Wise,D. Cassidy's Run. 2000

Wise, David. Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas. New York: Random House, 2000. 228 pages.

From 1958 to 1980, the FBI ran a counterintelligence operation with the help of Joseph Cassidy, an army sergeant untrained in espionage. Some 4,500 pages of classified documents about the U.S. nerve gas program were passed to Cassidy's Soviet handlers. Some were real and others were doctored; the army and FBI hoped to mislead the Soviets by suggesting that a powerful new gas was part of the U.S. arsenal. In fact, this gas had proven unstable. The assumption was that the Soviets would spend good money on a dead-end program in an effort to keep up with the U.S.

Over 23 years, two FBI agents working the case were accidentally killed when their small plane crashed, and the operation flushed out ten Soviet spies, including University of Minnesota professor Gilberto Lopez y Rivas. (Lopez is now a congressman in Mexico.) Wise notes that ironically, this operation can be considered a failure because it spurred the Soviets on to greater efforts in the area of nerve gas research, which were ultimately successful. To make this point, Wise interviewed various officials in Moscow, as well as Vil Mirzayanov, a nerve gas scientist who was arrested in 1992 for revealing the existence of Novichok. This gas was developed in 1973 and is between eight and ten times more toxic than anything in the U.S. arsenal. Until Mirzayanov blew the whistle, no one knew the Soviets even had Novichok.
ISBN 0-375-50153-3