The Film Archives's video: The Secret Spy War: A True Cold-War Story That Reads Like the Very Best Spy Thriller 2000

Read the book: https://amzn.to/3AKVvCr 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 Soviet intelligence (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,[4] 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 may have been one reason 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Shocker David Wise (May 10, 1930 – October 8, 2018) was an American journalist and author who worked for the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, and published a series of non-fiction books on espionage and US politics as well as several spy novels.[1] His book The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (1973) won the George Polk Award (Book category, 1973), and the George Orwell Award (1975). In 1951, Wise joined the New York Herald-Tribune and became the paper's White House correspondent in 1960. He was chief of the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau from 1963 to 1966.[3] In 1970–71 he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and in 1977–79, he lectured in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[3] He was later a commentator on intelligence issues for CNN for six years.[3] Beginning in 1962 with an examination of the Lockheed U-2, Wise published a series of non-fiction books, the first three with Thomas B. Ross. Their book Invisible Government (1964), exposed the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in foreign policy. This included CIA coups in Guatemala (Operation PBSuccess) and Iran (Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. Wise and Ross claimed that the CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government, but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.[4] A confidential CIA review of Invisible Government, declassified in 1995, declared that "In Great Britain, which is second to none in its devotion to liberty, there exists an Official Secrets Act under which the authors would have been tried and sentenced to prison. … That much of this material has been printed before does not reduce the value to the Soviets of having it gathered in one volume under such genuine American auspices."[5] Invisible Government also revealed the name and existence of the National Security Council covert operations sub-committee known as the 303 Group, prompting its renaming to the 40 Committee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wise_(journalist)