The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  Jim’s apologies continued.

  “I would like to ask my children to forgive me,” Jim said. “When I was initially arrested, I could have never imagined that I would fail them again. And I will endeavor not to do so, once more.”

  Nathan’s eyes brimmed, and Star’s shoulders trembled under the weight of her sobs.

  “I would like to say, your honor, in regard to my young son, that if he harbors any feeling of failure in this regard to let those feelings go. His efforts in all of this were completely selfless. And they were designed only to help his family in their time of need.”

  Behind Jim, Nathan’s face reddened as he wept.

  “I love him dearly,” Jim continued. “I could not be more proud of him. He has never let me down, and he has never failed his family. Any failure has been mine alone.

  “That’s what I would like to say, your honor. Thank you.”

  Judge Brown glared at Jim.

  “He’s made an eloquent statement today to his family, to his children,” Brown told the courtroom, eyes drawing a bead on Jim. “Notably absent from his remarks, however, was any suggestion of remorse for committing criminal conduct against the United States and its interests. What he calls ‘previous assistance’ to the Russian Federation was criminal espionage, for which he was sentenced. He’s been in solitary confinement pending today’s proceedings because of repeated criminal activity. His 1996 arrest was for a reason. The United States didn’t act against him on an arbitrary whim. He committed conduct which resulted in a conviction for espionage.”

  Brown sentenced Jim to the eight-year prison term the lawyers had agreed upon. But from her expression, it appeared to have left a bad taste in her mouth. She punctuated her decision by subtly warning Jim that he would rue the day he broke another law behind bars. If he ever did, she said, “I don’t know how anyone will be able to make an argument, Mr. Nicholson, that you should ever do anything other than spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  Jim nodded somberly. He had just sealed two more superlatives in the annals of American spying. He was already the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage. Now he was the only U.S. spy caught betraying his country twice, and the only American convicted of spying for a foreign government inside the bars of a federal prison.

  Brown pointed out that Jim had deservedly spent the last few years in the hole.

  “And so the time itself, going forward,” she said, “is not going to be easy time. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the defendant spends it in solitary confinement, too.”

  Brown ordered that Jim not reach out in any way to Russia or any foreign government, and that he have no contact with Nathan without advance approval of his probation officer. She reminded Jim he was to give no media interviews without telling the CIA in advance so it could make an officer present.

  Jim’s legal team had negotiated a few lines in his plea agreement to let him spend a few minutes with his family at the end of his sentencing. Deputy marshals would stand by to make sure Jim had no physical contact with them. FBI agents and CIA officers would listen to the conversation to make sure Jim betrayed no secrets to Nathan or anyone else in the closed-door gathering. Brown told the court she was honoring the agreement, but she wanted the get-together to be brief—about ten minutes.

  “Mr. Price,” she said to Nathan’s primary lawyer. “You and your client are free to stay if you wish. We’re in recess on this matter.”

  The courtroom doors closed at 2:18 p.m. Brown walked back to her chambers as the gallery filed out.

  When the courtroom doors closed, Jim swiveled in his high-backed chair as his family pressed closer to the wooden railing separating them. Jim had not laid eyes on his family in more than two years.

  “Hi, guys,” he began.

  Jim told Nathan and Star how much he loved them. Through tears, they told him how much they missed and loved him. His parents, Nick and Betty, and siblings, Rob and Tammie, also pushed a little closer to say hello and let Jim know he still had their unconditional love and support. Conspicuously absent was Jeremi, still furious with his father for reaching back to the Russians. Jeremi also remained troubled by Nathan’s willingness to take part in Jim’s harebrained scheme, which only brought more shame to the Nicholson family name and put their dad behind bars even longer.

  After Jim said his goodbyes, deputy marshals guided him through a door in the paneled wall on his way back to the hole. Nathan left the courtroom looking spent, his eyes red. He could muster only one thought before hiking out of the courthouse into a cold rain.

  “It was good to see him again.”

  This was an echo of the teenage Nathan who had told a TV reporter he liked talking on the phone with his imprisoned dad just to hear his voice. That was half a lifetime ago. That boy was a distant memory now. In his place was a grown man who’d made his own mistakes.

  As the months passed, Nathan forged plans. He would try to earn a college degree, find a nice woman, and start a family of his own. In the meantime, he was coming to grips with his dad’s betrayals, haunted by the old man’s words. He recalled phrases Jim had used to inspire him—some of them Bible verses—and he wasn’t ashamed to admit some of them still inspired him.

  Before you were born, I set you apart and anointed you as my spokesman to the world.

  You have been brave enough to step into this new unseen world that is sometimes dangerous but always fascinating.

  God leads us on our greatest adventures.

  I understand you—and me.

  Nathan and Jim had grown incredibly close during their years as spy and son, and Nathan sometimes choked up, in our many interviews, as he measured that bond against its outcomes. Some of Jim’s words carried special relevance now, revealing, in the objective world, what manipulations they were.

  Nathan also suffered from what might be called post-traumatic surveillance disorder. Like a soldier who feared mortar attacks long after coming home from combat, Nathan found himself flashing back to his short life as a spy. Paranoia shadowed him. He still drove the Chevy Cavalier the FBI had repeatedly searched. The government still monitored his computer usage. He still found himself hyperaware of his surroundings, and the number of times certain faces or vehicles came into view. Could he ever be certain someone wasn’t watching him?

  He had been tailed by professionals from the FBI, the SVR, and God only knows who else. The old man had seduced him with scripture and spy tales, goading him into seeing the world with new eyes. But the world Nathan occupied had eventually looked back in condemnation.

  There had been times in the past when Nathan read his dad’s letters and could hear Jim’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting on the bedroom floor reading them aloud. Jim’s words were now filtered by Nathan’s human education, bathed in the context of an FBI investigation. Some of the words that had guided him into trouble now had double meanings.

  Keep looking through your new eyes, Jim had said.

  That part, Nathan knew, would come easy.

  Epilogue

  The Last Asset

  The U.S. Department of Justice threw up every obstacle in its power to prevent Jim from talking to me. I had fooled myself into believing that the Bureau of Prisons, one of its agencies, would allow Jim to make good on his promise to give me an exclusive interview. But a little more than a month after his sentencing, the BOP quietly shuttled him out of Oregon. He moved through prisons in California and Oklahoma before he landed, on April 4, 2011, in the same prison complex where the government had executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 murder of 168 people.

  The BOP reconfigured its death row facilities at the Terre Haute Federal Correctional Complex in December 2006 to accommodate an influx of mostly Muslim men rolled up in post-9/11 terrorist plots. There the government created the first of two Communications Management Units, perhaps the most i
nvasive lockups in the modern era of American punishment. The government wired the facilities with video cameras and listening devices so that a team of counterterrorism experts in West Virginia could remotely snoop on inmates around the clock. News media nicknamed the facility Guantánamo North.

  The government’s intention was to monitor Jim as closely as the law allowed to prevent him from reaching out to the Russians. But the BOP, perhaps humiliated by the ease with which Jim had bypassed Sheridan’s security to communicate with Russian spies, also planned to shut him down from telling his story.

  In the spring of 2011, I wrote to the warden at the Terre Haute complex for permission to interview Jim, and he responded days later: “After a thorough review of your request and established policy regarding news media contacts, your request to interview inmate Nicholson has been denied. Specifically, it is our opinion the interview could jeopardize security and disturb the orderly running of the institution.” I asked the warden to reconsider, offering a compromise in which I’d agree to interview Jim by speakerphone, a CIA officer sitting next to me. I closed my letter by quoting forty-five powerful words penned in 1791 by James Madison. But the warden, clearly unmoved by my recitation of the First Amendment, denied my appeal. He was backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled in 1974 (Pell v. Procunier) that the need to maintain internal security in prisons thoroughly trumps prisoners’ free-speech rights.

  Jim’s liberties weren’t as important to me as those of my readers, who had a constitutional right to hear his story. I had written a few letters to him while he was in Sheridan, but the government seized his replies before they could reach my letterbox. Only after Jim’s sentencing did the FBI turn over photocopies of his letters.

  “In a way,” Jim wrote in the first of them, “I feel I should be writing this from an upper room of a house on the South Devon Coast. It somehow would seem fitting. For now that is not possible. . . . Perhaps you can appreciate that sometimes in life bridges blow up seemingly by themselves. Once we cross them we can’t get back. I believe this because I tried and failed. We must then go on from where we find ourselves.”

  Jim complained of writing from a cold concrete cell, putting pencil to lined notebook paper like a schoolboy. He posed questions to me as if he were interviewing a job candidate. There were no “correct” answers, he wrote. All he wanted was honest responses, not those I thought he might like to hear. He asked if I had children and about my relationship with them. “Do you have faith in anything—God, country, family, job, yourself?” he wrote. “Was there ever a time when you lost your faith in anything or everything?” In a postscript, Jim apologized for sounding overly suspicious and acknowledged that thirteen years in prison had degraded his social skills.

  Jim cautioned me not to expect too much, offering a hint that he might not be able to articulate why he twice betrayed his country and risked his own son’s future: “I don’t have answers to some of the questions you might expect me to know. Some things have been a mystery even to me about me.” I responded with a five-page letter, but it’s unclear whether Jim received it.

  In the summer of 2011, months after I sought permission from the BOP and CIA to interview Jim, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. forced Jim to sign a secret document called a Special Administrative Measure, known as a SAM. The papers were ostensibly intended to prevent him from communicating words—by any means—that could harm the U.S. What the SAM really did was crystallize the government’s intention to muzzle Jim, trample the public’s First Amendment rights, and punish him for exploiting security weaknesses at Sheridan. Jim’s own counsel, Sam Kauffman, was not permitted to speak to his client until he, too, signed the document. Forty-nine U.S. prisoners would be held under SAMs by the end of 2012. None could have any contact with journalists.

  I appealed directly to the Justice Department’s National Security Division. A contact there told me that Jim’s Special Administrative Measure expressly forbade him from contact with any journalist. “Not going to happen,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Shut down by the U.S. government, I reached out to the Russian Federation to learn why Moscow Center remained so loyal to Jim. The SVR would not discuss the personnel who handled Jim and Nathan: Sergei A. Polyakov, Mikhail Gorbunov, and Vasiliy Fedotov. I walked into the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, and its embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, asking to speak to a representative of its diplomatic corps or security detail to get Russia’s version of the story. In San Francisco, a tanned first-name-only official who called himself Sergei met me on the street to say, “I don’t like spy stories,” and claimed ignorance of the Nicholsons’ crimes. In Nicosia, a consular officer told me to e-mail my questions directly to the SVR at Moscow Center. I sent multiple queries in Russian and English. The SVR never responded.

  By then, the BOP had moved Jim to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, better known as the federal Supermax. Jim would serve his time in this Rocky Mountain Alcatraz with fellow spy Robert Hanssen, 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and a rogues’ gallery of other notorious prisoners. The Bureau of Prisons kept Jim locked in his private cell twenty-three hours a day, limited his correspondence to short letters to close family, and permitted him just one fifteen-minute phone call per month. He would eventually get a janitorial job that for a time provided some more time out of his cell, and $17 a month, Nick and Betty told me. He has not been allowed to communicate with Nathan.

  Jim’s earliest release date is June 27, 2024. If he gets out then, he will be seventy-three years old and will find himself at a crossroads. He can stay put in the U.S., where Jeremi and Nastia have borne him a grandson (they named him James) and Star bore him another grandson, or he can bolt for the Russian Federation and the pension that awaits him. His decision will prove to his family where his loyalties live.

  One of Jim’s letters to me from Sheridan noted there were reasons why a “a former Boy Scout, mom and apple pie-loving, flag-waving, country-first young man ended up as an older man in solitary confinement.” He asked if I’d seen Spy Game, the movie that stars Brad Pitt as a CIA man mentored by a grizzled case officer played by Robert Redford. “Interestingly,” Jim wrote, “Pitt’s character had also been a Boy Scout before becoming a special operator in Southeast Asia and then a CIA case officer. He said he learned how to shoot well in the scouts. I learned on my uncle’s farm as a boy. It’s perhaps not atypical to pick someone like this to mold into what the CIA needs. I guess it works pretty well until they expect you to juggle one too many balls at once.”

  Jim wasn’t forced to juggle more balls than a great many of his brother and sister officers in the CIA. He was hardly the first spy to face the strain of long-term covers, lying on cue, keeping secrets from the spouse, and hearing his kids grow up over long-distance lines. The CIA’s Employee Assistance Program and Family Advisory Board were designed to help agency families in crisis. These services were available to Jim. But there’s no record that he reached out to them, and there were good reasons why he wouldn’t. His revealing his problems—a crumbling marriage, infidelity, financial troubles, emotional wounds, disgruntlement with his employer—might have alerted Langley that Jim was in deep trouble. Agency superiors would have thought twice about sending him back overseas, because those vulnerabilities sometimes pushed intelligence officers into the hands of rival spy agencies.

  It may never be clear to me why Jim didn’t seek help from friends, family, coworkers, or bank officers for financial assistance. I’ve pored through court papers and other public documents detailing Jim’s financial predicament, and it’s clear he could have held things together without moonlighting for the SVR. Jim could have sold his town house and downsized his lust for electronics and other extravagances. Jeremi could have gone without a car at college. Star and Nathan didn’t require so much stuff; they were happy just to have their father around.

  The irony of Jim
’s latest crime is that by the time he and Nathan got things going with the Russians, his kids really didn’t need the money. Jeremi was in the Air Force. Star had a fine job. Uncle Sam was taking good care of Nathan as he worked toward a college diploma.

  Because I am a journalist, and perhaps not shot in the ass with compassion, I briefly flirted with the notion that Jim was born a conscienceless psychopath motivated by the thrill of pulling the wool over the CIA’s eyes. Successful spies, swaggering risk takers that they are, have a native talent to lie through their teeth during the day and check their covers at the doorstep at night. But it’s the extremely rare psychopath, I came to learn, who could get past the agency’s rigorous screening.

  Two psychiatrists with unique perspectives on CIA officers both told me that Jim’s love for Nathan and his family demonstrated the kind of empathy that psychopaths lack. Dr. Marc Sageman, who spent seven years as a CIA case officer, and Dr. David L. Charney, who has seen his share of patients from the agency at his northern Virginia practice, both believe Jim is, rather, an extreme narcissist. But Charney pointed out that the same qualities that made Jim a successful spy—superficial charm, grandiosity, impulsiveness, and the knack for burrowing into others like a parasite when he needed something—were also traits of the psychopath.

  Charney, a psychiatric expert on the defense team of Robert Hanssen, said that Jim and the FBI’s most damaging spy shared one intriguing parallel: Their country and colleagues spurned them after they were unmasked, yet their children still loved them deeply. In that way, Charney said, the children of Hanssen and Nicholson served as the last lines of protection from a disapproving world. Both traitors clung to their kids after the FBI turned their lives upside down. But the most heartbreaking consequences fell to Nathan. As Charney put it, Jim had turned his youngest son—emotionally and literally—into his last asset.

  The sun began to set over the rounded shoulders of Oregon’s Coast Range mountains on the early evening of June 15, 2013, the sky a smear of pink and plum. The air smelled of fresh-cut grass. The day foreshowed summer and possibilities. The college town of Corvallis, home of the Oregon State University Beavers, was forty minutes in my rearview mirror. Behind me, a few hundred newly minted graduates of the university’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science were gathered for cake and photos, most of them still wearing their graduation robes and mortarboards.