The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  Though Jim spent night after night away from her and the kids in hopes of finding a source capable of penetrating the KGB, Garrett didn’t recall his developing any sensational assets during his years in Manila, and he was certain that Jim brought no spies—those from the Soviet Union or other communist countries—into the CIA’s fold. Although it wasn’t for lack of trying: Jim’s reputation in Manila was that he was out on the town, but not stepping out on his wife. The city was full of sultry, flirtatious women hunting for husbands. Many of the men they pursued turned philandering into an art form, and Garrett remembered nearly sending one of Jim’s brother officers home—meaning back to the U.S.—for bringing unauthorized women into the CIA station. The agency’s spies were supposed to report their relationships with foreign nationals, even those in which all that passed between them were bodily fluids.

  Laurie took an entirely different view of Jim’s nights on the town. Late in his Manila tour, she recalled, their maid confessed to her that she and Jim were having an affair, and that she was pregnant. Laurie recalled that the Filipino housekeeper wanted her husband, her kids, and the family dog. Their maid wasn’t the first to throw herself at Jim, but she was the first hell-bent on breaking up the marriage. Laurie confronted Jim, and he quickly summoned the housekeeper for an intense conversation in Tagalog. Jim neither confirmed nor denied the affair to his wife. Many years later, he would deny ever cheating on her. But rumors about Jim’s affair with the housekeeper passed through the CIA station, according to one fellow officer.

  On the last day of July 1984, Laurie gave birth to Nathan in a hospital in Makati. The Nicholsons named him Nathaniel after the Old Testament prophet. It would have been easy at that point for Jim, with three kids in the house, to put his ambitions on the shelf and coast. But it might have been career suicide.

  The following year, the CIA posted Jim to Bangkok, Thailand, to take part in a covert program in support of the Cambodian resistance movement against communist Vietnam. The Vietnamese, backed by the Soviet Union, had seized Phnom Penh in the late 1970s and were at war with Cambodia. The bulk of Cambodia’s opposition movement—supported by the U.S.—had fled to the jungles of its western border with Thailand. The CIA needed bodies on the ground.

  Jim was thirty-four years old. He had sat out the Vietnam War in classrooms back in Oregon. Now came his chance to run paramilitary operations against the occupiers. Garrett, who supervised Jim in Manila, said the new assignment played to Jim’s strengths as a soldier. He recalled that his young subordinate was excited about running cross-border ops in a hot zone with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Part of the CIA’s mission was to ensure that Cambodians fleeing the bloodshed safely reached international refugee camps in Thailand. In a tricky arrangement, the U.S. supported the coalition forces of exiled leader Norodom Sihanouk and the anticommunist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front. The third leg of the coalition at odds with the communists was the Khmer Rouge, a guerrilla force led by Pol Pot, who had superintended genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. Many of the Cambodian refugees spilling into Thailand wanted food, asylum, and one-way tickets to the West. The CIA sent Jim and his colleagues to the border to train Sihanouk’s soldiers and make sure they reached safety.

  Jim shared no details of his new assignment with Laurie. He moved his wife and three kids into a house near the U.S. Embassy compound in Bangkok, hired a maid and a cook for them, and vanished. He took up residence in a CIA house in Aranyaprathet, Thailand, a border town more than 130 miles east of his family, where he spent much of the next three years. Jim was supposed to come home to Bangkok four days out of each fortnight, but his stretches on the border grew longer. At one point, he didn’t come home for months, leaving the kids heartbroken.

  The separation effectively turned Laurie into a single mom. She spent exhausting days making sure Jeremi caught his bus to and from the American School, packing Star off to preschool, and taking care of Nathan, still in diapers, as she took a weekday gemology class in downtown Bangkok. Nathan grew into toddlerhood scarcely knowing his dad. He was a terror: rebellious, tempestuous, the family daredevil. He seemed to find the highest spots in the house, often beds, then jump up and down until he fell. He was an unrepentant show-off who wore skinned knees like service medals. Nathan was, in almost every way, Jim’s mirror image.

  Meanwhile, Jim lost himself at work on the border, gathering intelligence alongside a young Thai interpreter, Kanokwan Lehliem, whom Jim would later credit with saving his life on a few occasions as they moved between troops and gunfire. Eventually they fell in love.

  Laurie and the kids paid a visit to Jim in Aranyaprathet one weekend, their driver carrying them past Buddhist shrines and green fields bleached by sunlight. When they reached Jim’s government house, Jeremi, who was just nine or ten, took one look at the place and thought it didn’t look like a man’s dwelling. The house was spotless, and it was abundantly clear to Jeremi and his mom that someone else was living with Jim.

  “There was a female in there, you could tell,” Laurie recalled in an interview years later. Yet there was no sign of a maid—not so much as a toothbrush. It was clear that whoever lived there had cleared out. Laurie couldn’t confront Jim with her suspicions in front of the kids. So she let it go. But the visit told her everything she needed to know. “He had his mistress there,” she said. “He had a house there. Why would he want me and three kids?” Laurie was torn apart by the latest of what she was starting to see as Jim’s serial infidelities. Still she wouldn’t leave him, clinging to the hope that Jim would overcome the demands of his job to make the most of their marriage.

  When Jim’s tour ended in 1987, the CIA shuttled Jim and his family off to Tokyo for a two-year hitch marred by the ambassador’s disdain for the agency. The CIA rotated Jim stateside in 1989. The Nicholsons bought a town house in Burke, Virginia, eighteen miles from agency headquarters.

  The CIA promoted Jim to chief of its station in Bucharest, where he would run intelligence operations against the communist bloc. This was a declared position, meaning Romanian officials would learn that he was the agency’s top spy in their country.

  Laurie didn’t want Jeremi to learn from outsiders that his dad was a CIA officer. So she sat down with her oldest, now twelve, asking him what he thought his dad did for a living. When Jeremi said his dad worked in government, Laurie helped guide him through a series of questions that steered him to Jim’s specific job. She swore Jeremi to secrecy and explained that Star and Nathan were too young to know.

  The Nicholson children had reached an age where Laurie felt comfortable taking a part-time job with the CIA to help serve her country and support Jim’s operations in Romania. She took some classes in the D.C. area—a couple of weeks of radio training and a course on how to identify surveillance—before they flew overseas.

  Bucharest, Romania, 1990

  The big house in Bucharest seemed like a palace to Nathan, who turned six that summer. The first-floor living space was cavernous, with stone floors, tall pillars, a fireplace, a servants’ staircase, and a large dining area with a built-in liquor cabinet. The table sat twelve. The basement had a wine cellar and cloakroom, with an overflow passage that held two refrigerators, where Jim—a fiend for chocolate—squirreled away Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Star took a small room with a domed ceiling. Nathan took a large room with Jeremi on the second floor, which had its own balcony. But he lived in the downstairs TV room playing Super Mario Brothers 3 on the game console.

  The house served as a party palace for the Nicholson kids and their classmates at the American School. Friends popped in for raucous games of hide-and-seek, making use of a massive attic where maids had once slept during the curfews imposed by malevolent communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. The Nicholsons threw an annual Halloween bash for kids in what Nathan recalled as their especially creepy basement.

  Jim’s posting in Romania put him
nine hundred miles from Moscow, a choice spot to run operations against his nation’s primary communist targets. But once again, Jim’s timing was poor. Anticommunism had already swept Europe, taking down regimes in Czechoslovakia and Poland. In East Germany, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. A month later, Ceauşescu’s rule over one of the most repressive nations in the Soviet bloc came to a dramatic close. He had made the mistake of ordering his KGB-like intelligence service, the Securitate, to open fire on antigovernment demonstrators. Ceauşescu’s own military hunted him down with his wife, Elena, capturing them on Christmas Day 1989, hastily trying them for genocide and public corruption, and summoning a firing squad. Hundreds of soldiers reportedly offered to deliver the fatal bullets.

  Jim was just thirty-nine years old, and his star shone brightly at Langley. He was practically a shoo-in to one day join the agency’s Senior Intelligence Service, the CIA’s top echelon. But he had a devil of a time in Bucharest, where his position was known to Romania’s intelligence service.

  Communism had fallen with Ceauşescu. But much of the Securitate’s rank and file—a secret police force once estimated at eleven thousand agents and a half-million citizen informants—still kept tabs on foreigners. Jim was tailed in his maroon Volvo and sometimes needed Laurie to sneak him around, dropping him off and picking him up at prearranged spots. She and Jim took hikes on streets near the embassy looking for dead drops, the secret hiding spots that spies and their assets used to communicate and exchange money.

  Laurie’s primary job was to man a radio monitoring system inside the embassy. She worked in a drafty garret, headset muffs clamped over her ears, as she tried to detect surveillance devices planted in the building. She sweated through Romania’s summers in her attic cubbyhole and wrapped herself in a blanket during its frozen winters, her antennas pointed down into the guts of the embassy to ensure that the offices of the CIA and the U.S. ambassador weren’t bugged.

  Laurie had hoped Jim’s new position in Bucharest would put him on something approximating a nine-to-five schedule. But once again, she found that his career came first. He worked long hours at the office, slipped out in the evenings, and occasionally left town on business. Laurie was certain he was playing around on her. She recalled that just two months after their arrival, Jim told her, “No matter what anyone says, I did not have an affair.” Laurie felt herself pulling away.

  She struck up a friendship with a polite young veterinarian named Radu, who was smart and good-looking and who, like so many eastern European vets, made house calls. He stood a little over six feet tall, about a foot taller than Laurie. Radu looked after the Nicholsons’ dog, Max, which was half wolf, and George, the stray orange-and-white cat that turned up on their doorstep. Radu treated George’s mange, and Laurie helped Radu with his English, correcting his pronunciation and teaching him American slang.

  Their friendship rattled Jim.

  It was late one evening when seven-year-old Nathan found his dad at the top of the staircase listening to Laurie and the young vet. They were seated on a sofa in the living room below, having an animated conversation. Nathan could see his dad eavesdropping with a furrowed brow, and he was curious. Jim motioned him over with a forefinger.

  “What’s up, Dad?”

  “That guy,” Jim said with a nod to the doings below, “really makes me uncomfortable.”

  That was all Nathan needed to hear. Before his father could say another word, he trotted downstairs and announced to Radu that he had overstayed his welcome and that it was time to hit the road. Nathan stood defiantly, his mom looking bewildered as Radu pulled himself to his feet. The young vet smiled uncomfortably and excused himself for the night.

  Not long after that, Jim confronted Laurie about the budding relationship. Their stories differ on what was said. Jim’s version, as he told it to his parents, was that he chewed her out for growing close to the young Romanian, saying it was precisely the kind of relationship the CIA had warned them about—one where she might be blackmailed into disclosing classified information. Laurie’s version is that Jim flat-out accused her of disclosing secrets to Radu, scolded her for being so stupid, and told her he’d been handed an inch-thick file on her misdeeds. It remains unclear what bothered Jim more—Laurie’s crush on the vet or her uncomfortable ties with a man he feared was a foreign spy.

  The Nicholsons’ marital bed wasn’t exactly on fire. Over the years, Laurie found Jim impatient in the sack, always wanting things his way. This was perhaps forgivable. But after all of his betrayals—his virtual abandonment of his family in Bangkok, his schtupping his way across much of southeastern Asia, at least in Laurie’s mind—his accusation that she’d been unfaithful to her country was the straw that broke the marriage’s back.

  In a kind of cosmic reorganization, Jim and Laurie’s union began to disintegrate just as one of the most feared superpowers in history imploded over the next border. On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Boris Yeltsin accepted the launch codes of the former empire’s nuclear missiles and became president of what would be called the Russian Federation. After decades of cruel leadership, systemic corruption, and austerity, the U.S.S.R. was dead. An obscenely expensive war in Afghanistan, tipped in the mujahideen’s favor by none other than the CIA, had helped to ruin the Soviet economy and end the Cold War.

  Back at CIA headquarters, the Soviet/East European Division threw a party that spilled into the fourth-floor hallways of the Original Headquarters Building. Many of the revelers, intoxicated by the global paradigm shift and the free flow of booze, pinned buttons to their suits. The buttons were circular and white, and featured a red hammer and sickle with three words stamped prominently:

  THE

  PARTY’S

  OVER!

  Jim’s attention in Bucharest stayed fixed on Moscow. He kept a laser focus on the foreign intelligence wing of the former KGB, now the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki. The Communist Party and the KGB were done. But its successors in foreign intelligence, the spies of the SVR, had merely tempered their hatred for the “Main Enemy,” the KGB’s nickname for the U.S. Now they called Americans their “Main Adversary.” The boys and girls in the SVR, many of them former KGB officers, weren’t holstering their Makarovs just yet. Their spying would now be a grudge rematch against the West, which had quietly knocked their dicks in the dirt. Jim saw Romania as a battleground in a new era in which the SVR and Romanian intelligence would surely pose a threat.

  But Jim’s take on things seemed paranoid and even delusional to John R. Davis Jr., who on March 11, 1992, became the new U.S. ambassador to Romania. Davis soon discovered that the CIA’s chief of station was, in his words, a bit odd.

  “For one thing,” Davis recalled, “he was seeing Russians under every bed. It was very strange. He tried to persuade me that the Romanians were still working for the Russians and that they shouldn’t be trusted under any circumstances. That they were up to no good in Romania.”

  Davis didn’t see it that way. He had spent thirteen years—­scattered over three decades—in Poland, where he witnessed firsthand the revolution that ended its piece of the Cold War. He believed that once the Soviets let go of the reins, the locals would scramble to ingratiate themselves with the West. It was something he’d seen all across eastern Europe. Davis was nearly certain that members of Romania’s Securitate, to assure their own survival, would do the same. He and Jim argued this point a few times before they agreed to disagree.

  Laurie continued to spend time with Radu, causing Jim personal and professional headaches. He probably felt that Radu posed a security threat—that he was a Romanian spy using Laurie to steal his office’s secrets. But he turned his anger directly at Laurie. He flew into a rage in early 1992, telling her never to see the veterinarian again. Jim promised her that if she did, he would take her, sexually, any way he pleased.

  The venomous attac
k came out of nowhere, Laurie recalled, leaving her confused and hurt. All that she and Radu had ever done was talk and maybe flirt a little. European men flirted perpetually. Jim’s response to her befriending the handsome vet wasn’t to lose his temper, to walk out on her, or to threaten to kill the bastard. He bullied the mother of his children into believing he would savage her if she disobeyed him, making Laurie feel like a whore.

  Perhaps it was spite, but she waited until Jim left town on a trip to Moldova to invite Radu over to the house. It was nighttime, and the kids were asleep, when she took him to bed in the attic. She made love to Radu another day, when the kids were at school. Laurie later confessed the affair to Jim, who demanded to know all the details. She recalls telling him, “A hundred times in a hundred places,” knowing it would piss him off.

  Just before Easter 1992, she got tipsy drinking wine with one of the embassy wives, and shared a few details of the discord in her marriage. Eventually she lost her temper, slipped off her wedding and engagement rings, and pitched them across the kitchen floor.

  In June, Laurie told Jim she wanted a divorce, and he said she could have it.

  “Fine,” she told him. “Get me on the first plane out of here.”

  Laurie recalls that Jim tried to dictate the terms, saying he would take the boys and she would take Star. But she wasn’t budging. She and the kids flew to Virginia, where Jeremi celebrated his fourteenth birthday, then traveled to upstate Washington to live with her brother. Jim stayed behind in Bucharest.