by Bryan Denson
Laurie secretly felt relieved. She had long worried Nathan would go off to war and come back in a body bag. More than forty men with ties to Oregon had already been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But her boy, always the family daredevil, was smitten with the notion of military glory. She understood how passionately men could behave in the service of their country; she had watched Jim prepare for war in a peacetime Army, then vanish into the violence of conflict on Cambodia’s border with Thailand in the 1980s.
At the end of his leave, Laurie drove Nathan to the airport for the trip to Bragg and they got into an argument about the tension at the house. In the heat of the moment, Nathan heard her say, “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t come back.” He took this to mean that maybe he should just go ahead and die and get it over with. Laurie hadn’t meant it that way. She just didn’t want Nathan to come back and fight with Bill.
Laurie’s words destroyed her son. He flew to Bragg, diving deeper into depression with each passing time zone. By the time he returned to the base, with none of his close friends to confide in, he thought about punching his own ticket. Nathan’s mind played tricks on him; maybe he really was better off dead. He was alone that weekend in his barracks bedroom. He sat on his rack for a long time, contemplating an end to his torment. He found the answer in a folding knife, pulling out the blade and surveying his wrists. He visualized a series of cuts up and across his veins. He would slice deeply, sit back on his bed, and let the warm blood drain him cold.
His phone rang with a jolt.
When he answered, he was greeted with a woman’s recorded voice: “This call is from a federal inmate. . . .”
“Hey, son.”
“Hey, Pa.”
There were times when the only person in the world capable of pulling Nathan’s ruined spirits out of his boots was his dad. Jim knew his son was depressed. But the timing of his call was pure prescience.
“I just called to tell you how much I love you,” Jim said.
Nathan’s throat tightened, tears running down his cheeks.
“I love you, too, Pa.”
Nathan was too ashamed to tell Jim what he was about to do. But when he hung up, he was armed with new resolve. He put the knife away.
Oregon, late 2004
Nathan settled into an apartment in Springfield, just across Interstate 5 from Eugene, and took a job as a Pizza Hut deliveryman. Nathan missed the camaraderie of his friends back at Bragg, who were readying for Iraq, and considered them battle buddies. But for him, there would be no battles. He had flown home that fall with an honorable discharge and a duffel bag of despair.
Depression shadowed him like a bill collector. The night of his near suicide attempt at Bragg, with his father’s voice still fresh in his ear, Nathan phoned his sergeant for help. The call set in motion a chain of events that began with the intervention of a mental health counselor, his acknowledgment of suicidal thoughts, and the end of his military career. His counselor, a man with thick glasses and a bow tie, prescribed Zoloft, little oval pills that were supposed to cushion emotional bumps. But Nathan never filled the prescription.
He had always powered through the obstacles thrown his way by counting his blessings. He carried the golden rule into life’s trickier corners, treating others better than he expected them to treat him. Some of those he invited into his world saw these qualities as exploitable weaknesses.
Dustin Rogers, Nathan’s cousin and confidant, was wary of his cousin’s new love interest. Nathan had met the lady in his life in an online chat room during his Army days. After his discharge, he had driven way out to the scrublands of eastern Oregon to meet her family and bring her home to live with him in his second-floor walk-up in Springfield. Dustin thought his cousin’s girlfriend was clingy and weird. She was several years older than Nathan and had an annoying habit of launching into loud, raunchy stories about their sex life, which left Nathan with crimson cheeks, sputtering to change the subject. From time to time, Dustin later explained, he could see a whole lot of crazy camped out in her eyes.
Nathan recalled that his girl had confessed early to him that she had overcome a drug problem. Her teeth were in terrible shape, and when a dentist discovered a pocket of toxins in her mouth that threatened to flow into her bloodstream and potentially kill her, Nathan maxed out his Citi card to pay for emergency dental care. His monthly income—a combination of his Veterans Affairs disability compensation and his tips and earnings from Pizza Hut—came to about $1,600. Now, in addition to rent and car payments, he faced the additional costs of paying for her dental work.
In early 2005, he enrolled at nearby Lane Community College to study drafting and architecture. Uncle Sam would later pick up the cost of his books and tuition. But as Nathan poured himself into his studies, his girlfriend remained jobless and relapsed into drugs. He offered to help her if she was committed to staying straight. When she was noncommittal, he drove her back to her family for good.
Nathan focused on his studies that fall. He was a lonely single man still grieving over lost opportunities in the Army and wondering how much different his life might have been had a parachute opened correctly over Fort Bragg. When Veterans Day rolled around that November, he broke out his dress uniform and set the self timer on his camera. Nathan stood at attention and threw a crisp salute, his beret pulled down snugly, infantry cord hanging just right, lips pinched tight. He still believed that God loved the infantry. And, by God, he still loved the infantry and the Army buddies who had flown off for Iraq. But he was a broken man.
He felt blessed to have his dad to lean on. Every other Saturday, Nathan drove up to Sheridan to see him.
In prison, they call it killing birds. You serve a long stretch one day at a time, killing your sentence by working hard and earning extra time off by keeping your head above the fray of gangs and potential hostilities. Friends inside, real ones anyway, help you cope. They’re the ones wishing each other a good day. Because a bad day in the joint is a very bad day indeed. A great cellmate can make the time go faster. An ideal cellie is a good conversationalist who knows when to shut up, tidies up after himself, doesn’t hang out in the cell all day, and gives you enough privacy to think or beat off.
Many prisoners find faith behind bars, but Jim walked into prison with his. Confronted by a minimum two decades inside, Jim immersed himself in Christianity. Rob Tillitz, once a high-seas drug smuggler, served time with Jim in Unit 4B and recalled that his friend had a bit of a Jesus aura about him—he wore a beard and long hair, and he seemed to be the only inmate in the place wearing moccasins. Tillitz thought Jim seemed utterly placid and in control of himself, which he attributed to Jim’s religious beliefs.
Jim struck out in his attempts to persuade Star and Jeremi to attend church. Star’s faith evaporated the day of his arrest, and Jeremi had followed Laurie into a new-age religion that teaches its followers they are particles of God sent to Earth for spiritual experience. Adherents of Eckankar, a faith dating all the way back to 1965, study the “Light and Sound of God,” believe in the concept of Soul Travel, and seek guidance from a spiritual leader known as the Living Eck Master. Jim was proud to hear that Nathan had become a regular at The Door, a nondenominational Christian congregation in Eugene. He thought it was a good place to get right with God, and maybe meet a nice woman.
Nathan and Jim connected in Christianity, reaching deep into the pockets of their faith. They sometimes prayed so hard in the visiting room that Nathan could practically feel God reaching through the wood-slat roof to hold them in his hand. He loved the steady, instructive timbre of his dad’s voice in those moments. The old man was very close to God, Nathan told me, and it was easy to see how his dad’s deep prayers sometimes transported him out of his felony tank.
Jim soothed his son’s angst about not making it into the Rangers, and believed God had a different plan for Nathan. Jim told him that faith would carry him through life�
�s roughest passages and into missions far greater than those undertaken by men and their militaries.
One Saturday in the spring of 2006, Nathan drove to Sheridan earlier than usual. He moved through the checkpoints and metal detectors as part of the weekend herd, reaching the visiting room well ahead of Star. He and the old man greeted each other with their customary bear hug.
Jim’s kids were going through rough patches in their finances. Jeremi, who had enlisted in the Air Force in 2003 because he hated working at McDonald’s, was $25,000 in debt. Star’s student loans totaled $50,000, and her car was in and out of the shop. Nathan scarcely made a dent in his two maxed-out credit cards, including the one he’d used to fix his ex-girlfriend’s teeth; also, he had bought himself a 2005 Chevy Cavalier and still owed $8,000 on the note. Jim’s UNICOR earnings, even in a month choked with overtime, topped at about $400, scarcely enough to help his kids out financially.
“I have an idea,” he shared in a whisper, “to help you kids.”
Nathan perked up.
“Would you be willing to help?”
“Of course.”
Jim asked his boy to do a little research on the Internet when he got back to his apartment. He wanted to find out the location of the nearest Russian consulate. Jim explained that his old friends in Moscow were holding an account open in his name, and that together they might be able to make some early withdrawals. Jim had lost his freedom in service to the Russian Federation, and now he felt it was Russia’s turn to help support his kids while he was away. He wanted to know if Nathan was willing to serve in his stead on the outside.
The old man was preaching to the converted. Nathan agreed on the spot to offer his assistance. He drove home feeling glorious. The dry season had come to the valley, sunshine bleaching the daytime sky into an Andrew Wyeth painting, with heart-stopping sunsets that streaked the sky pink and purple. They were magical days that could make a broken man feel positively invincible.
Two Saturdays later, Nathan pulled into Sheridan earlier than usual and parked in his customary spot near a helipad just outside the main gate. He was happy to see that Star’s decrepit hatchback wasn’t in the lot. He moved among the crowd through metal detectors and other indignities before a corrections officer stamped his hand with invisible ink. He followed uniformed staffers through the bowels of the institution, a journey punctuated by the crackling of radio traffic and the slamming of metal doors. Eventually he took his seat in the visiting room.
When Jim appeared, Nathan quickly filled him in on what he had learned: There was a Russian diplomatic station in Seattle, less than a five-hour drive north of his apartment, and a consulate in San Francisco, nearly nine hours to the south. Over their next few visits, Jim outlined his plan. He wanted Nathan to drive to San Francisco and walk into the Russian Consulate and ask for the director of security. Jim told his son he would prepare some notes that would introduce the two of them.
When Jim volunteered as a mole for the SVR in 1994, he was fully informed of possible consequences. Now he planned to send Nathan into the breach with the weakest possible grasp of the perils ahead. Perhaps Jim thought his son’s naïveté would protect everyone’s interests, including his own. What he surely knew—and failed to tell Nathan—was that the SVR had a huge presence in the big brick building in San Francisco, a den of spies likely to recognize the Nicholson name. He knew that once Nathan volunteered to serve as his agent, they would likely be happy to help his family. The Russians were sure to have questions for their long-lost asset, questions that Nathan could courier back to him in prison.
Nathan radiated in the glow of his dad’s confidence in him. He asked few questions, intoxicated at the very idea of dipping an exploratory toe into his father’s clandestine world. The old man’s career had been peppered with such élan, and Nathan was excited to play a supporting role. He was thrilled to help Jim make contact with the Russians, delighted to help his family, and unaware of any consequences.
“It’s risky,” Jim said. But he assured his boy there was nothing illegal about an American walking into a Russian diplomatic station. Indeed there wasn’t. But Jim didn’t tell Nathan that it’s a well-established fact in U.S. intelligence circles that FBI agents watched the consulate, and that the bureau gathered intelligence on suspicious visitors. If the bureau’s counterintelligence agents spotted Nathan at the consulate, and identified him as Jim’s son, it would have triggered a brisk and thorough inquiry.
Nathan was eager to take a road trip to San Francisco. He had passed through the town just once, on a trip to Disneyland with his dad. The notion that the Russians might give him money for his dad’s previously rendered services was merely a bonus. “I didn’t think I was starting up any trouble,” Nathan would recall years later. It seemed only right to him that the Russian Federation, now a democratic nation with improving diplomatic ties to the U.S., would quietly lend a hand. He figured the Russians owed the Nicholsons, because it was his dad’s service to the SVR that had torn his family apart.
One Saturday several weeks later, Jim told Nathan to wear a shirt with a breast pocket the next time he visited. His boy did as instructed. When Jim walked into the visiting room, they hugged and sat for a few moments, talking casually as surveillance cameras snooped the seating area. With spy-like sleight of hand, Jim plucked a note out of his khakis.
“Don’t look down,” he said.
Jim put his arm around Nathan’s shoulders and pulled him close, palming a folded square of composition paper sealed with plastic tape. Then, making sure no guards were looking, Jim slid the note into his son’s breast pocket.
“Don’t open it,” he said. He explained that if anyone ever questioned him about the note, he could say with all honesty that he hadn’t read it.
Visitors weren’t supposed to accept anything from prisoners. The institution’s regulations forbade couples from exchanging so much as an overly long kiss. But Jim, who had learned the art of the brush-pass at the agency, had perfected it early in his incarceration. In the past, he had occasionally slipped folded Christmas wish lists into Nathan’s pockets. Prison staffers never caught them.
Jim told Nathan he was mailing him a letter that included a photo of the two of them and that he was to carry that note to the Russian Consulate. The postmarked letter and father-son photo taken inside the prison would serve as evidence they were related.
As summer gave way to fall, Jim waited for one of their Saturday visits to slip an unsealed note under the food wrappers and napkins piled up on the snack tray between them. Nathan casually palmed it into his pocket. Jim told him to hand the note to the receptionist in Russia’s San Francisco consulate, and to be sure to wear his black business suit. He asked Nathan to carry the sealed note, along with the mailed letter and photo, to the head of security. The Russians would take it from there. Jim cautioned his boy to keep his eyes open to make sure no one tailed him into or out of the consulate.
In the intelligence world, spies like Jim worked foreign assets by befriending them, gaining their complete confidence, and learning their vulnerabilities. Then came the pitch—Will you help me?—and promises of a better life. Jim had worked many assets this way during foreign postings with the CIA, using these agents to help him collect all manner of intelligence on the Soviet Union and other nations.
Nathan came easy. Jim set a virtual banquet in front of his son’s eyes, telling him of the financial relief he could potentially bring to his family. Nathan would do nearly anything to help. Jim told him that this was their secret to keep, and that he chose Nathan for the assignment over his sister and brother. Star was strung too tightly for such work, and Jeremi—now stationed in Florida with the Air Force—was far too practical to even consider such a plan. Jim explained to Nathan it was his choice whether to eventually loop in his brother and sister. For now, they would operate as a two-man team.
Jim spent a few minutes during each visit t
eaching Nathan basic surveillance detection, a spy skill that would help him see if he was being tailed. Jim coached him on how to assess potential threats to his security—taking mental notes of the people and autos he saw during his travels, focusing vigilantly on those he saw with any frequency. He cautioned Nathan to be wary if his computer suddenly slowed—a sign it might be under surveillance—and warned him to pay cash rather than using his credit card to sidestep paper trails. He also provided Nathan with a cover story for his visit to the Russian Consulate: He’d pose as a student studying Russia’s architecture.
Words like “cover story” and “tails” should have scared the bejesus out of Nathan. They didn’t. The old man was dangling a new life in front of him, one full of daring, intrigue, and money. Nathan was certain his dad would never put him in any real danger, and it never occurred to him to ask impertinent questions about the potential consequences of his contact with the Russians. Whatever the risks, he was willing to shoulder them. He had pushed all in. And so it was that in the middle of October 2006, a dozen years after Jim began spying for the Russians, he sent them his youngest son.
11
The Russian Consulate, San Francisco
“My father was pleased I actually had the guts to do it.”
—Michael Walker, recruited by his dad,
John A. Walker Jr., to spy for the Soviet Union
Northern California, Fall 2006
The Russian Consulate in San Francisco rises in the middle of one of the city’s thigh-burning hillsides, a monolith of multicolored bricks in desert shades from cream to adobe, a blend that renders the building tabby-cat orange. The diplomatic establishment rises between the Presidio and Pacific Heights in a neighborhood covered by multimillion-dollar swankiendas, with their postcard views of the great dome of the Palace of Fine Arts and the rust-colored arch of the Golden Gate Bridge.