The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  Maguire was accustomed to routine lie-detector tests. The agency wired its clandestine officers to the box every few years, usually when they rotated through headquarters, for single-issue polygraphs. Tests on the box were supposed to help the agency detect turncoats in their midst. But rarely, if ever, did they do anything of the kind.

  Polygraph operators place their subjects on a pad that can sense the clenching of their sphincters, a device known by those who’ve sat on them as the “whoopee cushion.” Maguire took his seat, his sphincter already tight enough to crush walnuts. There the older agent connected him to a series of wires that measured his breathing, blood pressure, pulse, and perspiration.

  Polygraphers always begin with slam-dunk queries—“Is your name John R. Maguire?”—before asking the subject to respond with a deliberate lie or two. These are called control questions. For instance, the operator might tell a subject to deliberately lie to a question such as, “Have you ever stolen anything?” Few humans can honestly answer that with a no. When the respondent lies, the polygraph’s stylus jiggles, giving the operator a benchmark for later deceptive answers. Relevant questions follow.

  Maguire dreaded the first such query, which he imagined would go something like this: “Did you, or did you not, authorize or participate in an attempt to overthrow the regime in Iraq?”

  He tried to think ahead. He knew he hadn’t done anything illegal; the actions of CIA officers in the field assigned to wresting Saddam Hussein from power were fully authorized by senior agency officials like Richter. The White House was distancing itself, but officials in the Clinton administration had been briefed directly. Maguire decided that if the agent running the box posed even one question about Iraq, he’d politely ask to speak with his lawyer.

  The genteel polygraph operator, perhaps sensing Maguire’s inner tumult, told him to relax, everything was going to be OK. And sure enough, when the older man eventually got around to asking the ­moment-of-truth questions, they were all about Russia and Russian intelligence. Maguire breathed easier. He had no operational history with the Russians, and if Moscow’s foreign intelligence officers had anything on him, it would have been thin, dated, and focused on his paramilitary past. As far as he knew, he’d never been a target of the KGB or the SVR.

  The polygraph took about ninety minutes, and when the operator told him he’d passed, one of the FBI agents led Maguire into another room in the house, which clearly served as a hub for an investigation of some kind. They seated him at a desk, where he signed formal papers by which he swore not to divulge any of the classified information he was about to hear. The agents told him they were from Squad NS-34, a counterintelligence unit based in the Washington Metropolitan Field Office. They occupied a dilapidated building at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, a gritty corner of D.C. known as Buzzard Point.

  Maguire spied a photograph of a bearded man on the wall. It appeared to be an official CIA photo. He didn’t recognize the face.

  “You’ve been selected for this position,” one of the agents told Maguire. “We have another Ames, and we have to catch him.”

  The FBI and CIA had handpicked Maguire to help catch this new mole. His background as a cop, and his experience testifying in court, made him a shoo-in as a candidate to help the bureau gather evidence inside CIA headquarters and neuter their suspect: Harold James “Jim” Nicholson.

  Agents explained that Jim, whom Maguire had never met, was now in his sixteenth year as a CIA operations officer. He taught tradecraft at The Farm, a plum job given to spies who’d proven themselves in the field. Jim, he learned, was a single dad with primary custody of his three kids: Son Jeremi was headed to college; daughter Star and younger son Nathan lived in a two-story government house at Camp Peary, but were soon moving to the family town house in Burke, Virginia.

  Maguire knew The Farm well. He had taken his five-month career trainee course and extensive paramilitary training on its grounds before being sent to a CIA demolition school in a covert redoubt in the mid-Atlantic tidewaters. There, he had learned how to build and dismantle all manner of explosives.

  The agents had cooked up a scheme for senior CIA officials to call Jim back from The Farm and assign him as a branch chief in the Counter­terrorist Center, or CTC, in the Original Headquarters Building. (It was later renamed the Counterterrorism Center.) Maguire would apply to work as the deputy branch chief under Jim. FBI investigators hoped Jim would pick Maguire over other applicants for the position. If all went according to plan, Maguire would take the office next to Jim’s. The FBI-CIA team would covertly supervise Maguire’s undercover tilt against his own boss, a spy-versus-spy operation in the bosom of CIA headquarters.

  No such investigation had ever been run under the roof at Langley.

  Investigators knew Jim would interview several experienced CIA officers for the position of deputy branch chief, his top subordinate. But they secretly stacked the deck with Maguire, who had much stronger credentials than the others. Maguire was a founding member of the CTC, a distinction marking him as a “plank holder.” He knew the territory, having worked against Middle East terrorists for years.

  Maguire was a good spy, and the kind of guy you’d join for a few rounds of bourbon. But investigators looking to bring Jim to justice were more interested in the skills Maguire had acquired in his former life as a Baltimore City cop. He had worked long hours in the violent corners of Charm City’s neighborhoods, streets later made famous in The Wire. Maguire worked well with prosecutors and logged countless hours on witness stands.

  He walked into Room 6E2911 that summer for his interview with Jim. They took seats in Jim’s office, which sat behind a heavy cipher-locked door on the far end of a bullpen of case officers and career trainees. Much was revealed to Maguire when he sneaked a glance at the I-love-me walls flanking his prospective boss’s desk. Everywhere he looked there were framed photos of Jim, certificates, military awards, and other commendations. It was clear the guy was smart, and liked himself. A lot.

  “He was a good interviewer,” Maguire recalled. “He was looking for somebody who knew what they were doing, understood the target, somebody he could rely on—somebody he could use.”

  Maguire recited his bona fides to Jim, explaining that he was an experienced hand, good at cultivating assets, and was happy to put some of his best Middle East contacts back on the payroll. He said his assets could help Jim’s branch identify and break up cells of Islamic fundamentalists bent on killing Americans or otherwise threatening U.S. security.

  Jim wondered how a talented case officer had fallen so far, ending up in HR. So Maguire leveled with him. He’d pissed off Richter, who had cast him into the abyss. Maguire joked about wanting to jump out the window, but HR was on the second floor and he’d only break a bunch of bones. The two veteran spies shared a laugh. Jim knew Richter, and he’d certainly faced his own hassles with agency bureaucracy. But although he appreciated Maguire’s dire predicament, he couldn’t promise him anything.

  Maguire walked out thinking he’d nailed the interview. But he knew Jim wasn’t about to hire him until he’d worked the hallway file: the informal vetting of prospective employees in the corridors, back offices, and massive food court on the first floor of the agency’s Original Headquarters Building. There were plenty of people inside who would vouch for Maguire’s native talent as a spy, and a couple who could fuck things up with a mixed review.

  Investigators crossed their fingers. Without somebody working for them inside Jim’s locked office, there was no telling how many of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets Jim would purloin and sell to the Russians during daylight duties in the CTC.

  Weeks later, Maguire picked up an envelope addressed to him at work. Inside was a directive from the personnel division. The CIA bureaucracy was so big that if you moved from one part of the agency to another, even laterally, someone had to create paperwork to update your sa
lary and benefits. The papers told Maguire to report immediately as deputy branch chief in the CTC under Jim Nicholson. This was his passport out of the Death Star, and a chance to try his spy skills against one of the shrewdest characters he’d ever met.

  Not long after Maguire got word he would be working for Jim, Redmond called him for a meeting in one of the agency’s “black rooms,” offices with no descriptors on the door, just cipher locks. There he found himself buttonholed by the veteran counterintelligence supervisor who had headed the long-in-coming apprehension of Rick Ames. Redmond confided in Maguire that if he performed well in his undercover role, he’d serve his country admirably and notch a major milestone in his career.

  “If you fuck it up,” he said, “you’re finished. So don’t fuck it up.”

  On the first day of August, a warm, cloudy Sunday, Jim drove up to a row of blue mailboxes in an office complex in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The boxes sat along Greensboro Drive, a business park flanked by the Tysons Galleria and Tysons Corner Center shopping malls. Cars buzzed past as Jim dropped his envelope through the mail slot and eased away in his minivan.

  FBI agents tailing Jim stopped to drop a marker in the box to help them find their target’s envelope. The FBI often works with U.S. Postal Service inspectors to covertly retrieve evidence in criminal cases, and they soon found what appeared to be Jim’s correspondence, a sealed Hallmark greeting-card envelope. It was addressed to a mail drop in Zimbabwe and bore oversized commemorative stamps with a face value of one dollar, more than necessary to fly the missive overseas. Agents opened the envelope and found a postcard with the words “Washington, D.C.” printed on the front.

  “Dear J.F.,” Jim’s note began. “Just want to let you know that unfortunately I will not be your neighbor as expected. Priorities at the home office resulted in my assignment to the management position there. Some travel to your general vicinity to visit field offices will occur, but not for more than a few days at a time. Still, the work at the home office should prove very beneficial. I know you would find it very attractive. I look forward to a possible ski vacation this winter. Will keep you informed. Until then, your friend, Nevil R. Strachey. P.S. I am fine.”

  It didn’t require a team of code breakers to determine that Nichol­son was alerting his handler through an accommodation address that he’d been turned down for the chief-of-station job in Addis Ababa and assigned instead to Langley. But the line about a ski vacation was vexing. Where would Jim meet his Russian friend?

  Not long after Jim’s mailbox drop, he flew to Beirut, Lebanon, on official CIA business. In the wee hours of Sunday, August 11, a team of FBI agents prepared to search Jim’s minivan. Their target had left his 1994 Chevy Lumina sports van on an employee lot in the Langley compound. It was blue-gray with vanity license plates clearly picked by Jim: 8888BAT.

  The supervisory FBI agent who set up the minivan search was John McClurg, who served as a liaison between Langley and teams of investigators spread across the D.C. metropolitan area. McClurg’s job was to make sure that the FBI’s technical agents made it onto the sprawling CIA compound, planted their bugging devices and other surveillance gear, and got out without being spotted by custodians, security teams, or agency employees working after hours. McClurg had covertly obtained these workers’ schedules and studied their minute-by-minute movements on the 258-acre CIA compound, which hugs the western edge of the Potomac River.

  McClurg was a handsome man with sandy blond hair and a dimple in the middle of his broad chin. But he wasn’t just another FBI pretty boy. McClurg, one of Curran’s trusted deputies, possessed a potent and precise mind. The two had become friends in the Los Angeles Field Office, where Curran had served as McClurg’s “rabbi,” bureau slang for mentor and benefactor. Curran, fourteen years older than his protégé, had been duly impressed with his success as a cybercrime expert.

  McClurg’s cyber career had begun, quite by accident, when one of his bosses in the FBI’s counterespionage group yelled, “Who here knows anything about UNIX?” McClurg raised his hand, and his boss handed him a paper file. Get right on this, he said. Only after reading the document did McClurg realize his mistake. He thought his boss had said “eunuchs,” something that he knew quite a lot about. McClurg had grown up in Libya hearing the story of an Egyptian pharaoh who defeated an invading army of Libyans and took as trophies the uncircumcised penises of more than six thousand enemies. Now his big mouth consigned him to the study of UNIX. McClurg saved himself by reaching out to Sun Microsystems, a company specializing in computer operating systems.

  He later played a starring role in the takedown of Kevin Lee Poulsen, a black-hat hacker known as “Dark Dante.” Poulsen famously cyber-swiped the unpublished phone numbers of Soviet officials in their San Francisco consulate. U.S. defense industry officials had given Poulsen a security clearance to identify their vulnerabilities. But Poulson’s cheekiest crime came on June 1, 1990, when he hacked into KIIS-FM’s “Win a Porsche by Friday” call-in promotion in Los Angeles, commandeering twenty-five phone lines to win a Porsche 944 S2 sports car. McClurg and his FBI colleagues put another hacker undercover to take Poulsen down.

  Curran and McClurg made an odd pair. Curran was known to drink himself flannel-mouthed on occasion, and McClurg, a devout Mormon, never touched the stuff. They both had lived in the “FBI Ghetto” of Thousand Oaks, home to many agents. The town sat in the Conejo Valley, a brutal commute into the L.A. Field Office that Curran and McClurg often made together. They were riding into work on the morning of April 22, 1994, Curran behind the wheel of his Toyota, when news broke over the radio that the FBI had arrested Aldrich Ames.

  Curran looked stricken, as if he were having a heart attack.

  “What’s the matter, Ed?”

  “It’s Rick,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “They’ve arrested Rick Ames,” Curran said. “I worked with him in New York.”

  Curran and Ames went back more than fifteen years, to the late 1970s, when the CIA assigned Ames to the Big Apple. Ames earned a reputation as a talented, if forgetful, spy. Once, on his way to meet a Soviet asset, he left a briefcase full of sensitive documents on a train. The FBI retrieved the case from a Polish émigré, and the CIA man got off with a reprimand.

  Ames’ 1994 espionage arrest had a strangely serendipitous result: The FBI assigned Curran to CIA headquarters to serve as counterespionage chief so that the agency never produced another turncoat like his old compatriot.

  Curran pulled McClurg aside at his going away party. He explained that he was allowed to bring one agent of his choosing with him to the new assignment at Langley, and he wanted McClurg. The younger agent had just finished doctoral course work at UCLA in “Philosophical Hermeneutics,” and he was planning to embed himself with Crips and Bloods to see if teaching them conflict resolution skills might curtail gang carnage. Instead, he took Curran up on the offer and became one of the deputy branch chiefs in the espionage group at Langley. McClurg’s cover story was that he was working on Curran’s polygraph program. Instead, he would secretly work counterspy cases, spending much of 1995 and 1996 setting up technical operations to collect evidence against the CIA’s Batman.

  The search of Jim’s minivan in the parking lot at Langley wasn’t your standard black-bag job. Getting inside the van would be the easiest part of the operation, requiring no burglar tools. All investigators needed was a key, which any FBI agent could get with a vehicle identification number and credentials. But hauling off the Lumina was fraught with obstacles. They couldn’t drive the van off the lot because Jim might have jotted down the odometer reading before flying to Beirut. Also, they couldn’t search the van on the CIA lot, because Jim’s agency friends might see them and report the suspicious behavior—a potential case blower.

  On top of that, investigators knew little about the innards of the minivan, and they didn’t want to miss any hideaways during their search.
So they bought another 1994 Chevy Lumina and took dry runs dismantling it. They had to find any cavity inside the vehicle that Jim might exploit to hide evidence of his espionage.

  McClurg and his team picked the first hours of the second Sunday in August, with clouds muting a crescent moon, to make off with Jim’s minivan. A flatbed truck equipped with a boom pulled into the parking lot of the CIA compound and lifted the 3,510-pound Lumina onto the flatbed. It was important to McClurg and other investigators that the van’s wheels not turn an inch. The truck carried the Lumina to a shed that looked like a Quonset hut.

  Only after agents pored through Jim’s minivan did they get a glimpse at just how much damage he had done.

  Agents snatched Jim’s Toshiba laptop out of the van’s rear cargo area and mirrored the hard drive, which confirmed the government’s worst suspicions. Investigators found a letter of instructions from Jim’s Russian handler. They also learned that Jim had copied a trove of classified files to the laptop. Some were merely sensitive, but others were marked “Secret,” “Top Secret,” and another classification known as “SCI” (Sensitive Compartmented Information). Analysts determined that all the files from the program directories had been deleted, leading agents to conclude Jim had copied the information to diskettes and passed them to the Russians.

  Fragments of the hard drive showed the computer once held a secret file about staffing inside the CIA’s Moscow station, including the true identity of its new chief of station. Part of the chief’s job was to assess the Kremlin’s military preparedness and determine how much the Russians knew about U.S. defense plans. Those disclosures likely damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering operations in Russia and posed grave consequences—including possible execution—of assets cultivated there by spies supervised by the station chief.