num_pages: 240
description: Cassidy's Run is the story of one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War--an espionage operation mounted by Washington against the USSR that ran for 23 years. At the highest levels of the government, its code name was Operation Shocker. Lured by a double agent working for the USA, ten Russian spies, including a University of Minnesota professor, his wife &amp; a classic sleeper spy in NYC, were sent by Moscow to penetrate America's secrets. Two FBI agents were killed &amp; secret formulae were passed to the USSR in a dangerous ploy that may have spurred Moscow to create the world's most powerful nerve gas. Cassidy's Run tells this true story for the 1st time, following a trail that leads from DC to Moscow, with detours to Florida, Minnesota &amp; Mexico. Based on documents secret until now &amp; scores of interviews in the USA &amp; USSR, the book reveals that: more than 4500 pages of classified documents, including US nerve gas formulas, were passed to the USSR in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars; an Armageddon code: a telephone call to a number in NYC, was to alert the sleeper spy to an impending nuclear attack--a warning he would transmit to the Soviets by radio signal from atop a rock in Central Park; two FBI agents were killed when their plane crashed during surveillance of one of the spies as he headed for the Canadian border; secret drops for microdots were set up by Moscow from NY to Florida to DC. More than a cloak-&amp;-dagger tale, Cassidy's Run is the story of one ordinary man, Sergeant Joe Cassidy, not trained as a spy, who suddenly found himself the FBI's secret weapon in a dangerous clandestine war.
language: English
title: Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas
titlecomplete: Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas
genres: History, Nonfiction, Espionage
ratings_count: 150
publisher: Random House (NY)