The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  Nathan had vacillated for months over whether to cross the stage and publicly accept his diploma. He decided only in the final days to join his girlfriend, Savannah Lee Van Beek, and their classmates for the ceremony. By then, it was too late to be listed in the printed program. The graduates were about what you’d expect from an auditorium thick with computer geeks on the cutting edges of new technologies. Many wore shorts under their gowns. One festooned his graduation cap with a green circuit board. Another rigged hers with a strand of bright orange lights in a display of school spirit.

  Master’s and doctoral grads had pursued course work in such areas as “Bayesian Optimization with Empirical Constraints” and “Node-to-Set Node Disjoint Paths Routing in Some Interconnection Networks,” techno-gibberish that drew quiet chuckles from parents in the audience.

  “Look for ways to make the world a better place,” the head of the school told graduates before handing out their diplomas. “And laugh a lot.”

  When the ceremony ended, the new grads filed out as loudspeakers blared Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.” The song had been the nation’s number one hit on that day in 1980 when Nathan’s dad joined the CIA. I lingered for a few moments as the tide of black gowns pushed past. I kept thinking about how far Nathan had traveled in less than a decade, from doting son to broken soldier, spy to inmate, convicted felon to college graduate. Finally he had matriculated, diploma in hand, to his place in the world of commerce. He had met and fallen deeply in love with Savannah on the very campus where his parents met forty years earlier.

  I wondered how Jim would learn of his younger son’s achievement. I imagined Star would tell him by phone, or Nick and Betty might share the good news by letter. I thought about all the moments in Nathan’s life that Jim missed, the birthdays and graduations and the firsts that fathers and sons are supposed to share, from first car to first legal beer. And I remembered what Nathan told me when I asked him what he would ask his father, were they given the chance to one day talk again: “Was it worth it?” Nathan was determined to rebuild his own life, brick by brick, and restore the Nicholson name.

  Four years have passed since Nathan promised to tell me his story exclusively. Since then he has given me roughly two hundred hours of his life in face-to-face interviews, on the phone, by e-mail, and via text message. I asked him painful and impertinent questions, poking under the sore teeth of his psyche, which he handled with grace and good humor. His story never wavered. He sought nothing in return. After I sold the rights to this book to movie producers, they wanted to buy Nathan’s life-story rights. His plea agreement forbade him from earning a dime from his personal drama. So he signed his rights away gratis. All he asked in return was that they write a check for $500 payable to the U.S. government. He was making amends.

  I remember once telling Nathan that he would be about a month shy of his fortieth birthday before his dad got out of prison. I asked what kind of future he envisioned for himself. He told me he hoped to have a faded diploma, a wife, and three kids of his own. He told me with a chuckle that if things went according to plan, he’d have a helluva lot less adventure in his life.

  Nathan knew that if he was to achieve these things, he would do it without Jim’s guidance. By court order, he was forbidden from communicating with his dad by any means, even through a third party. But Nathan didn’t need a judge to tell him he should put some distance between himself and the naïve young man who’d been so easily seduced into serving as his dad’s agent. I asked him once, as he sat in a studio apartment not much bigger than a jail cell, whether he believed he had betrayed his country.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  Never have I heard so much anguish poured into one word.

  I thought about Nathan, and of my own son, Holden. I had shared Nathan’s story with my boy when he was just twelve, the same age at which Nathan had learned of his father’s arrest for espionage. I asked Holden how he’d feel if it were I who had been imprisoned for betraying our country. I’d be really mad, I recall him telling me. But I would still love you. He said it would take a long time for me to regain his trust.

  There is long-held orthodoxy in American journalism that forbids writers from getting too close to the subjects of their stories. We are counseled to keep barriers, however thin, between us and them. For many years, I adhered to this journalistic canon in service of something I called objectivity. I rationalized away my detachment by thinking of it as the foundation of fairness. Only late in my career did I cotton to the fact that it was a load of crap. Because, in the end, there’s only truth.

  As I sat in the college auditorium that afternoon, I thought about the steps I had taken to get into Nathan’s head and shake out the truth. I had literally walked in his shoes, donning the heavy orange slippers and jail scrubs and shackles he’d worn in two county jails. I had smelled air full of cleaning solvents inside both of the lockups that kept him, felt the sting of ankle chains when I took steps that exceeded their reach. I had walked the cobblestone streets of Nicosia, the polished floors of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, the carpeted courtrooms of Portland. I had toured Nathan’s boyhood town house in Burke, Virginia, thanks to a good-natured tenant aware she lived in “The Spy’s House.” I had listened to hours of wiretapped conversations between Nathan and his dad and read a pile of letters they’d exchanged. I had spent countless hours interviewing people who knew Nathan, or who had investigated him.

  Nathan and I shared our personal stories, some bawdy tales of youth and hormones, even a few secrets. We drank together several times, and I was always horrified by his cocktail of choice, a high-octane mix of light and dark rum, brandy, triple sec, and orange juice called a Scorpion. It was impossible not to grow fond of Nathan, not to feel a kind of paternal pride, especially on that Saturday in June at Oregon State—the day before Father’s Day— in the way he had cleaned his own slate.

  I found Nathan at the alumni center surrounded by friends and family. He had that goofy look on his face, eyes sweeping the ceiling with mirth, and I pumped his hand, telling him how proud I was to be there and celebrate his achievement. I shot some photos of Nathan and Star as parents nearby snapped pictures of their graduates. A few moments later, I drew Nathan aside and handed him a small gift bag. In it was a box of two-ounce miniatures of booze—enough for Nathan and Savannah to each mix a monstrous Scorpion cocktail.

  “Don’t drink and drive, kids,” I cautioned. And we laughed.

  I was speeding home to spend Father’s Day weekend with my boy when I got a text on my iPhone from Nathan. I waited until the car was farther up the interstate to defy the traffic laws of Oregon and read the message. Nathan was thanking me again for being there, and he concluded with a little semicolon wink to say thanks for something else I’d left in the bag.

  Inside the sack was a poorly gift-wrapped present, a little notebook with a blue marbled cover. I’d picked it up at a dime store. It was almost identical to the one Nathan had carried into his clandestine meetings with Fedotov. I left a short inscription on the first page.

  “A new book,” I wrote, “one to begin the rest of your life. . . . Godspeed, Nathan.”

  Four months later, as I was writing some of the words you’ve already read here, my cell phone dinged again with a text. It was from Nathan. There was a photograph attached. It showed a woman’s hand, Savannah’s, a diamond gleaming on her ring finger. Nathan wrote three words.

  “She said yes.”

  And so it began.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of journalism based on a five-year investigation. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing participants in this story, as well as other people who provided insights about them. Other sources helped set some of the scenes, including one who offered interpretations of biblical events mentioned in the book. Some offered technical or historical assistance. The spine of the narrative was constructed with many thousands of p
ages of public records, including FBI reports and federal court files in Virginia, Oregon, and New York; military records; contemporaneous news accounts; correspondence between key participants; government-generated reports on espionage; congressional testimony; and portions of more than fifty books about spy operations, the CIA, FBI, tradecraft, and traitors.

  Every person in this book is real, and all but a few endured neurotic rounds of fact-checking. As in all journalistic accounts, there are some people who prefer to avoid participation and others whose privacy must be maintained. I intentionally left out the name of one character because he still works for the CIA, and I changed the name of one minor character because I was unable to interview her and saw no reason to intrude on her privacy. For the sake of clarity and continuity, I have referred to Jim’s ex-wife throughout the book as Laurie, although her legal name is now Al’Aura Jusme (and she signs her name in the lower-case fashion “l’aurie”).

  The great bulk of dialogue in this book resulted from phone recordings provided by the FBI or from interviews with two or more participants in those conversations. In a few brief exchanges, I have included dialogue based on the best recollections of one participant. For example, I relied on Nathan Nicholson’s recollections of his conversations with Russian officials (backed by FBI reports in which Nathan provided investigators more timely accounts of those conversations). Some of the dialogue comes from contemporaneous news accounts. For example, conversations between Jim and his SVR contacts, and certain facts in those scenes, came directly from David Wise’s excellent March 1998 story in GQ magazine: “The Spy Who Sold the Farm.”

  Some readers may ask why I have revealed the identity of the U.S. intelligence source whose assistance to the CIA and FBI helped lead to Jim’s arrest in 1996. I named him because Russia has already released him from prison and because his name is already in the public domain. I believe Americans should know that a few foreign-born men and women have imperiled their lives and abandoned their homelands to serve this country, for good pay, and now move among them in anonymity. The untold story of this Russian, as I understand it, is so extraordinary that I hope he will one day sit down with me for an interview. I recognize that one nation’s hero is another’s traitor.

  Some of the thoughts and words ascribed to Jim in these pages came from letters he penned to Nathan, his parents, and his good friends Glenn and Shadley Wiegman, who shared those missives with me. Additionally, a counterintelligence expert shared excerpts from Jim’s diaries. Jim’s words to Star, in his letters from prison, were filed in government court papers.

  Acknowledgments

  This book began with a preternatural run of good luck that began in early 2010. I was recently divorced (again), drowning in my efforts to research the Nicholson espionage cases, when I received a series of life changing gifts.

  The first of these gifts was Kristin Quinlan, who entered my life and soon became my soulmate, co-conspirator in adventure, and my rock-solid love. Kristin cheered my labors, cooked and sometimes cleaned for me, and let me read portions of the book aloud to get her reaction and catch clunkers in my prose. She patiently put up with my spy obsession and (almost always) forgave me as my keyboard kept me as its mistress. She did all this while running her own household, sending two kids off to college, and managing a growing business. Kristin, the CEO of Certified Languages International, also provided me free translation services as I scoured the Internet and made entreaties—in Cyrillic—to the SVR. This book simply would not have happened, at all, ever, without Kristin. And I can only hope that one day she will consider making an honest man of me in front of God and everybody.

  The next gift came in the form of retired CIA officer Brian Kelley. He contacted me to say he had been using my Nicholson articles in The Oregonian as teaching tools for his students. Brian recognized I was green in matters of espionage and graciously offered to guide my research into the lives of spies. Brian mentored me in counterintelligence, tradecraft, and all things CIA. He gave me many hours by phone and e-mail and cheered me on to write this book. Brian’s backstory made him the perfect tour guide: He once was the target of a massive FBI counter-spy operation; agents tailed him for two years, turning his family upside down, as agents wrongly accused him of the crimes for which Robert Hanssen eventually was convicted. When Brian was exonerated, he could have sued his government. Instead he returned to the CIA to serve his country. He died of a heart attack on September 19, 2011, a few weeks shy of our first face-to-face meeting, leaving a hole in many hearts, including mine. Some of Brian’s many friends in U.S. intelligence circles—perhaps in memory of him—offered their time to help me research this book.

  My luck continued by putting me in the hands of two talented women. I am deeply grateful to Tamar Rydzinski, my agent at the Laura Dail Literary Agency, and Corinna Barsan, my editor at Grove Atlantic. Tamar had read “The Spy’s Kid” newspaper series and reached out to say the story sounded like the kernel of a great book. I had only hoped she could sell it. But Tamar, tirelessly swinging for the fences, turned up several publishing offers. Grove’s publisher, Morgan Entrekin, then gave me a treasure in Corinna, one of his senior editors. I’ve never worked with a better story editor. She’s a young woman with an old-school approach: She worked through my early drafts just as the gods of literature intended—on paper, with sharp pencils—and knew where to wield her machete and when to use a scalpel. Corinna instantly got the Nicholsons’ father-son dynamic. She worked like a scrivener over every line, pushing me hard to drill down on the key characters so that the sum of their deeds—good and bad—revealed the soul of the story.

  Closer to home, I owe a truckload of thanks to Margaret Haberman, one of The Oregonian’s many talented editors. Margaret understands the proper care and feeding of journalists, and always seems to know the best door to open for her writers. Margaret edited “The Spy’s Kid” and later joined two other great friends—Pulitzer Prize–winning feature writers Jacqui Banaszynski and Tom Hallman Jr.—in reading over a section of the book and offering suggested revisions. I love all three of them. I’m thankful to work at The Oregonian, which cherishes long-form journalism and where I was greatly encouraged by editors Peter Bhatia and John Killen, veteran photojournalist Michael Lloyd, and publisher N. Christian Anderson III.

  I’m indebted to the many people, named and unnamed, who patiently gave me so many hours of their time so that I could tell this story as accurately as possible. I’m terribly lucky and thankful that author David Wise published his excellent 1998 GQ story about Jim, The Spy Who Sold the Farm, when he did. Had he not spent many hours interviewing Jim and documenting his recollections before the government stifled this rogue CIA officer, there would be no source for details of Jim’s meetings with the SVR.

  I also owe a significant debt to America’s talented national security writers and foreign correspondents for the news they reported on Jim’s first arrest and conviction, and the state of present-day U.S.-Russia affairs. I’ve singled out several of my favorites: James Risen, David Johnston, Ronald J. Ostrow, Stan Crock, Dan Morain, Charlie Savage, Peter Baker, Benjamin Wiser, Scott Shane, Ellen Barry, Annys Shin, Ken Dilanian, Michael Schwirtz, Vladimir Isachenkov, Elaine Sciolino, Kathy Lally, and Will Englund.

  I thank David G. Major, founder and president of the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, whose “Spypedia” website aggregates and analyzes an astounding volume of data on convicted spies. I’m grateful to the Defense Personnel and Security Research Center, which has published rigorous studies on the motivations that drive Americans to spy against their country. I’d also like to thank Oleg Kalugin, a retired major general in the KGB, whose insights and recollections (along with his excellent books Spymaster and The First Directorate) were invaluable to my research. And I’m extraordinarily grateful to Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, authors of Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, which became my bible.

  The Spy’s Son would not ha
ve been possible without the men and women of the FBI and CIA, past and present, whose kindness and help drew me into the world of spies and spy catchers. Many are named in these pages, and some are not for reasons I can’t share. I owe special thanks to Angela Bell, in the FBI’s public information office in Washington, D.C., and to bureau spokeswoman Elizabeth A. Steele in the Portland Field Office, for their considerable help in setting up interviews with agents and analysts and other officials. I’m grateful for the help of several CIA public information staffers, notably Ned Price (now a spokesman for the National Security Council) and Christopher White for helping me to reach contacts in and out of the agency for interviews. Thanks also to Chris Burke, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, who helped me track the institutional movements of Jim and other inmates.

  The following generous souls provided technical assistance, historical context, and in some cases guided tours of the many places and time periods chronicled in the book. I’ve listed them alphabetically: Captain Raimond R. Adgers, a jail administrator for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office; Deputy U.S. Marshal Cory Cunningham, who literally brought Jim Nicholson to the halls of justice; Warden Marion Feather and Executive Assistant Kyle Olsen at FCI Sheridan, who allowed me to tour the prison; Frederick P. Hitz, a former inspector general of the CIA, who helped frame my understanding of the agency and those who betray it; author H. Keith Melton, who has probably forgotten more about spies and their methods than I’ll ever learn; the journalist Michael Ottey, who shot photos of a statue in Bratislavia, Slovakia, just so I could describe it accurately; CIA historian David Robarge; John Roth, the chief resource manager at the Oregon Caves National Monument; Chief Deputy Michael Shults, who heads corrections for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office; Matt Wiederholt with the City of Prineville Railway; and Jake and Whitney Zatzkin (who opened the doors to their home, the former Nicholson town house in Burke, Virginia).