The Spy's Son
Page 19
At least the FBI would know where to find him.
Harold James “Jim” Nicholson, age twelve.
COURTESY OF NICK AND BETTY NICHOLSON
Laura Sue Cooper married Jim Nicholson in June 1973. They passed beneath an arch of swords held by Jim’s ROTC comrades from Oregon State University.
COURTESY OF NICK AND BETTY NICHOLSON
Jim’s official CIA photo.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Jim tried on Bedouin attire during a family trip to Egypt a few years before his divorce from Laurie.
COURTESY OF AL’AURA JUSME
Jim gave Nathan trigger time with several firearms in his boyhood, including this AKM assault rifle.
COURTESY OF AL’AURA JUSME
Betty and Nick Nicholson still live in Eugene, Oregon, in a small home filled with their arts and crafts.
BRYAN DENSON, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Jim in Malaysia, 1992, with his children (from left) Jeremi, Nathan, and Star. The kids wore the tie-dyed T-shirts that their mom, separated from their father, bought them in the Pacific Northwest.
COURTESY OF NICK AND BETTY NICHOLSON
Neighbors who live near Jim’s former town house in Burke, Virginia, know it as “The Spy’s House.” In 1996, the FBI took the home apart looking for evidence of Jim’s espionage.
BRYAN DENSON
Jim sports his infamous “KGB is for me” T-shirt at a CIA function. The U.S. government circulated the image widely after Jim’s arrest.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
John Maguire (photographed in Iraq in the mid-1990s) is the only CIA officer to have spied on another inside the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters to help make a criminal conviction for espionage.
COURTESY OF JOHN MAGUIRE
Jim pulled up to this post office in Dunn Loring, Virginia, on the night of October 9, 1996, to mail a note signaling an earlier-than-expected meeting with his SVR handler in Switzerland.
BRYAN DENSON
FBI agents Steve Hooper, left, and Dave Raymond arrest Jim on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport on November 16, 1996.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
After Jim’s conviction, John Maguire’s colleagues gave him a cup with a handcuff handle that reads: “From Your Unindicted Colleagues In CTC/MSB 1996–1997. Thanks For Not Arresting Us.”
COURTESY OF JOHN MAGUIRE
Jim’s second round of espionage began in the federal prison complex in Sheridan, Oregon.
BRYAN DENSON
Nathan and Jim posed for a photo inside the prison visiting room in 2003.
COURTESY OF NATHAN NICHOLSON
Nathan used the Bible that Jim bought him for his eighteenth birthday to hide some of the money that the SVR had paid him for Jim’s messages.
MICHAEL LLOYD, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Nathan visited his dad at the prison for this photo in 2005, the year before Jim recruited him to serve as his agent in meetings with the SVR.
COURTESY OF NATHAN NICHOLSON
On Veterans Day 2005, honorably discharged from the Army, Nathan put on his dress uniform and shot a crisp salute in honor of the soldiers who carried on without him.
COURTESY OF NATHAN NICHOLSON
The Russian Consulate in San Francisco rises from a hillside east of the Presidio.
BRYAN DENSON
Vasiliy V. Fedotov, a former KGB general, came out of retirement to meet with Nathan in Mexico, Peru, and Cyprus.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Nathan bought a dime-store composition notebook to take notes during some of his meetings with the spy he knew as “George.”
DOUG BEGHTEL, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Inside the pages of Nathan’s blue notebook, Nathan scribbled the time and address of his 2008 meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus.
DOUG BEGHTEL, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
The FBI printed copies of Nathan’s coded notes to the Russians, which they found in a search of his Yahoo email account.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FBI agents found Nathan’s packing list for his trip to Cyprus during a secret search of his apartment in Eugene, Oregon.
DOUG BEGHTEL, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Nathan met his Russian handler outside the TGI Fridays in Nicosia, Cyprus, at Christmastime 2008.
BRYAN DENSON
Nathan upgraded to a nice third-floor walkup in the Heron Meadows Apartments after the Russians began to pay him tens of thousands of dollars. It was there, for the second time in his life, he would find FBI agents at his door.
BRYAN DENSON © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Scott Jensen, one of the key FBI agents in the father-son spy investigation, kept eyes on Nathan and attempted to eavesdrop on his prison visits with Jim.
BENJAMIN BRINK, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
FBI agents played a hole card—this postcard from Cyprus—during a key moment in the FBI’s investigation of Jim and Nathan.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Jared Garth, chief division counsel in the FBI’s Portland Field Office, served as lead case agent in the bureau’s investigation of Jim and Nathan Nicholson.
BENJAMIN BRINK, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan D. Knight worked with lead prosecutor Pamala Holsinger to bring the father-son spy team to justice.
BENJAMIN BRINK, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamala Holsinger, who headed prosecution of the Nicholsons, came to see Jim as ruthless and manipulative.
BENJAMIN BRINK, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
Nathan’s defense team spent untold hours trying to help him understand how destructive his relationship with Jim had become. They were (standing from left) investigator Karen Bates, lawyer Thomas E. Price, and investigator Janan Stoll; and (seated) investigator Wendy Kunkel and lawyer Jerry Needham.
MITZI MILLER, COURTESY OF THE OREGON FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICE
During hundreds of hours of interviews, Nathan acknowledged his betrayals of his country, and his family. Eventually he came to see that he, too, had been betrayed.
MICHAEL LLOYD, © OREGONIAN PUBLISHING CO.
10
A Fall into Blackness
“And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.”
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, early 2004
On the evening of June 14, 2004, Nathan and his fellow soldiers piled into the cargo hold of a sixty-five-ton C-130 airplane. The air smelled of rain. They took seats on benches along the walls of the flying boxcar, backs pressed into red nylon webs, diesel exhaust wafting past their noses as the hydraulic cargo door lifted noisily. The stocky four-prop plane rumbled down the runway, soldiers’ guts shifting as she lifted into the North Carolina sky toward a waning moon. The C-130 Hercules is the U.S. Army’s primary airlifter, a beloved aircraft. God and everybody flies it. The ninety-eight-foot plane was put into wide use after the Korean War to transport troops and gear into battle zones with short runways. The Herc can land on anything—sand, mud, snow, doesn’t matter—and stop on a dime. That night, the C-130 carrying Nathan and his fellow soldiers in woodland-camouflage battle dress uniforms was headed for the “Normandy” drop zone at Fort Bragg.
Jim had written Nathan earlier in the year to say how proud he felt about this training. “The anxiety I experience over what you are doing is, I suspect, my punishment for having infected you with the insanity gene,” he wrote. “But, I am bursting with pride and gratitude when I know you are safe and have endured some new adventure. I know you can’t avoid getting hard—it’s necessary to do what you do. I just hope you will never grow so hard you wo
n’t enjoy a good McManus story with me.”
In another letter, Jim recalled how infantry soldiers often talked about how fun it might be to jump out of perfectly good aircraft, but never took the plunge: “What they don’t understand is what it’s like to leap out into thin air from the back of a screaming aircraft into a place you can only pray is not going to hurt too much—provided, of course, that your chute opens, you don’t get tangled up with someone else and the wind doesn’t slam you down so hard you can taste the leather of your jump boots.”
Jim had given Nathan a Bible on his eighteenth birthday, the final day of July 2002, perhaps knowing it marked a crossroads. Nathan had moved into an apartment with his siblings after Laurie remarried, nudging him out of the nest. He was passionate about joining the Army, but Jim hoped he would first go to Oregon State, as Star and Jeremi had. Jim counseled his youngest not to enlist, but to enroll at OSU and—just as he had done—take officer training in the ROTC.
For the first time in his adulthood, Nathan bucked his dad. He did take out a student loan and trooped off to Oregon State, and he even took an ROTC class. But he never joined the Officers’ Training Corps, firmly believing he’d be a better leader by learning first what it was like to be led. His plan was to finish a semester of college and, unless he was completely blown away by the experience, enlist in the Army without telling a soul. When the fall term ended just before Christmas, he walked into an Army recruitment office fifteen minutes from campus and signed up for the delayed-entry program. He would soon drive to Portland to swear his enlistment oath. Nathan waited until after the holidays to tell his family.
Jim was wounded that his boy hadn’t taken the ROTC track. Jeremi scolded his little brother, telling him he was an idiot because the U.S. government would never let him rise through the ranks after their dad’s crime. Nathan’s mom and sister were stricken by Nathan’s enlistment. Not a week went by that soldiers weren’t brought home in body bags from the Middle East. Laurie and Star, he recalled, began to treat him as if he had already died in combat.
Nathan had hoped they would applaud his bold move to serve his country, as an enlisted man or otherwise. But they didn’t. So he left his orange cat Megacin with Star and Jeremi and flew off to begin his Army career.
In 2003, Nathan graduated from basic infantry training and airborne qualification at Fort Benning, Georgia, the same muggy hellhole where Jim had begun his Army career as a newlywed. When Nathan earned his light blue infantry cord, Jim’s best friend and boyhood pal, Len Beystrum, flew to Fort Bragg to cheer his accomplishment. Beystrum, who had parachuted from perfectly good aircraft a couple of times himself, bought Nathan a celebratory dinner at the LongHorn Steakhouse.
Nathan’s legs had taken such a pounding during jump training that he suffered terrible shin splints and missed his chance to take part in Ranger initiation, a requirement to join the elite force. The Army sent Nathan to Fort Bragg that fall to try out for a Long Range Surveillance assignment, which would set him up to apply for Ranger school. He was one of five soldiers selected for the tryout. They were put through punishing combat survival tests, forced to jump off diving boards blindfolded and tread water with rifles over their heads. They were pushed to run mile after mile, and perform land navigation tests through swamps.
In the early winter of 2004, Nathan was sent into a frozen forest near Bragg as part of a Special Forces exercise. He took part in a mock ambush of an enemy force and was assigned to man a border surveillance post for several hours. Nathan, already exhausted from the operation, found himself alone in a shallow foxhole in the snow, where he tried to stay alert. His instructors had been known to sneak up and chuck Whistling Petes, noisy fireworks intended to simulate incoming mortar rounds. But many hours passed and Nathan’s replacement hadn’t shown. He’d had enough MREs to stay fed for a day, but the food was now gone, and he was hungry and shivering. More than twenty-four hours passed before those running the operation realized they had mistakenly failed to replace young Nicholson. When they found him, his eyes were dry and bloodshot, his throat parched from lack of water. They seemed surprised Nathan had done as they ordered: He never left his post.
Nathan and another soldier passed the tryout. He earned the rank of private first class and was put on a list of soldiers scheduled for deployment to Iraq at the end of the year. Nathan looked forward to his second shot at making the Rangers. He was desperate to match his dad’s accomplishments in the fraternity whose code of ethics dictates, “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.”
The jump over Bragg’s Normandy drop zone was Nathan’s thirteenth. He had parachuted from C-130s five times at Fort Benning to earn his airborne qualification. Since then, assigned to Fox Company of the 51st Infantry Division, part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, Nathan had jumped out of Hercs, twin-rotor Chinook helicopters, and a C-17 jet transport. On that night, he pushed the pain of his shin splints away, donning full combat gear—including Kevlar helmet, M-4 assault rifle, and parachute—to take part in a mass tactical jump off a static line. A jump intended to prepare him for combat.
The plane was cruising at seventeen hundred feet when one of the Herc’s side doors opened just behind the bulkhead. Nathan and his fellow soldiers stood and took their positions. They had a saying in Army Infantry, which decorated the uniforms of its soldiers with a blue braided cord: “Why is the sky blue? Because God loves the infantry.” Nathan did love the infantry, but there was not a shred of blue in this sky.
Nathan felt the rush of air as he reached the door on the right side of the plane and took that final stride into the ink of night, kicking his knees up, heavy rucksack riding on his lap. He waited for that instant when the chute popped and billowed, taking that big gulp of air. But his chute didn’t fully open. He felt himself hurtling toward the ground, chute tangled above him into what parachutists call a “cigarette roll.” The nylon dome filled with just enough air to slow him down but not enough to give him the lift he needed for a safe landing. Nathan cursed as he pedaled frantically to untangle the mess above him. He managed to give himself a little more lift, but the dark came too fast. He scanned the horizon to see if he had enough altitude to pull his reserve chute.
Now he saw treetops—too low—and gritted his teeth.
The ground came hard and fast, and Nathan released the fifteen-foot lowering line that tethered his rucksack to his left hip. The line is like the string on a heavy teabag: It keeps the pack from landing on a soldier and crushing his legs on impact. Nathan’s pack weighed well over one hundred pounds, including radio gear, an AT4 antitank weapon, a Claymore land mine, two grenades, a stack of fully loaded rifle magazines, and a brick of simulated C-4 explosive, along with food and personal gear to last for two weeks. In the mad scramble to fix his chute, he had mistimed his landing, dropping the pack too soon, a mistake that sent him oscillating as he plummeted to the ground. He landed with his legs straight out, his butt and shoulder striking the earth, his useless parachute now pulling him like a plow as he skipped across the rocky field cursing . . . fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck . . . until suddenly, mercifully, it was over. He would learn later that soldiers back at the base had packed his chute improperly.
Nathan lay on the ground moaning and cursing, muscle memory sending his hands diving for his rifle to lock and load. He pulled a red ChemLight stick out of a pocket and popped it in the darkness. The rest was a blur: soldiers huddled over him, a stretcher, a neck brace and IV line, a ride in a Humvee, a doctor telling him he had fractured a bone in the curve of his spine just above the tailbone. Nathan would need assistance to walk. There was no way to splint or put a cast on the break. So the docs gave him crutches, a little rubber donut to sit on, and a bottle of pain pills.
His back, slow to heal, was murder. He hobbled down forty stairs from his barracks to make the daily formation, but his superiors
sent him back every time. Nathan was scheduled to go to Ranger school for his second and final tryout, but his injuries prevented him from participating. His dreams of becoming a Ranger were over, forever, a failure more painful than his wounded back. Now he worried his medical problems would sabotage his deployment to Iraq as his outfit readied for war. Depressed, he flew home to Oregon on leave to decompress.
He stayed with Laurie, who was living in Salem with her husband. Bill Billera was a former Oregon State Police trooper, a large, imposing man who ran a tight ship on the home front and guarded his wife’s meager savings from her three broke kids. During a previous leave, Billera had asked Nathan when he planned to pay back the $1,400 his mother had loaned him for his car, a baby blue 1992 Eagle Summit. Nathan explained to his stepfather that his mother bought him the car as a high school graduation present. But Billera saw things differently, sparking an angry quarrel over the money. Worsening matters, Laurie took her husband’s side in the dispute.
It was a tense time for Nathan, preoccupied with thoughts of either dodging bullets in Iraq or washing out of the Army with a bad back. He suffered in the riddle of his future, wondering how he would bear up under fire and how he might handle himself if he never got the chance to test himself in combat. He also feared death. Any combat veteran could have told him his fears were natural, even a good thing; no rational human enters a war zone without fear. But Nathan’s greatest fear was failing to take part, to prove himself.