by Bryan Denson
“Really?” he said. “That’s funny.”
Jensen placed a postcard on the table under Jim’s nose.
“Greetings from CYPRUS,” it read in big yellow letters. “The Island of Aphrodite.”
Classic Jensen. It was his hole card. He had carried it in to get a read on Jim’s expression the instant he recognized, once again, that the FBI had been through his underwear drawers. Jensen and Buckmeier hoped that literally laying their card on the table might put him on his heels. Jim studied the card for a long moment, looking stricken.
Jensen seized on Jim’s discomfort by outlining what they already knew: Nathan had met with a Russian spy on three continents, and it was clear that Jim was pulling the strings. Jensen told him that he and Nathan were suspected of acting as agents of a foreign government and laundering the proceeds. That very day, he said, agents were searching Nathan’s home and car, along with Nick and Betty’s house, for evidence of their crimes.
Jim interjected, “Are you holding Nathan?”
Jensen told Jim that Nathan wasn’t under arrest and neither was he. But he assured Jim the government had enough evidence to file felony charges.
“I don’t believe he has committed a crime,” Jim said. “Don’t you have to have him doing something with a foreign agent?”
Jensen and Buckmeier betrayed nothing. They didn’t say a word about the surveillance team in Nicosia. They had all the video they needed of Nathan and his Russian buddy in front of the T.G.I. Friday’s, his son ducking into the backseat of a blue sedan.
“We’re not getting into a legal debate,” Jensen said.
He told Jim he wanted to ask more questions about the letter, but first he had to read him his Miranda rights.
“If you’re charging me with a crime,” Jim said, “I need to have an attorney.”
The agents assured him he wasn’t charged with a crime.
Jim explained that Nathan had traveled abroad to meet Army buddies with money he had saved from the military and a couple of recent jobs.
Jensen looked Jim in the eyes and played the shame card, saying he could save his kid from a raft of shit.
“It’s time to cowboy up,” he said.
Jim’s voice box tightened and his eyes glistened.
“I’d do anything for my children,” he said.
Yeah, Jensen thought, like turn your kid into a Russian spy.
Jensen said they couldn’t talk further until they read him his rights.
“You’ve clearly been watching him very closely,” Jim said. He told the agents it was apparent they were trying to implicate him and Nathan in a crime. Jim said he personally had no quarrel answering their questions, but he wanted to look out for his son. He sealed his speech with words he knew would end the conversation.
“I’d like a lawyer.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Jensen said.
The agents handed Jim over to corrections officers, who took him to the hole. There Jim would spend twenty-three hours a day alone with his thoughts.
Jensen and Buckmeier made their way to Jim’s cell, where they joined Waldron in picking through their subject’s things. They leafed through several books, including The Thompson Chain-Reference Study Bible; the New Spirit-Filled Life Bible; and Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ. One of the bibles was dog-eared, underlined, highlighted, and annotated in the margins by Jim’s hand in such a way that it appeared to be code. The agents also seized a language book.
Jim was learning Russian.
Nathan waited until the FBI team cleared out of his apartment to check his voice mail. He listened to the first message, the one from Cooney as he stood on the porch. Cooney had pulled one of the oldest ruses in the FBI playbook, pretending to be a tow truck operator about to haul off his Chevy.
Nathan dialed Star first.
“Nathan, are you OK?” she asked in a panic.
“Yeah, I’m OK. Are you OK?”
“I’m good,” she said. “What’s up with the FBI?”
“Well, it’s kind of a long story, to be honest with you.”
Star asked if he was in jail.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t be calling from my cell phone if I was in jail.”
“Are they gonna put you in jail?”
“No, no, no. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
“I’ve been very worried,” she said.
“So has everyone else,” Nathan said. Laughing nervously, he told Star that their cousins were heading over to his apartment to check on him.
Star was at her place with her new boyfriend, Josh. She told her brother the FBI had taken down Josh’s name and Social Security number.
“They what?!”
“Yeah,” Star said, “’cause he was here when they came.”
“Oh my God. Is he there right now?”
“Yeah,” Star said.
“Tell him I’m so sorry to have him, um, meet my family in such a manner.”
Star handed the phone to Josh, and Nathan apologized for their weird introduction.
“Yeah,” said Josh. “Not a problem.”
“I bet that’s quite the shock there.”
Josh said Star had given him the skinny on the Nicholson family history, so the FBI’s sudden appearance wasn’t entirely out of the blue.
Nathan laughed, playing along: “Oh, you know, just regular business.”
“Standard procedure,” Josh said, laughing.
“I’m really kind of embarrassed you had to go through that there. I apologize, once again.”
“Not a problem, man.”
“Nice to meet you anyway,” Nathan said.
“Awright,” he said. “Here’s your sister.”
Star then blurted out the question on everyone’s mind.
“So what happened?!”
“Holy cow,” Nathan said. “Well, it’s a really long story. I don’t know if you want to spend time on the phone right now when your boyfriend’s there or not.”
“We’re watching Grumpier Old Men,” she said, her tone suggesting the movie could wait.
“OK,” Nathan said. “I’ll tell you what I can before the cousins head over.”
“OK.”
He began by explaining he had just been trying to help the family.
“Traveled to several places,” he said. “And, uh, I apologize for lying about who I was seeing.”
“You lied?!”
Star was hurt. Nathan rarely lied.
“Uhhh,” he said with a painful sigh. “I’m sorry. You know, um, it wasn’t that I didn’t feel I could trust you guys or anything. It was only for the sole purpose to try to protect you guys.”
“OK, so the FBI is OK with you?”
“Yeah,” he said, “they’re OK with me. I’m not going to prison or anything like that. But what was going on is, I was transporting some information . . . and, uh, you know, getting paid for it. . . . And that’s what the whole deal was about.”
“Are you a snitch?”
“Am I a snitch? No! No, no, no.”
“You’re not a professional snitch?”
“I don’t even know what the information was.”
“Whose information was it for?”
“Well,” Nathan said. He dreaded this. “It was—it was for the Russians.”
“Dude!”
“But um, you know, it was nothing illegal or anything like that.”
“‘Nothing illegal’?”
“If it was, I’d be in prison.”
“OK.”
“OK? So there’s nothing to worry about as far as that goes.”
“OK.”
That’s all it was, Nathan said, explaining that he went to Mexic
o twice, and to Peru. Star knew none of this.
“Dude!”
“And to Cyprus. Which was this last time here.”
“Dude! Dude!”
“Well, I’m telling you what it is,” he intoned, “I’m telling you what it is. I’m sorry you had to find out this way. We were planning on telling you when it was all said and done.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The time obviously came quite a bit sooner than was anticipated.” He explained that the FBI had carted off some of his things, including his computer and passport.
“Dude,” Star said, “you’re going to crash.”
“I know. But they left my TV—and my Wii.”
“Well, yeah,” she said, “those don’t have any information in ’em.”
Star asked if the FBI would return his things.
“They should, ’cause there’s no information on any of those things.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But last time something like that happened, we never got anything back.”
Nathan explained that on the way home from Cyprus, he’d been stopped at the airport in New York. This was because he was flying home from Turkey, a high-drug-trafficking area.
Star tried to lighten the mood.
“We would prefer you to be a gigolo.”
Nathan laughed and reassured Star he wasn’t going to jail, and that he still had his car.
“Did they make noises about throwing you in jail?”
“No,” he said. “They were all very polite, very well mannered.”
Star said the FBI sent two female agents to her place, and they were mean.
“Aw, Sis, I’m sorry.”
Star, clearly looking for reassurance, asked again if he was OK.
“I’m doin’ all right,” he said. “You know, just a little concerned about Christmas now because I was planning on using that money for presents.”
“They took your Christmas money?”
“Yeah,” he said, “because the information I gave the Russians was, um, worth ten thousand dollars.”
“Aw, dude!”
“And I was planning on giving you and Jeremi some of that money.”
“Aw, dude. No, no, no!”
“Like the past years, and, uh . . .”
Suddenly it was becoming clear to Star. The money that had helped her and Jeremi stay afloat financially during the hard times of the last couple of years had not come from her grandparents—it had come from the Russians, in payments to her baby brother.
“That was you?!”
“Yep.”
“Dude! You’re not supposed to do that. Thank you. Don’t think that I don’t appreciate it. But, but, but, you know, seriously. It just sounds kind of like what Daddy did.”
“Well,” he said, “I understand that.”
He explained that all he had done was pass information to the Russians on the details leading up to their dad’s arrest. Nothing big, he said.
Star sighed deeply.
Nathan said the information was to help the Russians check their own security, to see where they went wrong.
“You’re sure it’s not illegal?”
“I’m positive,” he said. “I’m so sorry for having you worry so much. And once again, I’m sorry for lying.”
“That’s OK, dude. But shame on you.”
They talked about Christmas, which was huge to Nathan and his siblings. When they were little, it meant their dad was home, the tree was buried in presents, and they were safe.
“I love you, dude,” Star said.
“Love you, too, Sis. And enjoy your little visit there.”
Before they hung up, Nathan tried to lighten the mood with his impression of Josh: “Hey, Star, how’s it going? What, the FBI? They want my Social Security number?”
There was a pause as Nathan reflected.
“That poor guy,” he said.
“Yeah,” Star said, clearly unamused.
Nathan turned morose. “My poor family.”
“Be good,” Star said.
“Well, you know,” he said with a laugh, “our family’s full of adventures, right?”
Later that night, Nathan learned that Jim had been put in the hole, and he blamed himself for his dad’s miseries. He could only imagine the dank confines of Jim’s isolation, a small bed in a cold concrete cell, cut off from his family and his close circle of inmate friends. Nathan’s own comforts, a warm bed in a house full of food, suddenly seemed too good for him. So he punished himself. He stalked into his bedroom and yanked the comforter and sheets off his bed and carried them to the living room. There he slept on the floor, hating himself.
“I felt equally responsible for what had happened,” he told me, “and I didn’t feel that it would be fair if I wasn’t disciplined.”
Discipline was on the way.
For many months, a federal grand jury had convened secretly in Portland to review the FBI’s evidence against the Nicholsons. Jurors came to view Jim as a driven spy willing to sacrifice his own son to build himself up. They wondered how a father could rope his flesh and blood into such a mess. Many of them felt sorry for Nathan, and loathed Jim.
“There was zero empathy for that guy in that room,” grand juror Dave Clemans recalled. Nathan seemed so naïve and gullible, said Clemans, who worked as a surgical nurse. It was easy to feel bad about what Jim had done to his boy. During his eighteen-month term as a grand juror, Clemans had heard the government’s evidence in hundreds of criminal prosecutions. There was never a time that he doubted the FBI’s case against Jim. During an interview, Clemans asked if I had ever heard the saying, “You can indict a ham sandwich.” Only about a million times, I was thinking. “Well,” he said, “that ham sandwich is fucking guilty.”
Jim mailed Nathan a letter from the hole on January 9. “My Dear Son (and treasure of my heart),” it began, “I have been going through near total torment in worry over you these past four weeks.” The prison had cut off Jim’s phone and visitation privileges, and he had not heard from Nathan. He had learned just the day before from his old attorney Jon Shapiro that Nathan wasn’t in custody. But it was killing him to think about what was ahead. “I am a broken man—nothing but shattered shards on the potter’s floor,” he wrote.
“Son, I know you can’t talk about stuff now as everything is probably stirred up, but are you OK? Are you hurt in any way? I know how they are and I’m sure they probably tried to terrify you, bully you and all that. I don’t know what’s going on but I know you and you are selfless, noble, kind and good to the core.”
Now Jim offered his son advice, telling him to go to the college’s legal aid office to prepare paperwork granting power of attorney to Star, Laurie, or Nick. He told Nathan to think about moving in with his grandparents or one of his cousins until things blew over, and get his finances in order. “We’ll get some money on your account if you get stuck in a jail so you can buy shower shoes, etc. (Don’t go barefoot into a prison shower if you can help it.) . . . No matter what, this too will pass . . . Remember, God is working here and my love for you is beyond description. I just hope my phone and visiting privileges are restored soon. I need to hold on to you. Love You Son, Pa.”
Jim’s letter would not reach Nathan for more than five years.
Cut off from his father, stung by the ruinous turn of events, Nathan buried himself in the opening weeks of the winter school term, and he clung to his family and friends.
He shot a text to Camilla Beavers on January 11, 2009, trying to learn when she was heading back to Oregon from her new home in Austin, Texas. Nathan’s unrequited crush was turning twenty-two at the end of the month, and he wanted to take her out with friends to celebrate. His text included a cryptic line about hoping he wasn’t in jail by then.
His phone rang almost immediately.
�
�Explain,” Beavers began.
“Explain? It’s a long story, really.”
“Well, I have about fifteen minutes for you to explain it. Now go.”
Nathan told her the basics. The Russians. The travel. The money. He said the Russians had been nice to him and asked if he might consider moving to Mexico City, where he could attend school on Moscow’s dime. But he’d declined their generosity, saying the VA already paid for his schooling.
“My friend’s a spy,” Beavers declared. “Not a spy, you’re just . . .”
“I’m just the messenger.”
Nathan told her about the grand jury that was meeting in Portland. His grandparents were supposed to testify in a couple of days.
“I’m one hundred percent sure that they are going to be able to make a case out of it,” he said. “Obviously they’re going to find me guilty, because I already said, ‘Hey, I did all this.’”
Nathan explained that he didn’t know what the government planned for him. At that hour, he didn’t know whether he was going to prison or whether the FBI might consider flipping him as a double agent. He thought perhaps the agents might send him to his scheduled meeting with the Russians in Slovakia to help the bureau identify his handler, George.
“You’re gonna be a spy’s spy?”
“I don’t know.”
Nathan told Beavers the FBI searched his home and car, and froze his bank account.
“In hindsight,” he said, “I didn’t really think I was doing anything wrong.”
Beavers then asked what Jim had done to land in prison.
“Well, he gave information to the Russians. …”
“Yeah, but like what type of information?”
“Nothing that jeopardized any lives, or anything like that,” he said. “I don’t really know one hundred percent what it was.”
Nathan honestly didn’t know the half of it. He never looked deep into the records of his dad’s arrest and conviction. At twelve, when the feds put his father away, Nathan put on blinders rather than shatter his comfortable illusions about his dad. Did he really need to know the intimate details of Jim’s betrayals? It would have been searing to learn that during the years he was drawing closest to his father—from ten to twelve—his old man was quietly betraying his nation’s secrets to the likes of Sergei Polyakov. It had been bad enough to see a GQ magazine headline that dubbed his dad “The Spy Who Sold the Farm.” Did he really need to know that Russia’s money paid for the family trip to Disneyland?