The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  During four visits with Vlasov in June 1994, Jim did his part to show the SVR he meant business. He turned over the names of more than a dozen assets cultivated by his CIA colleagues in Kuala Lumpur, some of them agents working inside Malaysia. All of Jim’s meetings were authorized by the CIA. The agency had no reason to suspect Jim of secretly using the meets to chart his course as the CIA’s new betrayer.

  As far as the CIA knew, Jim was performing bona fide intelligence work in Kuala Lumpur. The very month that he switched teams, the director of Malaysia’s spy service, known as the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysian Police, awarded Jim a gold ceremonial dagger, a kris with a serpentine blade.

  On the last day of June, Jim wired $12,000 into his savings account at the SELCO Credit Union in Eugene, Oregon. This put him in position to square things with Laurie. That summer, they would finalize the terms of their divorce. Jim was ordered to pay Laurie $4,000 for her share of their land, and $2,000 for her legal fees. The judge thought Jim and Laurie were both good parents. But Jim was a steady government worker with an excellent salary, and Laurie was a broke college student. The judge ruled that Jim would serve as the primary caregiver, and that he must fly the kids home to spend Christmas breaks and summer vacations with their mother.

  Camp Peary, Virginia, summer 1994

  The CIA’s covert training center stretches more than nine thousand acres across the Piedmont flats along the York River in southeastern Virginia. A tall fence corrals much of Camp Peary, named for the North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary. The base has a 1,500-meter airstrip, a helicopter pad, shooting ranges, classrooms, running trails, a swimming pool, a clubhouse, a Holiday Inn–like dormitory to house trainees, and nice homes for its instructors.

  CIA officials do not formally acknowledge the place. But to residents next door in Colonial Williamsburg, where actors in tricorner hats carry muskets and women wear bonnets and colonial skirts, Camp Peary is an open secret. The property had variously served as the indigenous home of the Shawnees, the hunting lodge of the last British governor of Virginia, a Civil War field hospital and, during World War II, a training center for Seabees and a stockade for German POWs. Now it was home to one of the world’s best spy schools.

  Jim had the right mix of skill and charisma to lead the next generation of the agency’s CTs. He was assigned to teach tradecraft. The course ran about five months, with a slightly shorter paramilitary course. Between those disciplines, CTs learned how to parachute out of a plane, write and decipher secret messages, shoot pistols and machine guns, drive a car through a roadblock, break into a house to plant bugs, and recruit and handle foreign agents. The CTs would also be dispatched to nearby towns, such as Richmond, for mock operations that taught them how to cultivate assets, set up secret communications, and put the slip on surveillance teams.

  The Farm was the ultimate gated community, a kind of secret national park, for the instructors and their families who lived there. Parents never worried about pedophiles or kidnappers, who would rue the day they trespassed on such a heavily secured and devilishly armed facility. The first thing instructors with children were told when they moved onto the base was to buy them bicycles to get around. While portions of The Farm were kept off limits, there were trails and creek beds through vast tracts of hardwood forests open for exploration.

  Nathan turned ten the month that his dad moved to Camp Peary. Star would turn thirteen in a few months, and Jeremi was sixteen. The base was so sprawling and clean that Nathan had no clue he lived in a private community inaccessible to the general public. He had spent almost his entire life in government housing in Asia and Europe and had no idea what living in the U.S. was supposed to look and feel like.

  The Nicholsons took up residence in a two-story government house with a splendid deck and big backyard at the end of a cul-de-sac. The house was marked M-16, an address that doesn’t exist outside The Farm. Nathan chuckled when he first heard the house number, because M-16 also was the name of the military rifle his dad carried in the Army. Jim sometimes regaled Nathan with tales of his days in the Army’s elite corps of airborne Rangers, of jump training and small-arms fire. Nathan ate it up, convinced that he, too, would one day wear the spit-and-polish boots of an Army Ranger.

  Nathan spent summer days lazing in the base’s outdoor swimming pool, nights playing hide-and-seek amid the fireflies. On Saturday evenings, he and other Camp Peary kids gathered in the base clubhouse for movies. They hiked and biked countless miles, exploring the ruins of abandoned houses that—like the boys themselves—were beaten by sun and salt air. They were tough boys, and mischievous.

  Early one Saturday evening, Nathan and his friends pedaled out to the airstrip, a restricted space next to the York River, about ten miles from the brackish waters of Chesapeake Bay. Some of the older boys posted Nathan and his friend Mike as lookouts. Nathan couldn’t fathom why an airfield held any allure. But they stood point as the others ditched their bikes on the runway and hiked toward a cargo plane. Nathan watched them, astonished by their cheek. The lights of a security station shone on the other end of the strip. What if someone saw them? What if a plane came in for a landing? Nathan could see the boys climb into the cargo plane. Soon, a security officer drove straight toward him and stopped.

  “What are you kids doing?” the security man asked.

  Nathan explained that he had no idea.

  “So how many of your friends are in the plane?”

  “Three.”

  The guard took Nathan’s name and drove over to roust the other boys and jot down their names. The boys pedaled back to the base clubhouse to await their fates. Some of them broke into tears as their parents, who’d been notified, rang the clubhouse phone. One by one, the boys took their brief calls, waved weak goodbyes to the others, and headed home to face the music.

  Finally, it was Nathan’s turn. He sat sick with dread. He could only imagine how disappointed his dad would be. Jim’s occasional upbraiding, unlike Laurie’s, was neither shrill nor violent. Laurie often shouted and gave them a choice of being either grounded or paddled, the former being so abhorrent to an adventurous kid like Nathan that he frequently took the paddling. Jim’s method was to sit Nathan down for discussions. With crisp diction and a wrinkled brow, he walked his youngest through the elements of his transgression. These discussions did not end until Jim was certain Nathan fully understood the gravity of his trespasses. Jim’s look of betrayal and words of admonishment were all the punishment he needed.

  “Nathan, it’s your dad.”

  He took the phone.

  “Son,” Jim said, “I understand you were questioned here earlier.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  Nathan admitted his role as lookout for the other boys.

  “You’re not gonna do this again, are you?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” he heard his dad say. “I think you’ve had enough of a scare.”

  And just like that, it was over. The fright of being caught and questioned by base security, as Jim had said, was punishment enough.

  That conversation stitched Nathan and Jim ever closer. But his father had never shared with him the family secret, nor had anyone else. Nathan knew his father held a government job, laboring in and around U.S. embassies. But he’d never been curious enough—or perhaps old enough—to ask the nature of his work. And he was slow to pick up on the abundant clues that his father wasn’t an ordinary bureaucrat.

  Nathan entered fifth grade that fall, and his yellow school bus seemed to be the only one at Queens Lake Elementary that passed in and out of Camp Peary. He heard someone say the driver had a special security clearance to enter the gates of the camp. The children who lived at the training center, and who knew what their parents really did for a living, were instructed to tell their classmates they lived on a Department of Defe
nse base. It was a small lie perpetuated by signage. But there were more obvious clues, too, that Camp Peary was no ordinary suburban community.

  The neighborhood was the only one Nathan ever saw with its own shooting range. Jim gave Nathan trigger time at the range, where he fired a .22-caliber rifle, a crossbow, and one of Jim’s big-bore pistols. His dad sometimes took him and his siblings to what he called “demonstrations.” Nathan recalls watching a group of men blow up a hillside. Another time, he witnessed a car, closely pursued by another, hurtling down what appeared to be a racetrack. Suddenly, both cars skidded to a halt, with the driver of one pulling a pistol and firing at the other. This was part of the CIA’s “Crash Bang” course.

  Car crashes, muzzle fire, explosions—to a ten-year-old boy, these were the Siren calls of manhood. But no one offered Nathan any context for these demonstrations.

  Nathan mined fragments of his memory for details that might explain why they lived on this strange military post. He recalled a conversation, on the sidelines of a soccer match in Malaysia, in which his father was telling a friend about tailing someone, or maybe of being tailed. His dad had uttered a name, and Nathan could see it bothered the old man to have spoken it in front of him. Jim had said, “I need you to not remember this, all right?” And later, when Jim had quizzed him about the name, he seemed pleased to see Nathan hadn’t remembered it.

  It’s unclear why Jim left Nathan in the dark about his job. Perhaps he figured his youngest was simply too immature to handle such a weighty disclosure. Star and Jeremi had kept the family secret from their little brother. Years would pass before Nathan heard his dad’s name uttered in the same breath as words like “spy” and “CIA.”

  4

  A New Counterspy Collaboration

  “Our investigative agencies seem to be more concerned with protecting their own bureaucratic turf than getting down to the business of catching spies. The nation cannot afford to let this situation continue.”

  —U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, May 3, 1994

  Langley, Virginia, 1994

  In May of 1994, Bill Clinton signed a presidential directive that reshaped the U.S. spy-catching apparatus. The administration, stupefied by sloth and missed opportunities in the Aldrich Ames case, ordered the FBI and CIA to share information to maximize the effectiveness of national counterintelligence efforts. Clinton’s directive required CIA counterintelligence officers to permanently staff management positions in the FBI’s National Security Division and possibly the bureau’s field offices. The directive also ordered that a senior FBI executive permanently serve as chief of the counterespionage group within the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center.

  These changes came as a crisp slap in the face to the CIA, an acknowledgment by the executive branch that Langley couldn’t be trusted to identify its own bad apples. The two agencies, notoriously competitive, would now be forced to work together to identify and catch spies in their own ranks.

  For Ed Curran, the first FBI executive embedded as the CIA’s counterespionage chief, the job was a bit like going to work each morning in the opposing team’s locker room. He was given a blue CIA badge, a parking space, and a small office at the agency’s headquarters, all of which gave him the appearance of being a senior agency man. But he was an outsider, a law enforcement guy, and his new position didn’t make him popular at Langley. After just two days, he wondered what in the hell he’d gotten himself into. Some of his new colleagues loathed the presence of any FBI man trespassing in the hallowed halls of the CIA, and this went double for an agent willing to turn the place upside down in the hunt for turncoats.

  “The bureau came in there, after Ames, like the Panzers into Poland,” observed Paul J. Redmond, who supervised the CIA’s investigation of Ames and was the agency’s deputy director of counterintelligence during the Nicholson probe. “They were in charge. They were throwing their weight around. We were getting the shit kicked out of us. We were pretty defensive.”

  It’s unlikely anyone hated the FBI’s taking over the counterespionage section of the shop more than Redmond, who had no faith in the bureau’s abilities to identify spies. He fully expected Curran and company to take residence at Langley, get a good look at how hard it was to commence spy-catching operations, and quit complaining, forever, about how the agency did things. Redmond secretly hoped the FBI would screw things up so royally that the bureau would permanently get out of his hair.

  But Curran wasn’t going anywhere. Early in the new job, he learned that from 1993 to 1994, about three hundred CIA officers—from first-tour spies to chiefs of station—had failed agency polygraph tests designed, in part, to unmask moles. Results of the tests were supposed to guide counterintelligence. But in the CIA’s culture, Curran explained, you could fail a test and no one took action. So he and his colleagues in the counterespionage section ordered new polygraphs for those who blew their previous ones. Officers were hauled in from all over the world for their turns on the box. Curran went so far as to assign three CIA polygraph operators—the best in the agency—to conduct a precise, highly targeted line of questioning he called “my test.”

  Curran wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want to find in your rearview mirror. He took a job as a clerk in the FBI in 1962 and clawed his way to agent and supervisor positions before breathing the rarer airs of the bureau’s top management. Curran, who stood six-foot-two, was a blunt, imposing lawman. He spoke with a word-merging, consonant-­swallowing New York accent, which he salted with colorful runs of profanity. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, spitting distance from Harlem, the same Irish Catholic neighborhood that the comedian George Carlin dubbed “White Harlem.” Curran followed Carlin by a few years at Corpus Christi School, where nuns kept order with an iron ruler. The FBI man was known to take just so much bullshit from any man, which was none at all.

  At the CIA, Curran’s new colleagues put the agency’s officers through fresh rounds of polygraphs. They didn’t give a rip whether CIA employees had beaten their wives or cheated on their taxes; being an asshole was perfectly acceptable, Curran said. They were hunting for spies. The wave of polygraphs caused a lot of grumbling at the agency. Supervisors berated Curran and Redmond. They complained that employees who failed their turns on the box fell under suspicion, their careers derailed, promotions denied, overseas assignments canceled.

  “The CIA had screwed up so badly with Ames that it could no longer be trusted to clean its own house,” former CIA man Bob Baer wrote in his 2003 memoir, See No Evil. Baer rotated through Langley the very month Curran showed up, and he, too, was put through two polygraphs in a half year. Baer complained that innocent officers under scrutiny were reassigned to security facilities in nearby Tysons Corner. “Everyone,” Baer wrote, “had a friend or colleague tied up in the security purgatory.”

  Baer said in an interview that a colleague’s desk had been yellow-taped as part of the morale-killing juggernaut of FBI agents, CIA security officers, and investigators from the Inspector General’s Office rolling through Langley. “All the outsiders were looked at as being a hostile occupying force,” he said. Operatives like Baer considered lie detection part of the dark arts, a fraud that scared people rather than establishing guilt or innocence. Putting the FBI in charge of counterespionage in the building was debilitating, he said. “It was like putting the fox in the chicken coop and saying, ‘Find me a crime.’”

  Curran acknowledged the paranoia wrought by the polygraphs. But he and Redmond knew secrets that Baer didn’t. The CIA and FBI were quietly working to resolve several espionage cases in their own ranks, and the only CIA personnel who needed to fear their investigations were those moonlighting as spies for foreign powers. The onslaught of polygraphs cleared all but about 5 percent of those who had proved deceptive in previous rounds on the box. But Curran noted that the lie detectors were just one piece of the Counterintelligence Center’s housecleaning strategy.

  The
CIA constantly worked its overseas contacts, including assets inside foreign intelligence services. It had developed information about leaks inside the agency that were far more ominous than the rank and file could have known. The CIA had turned up intriguing tidbits from a Russian intelligence officer about an agency man selling secrets to the SVR. The source didn’t know the CIA officer’s name, but knew he had worked in Asia, spoke a foreign language, and had spent time in the Middle East.

  The tip was vague, but alarming to U.S. counterespionage officials.

  New Delhi, India, December 1994

  That summer Jim jotted a note in his journal, saying he had no regrets about his work at The Farm or his forthcoming flight to India.

  “Both of them color my life experience,” he wrote, “and give me satisfaction that I’m doing much to get the most from my time on Earth.”

  In Delhi, Jim posed as a tourist in the lobby of Le Meridien Hotel. As he’d been instructed, he held a shopping bag and wore his Rolex on the wrong wrist. The man who approached him was a hulking fellow with a broad face and dark hair thinning above his temples. Jim stood casually, waiting for the big man to amble over and run his half of their parol.

  The stranger, pretending not to know Jim, asked if he were with a tour group, which he named. Jim played it out, telling him no, and that he was there with another group. That simple recognition dialogue commenced a lucrative bond between spy and handler. Jim would open the spigot of top-secret U.S. files and keep them flowing to the Russian Federation. In exchange, Moscow would pay Jim generously.

  Sergei A. Polyakov (friends called him “Seryozha”) introduced himself to Jim, who quietly handed over his shopping bag. The sack held a batch of CT dossiers straight off The Farm, which Jim had printed himself. Later that evening, a car collected Jim from the hotel and carried him to a commercial office, where Polyakov handed him a brown paper package. Jim looked inside and saw five bands of hundred-dollar bills. Fifty grand.