by Bryan Denson
That Tuesday, CIA employees from the Office of Technical Service appeared in Jim’s office.
The OTS, part of the Directorate of Science and Technology, is one of the least-heralded but coolest subdivisions of the agency. Its personnel serve up real-life gadgets, much like the fictional character “Q” in the James Bond movies. The OTS helped develop the U-2 spy plane; played a critical role in developing safe but extremely high-energy lithium carbon monofluoride batteries; and, through expert disguise, helped to sneak six American diplomats out of Tehran, Iran, after protesters overran the U.S. Embassy in 1980. The CIA also credits OTS scientists with engineering the first ultra-miniature camera.
This time, OTS employees were delivering Jim a document camera built into a briefcase. The case was designed so that when you opened it, the camera—bolted to a folding frame—lifted over a document platform. When the OTS folks left, Jim closed his office door and opened the case under his desk. He grabbed papers out of his black folder and knelt on the carpet, setting documents on the platform to photograph. Jim spent a half hour on the floor that day, and returned to shoot more of the documents later that night. He was at it again the following morning. The watchful eye of the video camera mounted in the ceiling captured every click.
Maguire watched the FBI’s video of Jim copying top-secret documents for what was clearly a planned intel dump for the Russians. It had been one thing to imagine he was a turncoat, quite another to watch him prepare his next betrayal of his brother officers. Maguire now wanted the prick behind bars. His career in espionage had put him elbow to elbow with dirty men all over the world, duplicitous souls guided by greed. But Jim had taken it to a new level. He was the mercenary’s mercenary, a purely destructive personality.
Armed with the latest tapes, the FBI took charge. Everyone involved in the investigation now knew they had enough evidence to charge Jim with espionage. For the first time Curran could remember, the FBI and CIA were in complete concurrence about their target. It was time to roll him up.
The question was where. Government prosecutors needed to prove that Jim was in play, taking overt actions to spy for the Russians. One way to catch him in motion was to let him take the flight to Europe for a meeting with the SVR. The Department of Justice considered getting the CIA to create a fictional crisis that demanded Jim’s urgent attention in Paris or London; there he could be summoned to a U.S. embassy in either city. Once they had him inside either diplomatic station, the FBI could sweep in and arrest him—possibly with top-secret documents in his bag. The trouble with that plan was that Jim might realize he was being set up. If so, he might rabbit and they would lose him forever.
Investigators devised a different plan. But it, too, carried risks.
That Friday night, November 15, Jim picked up his half brother, Rob Nicholson, at the airport and brought him back to the town house. Rob, who was thirty years old, had agreed to watch Star and Nathan while Jim was away on business. He missed his niece and nephew, having not seen them since their summer visit with their mom, and was happy that Jim paid his way to Virginia to see them. By the time they reached Burke Towne Court, the kids were already asleep. Rob caught up with his big brother before turning in.
They would all rise early the next morning to see Jim off.
7
FBI Takedown at Dulles
“In Guarani, a language spoken in Paraguay, ‘nye-eh’ has two meanings. It is the word for ‘word’ and the word for ‘soul.’ The Guarani Indians say those who lie betray the soul.”
—George Papagiannis
Sterling, Virginia, November 16, 1996
Jim steered his minivan to a stop in front of Dulles International Airport and stepped into the brisk sun of a Saturday morning. Rob climbed behind the wheel as his big brother threw his arms around the kids for one last hug. Then Jim was on the move again, striding toward the iconic terminal building with its beveled wall of concrete pillars and glass. Jim turned for an instant and shot them all a grin. He had a way of smiling through his eyes, a glint of pure mirth. He looked like a middle-aged college professor, bearded and bespectacled, dressed in white slacks and a dark turquoise button-down shirt. He carried a suitcase in each hand, and a brown leather satchel hung from his shoulder. His kids returned enthusiastic waves as their dad moved for the bank of glass doors.
Nathan had turned twelve on the last day of July. He had never stayed put in one home longer than three years, accepting Jim’s travels and new assignments without question. He was adaptable, cheerful, never tired of adventure. When he grew up, he hoped to be just like his dad.
He reminded himself this was a short trip. A week or so and his dad would be on his way home with funny tales of foreign travels. The old man had spent less time overseas since taking the new job at headquarters, and Nathan had taken advantage of his dad’s presence during those two years in Virginia. They had drawn immensely close. With Jeremi off at college, Nathan was pushing out of his big brother’s shadow, asserting himself as Jim’s main man.
As Rob steered for home in the minivan, he made an announcement to distract the kids from their father’s departure: “We’re gonna have an adventure this week.” But nothing could prepare them for the adventure that lay ahead.
Jim planned to rendezvous in the terminal with the two subordinates in his CTC branch who were joining him on the trip. They were set to hop on a thirty-two-seat American Eagle puddle jumper to New York, then jet off to South Africa and Rome on official counterterrorism business. At the end of the business trip, Jim planned to break away for a short vacation in Switzerland to meet with Polyakov.
One of Jim’s suitcases held nothing more than a pair of tan money belts; one he would wear under a pant leg, the other around his waist. Polyakov had promised $50,000 for the new haul. In his camera bag were ten rolls of exposed but undeveloped film. They held the images of seventy-four classified documents, some of them stamped “Top Secret.” He also carried two computer diskettes choked with a dozen classified files and an encrypted message for his Russian handler. Jim’s wallet held the business card of Roland Keller, his Swiss banker.
Jim strode to the American Airlines ticket window and checked his suitcases, then headed through security. He joined his two CIA subordinates in the main terminal and climbed aboard one of the airport’s big boxcar-on-wheels contraptions known as “people movers.” Moments later the vehicle pulled to a halt at the mid-field terminal, where they debarked.
FBI agents dressed as travelers folded into the crowd, eyes on Jim’s every move.
As Jim and his CIA companions neared Gate 24, the woman in their party—an Arabic language specialist—suddenly walked off to hit the ladies’ room. Up ahead, at the mouth of the gangway, stood a pair of undercover FBI agents posing as husband and wife. Their objective was to wait until the CIA officers entered the passageway and follow them downstairs to the tarmac. But suddenly they were the last people standing at the gate; all the other passengers had made their way to the airstrip. They couldn’t appear to be waiting for Jim, which might spook him. So they launched into an improvised marital spat that rang in the ears of every agent on the investigation team. The improvisation seemed to work. Jim and his colleagues walked past, and the agents shut down their vitriol to quietly fold behind them.
Agent Steve Hooper had walked onto the tarmac a few moments earlier wearing an American Airlines jacket and a blue ball cap with the Dallas Stars hockey logo on it. He had nonchalantly taken a position on one end of a blue metal baggage cart, where a real luggage handler, a lean blond woman also wearing an airline jacket, stared at Hooper as if he had just stepped off a spaceship. Hooper, a former hockey player from Boston with one of those thick Tom Selleck mustaches, shot her a reassuring look.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I won’t be here long.”
As Jim reached the ragged queue of passengers on the cold tarmac, he heard a voice.
“Hey!” Hooper called. “Jim Nicholson!”
Jim grinned and took a step toward Hooper. Perhaps he thought the stranger in the American Airlines jacket knew him from somewhere, or needed to talk to him about his luggage. He was still smiling when Hooper got close enough to flash his credentials.
“Jim, FBI,” he said. “It’s over.”
Jim tensed and balled his fists, looking furtively past Hooper.
“Don’t try it,” Hooper said. “It’s over.”
Dave Raymond, a baby-faced FBI tech agent in jeans and an identical American Airlines jacket, stepped behind Jim and locked hands around his suspect’s right arm.
Hooper tightened his grip around Jim’s other arm. He had arrested all kinds of people in his career, having worked organized crime and Russian mob cases. Most of his targets knew the day was coming, probably even expected it. But Hooper had never seen anyone look quite the way Jim did just then: stone-frozen paralyzed. His eyes were vacant. He seemed unable to utter a word.
Jim unclenched his fists. There would be no fight, no footrace.
Above the action, a member of the FBI surveillance team photographed the moment, frame after frame documenting the takedown with such clarity you could see that the crown of Jim’s head had grown a little threadbare. One of Jim’s CIA subordinates began to protest as agents guided his boss away from the plane. The officer explained that they were supposed to be taking an overseas business trip.
“Canceled,” an agent said, presenting his creds.
Hooper and Raymond handed Jim over to several of the key Squad NS-34 investigators behind the day’s collar. “The Three Mikes,” as they were known—Lonergan, Donner, and Anderson—received their suspect like a group of hunters accepting a pheasant from a floppy-eared springer spaniel. They had been hiding nearby, watching Jim hike to a plane they knew he would never board.
Lonergan, being a counterintelligence guy, was a little rusty cuffing suspects. But Hooper had agreed to take Jim into custody only if Lonergan agreed to do the honors and cuff his ass. As Jim assumed the position, hands behind his back, Lonergan swung the cuffs around his wrists expertly.
McClurg and others on the investigation team gathered at Buzzard Point, the FBI’s metro D.C. headquarters, watching the takedown on a closed-circuit video feed. He was delighted to see Dave Raymond taking part in the collar. Raymond was a key member of McClurg’s technical team, the guy who had covertly pulled what seemed like miles of fiber-optic cable through the ceiling at Langley to collect videotaped evidence of Jim’s espionage. Tech agents carry guns just like street agents, but their behind-the-scenes work, too often unheralded, plays a critical role in major cases. This time, the very hands that installed the camera above Jim’s desk had also taken custody of his suspect, affirming the bureau’s appreciation for his literal high-wire operations at Langley.
Maguire stood in the British Airways’ executive lounge, the only CIA man invited by the FBI to attend the arrest operation. Several other agency officers were deeply involved in the case, but none worked longer hours than their spy-versus-spy guy. During his previous life as a cop, Maguire had paid grudging respect to the FBI. The agents always carried themselves with a little more polish than city police. They even had a little more swagger, if that was possible. They also seemed to bring limitless enthusiasm, and huge government resources, to joint investigations with local law enforcement agencies.
Maguire knew he would never be a part of the FBI brotherhood. Those bonds were forged at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, tempered in field-office bullpens around the country, cemented on grueling overnight surveillance operations, and celebrated—often with strong drink—after they cuffed the bad guys. But for just a moment on that chilly Saturday, the ex-cop from Baltimore felt like one of them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring through a big picture window, all waiting for the money shot.
It came fast.
Agents bent Jim over the trunk of the car, spreading his legs and frisking him. They stripped him of his wallet and Rolex and shoulder bag. Those watching Jim saw his characteristic élan had evaporated, his eyes telegraphing the cold truth that he was now at the mercy of the government he betrayed.
To his credit, Jim never shed a tear.
Maguire made his way to a holding room, where agents guarded Jim’s two shell-shocked subordinates. “Look,” he told them, “you just witnessed something really bad. You’re not in any trouble. You’re not part of this. You’ll be interviewed by the FBI. This is all under control. We’ll talk about it when you get back to the office.” The officers stared back, still not comprehending Maguire’s role in this. He felt sorry for them, and he knew things were only going to get worse. The FBI would drive the officers to a nearby hotel for questioning. They would be sequestered overnight, unable to phone their families. The FBI would subject them to hostile interrogations, demanding to be told what they knew about Jim’s work for the Russians and how they might have helped him. The CIA had prepared them for such events in simulated interrogations. But this time, it was real.
FBI agents would interview all the CIA personnel in Jim’s branch after the bureau and agency made Jim’s arrest public the following Monday. They would drill down to the marrow, extracting every detail to make sure Jim had acted alone.
Investigators sat with Jim in a separate room and formally read him his Miranda rights. They asked if he might have anything he’d like to say.
“I’d like to see a lawyer,” he said.
Nathan heard loud raps on thick wood.
Whoever was at the front door had forgone the light tap of the brass knocker in favor of big, hard fists. From his bedroom window upstairs, which overlooked the front door, he parted the curtains for a peek. He saw a man and a woman he didn’t recognize on the stoop. He lingered for a moment, looking at the tops of their heads, thinking Uncle Rob would take care of it. But Rob was back in the den watching a college football game on TV, and probably couldn’t hear the knocking.
Nathan thumped down two flights of stairs.
On the other side of the door lay a cataclysm.
Nathan twisted the doorknob and pulled. He found a pair of unsmiling adults. They were asking for Mr. Nicholson.
“He’s not here right now,” Nathan told them. “He’s on a business trip.”
The man explained they needed to speak with Robert Nicholson.
Nathan called for Rob, who came down from the den to greet their visitors. Nathan passed him on the way back upstairs to resume his video game. When Rob reached the door, the strangers on the stoop flashed FBI credentials. He glanced over his shoulder and stepped outside, closing the door behind him. They had his undivided attention.
“Jim’s been arrested,” he heard one of them say, “for espionage.”
Rob thought they were playing a joke on him. He now figured the strangers were a couple of Jim’s cronies pranking the bumpkin from Oregon. But Rob was no bumpkin, and he wasn’t buying the stiff-faced strangers’ story.
The agents told him they had a warrant to search Jim’s house.
“Well,” Rob told them, “you’re not coming in till I see the warrant.”
He watched one of the agents, the woman, retrieve papers from their car and hand them to him. One of the FBI’s key investigators had written the document, signed by a federal magistrate, that gave the bureau the right to search 5764 Burke Towne Court for “fruits, evidence, and instrumentalities of crimes against the United States, to wit: espionage . . .” That was as far as Rob needed to read. The words put him on his heels, and it took him a moment to get his bearings. Suddenly this was real, and his first thought was about the kids. How was he going to tell Star and Nathan?
The agents explained to Rob that investigators would take many hours to search the town house, and they needed to clear the Nicholsons out. The bureau had booked them two hotel rooms nearby, where they could stay f
or the night. What the agents didn’t say was that an FBI team would turn the home upside down. They would slice open Jim’s mattress, cut through the popcorn ceiling in his bedroom, look behind every light socket, peer into every inch of his crawl space, and explore a basement storage closet that the kids sometimes played in. They would haul out any shred of evidence that Jim sold classified files to the Russian Federation.
Rob’s face went ashen. He turned somberly for the stairs and climbed toward the kids’ bedrooms. In his heart, he felt the FBI had it all wrong. There was no way he could believe his big brother, the guy he’d idolized since birth, was guilty of spying against the U.S. No way. In Rob’s mind, Jim was a patriot, a “Screaming Eagle” in the Army’s 101st Airborne, a globe-trotting government servant who helped his country win the Cold War.
When Rob reached the landing at the top of the stairs, he called to Nathan and Star. He told them to pack bags for the night and not ask any questions, he would explain everything later. Dutifully, the kids packed without a word.
The FBI checked the Nicholsons into a nearby hotel. There, Rob sat down with Nathan and Star. With a leaden heart, he broke the news to his niece and nephew that their father had been arrested for espionage.
Star began to bawl, begging her uncle through sobs to tell her that her dad would be OK.
“They’re not going to hurt him, are they?”
Rob told Star no one was going to hurt her dad.
Nathan wept quietly. His suspicion that his dad was a government spy had finally been confirmed. Unbeknownst to him, Jeremi and Star had learned the family secret by the time they reached their early teens. Jim had never had the talk with his youngest son. Nathan now pored through the sounds and images of his past. Whispers between his mom and dad. Jim’s long absences. All the foreign travel. Demonstrations at The Farm. Nathan’s mind looped over the word his uncle had used to describe his dad’s arrest: “espionage.” How could that be a crime?