by Bryan Denson
They spoke about once a week, typically with Jim phoning to rant at her. She remembers speaking little, weeping much, and going numb during those chats. Later, she recalled, Jim confessed he was having a nervous breakdown. When the CIA reassigned Jim to Kuala Lumpur, he phoned her to demand that she and the kids move to Malaysia and join him, or that she finally divorce him.
On July 27, 1992, Laurie filed dissolution papers in Shelton, Washington. Jim flew to the Pacific Northwest later that summer, where Judge Toni A. Sheldon granted him temporary custody of the kids, partly because Jim had a good job and Laurie was unemployed. The judge ordered him to pay for Laurie’s college education and send her $700 a month to get her back on her feet. In the interim, she would have the kids every summer and Christmas vacation, regular contact by letter and phone, and a say in their religious upbringing. It would take years for Jim and Laurie to reach a divorce settlement, an excruciating journey for the Nicholson clan.
When the summer of 1992 came to an end, Laurie, living in the Pacific Northwest, packed the kids up to go live with their dad in Malaysia, where Jim was now stationed. She returned to Oregon State University to pursue the dreams she had abandoned two decades before to help Jim chase his. She studied geology, walling herself off like a prisoner to rebuild her life brick by brick. After a full-time course load and laboratory sessions that stretched long into the night, she dragged herself home to her little apartment and crumpled into bed thirteen time zones from her kids. She woke many mornings with eyes cemented shut from tears. To survive, she recalled, “I had to seal off my heart.”
Jim rarely put the kids on the phone. When she did reach them, she could hear the changes in their voices. She sensed them growing up without her, and it made her feel powerless. She longed to hug them, to smell their hair, see them smile. As often as possible, she placed overseas calls hoping that Jim wouldn’t pick up. His voice only reminded her of that long, brutal chapter in her mortal education. She hated him, and in her weakest moments wished him dead. Jim had created malleable women—the meek Laura Sue Cooper he married, the compliant Laurie Nicholson who stayed. All she wanted was to become someone else, someone she could respect. In fact, when the divorce became final two years later, Laurie would legally change her name to Al’Aura Jusme. The new surname formally redefined her place in the world. Just me.
She blamed Jim for their miseries and sensed he was grooming the kids for a life apart from her. Laurie tried to convince herself that the children would see through his attempts to slowly turn them against her, and that they would be strong enough not to play along. But Jim was powerfully deceptive. He’d been professionally trained at duplicity and deceit. He was, in so many ways, precisely what the agency created.
3
“Batman” Switches Teams
“History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
—T. S. Eliot, Gerontian
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1994
Sometime in early 1994, Jim’s superiors cabled him with his new assignment. The CIA was sending him stateside later that year, where he would report to The Farm to teach tradecraft.
“I think the living environment there will be better for the kids than up in Washington,” Jim wrote in his personal journal. He had kept a diary since the 1970s, and it now filled several volumes. “The housing and living there is very good, more affordable than in D.C. and more attractive. The schools are smaller, also an advantage. I may have been able to do better career-wise in taking a job at headquarters this time, but the operations training will probably be better for the family as a whole, plus it will make best advantage of my experience for the future of our organization. Teaching is something I have thought would be interesting. I am a little nervous about it, nevertheless. Still, change is often interesting and usually good for me.”
The agency liked to rotate veteran spies through The Farm, where their skills and real-world espionage experience would inspire and embolden students. Jim was a likely pick for one of the plum jobs. He had put in a dozen years overseas, and his supervisors at Langley probably thought a little time on The Farm would reinvigorate him.
As a deputy chief in the CIA’s Kuala Lumpur station, Jim oversaw the office’s spy operations. He was assigned to the U.S. Embassy, which sat on the northwest corner of the Royal Selangor Golf Club, in a swanky part of downtown called the Golden Triangle. Near the embassy, workers were completing the superstructure of the Petronas Twin Towers, an architectural wonder that would eventually stand taller than the Empire State Building.
Nathan would turn ten that summer. He liked the International School of Kuala Lumpur, where he wore a uniform of navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt with the school’s Panther logo over the pocket. His life in Malaysia marked a crossroads. He had grown up with an absentee dad who returned from time to time bearing gifts. “He was more of a Santa Claus figure,” Nathan recalled. But the father who was always vanishing into taxis and airport terminals was now at his disposal. Jim coached Nathan’s soccer, basketball, and softball teams, and he shuttled his youngest to and from an introductory tae kwon do class.
Jim supervised his kids’ homework and chauffeured them from one activity to another, thrilling in their accomplishments. Jeremi earned his Eagle Scout medal. Star had become an excellent equestrian. Nathan was a dynamo on the soccer team. They ate late dinners together, slopping up curry with the popular local flatbread, roti canai. Jim often drove them out to the swimming pool at the exclusive Raintree Club of Kuala Lumpur. Nathan’s siblings spent many summer days reading indoors, but he couldn’t hack it inside. He hurled himself outdoors with school friends, searing golden brown in the tropics.
Jim spent the spring of 1994 finalizing his divorce, drawing closer to his kids, and trying to jump-start his love life. He had gotten serious about a Chinese Malaysian named Lily, who worked at the U.S. Embassy. But his oldest kids detested her. Star and Jeremi saw their dad’s sweet young trophy girlfriend as a barnacle they hoped to pry loose before things got too serious. Lily worsened matters by presenting them with trinkets that made them feel as if they were being bought off. Nathan was still young enough to appreciate Lily’s attention. He liked the little pewter spaceship figurine she bought him. But Nathan missed his mom and hoped his parents would reconcile. Unlike his siblings, he was grateful to Lily for doting on him and making his dad happy again.
As Jim’s tour in Malaysia drew to a close in the middle of 1994, he sat the kids down to tell them he planned to propose to Lily. “I’m gonna put you guys first,” Nathan recalled his dad saying. “If any of you don’t like Lily, that’s it.” Star and Jeremi immediately voted no. Nathan would never forget the look of heartbreak on his dad’s face. While Nathan voted yes, the deal was already sealed. Jim would slowly break things off with Lily. She stayed around for a time, but Nathan remembered that she and her dad now said their goodbyes outside the house.
When school ended that spring, Jim flew the kids back to Oregon to spend the summer with Laurie and his extended family. Laurie and her lawyer were now making noise about money, forcing Jim to consider the financial implications of years of alimony and child support, college tuition, and twice-a-year airfare for the kids to see Laurie. They fought over community property—cars and furniture and keepsakes, along with a few small patches of undeveloped land they owned in Texas and coastal Washington, and the equity in their northern Virginia town house. But their biggest tilts involved custody: Both sought primary care of the kids.
One of Jim’s greatest faults, Laurie recalled, was that he had somehow accustomed himself to champagne tastes on a Budweiser budget. She used to tell him, “You have holes in your pockets as big as your pockets.” Jim was almost a fetishist about acquiring electronic gadgets. He bought top-shelf TVs, stereos, computers, and video-game systems, swapping them out as they lo
st their luster. While most of his colleagues bought their clothes off the rack, Jim preferred hand-tailored suits from Hong Kong. Early in his marriage, he had flown off on an overseas assignment and returned wearing a silver Rolex watch. Perhaps knowing Laurie would flip, he’d picked her up a pair of cheap vases.
With his looming divorce decree sure to break the bank, Jim devised a plan.
The CIA authorized Jim in the spring of 1994 to meet face-to-face with the SVR’s top official in Kuala Lumpur, Yuri P. Vlasov. (This was perhaps a pseudonym, since this also was the name of a Soviet Olympic gold medalist in weightlifting who famously denounced the KGB.) Vlasov served as rezident in the Malaysian city, the equivalent of a CIA station chief. Jim’s official meetings with Vlasov at the SVR’s rezidentura were intended to throw open the door to dialogue between the two spy agencies. But Jim’s underlying goal, tacitly approved by the agency, was to offer the Russian intelligence chief a chance to work secretly for the CIA.
Russians had jumped ship in droves after the collapse of the Soviet Union to secretly work for the CIA and FBI. The going rate for U.S. intelligence agencies to bring one of the valuable traitors aboard was about one million dollars. It was a buyer’s market. So much so that U.S. intelligence officials had put limits on how many of these volunteers they would put on the payroll.
The CIA kept some of these voluntary turncoats, known as “walk-ins,” as agents in place. This meant they kept their jobs in Russian intelligence services, but leaked secrets to the agency. The United States and the Russian Federation, now democratic partners in the global marketplace, found themselves clumsy at making nice after decades of head-to-head battles. While they continued to spy on each other, it behooved them to team up on issues such as counterterrorism, which threatened both nations. It was the right time for the U.S. and the Russian Federation to quit acting like the playground bullies who’d been forced to shake hands after the fight.
Higher-ups in the CIA and SVR had agreed to share intelligence on Islamic terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, which threatened Russian and U.S. interests. Muslim extremists had bombed New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, and Russia—having lost its war against Afghanistan’s mujahideen—was now hip deep in an undeclared war against Islamic guerrilla forces in the breakaway region of Chechnya.
Jim made his way to the Russian Embassy. It was a mile away from the U.S. diplomatic station, walking distance if you didn’t mind soaking through your shirt on the way over. It may never be clear whether Jim and Vlasov discussed terrorism in their first meeting, but it would have been timely. Not quite six years later, a group of Arab terrorists—some battle-hardened by the Soviet war in Afghanistan—met in that very city to plan a series of attacks attributed to a group that came to be called al-Qaeda.
What is known about Jim’s meeting with Vlasov is that the CIA had given their man permission to offer the Russian—just between gentlemen—an opportunity to switch teams.
In spy parlance, this is called hanging out the shingle. This wasn’t a formal pitch, simply the CIA’s way of opening the door, a smidge, to see if Vlasov would take a peek at the pile of money on the other side. Jim knew that developing the rezident into a mole for the CIA would be next to impossible. But he also knew that were he successful, his star would shoot through the roof at Langley, and he’d likely earn a bump in pay. The same went for Vlasov: Recruiting Jim would be a major coup. Both spies were high-level officers who held the positions, and security clearances, necessary to breach some of their nations’ best-kept secrets.
What Vlasov couldn’t have known is that Jim had been daydreaming about switching teams even before their meeting. He imagined himself selling his country’s secrets in exchange for piles of cash—money that could solve his problems. He would pay off Laurie in the divorce and possibly gain primary custody of the kids. Jim tried to rationalize such a betrayal. He figured the CIA had long ago turned him into a criminal. He had broken into houses, planted bugs for the agency. He had paid people to steal their own countries’ secrets. Besides, as he noted years later in an interview with author David Wise, he didn’t see Russia as the “bogeyman” of yesteryear. But Jim was tortured by nightmares of going to prison.
Jim should have had nightmares. A few weeks back, in a courthouse near his old rental house in Alexandria, a federal judge had sentenced former CIA officer Aldrich Ames to prison for the rest of his life. Ames’ Russian handlers had given him the code name Kolokol (“The Bell”), paying him a staggering $2.5 million as their agent inside the CIA. Ames apologized during his sentencing hearing in Alexandria’s federal courthouse. But he told the judge he’d grown disenchanted by the U.S. government’s extreme political shift to the right and accused the CIA’s careerist bureaucrats of deceiving generations of Americans and their policy makers about the necessity and value of their spying.
Years later, from inside the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, Ames would acknowledge in a letter to me that the odds of someone inside the CIA selling the agency’s secrets and getting away with it was, and remains, quite poor. Ames wrote that the CIA’s spies are paid as well as comparably qualified civil servants. Like other Americans, they save money, buy houses, send their kids to college, and take vacations. Still, like other professionals, they come up short, suffer financial crises, and divorce. “Only a very, very few try to solve these problems illegally, robbing banks or getting money for secrets,” he wrote. “Loyalty of one sort or another, fear and conventionality, keep most on the straight and narrow.”
Jim knew that Ames had been captured, convicted, and sentenced to life. His colleagues in the CIA considered Ames a disgrace for embarrassing the agency and betraying his government’s secrets. Ames’ betrayals had helped Russia identify and execute spies inside its own intelligence operations. But Jim took a different view of Ames’ treachery and arrest. He figured that with Ames out of the way, the SVR might be in the market for another highly paid mole inside the CIA.
By sunset on June 17, 1994, one of the longest days of the year in Kuala Lumpur, Jim would have taken his first irreversible steps toward becoming the CIA’s new Judas. While meeting in Russia’s embassy, Jim told Vlasov he was in trouble. His tour in Malaysia was ending, he said, and he was up to his jugular in an expensive divorce and custody fight. Soon he would have to resettle his kids in the United States.
“I need twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said.
Vlasov sat for a moment, taking it all in. He had gray hair and a nice suit. His English was good.
“That should not be a problem,” he said.
The Russian’s face betrayed no emotion. But he must have been ready to burst into song over his good fortune. Jim had required neither flattery nor coaxing. There would be no seduction necessary to get the CIA man to betray his country for cash. Jim had simply volunteered to spy against the very nation he had served with distinction for twenty years. Vlasov, however, was trained to be suspicious. Guys like Jim rarely volunteered. Vlasov knew that CIA and FBI counterintelligence personnel sometimes posed as potential spies against the U.S. The long-term strategy of these “dangles” was to play the Russians, learn what kind of operations they were running, and give them useless tidbits to string them along. Moscow’s spies had done the same thing for generations.
Vlasov wanted to know what Jim could do for Russia, and Jim explained that he was being sent to The Farm as an instructor. Vlasov had to grin.
“What did you do wrong?”
Vlasov knew Jim could help the SVR. In his new position at The Farm, Jim would learn the true identities of hundreds of Career Trainees, known as CTs, many of whom would be sent overseas on their first tours—some to spy on Russia. If Jim gave up the identities of those CTs, the SVR would know them on sight. This meant Moscow wouldn’t have to waste time and countless rubles identifying CIA officers in foreign nations. This would turn Russia into a toothy cat in its global cat-and-mouse game
s with the CIA. The SVR could set traps for the young CIA officers all over the world, bugging their homes and tailing them.
Russian spies were notoriously patient. They often gathered information on foreign intelligence officers for years before pitching them to commit espionage against their own countries. A walk-in windfall such as Jim Nicholson could keep SVR spy operations hopping. With his new job in the CIA, Jim would be strategically placed to become the next Aldrich Ames.
But Vlasov was left to wonder whether Jim could deliver the SVR the names of deep-cover American spies. Officers with nonofficial cover, known as NOCs, operated alone, often posing as businessmen. This work was dangerous. Intelligence officers with embassy cover caught in the act of espionage in a foreign country were typically expelled. But the unmasking of NOCs was a different matter. They could be arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, even killed.
A week after Jim’s pivotal meeting with Vlasov, they met again at the Russian Embassy. Vlasov handed Jim a stack of hundred-dollar bills, $25,000 in all, and told him that Moscow was holding $75,000 more to pay him later. They met again on June 29. This time, Vlasov told Jim that Moscow had approved their arrangement, and that he would meet his new SVR handler in New Delhi, India, at Christmastime. Vlasov gave Jim a mail-drop address in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, and instructed him to send a postcard, signed Nevil R. Strachey, to signal the meeting in Delhi. Someone in the African nation would pick up the mail and alert his handler that the meet was on. The use of the mail drop, which spies call an accommodation address, would put layers of distance between Jim and the man he would meet in India.
Before Jim left the Russian Embassy, the SVR snapped his photo. This would be forwarded to his new handler, who would be told to watch for the CIA man in the lobby of Le Meridien Hotel in downtown Delhi. Vlasov instructed Jim to wear his Rolex on his right wrist and carry a magazine and shopping bag. He would wait for his handler to greet him first before responding with a pass-phrase.