The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  Beavers couldn’t understand why Nathan was in trouble.

  “We’re not, like, against the Russians, are we?” she asked. “I mean, last time I knew we weren’t worried about that at all.”

  “We really aren’t,” Nathan said. He explained that Hollywood plays up U.S. government paranoia about Russia.

  “I’ve never been paranoid against Russia,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nathan said. “And they’re cool people, they’re really cool people.”

  “Yeah,” Beavers said, “and they have cool accents.”

  “Yeah, they do.”

  Nathan blurted out that the Russians’ cash payments were gifts, and there was a remote chance the FBI would give him the money back.

  “Which,” he said, “would be freakin’ sweet.”

  Beavers laughed. She was curious about the messages Nathan couriered between his dad and the Russians. She wondered if Jim might have passed the notes—through him—in code.

  Nathan said he doubted it.

  “Unless you’re just not aware of it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Unless I’m just so naïve and oblivious to everything.”

  Beavers told him she had to get back to work. She was on break at LensCrafters.

  “Keep me updated,” she said, “on the whole you-might-be-going-to-federal-prison thing.”

  Nathan laughed. “Hopefully not,” he said.

  Not long after that conversation, a man popped into LensCrafters wearing jeans and carrying a file folder. Great, Beavers thought, another customer who thinks his prescription is the Holy Grail. The man introduced himself as an FBI agent and asked if they might talk. They took seats in a back office, and he asked her about a bracelet Nathan had given her. He seemed surprised she was wearing it.

  The agent asked Beavers about Nathan’s mentioning something in their recent phone call about the FBI’s seizure of his computer. Beavers had made a joke about all the porn Nathan downloaded. Now the agent, scribbling notes, was asking about Nathan’s religious faith, and it occurred to Beavers that he was trying to get her to say something bad about Nathan. She was furious. Nathan was one of her best friends, a sweet-natured guy without an ounce of guile. It was a short interview. On his way out, the FBI man handed her a card in case she remembered anything.

  Nathan learned from his grandparents that his dad was worried sick about him. He felt certain that any letter he mailed to Jim would be returned. But on January 18, 2009, he wrote his father anyway.

  “Dear Pa, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of the trouble I’ve caused you and our family. I don’t know what is going to happen to me—No one seems to have any answers for me.” He let his dad know that he was still in school, and living cheaply. “I see this time period as ‘pruning from God.’ It hurts, and our lives go into a bit of shock—but as a result we will bear more fruit than before! . . . Try to keep your spirits up—God has not forsaken us. I love you, Pa, and I am proud to be your son! . . . Surely God is watching over us to give us what we need to carry on! Hold Fast! Your loving son, Nathan.”

  It’s unclear whether Jim ever received the letter.

  On the afternoon of January 28, 2009, a gray and gusty Wednesday, Jared Garth rapped on Nathan’s apartment door. He stood for a moment before knocking again. Nathan roused himself from a catnap on the living room floor to answer the door. He instantly recognized Garth as one of the FBI agents who had interviewed him there. He didn’t know the other agent, Kirk Danielsen.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” Garth asked.

  “Yeah,” Nathan said.

  Garth delivered the bad news. One day earlier, the grand jury in Portland had handed up an indictment against Nathan and his dad for laundering money, acting as agents of the Russian Federation, and conspiring with each other to commit those crimes. Nathan faced six felony charges, which carried the possibility of decades behind bars.

  The agents let Nathan brush his teeth and pull on a pair of jeans. He wore a black T-shirt with a soccer player performing a bicycle kick at the moon. It read, “DARE TO DREAM.” Garth allowed Nathan to text Beavers and explain that he couldn’t take her to dinner for her birthday, and that it would be a while before he saw her again. “Sorry,” he wrote. The agents took Nathan’s phone, keys, and wallet, which held three dollars. Garth pulled out the FBI’s standard Miranda form, an FD-395, and read him his rights. He asked Nathan if he understood them.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d like to speak with a lawyer.”

  Garth handed him the form to sign. Nathan was so nervous he accidentally scrawled his name on the line waiving his rights to speak with a lawyer. Garth caught the error and let Nathan scratch out his name. When he signed the correct line, Garth cuffed Nathan’s wrists behind him. The agents locked his apartment door and walked him downstairs to a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria, the classic cop car. Danielsen crawled in next to Nathan in the backseat.

  They were just under way on the 115-mile drive to Portland when Nathan asked what would happen to him. Garth said he was taking him to the Justice Center Jail, and that he would be appointed a lawyer from the Federal Public Defender’s Office. Nathan would appear before a U.S. magistrate judge the next day.

  Heading north on I-5, Garth couldn’t resist asking Nathan if he remembered his face from the Houston airport. He explained that he’d been standing a few feet away when Customs officers searched Nathan’s bags on his way home from Peru. Nathan didn’t remember seeing him.

  “How long were you guys investigating me?”

  “For a while,” Garth said.

  He asked Nathan whether he’d ever read up on his father’s arrest in 1996. Nathan said he’d done enough reading online to find conflicting accounts of how much money the Russians paid his father. Nathan’s take on the conversation was that the agents thought he was just like Jim, and that they meant to put him in prison. He remembered that after his dad’s arrest, Jeremi had given his dad a lecture on his betrayal. Nathan could only imagine how Jeremi would treat him now.

  “I met your friend Jesse,” Garth said. “He’s got selective memory.”

  Nathan knew the FBI had interviewed Jesse, who had joined him on the second trip to San Francisco with his cousin Danielle. He told the agents neither of them was involved in any way with the Russians.

  “I want you to know that I had them drop me off a couple of blocks from the consulate in San Francisco,” Nathan said. “I didn’t want it to be obvious. I think they stayed in the car a few blocks away.”

  Farther up the interstate, Danielsen asked Nathan why he had been sleeping on the floor of his apartment. Nathan started to explain that it felt wrong to sleep in comfort with his dad laying his head in an isolation cell. But his throat tightened as he talked, and he felt tears burning down his face. The agents changed the subject.

  Garth steered the Crown Vic into downtown Portland shortly before 3 p.m., and eased down Second Avenue, a couple of blocks from the Willamette River. He turned into the opening of an underground parking area, wending into the bowels of the Justice Center, stopping at a pair of tall, yellow folding gates. The agents plucked Nathan out of the backseat and Garth walked his suspect toward the olive-green door of the booking room, where he spied another agent turning in a collar from out on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

  Forced to wait, Garth brought Nathan close for a chat. Garth was forty-five years old, with kids of his own, old enough to be Nathan’s dad. The veteran agent locked eyes on his suspect and, surprising himself, burst into a lecture.

  Garth pointed out that Nathan had slept on the floor in solidarity with his old man. Now here he was, going to jail, for a plot concocted by Jim.

  “You might blame your mother for the divorce,” Garth said. “But it was your father who sold out his country.”

  Garth told him his dad got a fair deal twelve years back, a
chance to serve his time in Oregon and see his kids on weekends. Instead, he used the training he got in the CIA to manipulate his own son.

  Nathan wept.

  “It’s time,” Garth said, “for you to be your own man.”

  At 2:56 p.m., Nathan stood at a gray desk, where booking staffers wearing latex gloves patted him down for weapons, took a “slap print” of four fingers, and began a battery of questions that included, “Are you feeling suicidal?” The next few minutes were a blur of shame. They moved Nathan to a brightly lit photo station with sea-foam green walls. A police ID tech stood him in front of a gray background and told him to look up. Nathan stared at the camera, a pair of comic goggle eyeballs taped above its lens. The camera often captured perps with expressions of bewilderment, anger, or mirth. Nathan’s mug shot—with his pursed lips, razor-cut hair, and red-eyed anguish—came out another way.

  He looked as if he had just walked off a battlefield.

  17

  Inmate 734520

  “When it comes to espionage, we’ll never forgive, we’ll never forget.”

  —Daniel Lee Cloyd, U.S. counterintelligence official

  Portland, Oregon, early 2009

  After spending half his life visiting the old man behind bars, Nathan got his own taste of the caged world in a concrete tower called the Justice Center Jail. His keepers in the downtown lockup dressed him in blue scrubs and heavy rubber slippers made in China. They quartered him in an eighth-floor cell, in a housing area that reeked of disinfectant. Nathan saw from his cell window an eighteen-story federal building partly named after a former member of Congress, Wendell Wyatt, who died that very day at age ninety-one. The voices of men caromed off the jail’s sand brown walls, but Nathan had never felt so alone.

  Blue pay phones on a nearby wall read “Charge-a-Call.” Nathan wanted to phone home—to Laurie, Star, Jeremi, anyone—just to let them know what had become of him. But he had no number to call. Like many Generation Xers, Nathan dialed names out of the address book on his cellular phone. Without his cell, he was completely cut off. He placed a call to the one number he’d been given, the Oregon Federal Public Defender’s Office, which occupied a high-rise a few hundred yards away. But an after-hours recording said the office was closed. Nathan put his head down that night on a mattress so thin it felt harder than the carpeted floor he’d slept on in his apartment. He wore a white jail-issue wristband with his inmate ID: 734520.

  The following morning, jailers herded Nathan and other inmates into the bowels of the jail and handed them sack lunches to eat before their court appearances. Deputy U.S. marshals put Nathan in what they call a “three-piece suit”—handcuffs, leg irons, and belly chain—and loaded him into a fourteen-passenger van. The trip that followed was unique to inmates appearing in federal court. The van pulled out of the underground garage, turned left, and traveled a shade over a hundred yards to a sally port, where buzzers sounded and the van descended into the bowels of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse.

  Fifty miles away, deputy U.S. marshals prepared to bring Jim to court under full motorcade. They cuffed and shackled him, seating him in the back of an unmarked car they call a “slick top.” Jim’s transport headed east toward Portland, trailed by a Chevy Suburban loaded with five heavily armed deputy marshals. Scott Jensen, the FBI agent who had slipped the “Greetings from CYPRUS” card under Jim’s nose, sat in the front seat of the lead car. Jensen hoped his suspect might volunteer a few thoughts on the ride. But Jim ignored Jensen, clearly annoyed by his presence.

  It had been a hectic few hours at the office of the Federal Public Defender, which sat in a high-rise across the street from the federal courthouse. A panicked e-mail that morning alerted staffers that they would handle the defense of a father-son duo in a spy case bound for the nightly news. Investigators spent the early part of the day boning up on Jim’s previous espionage to prepare for the arraignment.

  Deputy marshals locked Nathan in an interview room to meet his lawyer, Thomas E. Price. The two found themselves on opposite sides of a heavy screen. Price was a slender man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair. The fifty-year-old lawyer had spent half his life as a mental health counselor and private criminal defense lawyer. Now he was working his first “duty call,” representing a group of criminals, one by one, as they prepared for appearances in Mag Court. Picking up the Nicholson assignment was luck-of-the-draw for Price, putting him squarely in the middle of a huge case on his first week as a lawyer in the Federal Public Defender’s Office.

  Price explained to Nathan that at 1:30 p.m. they would appear together with Judge Janice M. Stewart, a federal magistrate, and he would enter a plea to the criminal charges. The answer, Price hastened to add, was “Not guilty.” He told Nathan not to utter a word during the Mag Court proceeding; he would do the talking for both of them. Price would ask for a jury trial. Nathan would not see his father, who would be arraigned separately. It would be a swift proceeding, Price explained. Later they would meet to plan his defense.

  Nathan thanked him profusely.

  Price’s first-blush impression, based on the government indictment and the FBI’s forty-eight-page criminal complaint affidavit, was that Nathan was in a world of hurt. Nathan’s confession to the FBI put the defense in a deep hole right from the drop. That afternoon he watched his young client shuffle into Stewart’s eleventh-floor courtroom in ankle chains. Nathan stole a look into the gallery for a friendly face, spotting Jared Garth in the back of the courtroom with other FBI agents. “Eyes front,” a deputy marshal warned him. The arraignment was over in minutes. Nathan reached the jail before dinner.

  Supervisors in the Public Defender’s Office designated Price as Nathan’s primary counsel. This meant the office would have to farm out Jim’s defense to a lawyer in private practice, because it is a conflict of interest for one law office to represent multiple defendants in the same case. Codefendants often turned on each other—even fathers and sons.

  Steven T. Wax supervised a staff of two dozen lawyers in Oregon’s Federal Public Defender’s Office, which he opened in 1983. He phoned Sam Kauffman, who worked at the Portland law firm of Garvey Schubert Barer, and asked if he would represent Jim. Kauffman, who was on a panel of lawyers appointed to serve as court-appointed counsel for indigent defendants, already held a security clearance. Taking on a high-profile client such as Jim didn’t hurt his public profile, but the downside was the lousy remuneration. The U.S. Judiciary paid its contract lawyers about $100 an hour, compared with the $320-an-hour rate Sam charged his regular GSB clientele. For the second time in Jim’s criminal career, he got top-flight legal defense paid for by the country he betrayed.

  Kauffman was a chiseled ultra-distance runner who liked the intellectual stimulation of complicated national security cases. He had a big, boyish smile, but you rarely saw it in court. He had spent the last several years defending Guantánamo detainees, cops accused of criminal misconduct, and corporate officers suspected of antitrust violations. He had a reputation as a tough litigator in corporate cases, the guy who could negotiate behind the scenes to keep his clients out of jail and their names out of the news.

  Jim’s 1997 conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage ensured that he would serve prison time into his sixties. It would be up to Kauffman to defend Jim against the new charges, which carried the very real chance that his client would never take another breath in the free world.

  Nathan faced the possibility that he would give his youth to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The money-laundering charges alone carried up to twenty years in prison, and a furious judge, under the right conditions, could potentially stack them in a way that would put him away for decades.

  Wax picked a seasoned hand as Price’s co-counsel in Nathan’s defense. Gerald “Jerry” Needham had served as a defense lawyer for twenty-six years, more than half of that time on Wax’s watch. Needham, a native New Yorker with an accent straight out of Queens,
had been known during his formative years with the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan for his cutthroat cross-examinations. He didn’t have an ounce of bullshit in him.

  Neither Price nor Needham had ever tried a national security case. But their office held a natural skepticism for FBI operations, a trickle-down of distrust from the top. Wax’s award-winning 2008 book Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror chronicled stories of two clients whose lives were derailed in the name of national security. One was Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer and Sunni Muslim wrongly jailed as a suspect in the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings. The FBI mistakenly matched Mayfield’s fingerprints to those lifted from a bag of bomb detonators in Madrid. They bugged his bedroom, tapped his phones, and accused Mayfield of mass murder. The government later acknowledged its error, freed Mayfield, apologized, and paid him and his family $2 million to settle a lawsuit.

  Nathan had spent so much time visiting his dad behind bars, the penned-in world seemed almost natural. But being locked in a jail was jarring. He felt cut off from everything and everyone he knew. He still hadn’t heard from his family. His mother had chewed him out on the phone after the FBI came to visit, as had Jeremi. Nathan was ashamed of himself and began to think jail was precisely where he belonged.

  Fifteen minutes in the Justice Center Jail is all it takes to catch up on the state of American corrections, a business based on minimalism and risk management. Inmates sleep on thin mattresses laid over concrete platforms, eliminating the need for box springs. They brush their teeth and move their bowels on a sink-and-toilet combination that looks like an abstract sculpture in stainless steel. Seats in common areas are attached to tabletops with built-in chessboards so that no one gets beaten to death with a stool. Even the undergarments—pink and unadorned—serve as minimalistic cost savers. Previous runs of T-shirts—white with the words “Multnomah County JAIL” stenciled on them—walked off on the backs of local thugs who wore them for street cred.