by Bryan Denson
Nathan never let go of the memory of that painful heart-to-heart. Seeing his dad so sorrowful, head literally hung low, churned in his young mind. He convinced himself that the government must have pressured him to confess—even to his own kids—that he spied for Russia. Nathan came to a conclusion about his dad’s confession that day, a belief he would cling to for many years.
He didn’t believe a word of it.
In letters to Nathan that fall and into the spring of 1998, Jim reminded his son how much he loved and missed him. How he longed for their next adventures together.
“I have spoken to Jesus about this,” he wrote. “Apparently it is only the will of men that I be in prison—not of God. Since God’s power is so much greater than man’s, I’ve asked God to set me free.” In a letter two months before Nathan’s fourteenth birthday, Jim acknowledged that one of his character flaws—always trying to make people like him—had been an asset in the CIA. “In fact,” Jim wrote, “my job demanded that and I really was into it. Now, I understand that it involved compromising my true beliefs in many cases. What was always the most important to me was my children.”
Jim hosted evening prayers in his cell and made new friends. One of his kindred was Steven Paul Meyers, who walked into Sheridan twenty-nine days after him. Meyers had been a talented sculptor before taking part in an audacious series of bank robberies that ended in a shoot-out with police. Jim and Meyers, both born in 1950, were arrested the same month. Both were bright, adventurous, equipped with healthy egos, and hated that they were forced to follow their kids’ lives through the filter of letters and phone calls.
In late January 1999, Meyers opened an envelope with a return address he didn’t recognize. Inside was a letter from a San Francisco woman who worked as a paralegal for an international law firm. She was writing to say she’d read about him in a new book by true-crime writer Ann Rule. The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up chronicled Meyers’ exploits with Scott Scurlock, dubbed “The Hollywood Bandit.” Scurlock’s gang—given to guns, theatrical makeup, and prosthetic faces—pulled more than a dozen successful bank jobs. But on November 27, 1996, things went badly when Scurlock, Meyers, and another man hit a north Seattle bank during a light rain. They made off with a duffel bag full of cash, more than $1 million, but got into a running gun battle with police. Scurlock escaped, then took his own life as the cops moved in. Meyers, wounded, later drew a twenty-one-year prison term.
The paralegal writing to Meyers in 1999 explained that she had once been held up while working as a bank teller. She was fascinated by his personal story, and she hoped he would write back. Meyers responded in February, saying he was happy to trade correspondence. His note concluded with an odd postscript: “Is it a problem to write you at your work address as legal mail?” As a matter of policy, prison officials don’t open mail that appeared to be attorney-client correspondence. The paralegal soon received a pair of letters marked “legal mail” from Meyers, including a screenplay Meyers wrote about his exploits as a bank robber.
The San Francisco woman, perhaps infatuated with the bad boy, made her way to Oregon in June 2000 to meet him in person. She and Meyers’ brother, Randall, spent the better part of four days in Sheridan’s visiting room, a space about the size of a high school cafeteria. Steve Meyers leaned forward in his seat during one of their visits and pointed across the floor to another inmate. In a hushed voice, he told his guests that the man was not only a friend, but a Russian spy. He didn’t tell them Jim’s name. But it would come up later.
It had taken Jim two years to figure out a way to circumvent the CIA’s snooping on his mail. He wanted Meyers to send the paralegal a document he had prepared for the SVR, making sure to mark it “legal mail” so that no one at the prison read it. Jim intended for Meyers’ friend to forward it to the Russian Federation, which had a consolate in San Francisco.
Nathan was deep into his teens, a time when most children pull away from their parents to spend time with friends. He lived with his mom, and they were close, but he clung to his dad. And who could blame him? He’d gone the first eight years of his life feeling almost fatherless before getting a four-year window in Malaysia and Virginia to cast Jim as the hero of his life. Suddenly he could spend every other Saturday quizzing the old man about his life in the Army and the CIA. Nathan thrilled at Jim’s stories of parachute jumps in the Rangers, daydreaming of following in his dad’s boot steps. Jim also shared tales of his days as the CIA’s Batman, including the daring escapes, with sidekick Robin, from armed gunmen on the streets of Manila.
Jim’s boy never considered him a traitor. After his dad’s sentencing, a TV news crew had come out to Laurie’s home in Oregon for interviews. They put Nathan on camera, asking the same question many different ways: What did your dad do? It was clear they wanted him to say his dad betrayed his country and was a turncoat, but Nathan never budged. He wanted to tell them his dad gave his life to the CIA, sacrificing time with his own family to protect America. But he let it go.
Jim always made Nathan feel like the center of his universe, and now his boy told him everything about the world outside the razor wire. Nathan painted vivid accounts of his life and times at Crescent Valley High School, just north of downtown Corvallis, where he earned As and Bs, ran a season of track—middling performances in the 200- and 400-meter sprints—and loafed around with a handful of straitlaced friends. They were a geeky bunch that gathered after the final bell to play cards, mostly Egyptian Rat Screw, and talk about the girls they secretly adored. They set up a closed computer network to do battle in Quake 3, a popular shoot-’em-up game. Eventually Nathan went punk, spiking his hair into a mild Mohawk, and got deep into hard-core music, thrashing to bands such as Disturbed. Nathan would later tell me his dad hung on every word, never appearing judgmental or uninterested.
Jim’s fatherly guilt ran deep. He was gut-sick that he couldn’t be there for his kids. He confided to other prisoners in his prayer circle the deep humiliation he felt in not providing material support to his own children. He wept openly about this with at least one cellmate. But in the presence of his kids, Jim tried not to let on how these shortcomings crushed him. It must have been punishing to live vicariously through his children’s stories, knowing they were coming of age in a world that, by the sound of things, moved at the speed of light.
Nathan didn’t want his dad to fall too far behind when he got out of prison in his sixties, so he constantly apprised the old man of developments in electronic gadgetry. He regaled his dad with news from the front lines of the expanding digital universe, from iTunes to Halo 2, Nintendo Wii to XBox 360, and the confounding iterations of Microsoft operating systems, from Windows 98 to Windows Vista. Even cellular phones had shifted beyond Jim’s comprehension. When he was arrested, Nokia’s top-of-the-line cells still had antennas. Now they were smaller, lighter, carried longer charges, and came with color displays.
Jim was ending his fourth year of confinement on September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the United States. He wrote two letters to the CIA that offered his help in finding the terrorists who planned the jetliner strikes on U.S. soil. Those letters have never been publicly disclosed. But it’s a good bet Jim reminded his former employer that his branch in the CTC had labored to draw beads on the likes of the Islamic fundamentalists now accused of mass murder. The CIA apparently never responded.
The attacks of 9/11 deeply wounded Nathan. He recalled standing at a bus stop near his mom’s home north of Corvallis, on a clear morning, when a classmate asked if he had heard the news about an attack on the Twin Towers. Nathan misunderstood her. The only Twin Towers that came to mind were the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. The spires were still under construction when he left Malaysia, and now stood as the tallest buildings in the world. When he reached Crescent Valley High, every TV in the place was lit up with live TV coverage of the horrors three time zones away. Nathan sat and watched, boiling mad.
Since turning seventeen that summer, he had quietly made plans to join the Army. He had no money for college, no girlfriend to tie him down, and he was desperate to prove himself as a combat soldier. Now there was a righteous cause. His country was under attack, and it was soon clear the U.S. was headed to war in the Middle East. Nathan figured young men would swarm military recruiting offices, and he wanted to be one of them. He knew his enlistment would freak out his family. So, for the time being, he kept his plans a secret. Even from his dad.
Several months later, on February 2, 2002, the paralegal from San Francisco paid another visit to Steve Meyers at Sheridan. While waiting for him in the visiting room, she found herself talking to a slender six-foot-three prisoner with a New Jersey accent so strong he sounded like a character out of central casting, “Wise Guy No. 3.” Phil Quackenbush was a bank robber and recovering crackhead who celled with Jim. He told the paralegal that his cellie was a convicted spy, and gave his name.
The paralegal put it together that Jim was the very guy Meyers had mentioned, the one trying to sneak messages to the Russians. When she got home to the Bay Area, she did a little research on Jim and phoned the FBI. Agents took a statement from her about the visits to Sheridan and her concerns that Jim was trying to pass messages to Russia. The FBI’s San Francisco’s Field Office had a sizable counterintelligence squad. Agents had much to protect from Russian spying in the tech-rich Silicon Valley, where defense contractors were plentiful. The squad kept a close watch on the Russian Consulate, a den of SVR spies.
The FBI has never disclosed what its agents did, if anything, to look further into the allegations against Jim. But in time, it would become clear they hadn’t lost interest.
Summer 2003
On July 29, 2003, an FBI agent from San Francisco dropped in on Steve Meyers, who was living easy in a low-security prison in Big Spring, Texas. The Bureau of Prisons had moved Meyers out to the West Texas lockup a few months earlier, possibly at the behest of the FBI. Agents knew Jim had come up with a muddy polygraph during his 1997 debriefings, perhaps withholding information he gave the SVR. Now they worried he might have reestablished contact with Moscow. The FBI man wanted Meyers to tell him about Jim’s scheme to contact the Russians.
Meyers told the agent what he knew. He had shared a cell with Jim before his transfer to Texas and was aware of Jim’s work in the CIA and his espionage conviction. He said Jim had confided in him that he still held agency secrets in his head, secrets that were slowly going stale and would one day lose any value to Russia. Meyers also told the agent that after his release Jim planned to move to Russia, where Moscow was still holding his “pension.”
The FBI sometimes rewards prisoners by recommending reductions in the sentences of those who cooperate with them. Meyers, perhaps sensing he could get time whittled off his punishment, continued his betrayals of Jim. He told the agent that one of Jim’s plans was to sneak a letter to the Russian Embassy in Rome. Jim’s impression, Meyers told the FBI, was that the U.S. did a poor job covering Russia’s spy operations in Italy, making it easier for an American to pass a letter from Jim to the SVR there. Meyers explained to the agent that Jim had tried to rope his brother Randall into carrying a document out of the prison during a 2002 visit. But Randall had rejected it out of hand.
Meyers then dropped Quackenbush in the grease. He told the FBI agent that when Quackenbush was freed from Sheridan, he carried out a manila envelope full of Jim’s papers.
Seven weeks later, on September 16, Quackenbush took a call from his probation officer in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“Listen,” he heard his PO say, “I need to meet you at your house tomorrow night. Two gentlemen need to speak to you.”
This wasn’t good news.
By appearances, things had been looking up for Quackenbush. He was working full-time as a roofing foreman, going to school four nights a week at the Community College of Southern Nevada. He had a nice place in the Desert Park Apartments just ten minutes from the Vegas Strip. But he was smoking crack again. The last person he wanted to see was his PO. If he found out Quackenbush was on the pipe, he’d violate him and send him back to prison.
“Whattaya mean two gentlemen wanna talk to me?”
The PO told him two FBI agents needed information about a former cellmate. Quackenbush wasn’t in a position to say no.
The next day, he entertained the agents at his apartment as the sun slowly dropped over the rocky red shoulders of Charleston Peak. Quackenbush was probably what the agents expected. He was thirty-nine, grew up in the Jersey suburbs west of Manhattan, and worked most of his life as a union plasterer before moving to Vegas, where at age thirty-five he met and fell in love with crack cocaine. He worked a second job as a serial bank robber to keep the rocks coming. But the law caught up to him, and he was sent to Sheridan on a fifty-one-month stretch in the spring of 2000.
He told the FBI agents he first met Jim in the prison chapel. They had both been raised as Christians and made friends with the chapel’s music director, Shadley Wiegman, and her husband, Glenn, a prison volunteer. The deeply religious couple served as parental figures for many of the inmates, who often called Mrs. Wiegman “Mama Shadley.” The Wiegmans worked in the prison ministry because it made them feel good to lift the spirits of prisoners clinging to life’s bottom rungs, but also because the testimonies of these caged men lifted them, too. They were especially fond of Jim, a natural leader who served as a kind of chapel toastmaster, introducing preachers and speakers. He also wrote Christmas passion plays, organized evening Bible studies, and prayed with his brothers behind bars before bunking in each night.
Quackenbush looked up to Jim, who was thirteen years older. The former CIA man seemed unflappable, always under control. Quackenbush saw Jim as bright, personable, even lovable. But there was a vanity about him. Jim hated that he was growing gray, losing hair, showing his age. When later they agreed to share a “house”—prison slang for a cell—Jim took the top bunk. Quackenbush, sitting on the bottom rack on Saturday mornings, teased Jim mercilessly about using an old toothbrush to comb shoe polish into his beard to look younger for his kids. His cellie also was exceedingly fastidious about his prison khakis. While some prisoners wore them dirty or wrinkled, Jim kept his uniform tidy, the buckle of his fabric web belt dead center, and carried himself with a military bearing. It was almost as if Jim were proud of the number over his left shirt pocket.
Jim fancied himself a writer. Not long after reaching Sheridan, he had penned a 176-page novella titled Welcome to Paradisio under the pen name H. J. Nicholson. It’s the story of a young San Francisco businessman who goes to work on a Caribbean island, where he is recruited by CIA operatives to cover for their work against drug cartels, terrorists, and revolutionaries. It was an imaginative narrative, with a romance built in. But he couldn’t find a publisher.
Quackenbush recalled that during the time they celled together, Jim had taken piles of notes on pads and tapped them into a typewriter on loan from the unit secretary. Jim had referred to the manuscript as his memoir. As Jim clacked away at the new document, carefully stacking its pages, he tore his paper notes to confetti. As typewriter cartridges went out, Jim lifted them from the machine and yanked out the ribbons until they looked like a fly fisherman’s nightmare. He tore them into tiny plastic pieces and flushed them down the toilet, Quackenbush told the FBI. Once, he said, the paper and plastic clogged the bowl, forcing him to reach into the soggy muck, haul it out, and feed it back through the porcelain mouth flush by flush until it disappeared.
Jim knew that Quackenbush would soon “kill his number”—prison slang for getting out—and he asked his cellmate to smuggle the document out with his gear. Quackenbush admitted to the FBI that he carried the papers—a sheaf two inches thick and stuffed into a manila envelope—when he flew home to Las Vegas. He told the agents he honored a promise he made to Jim that he not read it. Six weeks after reachi
ng Vegas, Quackenbush said, he mailed the package to Nick and Betty Nicholson, just as Jim had asked him.
FBI agents returned to Quackenbush’s apartment on a Friday morning in mid-October. They took him for breakfast and said they wanted to put him through a polygraph. Quackenbush had never taken one, and the thought of answering the FBI’s questions while wired up to the machine put him about a screwdriver’s turn from coming unglued.
“They pull up to a hotel casino,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ Straight-up feds shit, right?” The agents led him into a suite, where he found a man with a polygraph box. The operator tried to put him at ease, explaining how the machine worked and that they were just going to ask him a few questions. It didn’t take long to get to the moment-of-truth queries. Did Jim ask him to take classified information out of the prison? Did Jim ask him to mail a package to a foreign government? Quackenbush answered no to both questions, and he passed the polygraph.
Agents believed Quackenbush had indeed mailed Jim’s envelope to Nick and Betty, just as he said. But they didn’t want to confront Jim’s parents about this until they had more to go on. Questioning the retirees about their son’s mail would only tip Jim that he was under investigation. The FBI would wait until it had more evidence.
The bureau’s case appears to have stalled about that time. But agents kept tabs on Quackenbush, knowing they might need him as a material witness if they gathered enough evidence to arrest Jim for further espionage. On February 17, 2004, their boy approached a teller in a Bank of America in Vegas and said, “Let me get some hundreds.” The teller, failing to catch on, asked if he meant large bills. So Quackenbush, with crisp diction, helpfully cleared things up. “This is a bank robbery,” he said. “Let me have all your hundreds.” For this transgression, swiftly remedied by police, Quackenbush was sent to a penitentiary in eastern California to begin a fifty-seven-month sentence.