by Bryan Denson
Keeping an eye on Jim, a professional spy housed in a highly secure facility, posed enormous obstacles. Jensen and his colleagues came up with several plans to run surveillance operations on him. They considered sending in an undercover team of technical agents, posing as maintenance workers, to bug Jim’s cell and the visiting room. They soon realized that bugging the visiting room was the most viable plan, and they thought about planting bugs under every chair. But the space was an echo chamber of human voices laid over buzzing microwave ovens, coins jangling out of a change machine, and the hum of refrigeration units, major impediments for hidden microphones. The place was noisier than a bag of marbles in a garbage disposal. The agents thought about sending in an undercover crew to install carpet in the room to absorb the noise.
Jensen ran these operational plans past Payne, and recalled her pouring cold water on every one of them. Prisoners are creatures of habit, she explained, and they’d be extremely suspicious of new faces popping in to make repairs in the confines of a cell or laying carpet in the visiting room. Besides, Payne told Jensen, someone was bound to blab to the prison’s powerful employees union about the sudden appearance of a nonunion crew, which would cause an incendiary response. The chair-bugging idea was hit or miss at best, because seating in the visiting room was first come, first served. If they bugged a few of the roughly seventy chairs in the room, there were no guarantees Jim and Nathan would sit near enough to the hidden microphones to pick up their voices. Bugging all the chairs was expensive and required tech agents to isolate only the Nicholsons’ chats; the FBI had no legal authority to eavesdrop on others.
Investigators took notice of a letter Jim wrote to Nathan on the first day of autumn. They found it odd that his missive included not only Kanokwan’s address, but her banking information. The idea of Nathan’s sending money to a Thai national, his father’s supposed fiancée, left the FBI to wonder just how far past the fences the Nicholsons might be swinging.
On October 11, a Thursday, Nathan drove to Premier Travel & Cruise in Springfield, a few miles from his apartment, and paid $1,160.70 in cash for round-trip airfare to Lima, Peru. His departure was set for December 10, with a return flight three days later.
It’s not clear whether the FBI had legal authority at that point to tail Nathan. But one thing is certain: Agents had no clue their young suspect had a ticket to leave the country.
On the 13th of October, a hazy Saturday, a team of FBI agents secretly entered apartment 388 in the Heron Meadows complex. A judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had granted the FBI permission for a limited search of Nathan’s residence, and agents now performed a swift sneak and peek. They copied hard drives of computers and took photographs of Nathan’s photos, papers, letters, notes, and other documents. Agents uncovered an IRS W-2 form that showed Nathan had earned $9,756.66 in wages as a part-time Pizza Hut driver.
The FBI had taken special precautions to make sure that neither Nathan nor his neighbors caught them in the act. Garth and another agent stood on the roof of a nearby store to make sure no one observed the entry or departure of the search team. The FBI had also mounted a video camera on a utility pole on the perimeter of Heron Meadows, which gave investigators in Portland a live feed of traffic in and out of the apartments.
Nathan and Molly drove up to Beaverton that day to fetch Star and take her out for dinner to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday. They headed eastward over the Cascades, past stands of ponderosa pines and rim-rock canyons toward a high-desert rail stop just north of Redmond, Oregon. Nathan parked his Chevy on a red lava-gravel lot, and they climbed aboard the Crooked River Dinner Train for its Saturday night murder mystery ride. They planted themselves at a table in an orange railroad car for the three-and-a-half-hour dinner excursion out to Prineville and back. A couple of dozen actors dressed in Wild West costumes—including saloon floozies and six-gun-packing cowboys—would serve dinner.
More than one hundred passengers delighted in the interactive show, a whodunit murder mystery that played out piece by piece in the 1954 diesel locomotive that hauled them eastward at thirteen miles per hour as the sun set over the rocky shoulders of Mount Washington. The unhappiest passenger on the train had to be Scott Jensen. He had boarded the train posing as a tourist, his wife in tow for a bit of cover. His job was to serve as the eyeballs on Nathan during the thirty-eight-mile trip, making sure Nathan didn’t slip the bureau’s cover, jump off the train, and hightail it for his car. Jensen’s seating assignment was a nightmare. His ticket had put him on the wrong railcar, his seat facing away from Nathan. This forced him to abandon his wife for much of the journey to stretch his legs, hit the bar, or drop into the men’s room just to catch a short glimpse of his target.
Behind them, on the remote train station’s parking lot, FBI tech agents slipped into Nathan’s Chevy for a search.
Late that evening, when Nathan and his companions reached the lot, he keyed the remote to unlock the Cavalier. The alarm beeped twice, an indication someone had either entered the car or bumped into it while he was on the train. Nathan didn’t give it a lot of thought, figuring it was probably a malfunction rather than something more threatening. Either way, he said nothing to Star or Molly. But over the next few months, the remote would hiccup again and again.
The FBI investigation was in full swing by late fall, when agents began to keep closer tabs on Nathan’s travels. By the end of the year, a team of agents would sneak into his apartment and plant a bug in his living room.
In the early hours of December 5, 2007, Jensen and another agent assigned to the team, Kirk Danielsen, crept up to Nathan’s Chevy to abscond with his little auto and to plant a GPS tracking device inside. They had secretly created a spare key to enter the car, but they found it so close to the curb that they couldn’t disarm the alarm system. When they slipped the key into the lock, the Chevy’s alarm went off, which they remedied by starting the car. Jensen pulled a dummy car—an almost identical Chevy Cavalier—into Nathan’s parking spot in case he happened to look outside. He and Danielsen then eased out of the Heron Meadows complex and drove to a fellow agent’s garage nearby, where they installed the GPS inside the engine compartment. Later they returned the Cavalier to its space at the curb.
Nathan called Star a few days later to say he and Molly were heading to the Oregon coast on the 10th of December. He told his sister they wouldn’t be back for three days. It was a bald-faced lie concocted by Jim to give Nathan cover for his trip to Peru. Nathan knew that if Star called him while he was away and failed to connect, she’d probably freak out and summon the family posse for a drive down to Eugene. Star would probably understand if she couldn’t catch him at the coast. Cell coverage was hit or miss in some of Oregon’s beach towns, and there were so many dead zones over the coastal mountains that phones were about as valuable to telecommunication as paperweights.
The FBI had wiretapped the call, but investigators weren’t covering the wire around the clock. And they missed it.
Nathan found his gate at Portland International Airport at about 4 a.m. on Monday, December 10, 2007. Outside, a light rain fell on the dark tarmac as he rang Molly to let her know he’d reached PDX safely. He said he’d miss her while he was away. They sounded like clingy teens as they exchanged a multitude of sleepy I love yous. Nathan had told her before he left that he was flying to Peru to collect more money, another dangerous trip but nothing illegal. Just family business.
At a little after 8 a.m., the Nicholson investigation team began trickling into its office cubbyhole. When Danielsen turned on the Global Positioning System map on a computer screen, Garth looked down at the dot representing Nathan’s Chevy, which blinked back at them. As he peered at the screen, Garth could see that the car was nowhere near Nathan’s apartment in Eugene. It was parked on the north end of Portland, next to the Columbia River, at Portland International Airport.
“Holy shit!” he shouted.
Garth was still losing it when Jensen and another agent who covered the airport grabbed their jackets and bolted. Jensen’s SUV made the twelve-mile drive to the airport as if it were burning rocket fuel. He stalked onto the garish green carpet of the main terminal and walked down the row of airline counters, flashing his creds and asking clerk after clerk whether their manifests showed a twenty-three-year-old traveler named Nathaniel James Nicholson.
A counter agent at Continental Airlines punched keys and nodded. She said Nathan had caught a 6 a.m. flight to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, in Houston, with a connecting flight to Lima, Peru, that afternoon. He was returning in three days, she said, with a layover in Houston, where he would clear Customs. Jensen phoned his office with the news. He then hooked up with TSA officials to review surveillance video of Nathan moving through the PDX screening area.
Back in the Crown Plaza building, Garth sheepishly walked into the office of his boss, David Ian Miller, the special agent in charge. He broke the news that their boy had bolted. Miller took it in stride, looking past the lapse. Like any good field supervisor, Miller was less interested in problems than solutions.
Garth said he planned to phone the Houston Field Office and get it to put an agent on Nathan’s flight to Peru; the agent could tail Nathan from the airport. First they had to run the plan through FBI headquarters. But Daniel Lee “Dan” Cloyd, the bureau’s assistant director for counterintelligence, vetoed the plan. Any attempt to follow Nathan’s ride from the airport—likely by taxi—was fraught with complications. It wasn’t like you see in the movies, where a detective jumps into a cab and says, “Follow that car!” This was an espionage investigation with big implications; one poorly executed tail might expose the FBI and blow up the case.
With Nathan out of town, investigators wanted to look inside his apartment for clues about whom he might be meeting. First they had to find out if Molly was at home without letting her know who they were. A female FBI agent knocked on the metal door that day with a flyer in her hand. It was one of the oldest moves in the FBI playbook. Agents would find flyers for a new pizza joint or Chinese restaurant lunch special and then knock on a suspect’s door pretending to be handing them out in the neighborhood. The idea was to see whether anyone was in the dwelling before they slipped inside to search the place.
When Molly opened the door to accept the flyer, agents knew they’d have to circle back another time.
Nathan checked into the Melia Lima Hotel that night. His room, walking distance from several embassies and the United Nations complex, was by far the nicest of his travels. He woke early the next morning, hit the breakfast buffet, and caught a taxi down Avenida Salaverry toward the Pacific. When the car passed Avenida Juan Pezet, Nathan saw the Russian flag rising from the embassy compound, its pole-mounted security cameras peering from atop cream-colored walls.
The cab stopped and Nathan paid his fare, overtipping as usual. As he stepped out to look for an entrance, the polite driver pulled behind him to make sure he got in OK. Nathan was trying to find his way into the consulate, one of the buildings behind the wall. He strode along a sidewalk, backpack on his shoulder, to a wooden door. But he discovered the consulate hadn’t opened yet. At the suggestion of the taxi driver, he tried the intercom to reach someone inside. But he got no response. Now the driver was pressing the intercom and talking in Spanish. Tinny voices came from the speaker, and they sounded Russian.
It was like a brick hitting a beehive. The consulate came awake all of a sudden, a uniformed guard bursting into view pointing a military rifle at Nathan and shouting words so fast he didn’t know what language he was speaking. The guard now jerked the business end of the barrel toward the street, his intent unmistakable as he continued shouting. Nathan slowly moved backward, shaking his right hand as if to say there’d been a mistake.
“These Russians are gonna shoot me,” Nathan told the driver, chuckling nervously.
Another guard appeared and pointed him toward the gate, where Nathan found his way into the consular office. There, the Russian he knew as George stepped from behind a curtain to welcome him to Lima. The old man led him down a hallway, reminding him not to speak, and they took seats in another soundproof room. There, George upbraided him. First, he told Nathan, he had failed to signal his intention to meet by dropping an e-mail in the draft file of their shared Yahoo account. Second, he’d showed up so early that he spooked the security team.
Nathan apologized profusely for his failure to signal the meet. He had completely misunderstood George’s instructions, thinking they weren’t supposed to use the Yahoo address unless he couldn’t make the Lima appointment. In fact, he didn’t think they were going to execute the shared account until after the meeting in Lima. He promised George that he would follow through the next time. Nathan figured he’d screwed up so badly there might not be a next time.
He passed the Russian his dad’s latest note, along with the letter Jim had mailed him about visiting South America. Nathan sipped a Coke as the old spy read through everything. When George appeared to be finished, Nathan relayed a few of his dad’s verbal messages. Jim wanted him to know that he was a Christian and doing well, and that he was hoping to be freed sooner than expected. He also wanted Nathan’s handler to know how grateful he was for Russia’s help and to let him know that Jim’s family still needed the money, and that its funds were being put to good use.
George had no questions for Nathan, who was beginning to think he held no value to the Russians. Then George spilled a sack of hundred-dollar bills on the table.
“Please count.”
Nathan thumbed through the money and found that the Russian had given him $12,000, part of which was for his travel expenses. He explained that he couldn’t accept that much cash. Taking more than $10,000 back into the U.S. without declaring it at Customs was illegal, Nathan said. He watched the Russian’s expression soften. The old man raked back two grand.
The Russian pulled out his calendar to arrange their next meeting, and Nathan reached for his notebook. The Russian had always told him to write his notes in code, so that only he could understand them. But Nathan felt he couldn’t afford to screw up again. He scribbled the notes exactly as George dictated them so that he knew precisely where to go. He misspelled “Nicosia,” and “Cyprus,” but he got the address right.
Meet in City.
Entrance to restaurant “TGI Friday”
12 Diagorou Avenue
The Russian handed Nathan a camel-colored baseball cap to wear to their next meeting, telling him that he should carry his backpack in one hand. He gave him a parol to remember. The Russian would approach and ask, “Can you show me the way to the general post office?” To which Nathan would reply, “It should be somewhere here. Let me show it for you.”
Nathan took careful notes of the confirmation message the Russian wanted him to leave in their Yahoo account no later than October 10, 2008, preferably from an Internet café. The note was to begin, “Hola Nancy . . .”
When their meeting came to a close, George’s driver took Nathan to a shopping mall, where he caught a taxi to his hotel. The driver who had helped him get into the Russian Embassy without bloodshed later phoned Nathan, wondering what had become of him. Nathan felt like a jerk. He had put the cabbie’s business card in his wallet with the promise that he’d call for a ride back to the hotel. For all he knew, the guy had been sitting in his taxi the whole time. Nathan told the driver to please drive over to the Melia Lima Hotel. When he pulled up, Nathan trotted out to apologize in person and pressed a $20 bill in his hand.
A light rain fell across the tarmac at Houston’s Intercontinental Airport on the morning of December 13. Continental Flight 591 banked over the six-hundred-square-mile city as daylight crept over the oil refineries east of town. Traffic was already crowding Interstate 45, ten lanes of commuter hell that bottlenecked weekdays from The Woodlands, a suburban township twenty-fiv
e miles north, all the way into town. Nathan’s flight was late reaching Houston. But he would have ample time, if there were no delays, to clear Customs and catch his flight to Portland.
Jared Garth and John Cooney had spent the previous night in the Best Western Plus Intercontinental Airport Inn, one of those soulless lodgings a few minutes from the airport. Cooney had flown in from Philly to meet Garth, and the two ate dinner at a nearby Hooters. The two agents woke well before dawn and were waiting at the airport hours before Nathan’s plane landed. A Houston FBI agent showed them to an office near U.S. Customs, which looked into the international terminal and its secondary screening area. She gave Garth a blue blazer and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection badge to wear around his neck.
The Portland agents had arranged with their new Customs contacts to put Nathan through a secondary search to see what he brought home from Peru. An FBI technical agent would join Cooney in the back office so that when Customs officials pawed through Nathan’s belongings, they could pluck out his laptop and secretly deliver it to them to mirror the hard drive.
As Flight 591 debarked, Garth took his place outside, posing as a Customs supervisor. Nathan popped into a restroom to recheck his money, making sure it was divided into multiple hiding places. Soon Garth saw Nathan’s head bobbing through the crowd. He watched, trying not to make eye contact, as a Customs officer pointed Nathan and a few other passengers to a row of tables for secondary screening. Nathan carried only his backpack.