by Bryan Denson
Jim relinquished rights to any money traceable to his spying for Russia. Moscow had a time-honored tradition of holding open accounts for spies imprisoned for the motherland. History is replete with examples of Western spies, facing espionage charges in their own countries, who defected to the Soviet Union and lived on Moscow’s dime until they died, some of them by drinking themselves to death. The U.S. intelligence apparatus similarly remained loyal to Russians they bankrolled to spy on their country.
Jim also agreed in writing that if Russia ever paid money or some other benefit to him or his family, he would notify the CIA and assign those proceeds to the United States.
Jim spent much of that spring in a series of debriefings with FBI agents and teams of CIA officials. He acknowledged that the SVR had paid him $300,000—not the $180,000 investigators had identified—and he recounted in detail the secrets he handed to Polyakov. These informational downloads went on for ten weeks, sometimes three times a week. Jim walked his interrogators step by step through his meetings with his Russian handler in India, Indonesia, Switzerland, and Singapore. The sins Jim confessed helped the government assess the damage he’d done and prevent another Jim Nicholson. Agents independently corroborated much of what Jim told them.
When the debriefings ended, Jim took a polygraph. He easily passed questions about his contacts with the SVR, and whether he had been truthful about the money he made. But when he was asked whether he was withholding any secrets he’d passed to the Russians, Jim’s answers came up on the box as deceptive. At the time, the FBI saw no reason to believe he was lying, perhaps attributing the deception to the vagaries of the polygraph. Agents had no evidence of further crimes. They had wrung him dry for details of his espionage, forced him to give up his money and property, and now would see him off to federal prison.
Prosecutors gave Jim credit for helping the government determine the damage he caused. But in a memo filed a few days before his sentencing, they noted that he betrayed his colleagues and his nation out of greed. They said he deserved 283 months in prison. George Tenet, now serving as the CIA’s acting director, wrote that Jim put the lives of friends and colleagues at risk:
“Mr. Nicholson revealed, or planned to reveal, the names and positions of a large number of CIA officers whose jobs depend on their ability to work clandestinely. Some of these officers can no longer perform certain important assignments for which they were trained. Several other officers, who were working under our deepest cover program, had to be withdrawn because their missions, as well as their lives, were at risk. Still other officers whose identities were revealed to the Russians by Mr. Nicholson were our young Career Trainees, many of whom were his own students. The course of many of these young officers’ careers has been affected by Mr. Nicholson’s treachery.”
Jim’s giving up the names of NOCs—bona fide secret agents with nonofficial cover—killed the careers for which they had trained. The government had spent a lot of money putting them in some of the most dangerous spots on earth, and they had gone deep undercover to plumb the secrets of hostile governments and their militaries. Now they would be called back to Langley, where they would take desk jobs or quit the agency altogether. In all, Jim had given up the identities of several classes at The Farm—blowing the covers of hundreds of officers.
Tenet acknowledged that the U.S. spy apparatus might never know the full extent of the losses Jim caused. But the agency would have to assume the worst possible outcome. To that end, he wrote, the agency had no choice but to cancel promising spy operations, and had already recalled spies from overseas assignments back to the United States.
On the first Thursday in June, John Maguire lumbered into Cacheris’ courtroom and took a seat in the front row, squeezing in with a few of the FBI agents he’d worked so closely with on the Nicholson investigation. Maguire had come to Jim’s sentencing to hear what he would say for himself.
Jim walked in a moment later wearing a blue double-breasted blazer. Maguire caught his former boss’s eye for an instant as he walked past. They exchanged a short glance, and Jim’s face registered abject confusion. Maguire needed that. He wanted Jim to understand he had been the inside man. They had gone spy-versus-spy under the roof at Langley, both playing a brutal game of betrayal. But only one of them would go home to his family that night.
Judge Cacheris, still in his chambers, had read handwritten letters from both of Jim’s sons, neither of whom could afford to fly back to Virginia for their dad’s sentencing. Nathan had sounded like a little boy asking the all-powerful Oz to send his dad home.
“Dear Judge,” he wrote, “As you know, my Dad is in jail. Please let him out as soon as possible because I miss him very much. My Dad did what he did out of his love for us. . . We are going through a tough time right now and releasing my Dad would help a lot. Please don’t make me wait for a long time. . . . I don’t know if this will let you set my Dad free early, but I might as well try to do this for my Dad because I love him.” He closed with these words: “My Dad’s Son, Nathan Nicholson.”
Jeremi’s letter was raw and revealing. He wrote that his father was always capable and caring, a generous man whose work had so often taken him far from home. In Thailand, his dad was gone eleven out of fourteen days. But over the last four years, they had seen much more of him; his dad had served as mother and father.
“My father has always done everything in his power to have us live comfortably,” Jeremi wrote. “Unfortunately my father showed his love by material means. He enjoyed buying things for us. Though, now I think about it, what parent who truly loves his/her children wouldn’t wish to give them every comfort they can and as many of the items they desire (merely) to provide some physical proof that they care. I don’t say that is the best method, but it seems to have been the only way my father felt comfortable trying to ensure that his kids knew he loved us.”
When Cacheris took the bench, prosecutors told the judge what he already knew: The government had worked out a plea with Jim and his legal team. The United States sought a twenty-three year, seven-month sentence. The defense sought a couple of years less, with credit for time already served in jail.
Shapiro and O’Grady once again built up their client as a patriot who had given twenty years to his country, serving on the front lines of the Cold War, risking his life in the Middle East and Cambodia. “Mr. Nicholson established contacts nobody else could get,” Shapiro said. “He personally penetrated communist groups himself.” Shapiro recited the words of Jim’s superiors across the globe, who had given him rave reviews. “No weaknesses. . . . Mr. Nicholson can do it all. . . . His future is bright.”
When it was Jim’s turn to speak, he stood somberly. Those in the front row of the gallery could see he wore dress shoes with no socks. Jim told Cacheris he had lost everything that was ever dear and important to him, except his faith in God and his endless love for his children. His actions, he acknowledged, had blotted out all the good things he had done for himself and his colleagues.
“I won’t ask for the forgiveness of my colleagues and countrymen, for I know they cannot give it,” he said. “I will ask for the forgiveness of my family and children, because I know they will. . . . I reasoned I was doing this for my children—to make up for putting my country’s needs above my family’s needs and for failing to keep my marriage together by having done so. I am, in so many ways, so very sorry.”
Government lawyers and the federal agents who took part in the investigation were flabbergasted by Jim’s I-did-it-for-the-kids speech. Some would recall his words years later as the most destructive guilt trip a dad ever laid on his children.
Cacheris sentenced Jim to the full twenty-three years, seven months. With time off for good behavior, Jim could be out by the time he reached retirement age. The judge recommended that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Jim’s new keeper, let him serve his time in Oregon. Perhaps there, in the bosom of his family, Jim would mak
e good on the declaration he made to a court officer before his sentencing: “I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to offer some positive example to my children before I die.”
9
A New Cellblock Celebrity
“In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you. That little buck gives you a lot of time to think.”
—Suge Knight
Sheridan, Oregon, summer 1997
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons complex in Sheridan, Oregon, with its white concrete walls and red Spanish-style roofs, looks like a small college campus in the tropics. The compound spreads across 182 acres on the northern end of the Willamette Valley, just south of the little farm town of Sheridan, and is separated from its neighbors by twelve-foot chain-link fences topped with coils of gleaming razor wire. From the air, the grounds appear to be an island flanked by working fields and a large pond, a patchwork of agronomy in hues of camelback tan, olive, and emerald green. The soil on the eastern edge of Oregon’s mossy coastal mountains can grow pretty near anything, from pears to pinot noir grapes to grass seed. But one of the town’s leading employers is the prison.
The complex, formally known as the Federal Correctional Institution Sheridan, holds the majority of its inmates in a medium-security lockup, with others in a work camp and a detention center. Sheridan is the only federal prison in Oregon and employs several hundred people from the nearby countryside, their gray uniforms ubiquitous in the town’s cafés and groceries. Their workplace was built on political pork and powerful influence. U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield, the prison’s chief benefactor, served two stretches as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and few politicians were capable of steering more pet projects to their states than the maverick Republican. The government spent $52 million to build the prison complex, which houses inmates in dormitory-style units designed to foster rehabilitation. Today it holds a little more than eighteen hundred inmates, about four hundred over capacity, owing largely to prisoners of the decades-long war on drugs.
Jim passed through the gates for the first time at 3:13 p.m. on a warm Thursday in late July, one week before Nathan’s thirteenth birthday. In a way, Jim had finally returned home. His birthplace in Woodburn sat just twenty-seven miles from the prison complex. Jim’s overseers gave him a bright orange prison uniform that identified him as a new fish and a handbook that established the rules of conduct in the medium-security facility. He was almost immediately put to work in a 47,000-square-foot factory that produced oak and walnut executive desks and plastic office chairs. Jim’s job with the prison industries program, UNICOR, eventually led to a position as a product control manager. The pay topped out at a little more than $1 an hour, but through longevity and overtime hours, Jim would eventually earn a few hundred dollars a month. UNICOR’s furniture business was a national leader, and its captive workforce, laboring at prisons across the nation, brought in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sheridan had a reputation as easy time—not quite the Club Fed depicted in movies, but a soft landing for the federal prisoners lucky enough to land there. The place teemed with white-collar crooks serving short stretches, and a few well-behaved badasses serving the final years of long ones. What set Sheridan apart was the number of cellblock celebrities on the compound. By the time Jim clocked in, two front-page news figures were sharing a cell. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who stabbed his pregnant wife and two daughters to death with a knife and ice pick, had just passed his sixth anniversary at the prison. His crime had been chronicled in a book and a movie, both titled Fatal Vision. MacDonald, known as “Doc,” shared a cell with the Cold War spy Jim Harper, serving life with the possibility of parole for selling U.S. missile defense secrets to the Soviet bloc.
Harper obtained American defense secrets from his girlfriend (and later wife) Ruby Louise Schuler, an executive secretary at Systems Control, Inc., a Palo Alto, California, Army contractor. SCI’s research focused on highly secretive studies on such things as how to make Minuteman missiles less susceptible to Soviet intercepts. Schuler smuggled documents out of SCI in her purse, and Harper carried them to Poland’s spy service, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa. They paid Harper $100,000 in 1980 for a trove of documents, which a team of KGB officers picked through in the Russian Embassy in Warsaw. A CIA source later provided clues that led to Harper’s 1983 arrest.
Six days a week, Harper manned the desk in the prison law library, which sat between the chow hall and a recreation room. Inside were hundreds of law books and several rows of Swintec 7000 electric typewriters. Prisoners sat in private cubicles, tapping out legal papers, pro se appeals, and lawsuits that accused their overseers of missteps ranging from illegal beatdowns to bad food. It wasn’t long after Jim reached Sheridan that Harper looked up to find Jim walking into the library.
Harper had tried for years to prove that the damage he caused the U.S. was minimal, and that he should be paroled. Through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, he had obtained a redacted summary of his official damage assessment, which suggested the ballistic missile defense programs he compromised had been canceled before he passed secret papers to the Poles. He hoped Jim would glance at the documents and offer insights that might help him win parole. But when Harper stood to greet the new spy in town and ask if he might peek through the Department of Defense summary, Jim recoiled and said he could be of no help.
“It was just obvious the guy didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” Harper said in an interview years later from Lompoc Penitentiary. “I think it was the only time I tried to talk to him.”
Harper would observe Jim over the next several years as he walked into the library in the evenings, took a seat at a typewriter, and banged feverishly. Jim kept entirely to himself, guarding what appeared to be a growing stack of papers from prying eyes. While many inmates share their latest strategies to get out of prison early or sue the Bureau of Prisons, Jim worked in utter secrecy. Harper figured that Jim was drafting a document to provide the U.S. government additional information to shave time from his sentence.
Jim’s celebrity preceded him at Sheridan. He had spent much of June and July 1997 entertaining national TV journalists, positing a staggering array of rationalizations for his betrayals. He told ABC’s Nightline correspondent Dave Marash, “The primary reason for my decision to work with the Russians was my need to take care of my children back in the United States. . . . I just found myself in an untenable situation and I didn’t know how to get out of it. . . . No one was killed. No one was tortured and the only person that was arrested as a result of my action was me.” Jim conveniently failed to mention to Nightline that had he not been caught, some of the spies he compromised might have been tortured or killed.
Jim told NBC’s Katie Couric that by the time he became a walk-in for the Russian Federation, he thought Moscow was struggling to come to grips with democracy, and that assisting Russia’s efforts was not a bad thing. Couric asked, “Do you think that way now?” To which Jim answered, “No, I don’t think that way now. . . . It flew in the face of everything that I believe, everything that was important to me.” An ABC crew shot footage of Jim talking with Nathan on the phone. Jim’s youngest, who had not seen his dad since the morning of his arrest, offered this to an interviewer: “We don’t have a whole lot to talk to him about, but it’s nice to hear his voice every once in a while.”
Jim’s family soon trekked up to Sheridan to visit. Nick and Betty still refused to believe he had done anything terribly wrong. They had watched CNN’s report on Jim the day he was sentenced to prison, and they just weren’t buying the government line. They gave an interview to The Oregonian that day, saying they felt the CIA had somehow set up their son. “As far as I’m concerned,” Nick told the newspaper, “the CIA and FBI are very capable of doing that.”
Once Jim landed in Oregon, many of his family members drove to see him—his parents and siblings and children, even his aging uncle H
arold. But he felt he wasn’t getting enough time with his kids. So he carved out a plan so that he could share exclusive visits every other Saturday with Jeremi, Star, and Nathan. It was during one of those private meetings with the kids that Jim cleared the air about his crime.
Nathan vividly remembers that moment, his dad leaning forward in his chair, the faces of his children pushed close to hear his words. Jim began by saying how sorry and embarrassed he was for them to see him in such a place. He told them how proud they all had made him, holding things together without him. He was happy Star and Nathan had kept up their grades. And he was glad to know Jeremi, deeply hurt by his dad’s arrest, planned to return to Oregon State. Jim grew bitter as he spoke of his blind devotion to the agency, his long absences from them, and the ruins he had left of his family since the divorce.
The next part Nathan would never forget. Jim somberly admitted he had indeed sold secrets to the Russians for money.
“I just wanted to help you kids out,” he said.
Jim’s children mobbed him with hugs, professing their love and vowing to stand by their father no matter what. Star cried. Jeremi launched into a lecture, and Nathan recalled his brother breaking the tension by telling his dad he was forgiven, adding in jest, “Just don’t do it again.”