Cassidy's Run (16 page)

But the bureaucratic wheels slowly turning in Washington mysteriously ground to a halt. With no explanation, O’Flaherty was told to cancel Tafe’s hotel reservation. “I canceled it on Memorial Day weekend,” he said.

Despite the about-face in Washington, Parker flew to Minnesota as scheduled, still determined to get a confession. At the same time, he arranged for Aurelio Flores to meet him in Minneapolis. “The undercover agent was there for a couple of reasons,” Parker recounted, “mainly because of the shock value, and because he spoke Spanish.”

Carmen Espinoza, an FBI agent from New York who was also fluent in Spanish, flew out to Minnesota to interview Alicia Lopez. Both Lopez and his wife spoke good English, but Parker was covering all bases.

When there are two suspects in a case, police and FBI agents normally try to interview them separately. One might break even if the other does not, and separate interviews make it more difficult for suspects to coordinate their answers to questions.

Espinoza, later an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut and a Superior Court judge in Hartford, was bilingual, born in Puerto Rico, and a graduate of Brown University and George Washington University Law School. “They needed a Spanish-speaking female agent,” she recalled. “My name popped out of the computer.” Espinoza had joined the bureau only two years earlier, and she was intrigued at the prospect of participating in her first espionage case.

In Minneapolis on June 3, Flores checked into the Sheraton Ritz and called the professor. Parker had scripted the scenario.

Flores sounded casual on the telephone. “I said, ‘Hey I’m in town, come on over.’ So he said, ‘I will.’ He came over to the room. He was glad to see me.”

“What are you doing here?” Lopez asked.

“I’m on a business trip, just passing through town.”

Parker and Dennis Conway were waiting in an adjoining room. After a minute, they knocked on the door. Flores let them in.

“Gilberto,” Flores said, “this is Phillip Parker and Dennis Conway, and we are all FBI agents.”

Lopez looked stunned.

“We showed him our credentials,” Flores said. “He turned pale. He looked like he was going to faint. We told him someone was talking to Alicia at this moment.”

Agent Conway read Lopez his rights. He was told he would be interviewed about his and his wife’s espionage activities.

Lopez stared at Flores. “He said, ‘How long have you been an agent? You just got a job with them?’ He may have thought the bureau somehow found out about him and approached me to help them. ‘No, Gilberto,’ I said, ‘I’ve been an agent since the first day I met you.’ That’s when he sat down.

“He said, ‘From the very first day that I met you, you were an agent?’ I said, ‘Yes. We knew you were a Soviet agent, and we made an effort to get close to you, and that was me.’ He kind of went into shock.”

Parker picked up the story: “He didn’t say anything at first. He was sweating. We said, ‘We know you’ve been working for the Soviets.’ He didn’t respond.

“We continued talking. Most of the talking was done by Flores, in English and Spanish. We used all the interview techniques—good guy, bad guy. Flores was being sympathetic, we want to get your side of the story. I was the bad guy. Aurelio was expressing sympathy for the plight of Hispanics in Mexico and in the U.S.”

Parker had come armed with FBI surveillance photos of Lopez and his wife clearing dead drops. He spread them out on the table. “We showed him the photographs after about twenty minutes. We wanted him to know we knew everything he’d been doing over the past seven years. We showed him surveillance logs, to persuade Lopez we’d been watching him for a long time.” The agents also showed Lopez three-by-five-inch bureau index cards listing the radio transmissions he had received from the Soviets. But it was the photos that seemed to do the trick.

“Soon after that he said, ‘Yes, I have worked for the Russians, I am working for the Russians, and I will.’ ”
⁶

According to Flores, Lopez admitted he had been active in three countries. “He said he had been working for the Soviets, that he had worked for them in Mexico, the United States, and Calgary, Canada.”

Parker pressed Lopez for a motive. “He said, ‘It’s not that I love the Russians, it’s that I hate the United States.’ ” Lopez, Parker said, explained he had spied for the Russians “because of how the United States has treated Mexico, throughout history. And because of the way Chicanos are treated in the U.S.” Mexico, Lopez said, was a puppet of the United States; he had spied for the Russians because any enemy of the United States was his friend.

“He admitted it was him in the pictures,” Parker said. “He never admitted meeting Danilin in Washington. We talked to him about three hours. Some of it was, how do you like Minnesota, the weather. We would change the subject.”

Conway said the bureau hoped to turn the
PALMETTOS
. Once Lopez confessed, instead of being arrested, he might agree to work for the FBI against the Russians, becoming a double agent for the United States. Or as Conway put it: “Our main purpose was to try to flip the guy. We were trying to give him a break. We gotcha: You can go to jail, or you can work with us. It was a little more sophisticated than that, but that was the bottom line.”

It is a classic maneuver in spy cases and has often worked. In questioning an espionage target, the FBI will attempt—without making any actual promises—to lead a suspect to think he might be able to avoid prison by confessing or acting as a double agent. And sometimes such cooperation does get the suspects off the hook. In this case, Parker encouraged Lopez to talk but offered no guarantees.

“We would not say if he became a double for the bureau he would not be prosecuted. It would depend on the extent of his cooperation. If he turned over to us half a dozen recruitments by the GRU, there was a good possibility he’d walk.

“We’re not after you, we’re after the people who are running you. If you’ll cooperate with us, things will go easier for you. We didn’t promise him he would walk. We did not say we were going to arrest him.”

The FBI agents, Parker said, asked Lopez “when and how he was recruited and by whom. He would not say. He seemed on the verge of cooperation at various points, and we did what we could to make him roll over.”

While the FBI men were questioning Lopez at the hotel, Alicia Lopez was simultaneously being interviewed by Carmen Espinoza and an agent from the Minneapolis office. The two agents had moved in as soon as Lopez had left for the hotel.

“They lived in a town house,” Espinoza said. “We rang the bell, she answered. I went in, and we spoke in Spanish. We told her they were caught. We showed her surveillance photos of them making the drops, some with their child. She was hard as a rock. She was a tough cookie. She said we had fabricated the photographs. She didn’t believe it. She wasn’t going to say anything, and we’re making all this up.”

When Espinoza reported that Alicia Lopez was stonewalling, Parker decided to bring the
PALMETTOS
together. “We had told Lopez his wife was also being interviewed,” Parker related. “At that point, we suggested he call his wife. We were at an impasse. He agreed to call his wife and ask her to come to the hotel.

“She showed up about half an hour later. She and her two kids were brought over by Carmen Espinoza and the other agent.” Now there were nine people in the room, five agents and four Lopezes. “When Alicia walked in, her husband said, ‘They know everything.’ ”

“Don’t say anything,” Alicia shot back.

Recognizing Flores, she embraced him. “She gave me a hug and a kiss,” he recalled. “She said, ‘¿
Qué pasa?
What is this all about?’ ”

The
PALMETTO
s, of course, knew what it was all about. It was Parker’s move. “We decided to leave them alone in the hotel room, and we went to eat,” he said.

Parker wanted the Lopezes to have time together to talk over their predicament. But Parker was apprehensive; he had checked the windows in the room, which was on the fourteenth floor, and knew that they could be opened. “I was worried about a suicide pact,” he said. “They’re in the room, and they’re saying, ‘Oh shit, what are we going to do?’ and they go out the window. That is not a nice thing to happen.”

As soon as Parker had left the hotel, he went across the street to the FBI office and called Gene Peterson at FBI headquarters to report that Lopez had confessed. “I briefed him on what Lopez had said. . . . He said, ‘OK, get it into a 302,’ which is an interview report. I said, ‘When do we get the authorization to arrest?’ He said ‘We’ll get back to you.’ ”

In less than an hour, Peterson called back, having talked to the Justice Department. Parker shook his head at the memory of that moment. “Pete said they wouldn’t authorize it.”

Parker was crushed and furious. His disappointment was shared by Peterson, who had supervised the case for so long. The bureau had by then worked the overall operation for twenty years—the longest espionage case of its kind in the history of the cold war. Two FBI men had died. The Justice Department had refused to move unless Parker got a confession, and he had just gotten it. But still the answer was no.

The FBI agents returned to the hotel, but the Lopezes declined to say more. “Lopez said, ‘What are you going to do to me?’ We said we don’t know yet, or words to that effect.” Parker then told the Lopezes they could go.

Aurelio Flores said the news seemed almost disappointing to the couple. “They wanted to be martyrs, to go on trial. He [Lopez] said, ‘We want our kids sent back to Mexico, and we want to stand trial.’ They wanted the publicity.

“Alicia said, ‘Why are you letting us go, we could have a trial.’ She said, ‘Is this like a spy swap? The Soviets have somebody they are going to exchange for us?’ She said to Gilberto in Spanish, ‘Ask Aurelio, why are they letting us go?’ ” There may have been another reason why the Lopezes were scared, Flores said. “I think she was worried about what might happen when they got back to Mexico and had to explain to their handlers what had happened. She didn’t say that, but I felt that.”

Espinoza, too, remembered that the Lopezes were reluctant to leave, though for another reason. “They thought they were going to be killed if they walked out the door,” she said. “They didn’t want to leave. I had to convince them it was OK. Finally, they walked out and left.”

Parker knew the spies were slipping out of his grasp, but he was not ready to give up just yet.

The FBI continued to watch the couple. “The Lopezes were under surveillance from the time they left the hotel,” Parker said. Two days later, Parker got word that the Lopezes were leaving for the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport.

Lopez may have thought there was safety in numbers. Arturo Madrid, the chairman of the Spanish department, got a frantic call from Manuel Guerrero, Lopez’s colleague and friend. “He said, ‘Arturo, I need you to meet me at the airport.’ ” With another professor from the Spanish department, Madrid sped to the airport, where he met Guerrero. “Manuel said, ‘I can’t explain right now. I need you to come to the gate with me. Gilberto is leaving on a plane for Mexico City right now.”

The FBI agents conducting the surveillance had followed the Lopezes to the airport. With several other agents, Parker also drove to the terminal.

He found a telephone and called William O. Cregar, the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the intelligence division.

“They’re in the terminal,” Parker said. He pleaded with his superior in Washington to try to reverse the decision. “I’ll call back later,” Parker said.

“No, they’re not going to authorize,” Cregar replied.

Parker watched the Lopezes get on the plane.

As the airliner taxied toward the runway, he called Cregar again.

“We’ve got one chance,” Parker said. “They’re going to land in San Antonio. It’s not too late.”

“Forget it,” Cregar said.

It was clear that the conversation was over. Parker added, “I was not in a position to question Bill Cregar.”

Totally frustrated, Parker watched until the plane carrying the Lopezes was only a speck in the distant sky.

He alerted the FBI’s San Antonio office, where Edward J. O’Malley was the assistant special agent in charge. “O’Malley had two of his biggest, toughest guys board the plane. One of the agents leaned over and said, ‘Have a good trip, Mr. Lopez.’ As the agents got off the plane, Lopez threw up.”

Professor Rolando Hinojosa-Smith,
the new chairman of the Chicano studies department at the University of Minnesota, was startled to get word that day that Professor Lopez had vanished. “I went to work one day, and all of a sudden I was confronted with a missing professor,” he said.

No accurate explanation was given to Lopez’s students for his mysterious departure. Another faculty member took over his classes.

Among the faculty, there was a good deal of buzzing over the unexpected, fast exit of Lopez and his family. Hinojosa-Smith reported Lopez’s abrupt departure to Frank J. Sorauf, an eminent political scientist then serving as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. But Sorauf had apparently already learned something about what had happened, according to Arturo Madrid. Along with a few other colleages, Madrid knew that Lopez had been confronted by the FBI. Madrid recalled speaking with Hinojosa-Smith at the time.

“I remember saying to Rolando we really must protest this, this is outrageous,” Madrid said. “And Rolando said, ‘Well, I’ve already taken it up with the dean, who has informed me that Gilberto was operating as an agent of a foreign power.’ ”

In the days that followed, word spread among Lopez’s closer associates on the faculty that he had somehow been involved with Cubans. It was a cover story encouraged by Lopez himself.

Arturo Madrid remembered running into Lopez a year later in Mexico. “I was in Guadalajara, and I saw Gilberto Lopez at a conference I was at,” Madrid said. “He came up and thanked me profusely for having come to the airport that day. I kept Gilberto at a distance. I remember talking to my friend Jorge Bustamente. . . . I said, ‘Be careful, he [Lopez] was acting as an agent of a foreign power.’ Years later, Jorge told me what happened” the day Lopez and his wife fled to Mexico. “He said he had got a call from Lopez from San Antonio saying, ‘It’s a life-or-death situation, meet me at the airport in Mexico City.’ He came off the plane white as a sheet, scared to death, looking all around, and they drove him to his father-in-law’s house. He told Jorge he had been a courier for the Cubans and the FBI had shown him incriminating photos in which he was giving or receiving something from somebody from the Cuban mission to the UN, or the Cuban office in Washington.”