signed off on the proposal, it moved to the army’s Office of the Chief of Research and Development (OCRD), which prepared the feed for the FBI.²
At FBI headquarters, the deception operation was supervised by Eugene C. Peterson, a veteran counterintelligence agent in the Soviet section. A big, burly, professional counterspy, Peterson had the face of a boxer—a broad pug nose with a horizontal scar between intent blue eyes, a face with a lot of miles on it. In the course of his twenty-eight-year career with the FBI, he worked on most of the major Soviet cases of the cold war.
Despite his tough-looking exterior, Peterson was an affable, pleasant man from Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his father drove a laundry truck and his mother worked as the firm’s bookkeeper. Peterson enlisted in the army air corps out of high school, then graduated from Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen in 1951 and joined the FBI. He began his counterintelligence career in Puerto Rico in 1960. Four years later, Peterson was transferred to headquarters to work against Soviet spies. He rose to chief of the Soviet section in 1976.
Although an elaborate structure of Pentagon boards and committees had approved SHOCKER , the actual control of the operation rested in the hands of a small number of people—Peterson at FBI headquarters, successive case agents at the Washington field office, and across the Potomac in the Pentagon, Taro Yoshihashi, the army’s top counterespionage expert. A quiet, self-effacing man who worked deep in the intelligence bureaucracy, Yoshihashi was a double-agent specialist and thus the FBI’s point of contact inside the Defense Department.
Born in Hollywood, California, to a Japanese-American family, Yoshihashi earned a degree in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and joined the army in 1942, not long before the rest of his family was evacuated to a relocation camp in Cody, Wyoming. Assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, Yoshihashi maintained files on all Japanese Army units with the help of MAGIC, the decrypted messages obtained after the United States broke the Japanese code.
After the war, the army sent him to investigate the biologicalwarfare experiments conducted by the Japanese against civilians in Manchuria. He was assigned to the Pentagon in 1968. As a double-agent specialist, Yoshihashi was also the army’s representative on the staff of USEB.
As in the case of many obscure government panels, USEB’s staff really ran it. “In the five years I was there,” Yoshihashi recalled, “the principals at USEB only met once, in January of 1972. The meeting was in the basement of the Pentagon in one of the J-3 offices.” James J. Angleton, the CIA’s controversial chief of counterintelligence, showed up for the rare meeting. Angleton, who trusted no one, had nearly destroyed the CIA trying to unearth moles who he was convinced were burrowing away inside the agency.
At the meeting, he was true to form. “Angleton was the agency representative. At one point he said, ‘I have a lot of interesting information I could give you, but I’m not sure about your security here.’ I thought, what a lot of b.s.”
Although the CIA, through its membership on USEB, was aware of the nerve-gas deception, it exercised no operational control. In the jargon of the intelligence world, Cassidy was the FBI’s “asset,” not the CIA’s, nor the army’s.
“The army’s role was merely providing support,” Yoshihashi noted. “It was a bureau operation. I would get requests from Gene Peterson.
“The bureau would bring in documents from Edgewood and say can we release these? Gene or the bureau’s liaison agent would bring the documents over to the Pentagon. Then I would go to DCSOPS for approval. In some cases, I would make a recommendation that material should not be released. Most of the documents that we approved, except for the deception, were true
At FBI headquarters, the deception operation was supervised by Eugene C. Peterson, a veteran counterintelligence agent in the Soviet section. A big, burly, professional counterspy, Peterson had the face of a boxer—a broad pug nose with a horizontal scar between intent blue eyes, a face with a lot of miles on it. In the course of his twenty-eight-year career with the FBI, he worked on most of the major Soviet cases of the cold war.
Despite his tough-looking exterior, Peterson was an affable, pleasant man from Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his father drove a laundry truck and his mother worked as the firm’s bookkeeper. Peterson enlisted in the army air corps out of high school, then graduated from Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen in 1951 and joined the FBI. He began his counterintelligence career in Puerto Rico in 1960. Four years later, Peterson was transferred to headquarters to work against Soviet spies. He rose to chief of the Soviet section in 1976.
Although an elaborate structure of Pentagon boards and committees had approved SHOCKER , the actual control of the operation rested in the hands of a small number of people—Peterson at FBI headquarters, successive case agents at the Washington field office, and across the Potomac in the Pentagon, Taro Yoshihashi, the army’s top counterespionage expert. A quiet, self-effacing man who worked deep in the intelligence bureaucracy, Yoshihashi was a double-agent specialist and thus the FBI’s point of contact inside the Defense Department.
Born in Hollywood, California, to a Japanese-American family, Yoshihashi earned a degree in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and joined the army in 1942, not long before the rest of his family was evacuated to a relocation camp in Cody, Wyoming. Assigned to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, Yoshihashi maintained files on all Japanese Army units with the help of MAGIC, the decrypted messages obtained after the United States broke the Japanese code.
After the war, the army sent him to investigate the biologicalwarfare experiments conducted by the Japanese against civilians in Manchuria. He was assigned to the Pentagon in 1968. As a double-agent specialist, Yoshihashi was also the army’s representative on the staff of USEB.
As in the case of many obscure government panels, USEB’s staff really ran it. “In the five years I was there,” Yoshihashi recalled, “the principals at USEB only met once, in January of 1972. The meeting was in the basement of the Pentagon in one of the J-3 offices.” James J. Angleton, the CIA’s controversial chief of counterintelligence, showed up for the rare meeting. Angleton, who trusted no one, had nearly destroyed the CIA trying to unearth moles who he was convinced were burrowing away inside the agency.
At the meeting, he was true to form. “Angleton was the agency representative. At one point he said, ‘I have a lot of interesting information I could give you, but I’m not sure about your security here.’ I thought, what a lot of b.s.”
Although the CIA, through its membership on USEB, was aware of the nerve-gas deception, it exercised no operational control. In the jargon of the intelligence world, Cassidy was the FBI’s “asset,” not the CIA’s, nor the army’s.
“The army’s role was merely providing support,” Yoshihashi noted. “It was a bureau operation. I would get requests from Gene Peterson.
“The bureau would bring in documents from Edgewood and say can we release these? Gene or the bureau’s liaison agent would bring the documents over to the Pentagon. Then I would go to DCSOPS for approval. In some cases, I would make a recommendation that material should not be released. Most of the documents that we approved, except for the deception, were true
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