The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  He wanted to know if Nathan saw anything suspicious in his travels, including his walk from the Hilton to the T.G.I. Friday’s. Nathan explained that he had walked a basic surveillance detection route on the way over, running into a pair of guys with Russian accents who asked where they might find someplace to eat. The Russian nodded, as if in deep thought. Nathan said he had turned around at one point to see if he was being tailed and caught a glimpse of a short man abruptly ducking out of sight.

  The old man smirked.

  “I was tailing you,” he said.

  Nathan hadn’t recognized him.

  “Do you have any new messages for me?” the Russian asked.

  The question put Nathan on his heels. The Russian had cautioned him in their last meeting not to carry more of his dad’s handwritten notes out of the prison—“Too dangerous,” he had said—and now seemed to have changed his mind. Nathan tried not to look flustered. He pulled out the letter Jim had mailed him that summer—it was intended for the Russian—and handed it across the coffee table.

  Jim was permitted to send letters from the prison, but all his ­correspondence—peppered with hand-drawn emoticons—was routed through the CIA’s headquarters at Langley. Analysts there reviewed Jim’s mail to ensure that he wasn’t sharing classified information still etched in the coils of his brain from sixteen years in the agency.

  The Russian now read the letter.

  “Hi Tiger! I want to thank you for your very moving letter of 10 August. I want to also tell you that the qualities you said you had received from me—respect for others, discipline, endurance, faith, patience, love, and sheer will power—are very much qualities that apply to you, whether you received them via me or not. I am so very proud of you, son. You are a man of great courage and a blessing to our entire family.”

  Jim’s missive then veered weirdly into his latest health exams. He listed his height, weight, age, and notes about his excellent physical conditioning, right down to the results of his latest EKG, blood pressure test, and prostate cancer screening. The letter also mentioned the status of two bills before Congress that Jim hoped would get him out of prison sooner. Then came a line with no ambiguity. The words were clearly intended for the Russian, whose countrymen had long stood behind those caught spying for Moscow.

  “We’ve waited a long time for a miracle, but patience is what we’ve learned instead,” Jim wrote. “I have much to do for those who have stood by me.”

  The six-page letter noted the financial struggles facing Jeremi and his Russian wife, Nastia, who lived in Panama City, Florida. Jeremi, weighted down with student loans, worked at Tyndall Air Force Base. “He’s a [staff sergeant] now,” Jim wrote, “and still would like to be an officer—which he would have been if they hadn’t sat on his security clearance for so long, no doubt because of me.” Jim pointed out that Star, who had a decent job at a Portland software company, had accumulated even bigger student loan debts. He wrote how proud he was of Nathan for working as a draftsman while attending college.

  “I’ve probably not told you anything you didn’t already know,” Jim wrote, “but it’s good for me to review all these blessings from time to time lest I forget and become melancholy from wandering around this old prison for a twelfth year. You know. But, I still have dreams and goals and I don’t see me sitting back in retirement mode once I am free again. . . . Too much wasted time has already passed for me to waste the future too.”

  The old man closed by advising his son to put half his savings in euros, owing to the precarious U.S. dollar. Then, with a final wink to the Russian he knew would read his words, Jim wrote: “Take good care of yourself, son, and please extend my very best to those with you. We will have our day. With pride and love, Pa.”

  The Russian looked up from the letter and asked Nathan if he had any other messages from his father.

  “That was all I was instructed to carry,” he said.

  Nathan knew his dad wanted to set himself up in Russia after serving his time. The old man clearly wanted to live the adventurous life again, this time in luxury, on Moscow’s dime.

  The Russian wound down the meeting by asking Nathan a few questions about The Farm, the CIA’s covert training center. Jim had taught tradecraft, the art and craft of espionage, at the base along the Virginia tidewater. He wanted to know the circumstances that got Jim assigned to the center in Camp Peary in the mid-1990s, where the Nicholson children lived in a government house. The CIA does not publicly acknowledge its nine-thousand-acre training center, one of the government’s worst-kept secrets.

  “This is the next assignment,” the Russian said, pulling out an envelope. They would meet again a year later, on December 18, 2009, in Bratislava, Slovakia. The Russian slid a black-and-white photo in front of Nathan, and smiled.

  “Tell me if you see a woman in this.”

  The photo pictured an abstract sculpture. The piece looked like a human with a halo of hair and massive knees, but there was a gash sliced from hip to sternum. Nathan saw little in the piece to suggest a woman. The Russian noted that she was supposed to be pregnant. This, too, offered no help.

  “I don’t see it either,” the Russian said.

  The two men laughed.

  The Russian told Nathan that the sculpture sat in a park at Bratislava’s Račianske mýto, a major transportation hub, and it was to be the site of their next rendezvous. They would meet at 7 p.m.

  The Russian made Nathan repeat the instructions for their meeting, including the coded phrase he was to drop in their Yahoo account in the event he couldn’t make it.

  “My brother Eugene is ill,” Nathan said.

  The Russian nodded. He opened a folder and withdrew a paper pouch, out of which he pulled a rectangular envelope. He spilled its contents—a bundle of U.S. hundreds—on the table, careful not to touch the currency.

  “Please count it,” he said.

  Nathan protested, saying it wasn’t necessary; they were all friends.

  “I insist,” the Russian said.

  Nathan carefully counted out $13,000, much more than he expected.

  “Too much,” he said.

  The Russian looked puzzled.

  Nathan tutored him on U.S. law, explaining that it’s illegal not to declare more than $10,000 in cash when reentering the country. That meant he would have to burn through a few grand in the following days so that he came in under the limit. This seemed wasteful to Nathan. The Russian, who had lived through generations of austerity in the former Soviet Union, insisted that the broke American college student take the money. This commenced a comical round of reverse haggling. In the end, Nathan agreed to accept $12,000—not a penny more.

  With Christmas coming, Nathan wanted to know what the Russian had planned for the holidays. The two men had made little in the way of small talk in their past meets, and Nathan could see the question made his handler uncomfortable. But the old spy let his guard down, saying he hoped to get home in time to spend the New Year holiday with his wife and son.

  It occurred to Nathan that he had no earthly idea where the Russian lived. He knew better than to ask, and it wasn’t in his nature to pry.

  The two men made their way to the garage and climbed into the sedan, where Nathan folded himself onto the floorboards again. The car rumbled through the south side of the city, all done up for the holidays, Christmas lights sparkling from tree trunks and white globes strung above Makarios Avenue. They drove in silence for a long time before the car slowly came to a stop. The Russian gave a nod, and Nathan climbed out wordlessly. He stood on a parking lot a few blocks from the Hilton trying to orient himself. Suddenly, the sedan kicked up gravel behind him and vanished.

  Nathan spent the next couple of days knocking around Nicosia, ordering room-service sushi, gorging on the Hilton’s all-you-can-eat buffet, and hitting Pizza Hut, where he sampled the Mediterranean pie with stuffed cheese.
As a former deliveryman for the pizza chain, he liked to see how they made their pies in other countries. Nathan stayed on the swanky side of Nicosia, but toured the bastions of the ancient city, deciding he liked the cobblestone streets and solar panels, a splendid collision of old and new. Empires had fought over the city for thousands of years. They had thrown up stone walls and battlements until the latest of them—thanks to a simmering truce between the Turks in the north and the Greek-backed Cypriots in the south—apparently agreed to propagate the town with shopping malls and beige high-rises and to cover every horizontal surface with satellite dishes and antennas.

  Before he left Nicosia, Nathan wired Kanokwan $500 and paid his hotel bill, which ran just over a grand. Later that day he landed in Istanbul, where he wended through a serpentine line. He presented his passport to an unsmiling window clerk and walked toward a brightly lit red sign reading, “Duty Free.” There he dropped about $100 on the bottle of Armani Code that Jim wanted him to buy Star for Christmas.

  Then he flew backward in time, toward Oregon and his one-­bedroom walk-up in the Heron Meadows Apartments.

  Nathan reached Portland International the first hour of Monday, December 15, and slogged to his Chevy. He drove south toward Eugene in a rare snow shower, which threw a brilliant white blanket over the valley. He reached his apartment at 3:30 a.m. and stashed $9,500 cash in his nightstand. Nathan climbed into his rack knowing his dad would be pleased with the latest payment and with another meeting set for Slovakia the following year. Then he collapsed in the loopy delirium known only to those who’ve flown halfway around the world in coach.

  At precisely 1:20 p.m., a loud pounding woke him. He lay in bed for a few seconds, his eyes adjusting to the light. Someone was knocking so hard on his metal door it reminded him of his sergeants back in the Army.

  Nathan lurched out of bed and lumbered barefoot across the carpet toward the door.

  The pounding persisted.

  He pushed an eye against the peephole and saw the fish-eye forms of two middle-aged white guys standing on his stoop. They were serious-looking men in jeans and heavy winter coats. One of them chewed gum.

  Feds, he thought. Had to be.

  Nathan stood frozen behind the door. For an instant, he thought maybe they would just walk away, hoped they would.

  The gum-chewing man pulled out a phone and began to dial. Nathan turned from the peephole and sprinted on tiptoes toward his bedroom. He was closing in on his flip phone when suddenly it rang. He pounced on the silence button before it could ring twice. Then he waited, praying for the men to go away.

  Moments later, the pounding resumed.

  The hell with it, Nathan thought, moving for the door. It’s now or never.

  He exhaled and reached for the doorknob.

  2

  First CIA Tour, Manila Station

  “Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque.”

  —Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

  Manila, Republic of the Philippines, 1982

  The U.S. Embassy compound sits on Manila Bay, a complex of sun-scrubbed buildings overlooking a wide promenade lined with coconut palms along Roxas Boulevard. Just up the harbor sits the Manila Yacht Club, and next door is a busy shipping terminal that sends massive vessels churning toward the tadpole-shaped island of Corregidor and the wide-open waters of the South China Sea. To the north of the embassy, a colorful patchwork of buildings rises from both sides of the Pasig River, a sluggish tidal estuary that bisects the city and runs in opposite directions on the whims and seasonal water levels of nearby Laguna de Bay. Everywhere, knots of mosquitoes hunt for blood.

  The embassy compound’s chancery, which sat a block from Manila’s largest red-light district, Ermita, had served as a jail after World War II, its basement a makeshift court to try Japanese war criminals. Jim’s desk, little more than a prop, now occupied an office upstairs. There the first-tour spy posed as a diplomatic officer in the mornings and slipped out in the afternoons. He filed reports behind a heavy wooden door marked “Office of Regional Affairs,” a well-known euphemism for CIA stations around the globe.

  Manila was a playground for a young CIA man in those days. The operations officers in Jim’s station enjoyed a decent relationship with the host government of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and seldom worried about being revealed, caught, or arrested for their espionage. They also didn’t fear Filipino counterintelligence officers, who were too clumsy and overmatched by their CIA counterparts. The spies in Jim’s wing focused their intelligence gathering on the KGB and its cohorts from Cuba, China, and Vietnam.

  Marcos ran one of the world’s most corrupt governments, famously telling ABC News, “I have committed many sins in my life. But stealing money from the government, from the people, is not one of them.” Of course, Marcos and his famously shoe-hoarding wife Imelda were busily siphoning billions of dollars from public programs at the time, parking much of it in North American banks. Marcos so detested communist groups working to overthrow him that he fell into lockstep with the U.S. government and its efforts to thwart the spread of communism. Marcos had imposed martial law in 1972, closing the nation’s congress and news outlets, and ordering the arrest of political foes. By the time Jim reached Manila, Marcos had presided over a decade of brutal human rights violations.

  Jim was assigned to the CIA’s internal branch, which spied on the emerging Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed splinter group, the New People’s Army. The NPA, with assassination units scattered up and down the nation, was growing. Its gun-toting killers served as shakedown artists, extorting money from local businesses and foreign-owned mining and logging companies in hopes of fomenting a communist revolution.

  Marcos’ principle antagonist, former Filipino politician Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., had aligned himself with the left in hopes of overthrowing the regime’s ruthless government. Aquino, once expected to ascend to the presidency in 1973, was instead imprisoned. When he suffered a heart attack, the Marcos regime allowed him to fly to Dallas for bypass surgery. He remained there in exile as his people fell into years of withering poverty. In the summer of 1983, Aquino flew home to the Philippines to confront the sagging political climate and talk to Marcos about a peaceful restoration of democracy. Aquino told journalists he was returning of his own free will, and was prepared for the worst. “A death sentence awaits me,” he prophesied in an undelivered speech. And he was right.

  The assassination of Aquino triggered angry protests across Manila, and many Filipinos believed Marcos had ordered the slaying. The Communist Party’s labor and women’s movements organized massive demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy and other spots across the city, calling for the end of the U.S.-backed Marcos government and carrying posters emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. Jim and other officers dressed down in casual clothes and launched themselves into the daylight demonstrations. Jim posed as an American sympathetic to their cause.

  Jim and a fellow case officer, one of his closest friends, often paired up to wade into the raucous crowds. Their job was to observe and report on conditions. Armed gunmen halted them from time to time for questioning. “We always did talk our way past them,” Jim’s former partner told me. “A former supervisor began calling us ‘Batman and Robin’ after one of these episodes.”

  Jim ate up his superiors’ bon mots, delighted to be thought of as the station’s caped crusader. He worked doggedly to develop assets who could provide him entree to key figures in the communist insurgency and the NPA, according to Norb Garrett, who served as the CIA’s station chief in Manila from 1984 to 1988.

  “He had the reputation of being kind of an up-and-comer,” Garrett said. “A bright kid. Hard worker.”

  Jim worked like a journalist trying to learn what the protesters might do next, gathering intelligence and filing real-time reports. Emb
assy officials had a stake in the doings on the street. They feared demonstrators might breach the gates of their compound like the student protesters who overtook the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, holding fifty-two hostages for more than four hundred days.

  Jim’s workdays didn’t end on the streets. He and other ambitious CIA officers rounded out their days in bars and other nightspots, cultivating new contacts and working old sources as they mixed business with beer and other pleasures. One of Jim’s brother officers in the internal branch remembered beaching up with Jim and other colleagues at the Hobbit House. The popular bar, opened by a fan of J. R. R. Tolkien, was staffed almost entirely with dwarfs and other little people. It was a popular spot for Americans, especially young, good-looking, ambitious CIA officers trolling for intel to get ahead in the agency while drinking San Miguel.

  But the extracurricular nights out played hell on marriages, including Jim’s.

  Laura Sue Cooper hadn’t seen him coming that day in early 1973.

  She was eighteen years old, a freshman at Oregon State University, weighing in before fencing class. She stood on the gymnasium scale after a short workout on the universal weight set. Jim sidled up, noting that the scale read ninety-three pounds.

  “Getting a little heavy,” he remarked.

  Miss Cooper responded by slugging Jim in the arm. Love at first swing.

  She stood five feet tall, a fair-skinned hazel-eyed blonde with a sprinkle of light freckles. She was born in the seaside dairy country of Tillamook, Oregon, but raised mostly in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon Ducks.