with the US intending to waste Soviet resources.

Overview

The operation began in 1959 when U.S. Army First Sergeant Joseph Edward Cassidy (1920-2011), assigned to the Army's nuclear power office near Washington, D.C., was approached (with Army permission) by the FBI. Cassidy, despite having no previous training, was able to make contact with a Soviet naval attache believed to be a spy, and set up an arrangement where he would provide information to the Soviets in exchange for money. Soviet requests for information were passed to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and various classified information provided as a result.

The principal Russian interest was in information about the US nerve gas program, and Cassidy initially established his credentials by providing genuine data from the US program. By 1964 he was in a position to begin pointing Soviet research towards a G-series nerve agent, GJ, which the US thought could not be produced in stable, weaponizable form. Cassidy provided over 4,000 documents on a mixture of real and non-existent research into the new gas, with the US intending to waste Soviet resources attempting to duplicate the work. David Wise, in his book Cassidy's Run, implies that the Soviet program to develop the Novichok agents may have been an unintended result of the misleading information.

The operation was highly classified, and when two FBI agents died in a plane crash while surveilling a Soviet spy, press and public were misled about the circumstances, and even the agents' families were told nothing for years.

A similar, and arguably more significant, disinformation operation was run by the FBI via double-agent Dmitri Polyakov, feeding the Soviet Union the false information that the US was covertly continuing with its biological weapons program despite public announcements to the contrary. The disinformation could be one reasons which led the Soviet Union to expand its biological weapons program, and a near-universal belief into the 1990s among its scientists that they were mirroring US efforts.

• Novichok agent (nonfiction) - a series of binary chemical weapons developed by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993. Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent than VX, and others up to ten times more potent than soman.

Novichok has however been known to most western secret services ever since the 1990s.

Washington Post article

The Washington Post published "Canned Death", a book review by Robert Sherrill (February 27, 2000). Excerpt:

It started when the FBI used Cassidy as bait by having him play volleyball at the Washington YMCA on the same night a Soviet agent played there. Eventually, they knew each other well enough that the agent popped the question: Would the sergeant like to make some money on the side? Sure. So the Soviet spy apparatus, working out of the embassy in Washington, began giving him lists of things they wanted him to filch from his various work places, including the nerve-gas laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore.

The routine was for Cassidy to take the Soviet wishlist to the FBI. A special committee of military and espionage experts would then decide which "stolen" documents Cassidy could photograph and give away.

This was a very tricky operation. As Wise explains, Cassidy had to transmit real secrets to convince the Soviets that he was trustworthy. Then he could begin "slipping in bogus documents, false information designed to mislead and confuse." But the strategy also carried a serious risk. What if the experts outsmarted themselves and some of the information that was meant to deceive turned out to be useful to the enemy? Wise suggests it just might have happened, in a big way, like this:

Edgewood scientists "strove at great length and at considerable expense to develop a more powerful nerve gas" called GJ. "In the end, however, the technical problems they encountered were insurmountable." Or so they thought. This gave them an idea: Pass the formula for GJ to the Soviets and let them waste endless time and money in a futile effort.

Some say the deception and its desired results were achieved. Others suspect that our experts miscalculated and that the data leaked to mislead the Soviets instead helped them develop a super nerve gas called Novichok, which a Moscow scientist told Wise is "eight, maybe ten times more toxic" than any nerve gas in the U.S. arsenal. Wise doesn't take sides, but I think he leans toward the latter view.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Savory Nickel

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• Operation Shocker @ Wikipedia
• Canned Death @ The Washington Post

[[Category:Chemical warfare (nonfiction)]