by Bryan Denson
“I’m good,” he said.
“Why don’t you put that down?” Smylie suggested helpfully. “Have you worked against Russian or other Eastern bloc intel officers?”
Jim said he had.
“Put it down,” Smylie said.
After the two men parted, Jim paid his tab at the Shangri-La with $1,679.59 in cash and stopped by the Overseas Union Bank, where he bought gold coins valued at $820.58.
Smylie turned over the laughing Buddha statuette to the FBI to be X-rayed for bugs. When it cleared the bureau’s scrutiny, they gave it back. Only later would Smylie come to believe that Polyakov had given the Buddha to Jim, who had regifted it to him as a sick joke. It dug in Smylie’s craw that his brother officer came to Singapore to commit espionage under his nose and expected to get away with it. Jim’s ego, Smylie later explained, had exceeded his expertise.
Back in the U.S., FBI agents tuned in to Jim’s hour-by-hour doings in Singapore were now certain they had a traitor in their sights. But they would still need more evidence.
“You’d lose your job for stepping into a limo of a foreign service, but you don’t go to jail for that,” said John E. McClurg, an FBI supervisor who worked under Curran at Langley. “You have a hard time passing a polygraph when you do things like that, but you don’t go to jail. So from that moment on, we knew the horses were off and running. Now the task was to build a defensible criminal case against this guy.”
The FBI and CIA wanted the Nicholson case dispatched quickly, by plea bargain. But to get there, they needed overwhelming evidence. Jim’s secret meeting in Singapore wasn’t the rock-solid evidence they needed.
Some of Jim’s colleagues would later ridicule Jim for making the mistake of climbing into a car with Russian diplomatic plates. But the Russians had set things up that way, perhaps a calculated move to further assert dominion over their CIA man. They were showing their mole they owned him.
On July 1, 1996, after Jim’s business in Singapore concluded, he flew to Bangkok. He retraced familiar ground, speeding across gentle green farmland abundant with Buddhist shrines toward Aranyaprathet to see Kanokwan. He headed back through time to the place, and the people, where their adventures began. The following day, they caught a plane to Hawaii for a short vacation.
Jim had already notified the CIA he intended to marry Kanokwan. She was thirty years old, fifteen years his junior, and her devotion to Jim and his government remained strong. Agency policy required thorough background checks of foreigners who intended to marry into the CIA. This was to ensure that a rival intelligence agency hadn’t planted a spy—masquerading as a lover or potential spouse—in the bedroom of one of its own.
Kanokwan and Jim luxuriated for a few days at the sprawling Hanalei Bay Resort on Kauai before flying off to Oregon, where she would meet his family. Nick and Betty let Jim and his love stay with them in their little home in Eugene. They weren’t bowled over by the demure Thai, but it was clear their oldest son was smitten with Kanokwan, who was so much younger, and Buddhist. They wondered how Jim’s kids would react.
The Nicholson kids, spending their summer in Oregon, were polite to their dad’s love interest. Jim had often told his family that Kanokwan had saved his life a few times during his assignment on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. But the Nicholson children were still torn up by the divorce and their parents’ lingering acrimony.
When Jim quietly drew the kids aside to announce his intentions to marry Kanokwan, Jeremi and Star balked. They refused to bless the union. Both thought the divorce, finalized only two years earlier, was too recent for their parents to consider remarrying.
“My sister and I selfishly believed that our family was our family,” Jeremi recalled years after that conversation. “We wanted to keep it that way. We didn’t want to bring outside sources in.” Star, who would turn fifteen in the fall, understood that her dad wanted to start a new family with Kanokwan. But neither she nor Jeremi wanted half brothers or half sisters. Stubbornly, Jeremi said, they refused to yield to their dad’s plans to bring Kanokwan into the family. Both he and Star turned two thumbs down.
Nathan, who would celebrate his twelfth birthday at the end of the month, thought his dad often seemed terribly lonely. He was happy to share him with someone who could light him up. He voted yes to the marriage, as he had with Lily, another demonstration of Nathan’s fidelity to his dad.
By all accounts, Nathan was a whole lot like Jim. Both were charming and possessed the perfect mix of left- and right-brain capabilities. They also bore an uncanny resemblance, with the same toothy smiles, strong brows and chins, and eyes as blue as an early summer sky. But it was Jim’s and Nathan’s temperaments that people noticed most. They were both so easygoing, very slow to anger. They were also risk takers with bold ambitions, and both placed high value on these qualities. They endeavored to move through life’s adventures as charming gentlemen. The fundamental difference between Jim and his youngest was that Jim could be uncommonly self-centered, while Nathan—to a fault—thought of everyone else first.
Star was fiercely protective of Nathan, and smothered him with love. She was a classic middle child, brokering peace and serving as a human barometer of the family’s moods. When things were going poorly, she was the first to break down and cry. But she was typically upbeat, kept a close circle of girlfriends, and treated the family cats as humans. Jeremi was intellectually curious, a student of the world who kept an eye on his siblings. In the years to come, he would take on an almost paternal role in dressing Star down for swearing or sneaking a beer. Nathan’s siblings fought often.
On July 12, Jim gave Jeremi $12,377.50 to buy a new Dodge Neon. His oldest was headed to college that fall, to his parents’ alma mater in nearby Corvallis. Two days later, Jim flew home to northern Virginia, paying a $120 parking tab at Dulles. It’s unclear whether he took Kanokwan with him. What is clear is that they didn’t make immediate plans to marry.
By now, the FBI had launched an investigative full-court press. Their orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowed them to tail Jim wherever he went and electronically eavesdrop on every utterance he made. Investigators now believed Jim was selling out his country. But they met resistance at CIA headquarters, where a few senior officials bitched that the FBI was about to ruin the career of a promising officer. The bureau’s investigators didn’t give a rip about Jim’s promising career.
Jim’s Singapore trip foreclosed on virtually any chance the U.S. might spare him from criminal charges. U.S. intelligence officers caught in compromising situations with foreign spies were sometimes recycled as double agents. In Jim’s case, senior CIA officials could have kept him on a short leash at Langley, allowing him to keep his regular meetings with the SVR. They could pass mildly interesting or phony information to Russia, giving Jim the chance to report to the CIA what kinds of information the SVR sought. But this was always risky business. Had the U.S. played that card, the CIA ran the risk of watching Jim defect to Moscow.
Government lawyers hoped to gather enough evidence to arrest Jim on an espionage charge potentially punishable by death. This would give prosecutors leverage to negotiate a quick guilty plea in exchange for a lesser sentence. But they had much work to do. On July 16, 1996, Jim took his first management position at CIA headquarters. He remained disappointed the agency turned him down for the station-chief job in Addis Ababa, where he and the kids could have had a housing allowance and a maid. But his new job as a branch chief inside Langley’s vast Counterterrorist Center came with a promotion to GS-15, the highest civil service pay rating in U.S. government. By that fall, he would earn $78,385 a year.
Investigators now kept tabs on Jim around the clock. A July 19 audit of the CIA computer system showed that while working at The Farm, Jim had searched for cables and other reports using such keywords as “Russia” and “Chechnya.” Jim’s high clearance allowed him to access the Central
Eurasia Division database, but he wasn’t authorized to poke around in those files. His breach had triggered security alerts and caused CIA systems personnel to list him as a “surfer.”
5
We Have Another Aldrich Ames
“We should begin by recognizing that spying is a fact of life . . . We’re in a long twilight struggle with an implacable foe of freedom.”
—Ronald Wilson Reagan, presidential radio address,
June 19, 1985
Langley, Virginia, summer 1996
John Maguire sat in a cubicle village on the second floor of CIA headquarters, a clean, well-carpeted place full of file cabinets and misery. After fourteen years of exciting spy work, he now labored in utter obscurity in a pool of human resources mopes. Maguire had spent most of his years in the agency on the front lines of the Cold War, although more recently he labored as a counterterrorism operative in the Middle East. He had served in such garden spots as El Salvador, Honduras, Lebanon, and Iraq. But now it was abundantly clear that at forty-two, his once-promising career in espionage was over.
Maguire had gotten crossways with his boss, the Near East Division chief, for refusing to take an overseas posting in Karachi, Pakistan. His penance was a position in HR, in the bowels of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building, part of the agency’s sprawling, highly secured compound in the Langley community of McLean, Virginia. There he drank sweetened coffee and pushed pencils amid the agency’s plebes, poring through the personnel files of other CIA officers to determine those worthy of promotions. He found it disheartening to labor through the applications of agency employees who, unlike himself, might actually be promoted.
Maguire’s ennui was broken, from time to time, by the prank calls of colleagues still performing actual spy work. Some disguised their voices to ask about their promotions packets before busting a gut. Others phoned to make such helpful declarations as, “You’re so fucked.” One day, in the spring of 1996, Maguire’s phone rang and he heard the voice of Anna, the secretary of the Near East Division.
Anna was a powerful figure in the division, something of an aging Miss Moneypenny, and as part of the senior secretarial pool, she enjoyed the oblique horsepower of her division chief. When Anna called, you paid attention. When you needed help, she was your oracle. Need to proof-check an official memo? She pored over it, caught your errors. Need to reach an overseas leader, a business figure, someone at the White House? She had the number. Screw up badly? She dressed you down, leaving you standing with your shoes smoking as if you’d been struck by lightning. Anna was a striking, statuesque woman with raven hair. All the senior secretaries in the CIA had juice. If they liked you, they could make your life easier. Anna seemed to like Maguire.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m trying not to kill myself in my seat,” he said.
“Come upstairs,” he heard her say. “Don’t tell anybody where you’re going. Just leave your desk and come up here to me right now.”
“OK.”
Like so many times in his career, Maguire could only imagine the fresh patch of hell in front of him. He had served seven years as a cop in his native Baltimore, then fourteen more as a spy. He understood the swift, decisive nature of upper-management bureaucrats, whose sudden decrees often fell into subordinates’ laps like hot coals. Maguire hauled his six-foot-three, 195-pound frame out of his chair and slipped away quietly. He caught an elevator to the sixth floor, one level below the penthouse of power, where the Director of Central Intelligence runs the show. There, outside his boss’s door, he found Anna at her desk. She steered him into the office, and the door closed.
He stood in front of a familiar wooden desk, behind which sat Steve Richter, whom he had never seen without a suit and tie. Richter, a key part of the Directorate of Operations, the CIA’s clandestine wing, oversaw spy operations across the Middle East. Maguire thought his boss was one of the smartest and most talented of the agency’s senior intelligence officers, and also one of the most vindictive.
The previous fall, Richter had flown to London to tell Maguire of his next assignment: Karachi. The move would have taken Maguire out of his work in northern Iraq, and he wanted none of it. He had run spy and paramilitary operations in the Middle East nation for five years, having first dropped into Iraq for the Persian Gulf War. Maguire felt invested in Iraq’s future. It had taken years to wrap his head around the country’s complicated, tribally based culture, its Ba’ath Party leadership, and the wickedness of Saddam Hussein and his power-sick sons, Uday and Qusay. He had hoped that his good work would be rewarded with a promotion to a leadership post in Amman or Abu Dhabi.
Maguire asked Richter to let him stay on in London. He was happy there, enjoying what is known in Foreign Service parlance as an “accompanied tour” with his wife and two daughters. Maguire told Richter he hoped to continue his vital work in Iraq, where he had developed locals—sometimes with trunks of cash—to gain secrets from inside Iraq’s seats of power.
Richter hadn’t flown to London to negotiate. He urged Maguire to take the assignment and report to the CIA station in Karachi. That’s when Maguire played his last card. He told Richter that his wife, a registered nurse, had long told him there were only two countries on the planet so full of filth and disease that she refused to raise their girls in them: India and Pakistan. For those reasons, Maguire told his boss, he would have to politely decline the job in Karachi. Richter wasn’t accustomed to being told no. He left Maguire in stony silence.
Soon after, Maguire got the cable letting him know he was being called back to Langley to work in human resources, his requests for posts in the Middle East denied.
Now he found himself standing in front of Richter’s desk.
Maguire’s boss, not known for warm and fuzzy moments with subordinates, didn’t invite him to take a seat. It would be a short meeting.
“I have an assignment for you,” Richter said. “I can’t tell you anything about it.” He told Maguire that he needed an answer then and there, and that a yes would be good for his career. If he said no, all he had to do was go back downstairs and never utter a word about the conversation. “You have to give me an answer now,” Richter said.
Maguire, flummoxed, glanced to his right. A stranger sat on the couch. The man wore a nice suit and a blue badge denoting him as a CIA staffer. Maguire figured he was a senior agency man. He planted his eyes on Richter’s face to read his reaction to his next words.
“Can I ask a question or two?”
Richter peered at Maguire sourly.
“You can ask,” he said.
Maguire turned to the man on the couch.
“Who’s this guy?”
“I’m Ed Curran,” the stranger said. “I’m the highest-ranking FBI agent assigned inside the CIA.”
Fuck me, Maguire thought.
His mind flew back to Iraq and the troubles there. The FBI was still investigating the CIA’s role in organizing an unsuccessful coup that March against Saddam Hussein by his own military. Maguire and his team had rotated into northern Iraq during that covert action (code-named DBACHILLES), which failed. Saddam executed at least eighty of his officers involved in the attempted overthrow.
Maguire feared that the new “assignment” Richter was offering might be a ham-handed setup for questioning by the FBI. The appearance of Curran only deepened his anxiety. Maguire’s choices seemed clear. He could turn down a potentially choice assignment, whatever it was, and retreat to the cubicle dungeon and the slow immolation of his soul. Or he could do as the paratroopers say in that instant before leaping out of airplanes: Pull the cord, trust the Lord.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll take it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“Wise choice,” Richter said.
Maguire could sense by the tone of his boss’s voice that the meeting was over.
Curran, no doubt amused
by the exchange, gave Maguire orders: Go downstairs to the lobby. Do not talk to anyone, and tell no one where you’ve been. You’ll meet a couple of FBI agents at the front door, who will give you instructions.
Maguire nodded along.
“OK,” he said.
Outside Richter’s office, he shot a glance at Anna.
She winked.
Moments later, Maguire walked off an elevator on the first floor, turned a corner, and trudged down a half-dozen steps, where he badged through the security turnstiles. He walked past the statue of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a figure who stood literally and figuratively on a pedestal in the agency. Donovan had created the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, which helped win World War II. Maguire stepped across the agency’s iconic lobby, with its massive seal—the head of an eagle atop a thirteen-point compass—laid into cold granite. There he found two men standing in business suits. They flashed their credentials and asked Maguire to follow them. All moved for the front doors.
Maguire found himself seated in the rear of a plain-Jane bureau car, which rolled out of the Langley compound into the northern Virginia suburbs. The ride was a blur of bright green tree canopies, the engine’s drone, and a pair of FBI agents attempting to break the tension with small talk. Maguire heard one of them ask him, “Whattaya think?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not used to riding in the back of a police car. It doesn’t fill me with confidence. But I’m not cuffed yet.”
The agents told him to relax. But Maguire, who had served on some of America’s most dangerous streets in Baltimore, didn’t feel fine. When he was a cop, he’d been the one putting perps in squad cars for the free rides to jail.
Soon the car pulled up to a house deep in the suburbs, in a neighborhood Maguire didn’t recognize. The FBI agents led him inside, where he spied a few others. Only then did he fully understand where he’d been taken. He was in a bureau safe house. Agents brought him to a bedroom, where he found an older man sitting behind a desk. The man hooked him up to a polygraph with a confidence that only contributed to Maguire’s unease.