by Bryan Denson
Nathan shared with the Russian his dad’s plans to bust out of prison. Life inside was wearing the old man down, and he wanted out.
George listened intently as Nathan explained that his dad wanted the Russians to pluck him off one of the prison’s outdoor recreation yards by helicopter. Jim’s plan was for the extraction team to carry him to a submarine parked in the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast so he could escape to the motherland. The Sheridan complex didn’t have traditional guard towers, and corrections officers didn’t carry firearms inside the institution. But there were guns on the complex, and Jim clearly had prepared himself for the possibility of a shoot-out. His newest tattoo, the work of a prison ink artist, provided his blood type: “O POS.”
As comical as Jim’s plan sounded, it wouldn’t have been the first air escape attempted at Sheridan. About the time he arrived at the prison, officers broke up an elaborate plot in which inmates had built a large hang glider with plans to fly it over the fences. They had gone so far as to build leather britches to protect the pilot in case he landed in coils of razor wire. But they clearly hadn’t thought things through. There was no building high enough to launch such a craft.
Dozens of prisoners across the globe—typically assisted by hijackers on the outside—had escaped their confines by helicopter, including a few from federal prisons in the U.S. But the escapes often ended poorly. Jim might have been inspired by something he saw on the news. Just that April, two men posing as tourists hijacked a chopper to evacuate a thief named Eric Ferdinand from a prison in Belgium. It’s also possible that Jim concocted his chopper escape plans after watching Spy Game, a 2001 film he saw at Sheridan. The movie features a CIA operative played by Brad Pitt who is extracted by helicopter from a Chinese prison minutes before he is to be executed.
George smiled at Nathan. He told him to let his dad know that the Russian Federation wasn’t risking an international incident to pluck him off a prison yard.
Jim’s latest notes for the Russians answered questions about his travels in southeastern Asia. He wrote that someone seemed to be tailing him in Malaysia in the early 1990s. Also, a contact he made in Singapore—someone “off the grid”—appeared to be tainted, possibly connected to the FBI. Jim wrote that he suspected his computer at The Farm had been tapped, because it had slowed to a crawl.
George poured $10,000 on the table for Nathan. He told his young charge that he was trying to find a secure way to signal their next meeting over the Internet. He gave Nathan an e-mail address—[email protected]—but he fretted aloud about trading electronic mail, even in code, that might connect them. He asked Nathan if he knew how to communicate without passing standard e-mail.
Nathan couldn’t believe his ears. Every teenager in America knew how to hide e-mail from his parents. He stifled a laugh. Was this really the best that Russian intelligence could do?
As politely as he knew how, Nathan explained how to communicate electronically without ever hitting a send button. All they needed was a shared e-mail address and password. They could use the Russian’s Mexican Yahoo account, writing messages and leaving them in the draft queue. Instead of sending messages, they would just read each other’s drafts.
The Russian perked up, seemingly pleased with Nathan’s craftiness, and asked him to jot down the password to the Yahoo account: Florida12.
Nathan scribbled it in his notebook as the Russian pulled out his calendar and said they would meet again on December 11, 2007, at the Russian Consulate in Lima, Peru. He gave Nathan some code names: The Russians would be “Nancy,” and Nathan would be “Dick.” George told him that if for some reason he could not meet on the appointed date, he was to leave a draft e-mail in their Yahoo account saying, “My brother Eugene is ill. . . .” They would also code the day of their rescheduled meeting. For example, the Russian said, if Nathan wanted to meet on December 16, he would put down a date two days later—December 18.
Nathan could not imagine a scenario that would prevent him from accepting another stack of cash. He wrote the date and locale in his notebook.
Dec. 11-13
10am by local time to 1pm by self
Peru (Lima) Consular Section
Avenida Salaverry 3424
On July 12, Nathan flew home, declaring $9,080 in cash at U.S. Customs. He carried a pearl necklace for Molly, which he valued at $100 but cost twice that much. Nathan presented his sweetheart with the pearls and, in a moment of weakness, showed off the wad of money. Nathan explained that the source of this largesse was a family secret, and that he wasn’t doing anything illegal like selling drugs. She would just have to trust him on this one.
At the end of the month, Nathan rented a third-floor walk-up less than a mile from his grandparents’ home in Eugene, a major upgrade in his living standards. His carpeted bedroom in the Heron Meadows Apartments overlooked a clubhouse with a spa, an Internet café, and a twenty-four-hour fitness room.
Molly began spending her nights in Nathan’s bed, and it was clear she was angling for permanent residency.
“It started with a toothbrush,” he said. “Within a month, she was moved in.”
He soon discovered his girlfriend had a hedonistic streak. She stayed up late, left dirty dishes in the sink, and rose from his bed when the sun was nice and warm. She quit her job, running up her credit card with a thirty-two-inch television and a state-of-the-art laptop computer that Nathan ultimately paid for. He had made the mistake of introducing her to World of Warcraft, a highly addictive Internet role-play game. While Nathan was sitting through drafting classes, he imagined her on the front lines as a Blood Elf, battling the Burning Legion to regain the ravaged territory of Outland.
Nathan found himself mentally tallying Molly’s flaws. Her addiction to World of Warcraft would have been a deal breaker for most ambitious young guys. Yes, Molly was smart, but it seemed to Nathan that she lacked get-up-and-go. She had a cute face and hair that shimmered like fire when the sun hit it just right. But she often wore her locks in an unfortunate bun. She was sexy, but overweight; Nathan couldn’t for the life of him understand why she wouldn’t hit a treadmill that sat a hundred yards from their bedroom. “She was,” as he explained years later, “a depressed bear.” Molly seemed to adore him and always tried to make him happy. But they fought over insane things. Once she criticized the way he prepared Top Ramen noodles, saying he failed to measure the water.
They were at loggerheads. Both were night owls, but Nathan was an early riser. Molly was a homebody; he suffered cabin fever very quickly. Nathan liked to stay fit; she liked cookies. She was unemployed; he was trying to earn a college degree. Nathan knew that opposites often attract, and he decided to give their live-in arrangement some more time to take. But her shortcomings were wearing him down.
Nathan took some of these laments to his dad, who counseled him not to stay with a woman he didn’t love.
14
CIA Detects Codes, Espionage, Again
“The concept of surveillance is ingrained in our beings. God was the original surveillance camera.”
—Hasan M. Elahi
Portland, Oregon, summer 2007
One day that August, a CIA case officer and another government official presented their credentials at the reception desk of the FBI’s Portland Field Office. The receptionist buzzed them into the bureau’s fourth-floor reception area in the downtown Crown Plaza building, where they were directed into the office of Dan Nielsen, the acting special agent in charge. The three men exchanged pleasantries next to a picture window overlooking a broad bend of the Willamette River.
The men caught an elevator to one of the upper floors of the field office, where they took seats in a SCIF, an acronym for a bugproof room formally known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The room, designed to allow agents to review classified files, was decorated in standard FBI Spartan, with a few chairs and computer workstations. The
CIA officer had scarcely sat down before launching into the reason for his visit. The agency’s analysts had uncovered apparent evidence of the further adventures of Harold James Nicholson.
The FBI hadn’t abandoned the investigation it opened against Jim five years earlier. But the trail ran cold when agents couldn’t prove the package Jim smuggled out of prison in the capable hands of former cellmate Phil Quackenbush ever found its way to the SVR. The feds believed Quackenbush mailed the envelope to Nick and Betty Nicholson. If that was really the case, it was anyone’s guess where it might have turned up—or even whether it ever reached Jim’s parents.
What the CIA man said next breathed new life into the moribund case: Langley’s analysts had detected peculiarities in Jim’s phone calls and correspondence with Nathan. Father and son appeared to be talking in code, with suspicious discussions of money. The CIA was especially piqued by an August 2, 2007, letter Jim mailed to Nathan. “Anyway,” he wrote, “if you get the chance I’d recommend hopping down to S. America to check it out. Brazil, Argentina, Chile or Peru could be great places to visit. Peru would be the cheapest although Brazil might not be too bad either. I’d steer clear of Colombia and those countries along the top.” Jim’s letter appeared to encourage Nathan to fly to one of four cities in South America where Russia held strong diplomatic ties: Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima.
Nielsen walked out of the SCIF on two wheels. He knew he’d need to quickly assign a team of investigators to the top-secret case. The Portland office had its own counterintelligence squad, but Nielsen and top counterintelligence officials at headquarters lacked confidence in its supervisor. Nielsen couldn’t recall a single espionage case ever worked by the unit. He ran through a mental index of the sharpest minds in the building, knowing he would need his best people to reignite the Nicholson case.
Within twenty-four hours, Nielsen picked four middle-aged white men—three agents and an intelligence analyst—and brought them into his office. He asked the men if they wanted a piece of a closely guarded national security investigation, a priority case guaranteed to disrupt their lives. When each man said yes, he briefed them on the allegations and got them to sign papers promising not to divulge the nature of the investigation to anyone else, a process known as being “read in.” Nielsen explained they needed to move quickly and carefully to learn where Nathan was going, and who he was meeting. Job one was to put a stop to whatever Jim was doing.
The FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence had ruffled feathers at the Washington Field Office by assigning the case to Portland’s agents instead of their own highly regarded CI group, which handles many of the nation’s counterspy operations.
The case was so closely guarded that Nielsen considered moving the Nicholson investigation out of the FBI’s downtown headquarters into a rental space. He was concerned that other staffers, a curious bunch by nature, might pick up on the probe by office osmosis. Squads of FBI agents, analysts, and support staff occupied several floors in the Crown Plaza building, their workspaces set up in bullpens where they shared snippets and snatches of their cases with colleagues. That kind of collegiality was verboten in an espionage case. But Nielsen knew the men he chose could keep their mouths shut.
Nielsen’s easiest pick was Jared Garth, a supervisory special agent with a background in counterintelligence. He had worked Chinese counterintelligence cases out of the busy New York Field Office before being assigned to headquarters, where he continued his CI investigations. Garth now served as the chief division counsel in the Portland Field Office, making him the FBI’s top lawyer in Oregon. Garth and two other investigators would be named co–case agents. But the Nicholson case would be Garth’s to run.
He was deeply familiar with national security law, including FISA, which would allow agents to secretly tail Nathan and tap his phone without a standard wiretap order. He was smart, but down-to-earth, the kind of agent you could take for a beer without fear he was sizing you up. Most days, he comported himself like a wisecracking frat boy. But he could turn surly in a hurry when things weren’t going his way.
John Cooney was another easy choice. He was a native Oregonian who spoke Russian. He had spent five years in the Los Angeles Field Office, where he worked on the Russian foreign counterintelligence squad. He came to Portland shortly before the 9/11 attacks, where he investigated domestic terrorism. Cooney helped take down The Family, a multistate ring of eco-arsonists that hit such targets as logging company offices and a ski resort under construction in Vail, Colorado, causing $40 million in damage. Cooney was a clever street agent who could pull your life story out of you, warts and all, between train stops.
Scott Jensen was the oldest of the bunch, the son of a Ford mechanic with the looks of an aging Marlboro Man. When he was a schoolboy, his grandmother gave him a book about the FBI; from then on, all he wanted was to be an agent. Jensen worked his way up from the bottom rungs of the bureau, first sorting fingerprint cards in the Hoover Building. His big break came when Ronald Reagan declared his War on Drugs. Jensen made his bones as an agent in the Chicago Field Office, where he investigated Colombian cocaine dealers, before taking over a one-man office out in the scrublands of eastern Oregon. There he hunted down fugitives, fraudsters, kidnappers, pedophiles, bank robbers, and extortionists.
Jensen, whose wit was drier than desert cheat grass, referred to himself as the “Special Agent in Charge of Pendleton,” a small town in Oregon best known for its annual rodeo. He earned a reputation as relentless, coolheaded, and one of the very last men on earth you’d want cold-trailing you. The FBI assigned him to Portland in 2002, where he jumped feetfirst into the investigation of Ward Weaver III, who murdered two of his daughter’s middle-school classmates before raping his son’s girlfriend. Weaver, whose old man sat on California’s death row for a similar run of rape and murder, cut a deal for life in prison.
The Nicholson investigation team set up shop in a small room with a keypad lock on the fifth floor of the Crown Plaza building. The secure workspace comfortably fit four people, although it could hold five or more in a pinch. The space quickly filled with computer gear to run wiretaps and a GPS tracking system so investigators could keep tabs on the doings of young Nathaniel James Nicholson.
Jensen drove out to Sheridan with Nielsen and Garth to meet the warden and Lieutenant Debra Payne, who worked in the prison’s Special Investigative Services. The FBI men shared only that Jim was under investigation, a strictly need-to-know case in which they required help running operations inside the prison. Jensen soon began a weekly fifty-mile drive to prison to secretly collect Jim’s outgoing mail. Jensen carried Jim’s letters to his office, photocopied them, and sent them off to the CIA. Langley’s analysts then copied Jim’s letters and mailed off his originals to their intended recipients.
The fourth man assigned to the team was Bob Feldman, an FBI intelligence analyst. Feldman was ideally suited for the case. He was already embedded as an analyst in the Portland FBI’s counterintelligence squad, so he understood the spy world. As Feldman read through Jim’s correspondence and pored over his history, he discovered their lives were uncannily similar. Both were dependents of Air Force personnel, spent portions of their childhoods on Okinawa and other air bases, earned officer’s commissions through ROTC, and entered military service just after the draft ended in the 1970s. About the time Jim joined the CIA, Feldman went to work as an electronics warfare officer aboard Boeing B-52D Stratofortress bombers. While Jim climbed through the ranks of the CIA, Feldman ascended to lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. In a way, Feldman felt an affinity to Jim. But he shared the bureau’s revulsion for his betrayals.
Jensen reached out to the CIA to obtain all of Jim’s letters and phone recordings dating back to 1997 so that he and Feldman could pick through this mountain of potential evidence. Feldman spent countless hours, earphones clamped on his head, listening to hundreds of Jim’s phone calls. He and Jensen hoped so
me word or phrase might jump out at them—any little clue that might tell them what Jim and Nathan were plotting.
Investigators were intrigued to learn Jeremi held a secret security clearance in the Air Force, where he labored as an electronics warfare maintenance technician, a job that potentially gave him access to classified files. They were positively flabbergasted to learn Jeremi’s girlfriend was Russian. Jeremi had met Anastassia “Nastia” Suvbotina on Elena’s Models, a matchmaking website that featured no shortage of former Soviet-bloc women ready to uproot and pledge troth to Western men. Jeremi had flown to Nastia’s home near the Volga River earlier that year, and brought her back to the U.S. Eventually they would marry.
Jensen and Feldman listened to recorded phone calls between Jeremi and his dad, trying to pick up code or some hint they might be co-conspirators. In time, they concluded Jim had kept Jeremi in the dark, and that it was just a jaw-dropping coincidence that Jeremi, who had an entire planet to comb for a wife, found his bride in the same country to which Jim literally sold The Farm.
Investigators determined that the frequency of Jim’s contact with Nathan—in prison visits, and by phone and letter—had ramped up markedly in the last year. The FBI’s investigators hoped to spy on Jim and Nathan—physically and electronically—to find out what they were up to. Government lawyers in Washington moved swiftly to get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s approval to eavesdrop on the Nicholsons. Eventually agents would tap Nathan’s cell phone and computer, plant a GPS tracker on his Chevy, obtain his bank records, search his apartment, and put surveillance teams on him—some of them from as far away as Phoenix.
Lieutenant Payne quickly got into the spirit of the FBI’s work, offering advice to Jensen and running interference for him at Sheridan. Agents briefed only one other person at the prison complex about their investigation: Warden Charles Daniels. Payne couldn’t even tell her colleagues in the prison’s Office of the Special Investigative Supervisor that she was helping in the FBI’s probe of Jim. Instead she gave a cover story that they were involved in a “contraband” investigation. This was a timely lie. Earlier that year, the FBI had arrested thirteen people, including three prison workers and Cold War spy James Harper, for their roles in an elaborate tobacco smuggling ring in the newly “smokeless” facility. Single cans of Bugler had fetched $600 on the prison compound.