by Bryan Denson
McClurg was poking through Jim’s office one evening, watching the clock, when security guards approached unexpectedly. He slipped into Jim’s office and quietly closed the door behind him. He stood in darkness, heart racing, and waited out the guards. He tried to imagine what he might say if discovered. Minutes passed, an eternity each, and finally he heard the guards depart. When his breathing returned to normal, McClurg crept out and into an elevator.
As investigators kept their surveillance under wraps, Jim seemed to grow more brazen.
Kathleen Hunt spied Maguire one day as he made his way through the branch and motioned him to her cubicle. Hunt was thirty-six years old, a veteran case officer recruited right out of college by the CIA during the early Reagan years. The agency’s headhunters must have been dazzled when they sat her down at Bay Path College, a small women’s school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She was the whole package, a stone-cold knockout with Celtic skin, cobalt eyes, and dark hair with a hint of chestnut. She had an inquisitive personality and a laugh so powerful it could rattle your coffee cup. The agency hired and trained Hunt, then sent her straight to Eastern Europe, the front lines of the Cold War.
Maguire could see there was something serious on her mind.
In a low voice, she confided to Maguire that Jim had requisitioned gadgets completely unnecessary for the branch’s work. He had sent CTs to fetch him a camera and a portable printer.
Maguire tried not to betray his emotions. She was sniffing Jim out, and he’d have to throw her off the scent. Hunt, of course, was spot-on. There was positively no reason for Jim or anyone else in the branch to have a spy camera or a portable printer. The office was supposed to operate like the vault of closely held secrets that it was.
The room sat behind a heavy wooden door with a spin-dial combination lock. Inside was a bullpen of workstations. Every desk had locking drawers, and it was mandatory to button up tight before leaving each night. Computers were designed for internal use only; they had no ports for diskettes, and the e-mail system was internal and didn’t reach beyond the CIA compound. It was verboten to shoot photos inside or carry documents out. An electronic security crew swept the office for bugs. Jim and Maguire, both supervisors, had private offices at the back of the room, each with keypad locks.
Hunt looked at Maguire imploringly. She wanted assurances about Jim’s peculiar requisitions.
“What’s he need them for?”
“That’s just Jim,” he told her, explaining that Jim was a gadget nut. “He’s quirky.”
Maguire knew that Hunt had worked under Rick Ames during a headquarters assignment in the Soviet/East European Division. He knew Ames’ betrayals had left her feeling betrayed, and angry. Her inquiries about Jim showed she was following her training; she was properly skeptical and vigilant. Ordinarily, Maguire would have welcomed such concerns. But since their boss was a suspected traitor, and Maguire was secretly helping to catch Jim, he had to figure out a way to calm her down. His immediate fear was that Hunt would take her concerns to someone else in the building, perhaps even to Jim. He worried she might raise such a fuss that she’d derail the case, turning Redmond’s motivational speech—“If you fuck it up, you’re finished”—into prophecy. Maguire looked Hunt in the eyes and calmly suggested she let it go.
When he left the office that night, Maguire considered signaling a meeting with his FBI handlers. He thought they might consider reading Hunt in on the case; her instincts were clearly valuable. But Maguire knew it was unlikely the FBI or the agency would include her. Investigators were doing their best to keep a soft footprint in the CIA, where Jim still had friends, fearing someone might spill the secret. He kept his worries to himself.
Mercifully, Hunt didn’t pass her concerns higher up the food chain. She trusted Maguire implicitly and believed his tale of Jim’s eccentricities. From the moment Hunt first stepped into Jim’s office to interview for the CTC job, she had found him an odd duck. He was a bit like a bearded Mr. Rogers, but vain. His whiskers were always perfectly trimmed, and he hit the tanning beds. Every time she popped in to talk to Jim, an adornment on his wall caught her attention: a round web of string and feathers big as your forearm. One day she had to ask what it was.
“It’s a dream catcher,” Jim told her.
Nathan had told his dad about the Native American webs, which were supposed to ward off nightmares. They had made it together at home.
“Would you like one?” Jim asked.
Hunt declined, politely, thinking it all so new agey. She had to wonder if Jim’s ex, whom he had described as a kind of “Miss Moonbeam” character out in the sticks, might have been behind the dream catcher.
Mystical totems and vanity aside, Hunt found much to like about Jim. For one thing, he had an exceptional military background, which she admired. He was easygoing, too, not at all the mercurial sort that often ascended to management positions in the agency. He also was bright and effortlessly competent, and seemed to have a life outside the office. Many clandestine officers in supervisory positions worked long hours and glared over their glasses at underlings who didn’t follow suit. Jim seemed just as happy to work a normal day and join the crush of rush-hour commuters in his minivan, another Superdad racing home to the kids.
On September 23, a Monday, investigators watching the video feed from Jim’s office saw their target set papers on his lap and reach into a desk drawer. Jim pulled out the spy camera he had requisitioned and began shooting photos of documents on his lap.
Eleven days later, Jim booked flights to Europe with two of his subordinates to meet with friendly foreign intelligence services on an official counterterrorism mission. They were headed to New York, South Africa, and Italy. But Jim also made plans to peel away from the group for a personal vacation. He planned to see Polyakov in Switzerland.
On Wednesday, October 9, Maguire joined Jim for a drive down to Georgetown for what turned out to be a liquid lunch at one of the D.C. neighborhood’s trendy bistros. They lingered over a few beers before Jim picked up the tab, as usual, and then piled back into his minivan for the drive over the Potomac River to the CIA compound. Inside the van, the two officers opened fresh beers. Maguire soon noted that instead of hooking north along the Potomac, Jim drove westward on Interstate 66. He said nothing as Jim kept driving out of their way, beyond the western stretch of the I-495 loop. This detour took them through northern Virginia suburbs several miles from Jim’s town house. They drank beer in broad daylight and kvetched about the usual stuff—the office, the assholes they worked for, women.
Suddenly Jim jerked the wheel and swerved through traffic, speeding up and darting into the far right lane where overloaded truckers and blue hairs slowed everybody down. Maguire knew instantly what Jim was doing. His provocative maneuvers were intended to expose anyone who might be tailing. The agency had taught him well. But not well enough. Maguire stole a glance in the rearview mirror, relieved that the FBI’s tails covered them constantly.
They were a full twenty minutes outside of downtown D.C. when Jim pulled up to a U.S. Post Office across the street from a 7-Eleven in Dunn Loring, Virginia. The brick building sat on the corner of Gallows Road and Electric Avenue, an intersection in the outer burbs. The FBI stayed close as Jim parked the minivan on an L-shaped lot. Jim announced that he had to buy some stamps and that he’d be right back. He left Maguire in the van.
When Jim returned, Maguire asked why they had driven way out to bumfuck to buy stamps they could have picked up at headquarters.
“I collect stamps,” Jim said. The Dunn Loring post office, he explained, had quite a collection of unique overseas postage.
Back at Langley, Maguire signaled his FBI handlers for a meet. Later that day, he talked things over with one of the agents, explaining that it’s common practice for spies and their handlers to signal rendezvous by mailing letters with unique stamps or combinations of them.
“You
should smother him tonight,” Maguire told his handler. “I think he’s going to do something operational.”
Dozens of agents tailed Jim that night as he drove the minivan toward his town house in Burke. Agents were pulled off other assignments and told—on a need-to-know basis—that they had to stay glued to a high-priority target driving a late-model Chevy Lumina, license plate 8888BAT.
They observed their target ease his minivan up to a row of blue mailboxes that hug the east side of the Dunn Loring post office, where Jim had stopped that very day to buy the stamps. Agents saw him drop a parcel into one of the boxes and drive off. They waited until Jim was well down the road before calling in a team to pore through the belly of the blue box to find what they were looking for, a sealed airmail envelope that held a postcard. Stuck to both the card and the envelope were the same oversized commemorative stamps, each with a face value of one dollar.
“Hello Old Friend,” the postcard read. “I hope it is possible that you will be my guest for a ski holiday this year on 23-24 November. A bit early but it would fit my schedule nicely. I am fine and all is well. Hope you are the same and can accept my invitation. Best Regards, Nevil R. Strachey. P.S. The snow should be fine by then.”
Maguire scarcely slept that night. He hoped he hadn’t wasted the FBI’s time with his tip about the stamps. The work was wearing him down, and he caught himself fretting over things he couldn’t control. They’d all been working long hours.
He stumbled into work the next day, sleep-deprived and hoping for good news. When Maguire’s green phone rang, he heard triumph in his handler’s voice.
“You scored a touchdown last night.”
Maguire’s handlers now gave him high-risk tasks to collect evidence against Jim. The FBI needed him to come up with a sample of Jim’s DNA, along with the key to his town house, without arousing his suspicions.
The FBI camera mounted in Jim’s office ceiling spied the perfect repository for a sample of his DNA: a paper coffee cup from a stand on the agency’s first floor.
Maguire waited for Jim to leave the office before sweeping in. He saw that Jim’s cup was partway full and dashed downstairs to grab an identical one. On the way back, he poured out some of the fresh coffee, letting the rest cool for a few minutes before carrying it into Jim’s office and swapping it for his boss’s java. He then carried Jim’s cup downstairs into a distant corridor, where a female FBI agent was striding toward him with an identical cup in her hand. They pulled a classic brush-pass, exchanging the cups so quickly no one noticed.
The FBI bagged and tagged Jim’s cup and its contents and sent it to the lab for testing. His saliva would provide investigators all the DNA they needed to match Jim to evidence of his crimes, including the postage stamps he licked to signal his meeting with Polyakov.
Maguire’s next task was to help the FBI get a copy of Jim’s house key. Jim gave him an opening one day when they headed for lunch at one of Jim’s favorite restaurants in Georgetown, one of those Thai or Vietnamese places where the peppers ranged from blistering hot to napalm. On the way back to the office, riding shotgun in Jim’s minivan, Maguire quietly pulled out his wallet and dropped it to the floor between the seat and door. Later, in the CTC, Maguire walked into Jim’s office looking a bit sheepish, saying he lost his wallet.
“I think I might of left it in your van,” he said.
Jim didn’t blink. He tossed him the keys.
A few moments later, Maguire pulled open the minivan’s passenger door and plucked his wallet off the floor. He lifted from his pocket a compact key impression kit, a plastic folding model with casting material that left no trace on keys. Maguire quickly made an imprint of the house key and badged back into the building through a side entrance. He made his way to a basement black area, where he dropped off the impression kit with a brush-pass.
FBI surveillance teams studied the layout of Jim’s three-bedroom town house in Burke, Virginia. The cream-colored dwelling had tiny lawns, fore and aft, and a sturdy back deck with a privacy fence. The property sat on the lower end of a seventy-home condo complex that hugged a curving cul-de-sac called Burke Towne Court, one of many such developments cut into stands of maples and oaks west of Washington. Jim’s bedroom windows overlooked a short, steep hill topped with brambles at the edge of a thick wood and a view across a grassy easement to another unit in the complex.
FBI investigators were delighted to learn the town house next door was for sale. Jim’s bedroom sat less than seventy-five feet away.
Agents Steve Hooper and Bernie Cerra went undercover to meet with a real-estate agent on the parking lot of a nearby supermarket. Cerra, using a cover name, had set up the meeting to arrange a tour of the property. The agents had just begun talking with the Realtor when Hooper heard a familiar voice calling from across the lot.
“Excuse me, sir, are you following me?”
Hooper turned to see a woman he knew, a family friend. Their sons went to school together, and she knew that Hooper and his wife were both FBI agents. Hooper’s friend was just playing around, not realizing he was on the job. He whirled and pulled eyeball to eyeball with his neighbor.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t know me.”
“OK,” she said cheerily, “I’m going now.”
The FBI bought the house next door to Jim’s and installed two agents, posing as husband and wife, to run surveillance operations on the Nicholson home. They would see Star and Nathan leaving the house on weekday mornings, returning like other latchkey kids after school. Their microphones would pick up the sounds of mysterious tapping, late at night, from Jim’s bedroom.
On a Wednesday morning in late October, Hooper and two other FBI agents, including Tom Almon, one of the primary agents in the Nicholson investigation, pulled into a parking space in front of Jim’s town house. An agent running surveillance in the neighborhood told them through their earpieces that the coast was clear, and they climbed out of their car. Agents casually hiked Jim’s concrete steps to the front door as if they belonged there.
They had timed their entry so that no one was home: Jim was under watch at the CIA compound, and Nathan and Star were off at school. The agents stood on the landing in front of a grayish brown door affixed with a cheap brass knocker and let themselves in with a key made from Maguire’s key-impression kit.
They stepped into the narrow foyer, where they were confronted by two sets of stairs. One dropped into a den. The other climbed to a kitchen, which faced the front of the house, and a living space that opened to a back deck. Another flight of stairs led to the top floor, which served as sleeping quarters for Jim, Star, and Nathan. The agents were extremely careful not to let either of the Nicholson kids’ cats—Megacin and Maxina—flee through the front door. (There is an old story in the bureau about agents who accidentally freed a cat during a covert entry. After a frantic effort, they recaptured the fugitive feline and put it back inside before they left, only later to learn—the hard way—that it wasn’t the right cat.)
The agents had just enough time for a sneak and peek, their task specific. They needed to discover the origin of the tapping noises in Jim’s bedroom. The agents had been in the house a few minutes when their outside man alerted them through earpieces that someone was approaching. Whoever it was had walked into the backyard and was now approaching the door.
One of the hazards federal agents face in their daylight entries are amateur snoops, such as cranky condo board members and neighborhood-watch nazis, whose observations might be reported to their target. Agents knew that if a neighbor spied a stranger inside the Nicholson home, and Jim heard about it, he would realize he was under investigation.
“It might be a neighbor,” Hooper heard the surveillance agent say.
He glared wide-eyed at Almon and the other agent.
They froze in place, waiting for more details. A long moment passed.
/> “It’s the gas man,” they heard the surveillance agent say. He was there to read the meter.
In the master bedroom, the agents found Jim’s Toshiba laptop, the source of the tapping. They also turned up a document scanner. The agents were careful not to touch or move anything as they snapped photographs and prepared to exit. When the coast was clear, they slipped out as if they’d never been there.
One weekday that fall, the phone rang in Maguire’s office. He picked up the receiver to find one of the FBI guys on the line.
“What the fuck is he doing? He’s standing on his chair!”
Maguire leaped up and walked to Jim’s office, giving a perfunctory rap on the door before barging through. There he found Jim still standing on his chair, staring at the ceiling.
“What’re you doing?” Maguire asked. “Redecorating?”
Jim stammered and stepped down.
On November 3, a Sunday, FBI agents sneaked into the Other World Terrorism branch. They moved slowly toward Jim’s office and stopped, studying the lines between his door and door frame to make certain Jim hadn’t applied a tiny sliver of clear tape or some other marker that would show someone had secretly entered his office.
Once inside, they shot photos to document a “before” picture, including images of the item they’d come to search, a black folder atop Jim’s desk. They peeked inside and saw that it was choked with papers about Russia. There were roughly forty files in the folder and a few other spots in Jim’s desk, none of which had anything to do with counterterrorism. They photographed every page and put the documents back as they’d found them. They shot a few “after” photos before quietly slipping away.
The following Saturday, one week before he would leave for Europe, Jim drove up to Langley to prepare documents for Polyakov. The computers in his branch, unlike the ones at The Farm and CIA stations around the globe, had no disk drives. So there was no easy way to copy, edit, or transfer documents. Jim went old-school. He pulled files out of the black folder and took scissors to the tops and bottoms of each page, shearing away classification stamps. Documents about Russia, which had been clearly marked “Secret” and “Top Secret,” were now devoid of any classification.