The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  “Uncle Rob,” Nathan said, “that’s what they pay my dad to do.”

  This was complicated business for a twelve-year-old. But Rob, too, was bewildered by the turn of events. He figured Jim had fallen so deeply into his work for the agency that someone had set him up.

  Agents drew Rob into another room, leaving the kids alone to watch TV and fret. They told him it was time for him to phone his mom and dad. But Rob balked, telling them he simply couldn’t be the one to break the news to his parents, that it would shatter them. The agents assured him that the FBI had already made contact with Nick and Betty. So Rob picked up the phone and dialed his parents in Eugene. His mom answered.

  “I guess you’ve heard the news about Jim,” Rob said.

  “No,” Betty gasped.

  Rob could have killed the FBI for doing this to him. Now he had no choice but to break the news that her firstborn was in jail.

  Betty was standing in the kitchen of their little house in the Woodland Park Estates, bracing herself for the worst possible news. The tone of Rob’s voice was grave, and she feared he was about to tell her that Jim’s plane had gone down.

  “He’s been arrested,” Rob told her, “for espionage.”

  “Arrested? Jim? Are you sure?”

  Yes, Rob told her. By the FBI.

  A couple of hours later, a pair of FBI agents, both women, pulled up to Nick and Betty’s home to confirm the news and take statements.

  Laurie was deep in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon that Saturday, where she was interning as a seasonal field ranger for the Oregon Caves National Monument. She lived a spare, bohemian life that gave her time to appreciate the magic of the natural world. The kids had been gone since the end of summer. She lost herself in her work on the mountain by day, and retired to her bedroom and her books in an old lodge by night.

  The place was nirvana for an earthy forty-two-year-old geologist. A quarter-billion years before, an ocean basin collided with a massive reef, causing limestone to cook into marble that rose four thousand feet into mountains. Rain had poured off trees, seeping through acid-rich earth to dissolve tunnels, creating one of the nation’s rare marble caves.

  Laurie had spent that Saturday on the south side of the caves, where she was helping a moth expert with his research on the many species that wintered there. With sunset closing in, they hightailed it over a creek crisscrossed by deadfall timber, reaching the ranger station after dark. A message awaited Laurie.

  One of her brothers had phoned, leaving an urgent message to call him. When she got him on the line, he said Jim had been arrested on spy charges, and that the FBI needed to talk with her in Eugene.

  Laurie drove three-and-a-half hours through hard rain to reach her hometown. She spoke for about ninety minutes that night with a pair of agents, candidly sharing her impressions of her ex. She told them he was a control freak, and that he squandered money on himself while constantly griping to their kids that he was short on cash. The agents slid some photos in front of her—Russians she didn’t recognize. Laurie knew from their years together that Jim had frequently been targeted for recruitment by Moscow’s spy services. But she didn’t think they would ever succeed in turning him. Now it appeared Jim, who had wrongly accused her of betraying their country to the Romanians, was getting a criminal comeuppance.

  Later, Laurie recalled how the FBI’s news had struck her: “Serves him right, the bastard. Sooner or later, a person shows his true colors.”

  Laurie filed a motion for full custody of her kids, which was granted almost immediately.

  Jim spent that Sunday, his forty-sixth birthday, in jail.

  The FBI took Nathan, Star, and Rob back to the town house to pack clothes and a few of their other belongings. The kids rounded up their cats and put them in pet carriers. They were heading to new lodging, a motel closer to the airport, and it was unclear whether pets were allowed. So the agents draped blankets over the carriers and helped the kids smuggle the cats into their room.

  In Oregon, Jeremi arranged to redeem frequent flier miles to fly his brother and sister back to their family. He feared that if he didn’t get them on a plane right away, the Commonwealth of Virginia would split them up, put them in foster care, and he would never see them again. Jeremi prepared to withdraw from his freshman year at Oregon State. His mom’s job didn’t pay enough to support them all, so he would get work to help out. It wasn’t immediately clear where they would live. But Jeremi took control as the man of the house. One way or the other, he would keep the family together.

  The FBI waited until Monday to publicly announce Jim’s arrest.

  Nathan and Star were sitting in their hotel room that morning, watching TV as the hours ticked down to their flight to Oregon. Suddenly their dad’s face appeared on the screen. They heard a voice saying Harold James Nicholson had been charged with espionage, and that he potentially faced the death penalty.

  Star began to sob, and Nathan tried to calm her down. But she was beyond consolable. The FBI had jailed their dad, torn up their home, and sent them packing with little more than their cats and the clothes on their backs. Nathan had never seen his sister more anguished, and he would never forget her next words, a declaration that bared the sudden, terrible upheaval in their young lives.

  “I don’t believe in God anymore!”

  8

  Forsaken All Allegiance to His Homeland

  “The guy in After the Fall says, ‘Why is betrayal the only truth that sticks?’ I can’t answer that altogether, but after all, the Bible begins with a betrayal, doesn’t it?”

  —Arthur Miller, interview in the Paris Review

  Langley, Virginia, November 1996

  Something caught Kathleen Hunt’s eye when she walked into the branch office on the Monday morning of November 18. She peered across the bullpen to the back of the room. Strands of canary yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed Jim’s door, which was covered with the human silhouette of a target straight off a shooting range. She stood gawking. It was the most bizarre thing she’d ever seen in a CIA office.

  A few of Hunt’s colleagues were already in the room, including Maguire, who crossed the carpet to see her.

  “Jim’s been arrested for espionage,” he said.

  Hunt’s jaw dropped.

  “I was so worried that you had figured it out,” Maguire said, reminding her of their conversation about Jim’s requisitions for the camera and printer. “You were asking all these questions.”

  But she hadn’t figured it out. Who goes to work in a secure ­office—the CIA, for God’s sake—thinking one of her coworkers is a mole? First Ames, now Jim. Ames was precisely the kind of guy she could imagine switching teams. He was a sour, embittered bureaucrat who chain-smoked, drank excessively, and was prone to occasional bursts of anger. Jim was the mirror opposite. He was easygoing, seemingly self-assured, sober. But as she thought about it, she realized that Ames and Nicholson had a common bond.

  “Each in their own way,” she said, “were very insecure men.”

  Hunt took a closer look at the target taped across Jim’s door. She noticed that someone had fired at least one slug through the forehead of the silhouette, the FBI’s not-so-subtle way of counting coup. As Hunt recalls the moment, the hole symbolized what everyone in the building was thinking of the CIA’s latest betrayer: We want to kill you. She asked Maguire if she could take a peek at the crime scene, and he obliged her by tearing through the mess in Jim’s doorway. Hunt saw that his office had been picked clean. Agents had slashed through a leather side chair in their inch-by-inch hunt for evidence. Cushion stuffing littered the floor.

  CIA and FBI officials spent that day interviewing Hunt and others in the branch about Jim and his arrest. During an hour-long talk with FBI agents, Hunt told them about Jim’s peculiar requisitions. She also told them about another of Jim’s unorthodox moves, which sudden
ly struck her as noteworthy. Jim had been pushing the notion of greater collaboration with Russian intelligence on counterterrorism. He seemed to be angling to shoehorn the Russians into the CIA’s working model, she told them. Now it was clear why.

  John Deutch hobbled into the branch office later that day with the wooden cane he sometimes used when an old leg injury flared up. It had been a grueling forty-eight hours for the CIA director. Deutch had flown out to L.A. to assure a hostile crowd in Watts that the CIA had not taken part in a plot to push crack cocaine into the U.S. to finance the Nicaraguan contras in their 1980s war against Managua’s Soviet-backed government. Now Deutch was back in the agency’s headquarters to put a good face on the unmasking of another CIA man as a Russian spy. He took a seat just inside the door of the branch and told Hunt and their colleagues to relax, they had caught their betrayer. Later that year, Deutch would leave the agency amid controversy after he made the rookie mistake of opening classified files on an unsecured home computer.

  Jim appeared that gray Monday before a federal magistrate in the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. He was still in the turquoise shirt and white pants he wore onto the tarmac at Dulles. The magistrate formally read Jim’s spy charges. Prosecutors sought forfeiture of $180,000 in illegal proceeds from the Russians.

  Americans are granted by birth the right to a speedy trial, and few halls of justice demonstrate that inalienable right more emphatically than those in the Eastern District of Virginia. Its judges preside over a court calendar that moves so swiftly it is widely known as the Rocket Docket. The new courthouse, a postmodern building that opened eleven months before Jim walked in wearing cuffs, was accoutered with a statue above its entryway that seemed to personify the proceedings inside. The statue of Blind Justice stood twelve feet, six inches tall, eyes blindfolded, robe billowing, arms outstretched. One of her massive bronze feet was planted on a pedestal, another extended behind her as if she were breaking into a sprint. Her hands clutched the scales of justice as if they were track batons. The statue was inscribed, “Justice Delayed, Justice Denied.”

  Jim signed a financial affidavit stating he netted $2,900 a month, $1,360 of which went toward his town house mortgage and $160 in payment on his minivan. He acknowledged that he had $4,000 cash on hand. The affidavit asked if he had received payments from another profession or source. Jim checked no. The document publicly acknowledged what had been all over the news that morning: Jim’s employer was the CIA.

  He was the sixth American charged that year with spying. Two others—Phillip Tyler Seldon, sentenced ten days earlier with wrongly giving military documents to El Salvador, and Robert Chaegun Kim, accused in a conspiracy to steal U.S. military secrets for his native South Korea—had come through the same Alexandria courthouse. Jim’s GS-15 rank put him a notch above Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency’s hall of shame. He was the highest-ranking CIA official ever arrested for espionage. News agencies ate it up.

  “Good evening,” Peter Jennings said as he opened ABC World News Tonight. “We begin tonight with another American accused of selling out his country to the Russians.” Jennings’ segment quoted one outraged government official after another. U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey: “Mr. Nicholson betrayed his country for money. He was not motivated by ideology, but by greed.” FBI director Louis J. Freeh: “The passing of such information placed those officers’ lives, as well as the lives of these foreign contacts, in danger.” Deutch predicted there would be more such arrests.

  The FBI would in fact arrest one of its own, Earl Edwin Pitts, one month later. The forty-three-year-old supervisory agent and lawyer had been selling the bureau’s secrets to Moscow’s foreign intelligence services for nearly a decade. Much like Jim, Pitts sold the dossiers of colleagues and was betrayed by a Russian cooperating with U.S. counterintelligence personnel for money. The FBI had made its case against Pitts by sending in undercover agents posing as SVR officers to talk him into parting with U.S. secrets. They arrested him at the FBI Academy at Quantico, the bureau’s holy land.

  Top officials in the FBI and CIA trumpeted Jim’s arrest, with Deutch acknowledging in a quip to ABC newsman Sam Donaldson the rarity of their joint counterespionage investigation: “It used to be that directors of the FBI and directors of the CIA only met at one or the other’s funeral.”

  Paul Redmond, behind the scenes, quietly gagged at the Kumbaya moment. He soon got a call that would worsen matters. A Pentagon reporter for one of the TV networks missed the press conference, and Deutch now wanted Redmond to give an on-camera interview about the Nicholson case. It was late in the day, and Redmond had worked a slew of thirteen-hour days while supervising simultaneous counterintelligence operations. He passed word up the chain of command that he would only do the interview if what he called the “Federal Bureau of Curiosity” put one of its agents on camera with him. Curran got dragooned into doing the FBI’s part.

  Redmond and Curran were interviewed together that night inside the Langley compound. A producer then got the two of them to walk down the hall, side by side, so the cameraman could shoot B roll—­footage to fill in visual gaps in the reporter’s narration. The producer didn’t like what she saw.

  “You didn’t talk enough,” she told them.

  So they did it again. This time, as Redmond and Curran strode down the hallway conversing, Redmond said to the much taller FBI man, “Eddie, every FBI guy I ever met is a fuckin’ asshole.” And Curran happily noted that Redmond and all his CIA buddies were assholes, too. Both men hoped there were no attentive lip-readers in the viewing audience.

  Jim made a brief appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas R. Jones Jr. that Wednesday wearing a jumpsuit stenciled “Alexandria Jail.” Jim’s lead attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, later told reporters his client would vigorously fight the accusations. The following day, November 21, a federal grand jury handed up an indictment charging Jim with a single crime: conspiracy to commit espionage.

  Shapiro, who had never tried a spy case, would soon be joined by two other court-appointed attorneys, Michael W. Lieberman and Liam O’Grady. The defense team later filed papers asking the judge to prevent the government from talking out of turn about Jim:

  “Counsel is shocked at the daily deluge of extraordinarily prejudicial comment, speculation and innuendo coming from the mouths of high law enforcement officials who seem bent on putting the best spin possible on their embarrassment about alleged security breaches at the CIA so close on the heals [sic] of the Ames case,” they wrote. “Senior CIA and FBI officials are almost gleeful in their attacks on Mr. Nicholson, telling the world of the ‘overwhelming evidence of guilt’ and the ‘ironclad case’ they have developed against him, and disclosing alleged facts laced with speculation about Mr. Nicholson’s motives, all with devastating effect on this defendant’s right to a fair trial.”

  Jim’s defense team spent a week preparing for a November 25 hearing before Judge Jones to spring Jim from the Alexandria jail. Detention hearings are key junctures for any defense team. Jim’s lawyers hoped to persuade Jones that he posed no danger to society and wouldn’t flee if the judge granted him pretrial release. It would pay big dividends later, assuming he didn’t bolt for Moscow. The defense wanted to present Jim as the all-American boy, the guy who made the Commandant’s List in Army officer training and helped Jeremi earn his Eagle Scout medal.

  The government’s top lawyer in the case, Robert C. Chesnut, had served as chief prosecutor in the Ames case just ten years after graduating cum laude from Harvard Law. Chesnut had recently played roles in the Seldon and Kim spy cases. The government had collected huge mounds of evidence in those cases and dispatched them with pleas.

  Chesnut opened Jim’s detention hearing by calling the agent who ran the arrest operation at Dulles, Steve Hooper, to the witness stand.

  “After you arrested him,” Chesnut asked, “did you take custody of his wallet?”

 
“Yes.”

  “And, later, did you have an opportunity to go through the contents of the wallet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find anything in that wallet that would relate to a foreign bank account?”

  “Yes. There was a business card in there bearing the name of Roland Keller, and it had foreign language printing on it, other than the name, and an account number on the back.”

  “Was the account number printed or handwritten?”

  “It was handwritten,” Hooper said.

  “And in what country was this bank located?”

  “It appeared by the writing to be a Swiss bank.”

  Hooper testified that during the search of Jim’s town house, agents found a payment sheet that showed Jim had deposited $61,000 into Bank Leu. The funds were still in the account, he said, but bank officials had frozen it. Jim hadn’t bothered to mention the matter of a Swiss bank account on his financial disclosure form.

  Shapiro took up cross-examination.

  “Are you aware of any information that the defendant was leading a lavish lifestyle here in the United States?”

  “No,” Hooper said.

  “Or that he drove, for example, a Jaguar?”

  This was a wink to Ames, who had bought two Jags with Moscow’s money.

  “I’m not aware.”

  “Or paid for cash—paid for his house in cash?”

  “No,” Hooper said, “I’m not aware of that.”

  Shapiro asked the agent whether Jim would be tailed by the FBI or allowed to leave the United States if he was released while awaiting trial.