The Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia

By Bryan Denson

The true account of the Nicholsons, the father and son who sold national secrets to Russia. “One of the strangest spy stories in American history” (Robert Lindsey, author of The Falcon and the Snowman).
 
Investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Bryan Denson tells the riveting story of the father and son co-conspirators who betrayed the United States.
 
Jim Nicholson was one of the CIA’s top veteran case officers. By day, he taught spycraft at the CIA’s clandestine training center, The Farm. By night, he was a minivan-driving single father racing home to have dinner with his kids. But Nicholson led a double life. For more than two years, he had met covertly with agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service and turned over troves of classified documents.
 
In 1997, Nicholson became the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage. But his duplicity didn’t stop there. While behind the bars of a federal prison, the former mole systematically groomed the one person he trusted most to serve as his stand-in: his youngest son, Nathan. When asked to smuggle messages out of prison to Russian contacts, Nathan saw an opportunity to be heroic and to make his father proud.
 
“Filled with fascinating details of the cloak-and-dagger techniques of KGB and CIA operatives, double agents, and spy catchers . . . A poignant and painful tale of family love, loyalty, manipulation and betrayal.” —The Oregonian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780802191311

Bryan Denson

Bryan Denson is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Spy’s Son. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, and contributes stories to Newsweek and serves as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. FBI Files is Bryan’s first series for young readers. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Book preview

The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA

Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and

the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia

Bryan Denson

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2015 by Bryan Denson

Jacket design by Royce M. Becker

Author photograph © Beth Nakamura

The author owes a great debt of thanks to The Oregonian, which published The Spy’s Kid story in its original form in May 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2358-9

eISBN 978-0-8021-9131-1

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

In memory of my father,

Kenneth Earl Denson,

and dedicated to Holden Miles Denson,

my son, my wingman, my pride and joy

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.

—Albert Camus, The Fall

Contents

Prologue: Suspected Spies in Chains

One: Hola Nancy

Two: First CIA Tour, Manila Station

Three: Batman Switches Teams

Four: A New Counterspy Collaboration

Five: We Have Another Aldrich Ames

Six: Spy vs. Spy Under Langley’s Roof

Seven: FBI Takedown at Dulles

Eight: Forsaken All Allegiance to His Homeland

Nine: A New Cellblock Celebrity

Ten: A Fall into Blackness

Eleven: The Russian Consulate, San Francisco

Twelve: A Spy Named George

Thirteen: Faith, Prosperity, and The Door

Fourteen: CIA Detects Codes, Espionage, Again

Fifteen: Keep Looking Through Your New Eyes

Sixteen: FBI Offers a Mulligan

Seventeen: Inmate 734520

Eighteen: A Spy Swap and Reparations

Epilogue: The Last Asset

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Prologue

Suspected Spies in Chains

Portland, Oregon, January 29, 2009

I’m sitting in Satan’s Pew, the name I’ve conferred upon the torturously narrow courtroom benches in the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse. As I squirm in my seat, reporter’s notebook dandling on my lap, I notice a curiously high number of deputy U.S. marshals in the gallery, mostly buff guys with steely gazes and Glocks under their sports coats. Behind me, wearing blazers and striped clip-on ties, stands a knot of court security officers. Next to them, FBI agents squeeze together on a bench against the back wall. I haven’t witnessed court security this tight since the feds rolled up Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and hauled him before a judge in Helena, Montana. A courthouse contact has already tipped me that today I’ll witness something groundbreaking here in the cheap seats of American justice.

Keys jangle behind a paneled wall to my right, where I can hear the clank of a metal door. Deputy marshals are queuing today’s prisoners, who will appear one by one to face their charges before a magistrate judge. The weekday parade of pathos, known to courthouse denizens as Mag Court, normally features a tedious cast of freshly arrested miscreants, some scratching from withdrawal. Now and again the show comes alive with stone killers, cops gone bad, diamond thieves, outlaw bikers, cockfighting impresarios, ecoterrorists, grave robbers, or the corner-cutting captains of industry.

On this foggy Thursday afternoon, I’ve come to write about two suspects—an international spy, and the son who joined him in the family business of espionage.

My editors at The Oregonian, the daily newspaper several blocks away, are holding space on the front page for my father-son spy story. But the duo—whose names I’d never heard until this morning—will be arraigned separately, consigning me to a hellish deadline. I look at my watch and silently curse the docket gods. A hapless bunch of schnooks are scheduled ahead of my spy suspects, and the judge will take her good old time reading them their rights.

First up today is an accused scam artist from California who sold central home vacuum cleaning units across North America; apparently he was brilliant at sales and collecting money, but not at delivering the goods. Now comes another genius, a career bank robber arrested yesterday just twenty-one minutes after knocking off a Bank of America for a lousy $700; he’s already calculating how much time he’ll serve in prison. Up next is a guy who drank himself stupid out on the Umatilla Indian Reservation and threw some playful karate kicks at a buddy, who hurled him to the ground, whereupon Junior Jackie Chan blew a gasket, picked up two knives, and stabbed his pal nearly to death. Then come two men accused of illegally harboring a luckless El Salvadoran woman; she turned up, like so many, on the wrong side of the U.S. border.

Today’s guest of honor is Harold James Jim Nicholson, who in 1997 became the highest-ranking Central Intelligence Agency officer ever convicted of espionage. Nicholson, serving time at the federal prison fifty miles from where I sit, sold the identities of hundreds of CIA trainees to Russian spies. Now he’s accused of betraying his country again—this time from behind bars. The Rolex-wearing spy nicknamed Batman, having recruited countless foreign assets to betray their own countries for the CIA, is suspected of sending the Russians his youngest son, twenty-four-year-old Nathaniel James Nicholson, as his emissary. Nathan, a partially disabled Army veteran, took basic lessons in spycraft from the old man, then smuggled his dad’s secret messages out of the prison visiting room to Russian spies on three continents. For the trophy-conscious FBI, securing another conviction against Jim Nicholson would be a major prize.

A heavy door swings open, and here he is.

Jim wears a khaki prison uniform and a faded T-shirt the color of broiled salmon. His pale blue eyes sweep the room with an expression that shifts abruptly, as if he’d expected something grander than this feckless rabble of court staffers, lawyers, and a few scribbling journalists. Jim moves for the defense table with the short-step shuffle of a man who knows the sting of a jaunty stride in ankle chains. He eases into a high-back chair. Jim sports a soul patch and mustache, gray hair sweeping over the tops of his ears. I take a mental note. This guy would look right at home playing tenor sax in a jazz quartet.

I’ve gazed at hundreds and hundreds of suspected felons in courtrooms across the country, but Jim Nicholson carries himself differently. He’s not eye-fucking the prosecutors or sneaking glances into the gallery for a friendly face. There’s no swagger, no tapping foot, no nervous smile that might offer some kind of tell. The man doesn’t even appear to be breathing. He wears an expression of captive resignation, like a golfer on a tee box watching the foursome in front of him swat cattails in search of a lost ball.

Then I see something. The chin. It tilts upward ever so slightly and guides his gaze, regally, a few inches above the eyes of everyone else on the floor of the courtroom. It’s a look that tells me everything I need to understand: This guy just knows he’s the smartest man in the building.

At this moment, I have no clue that I will spend the next five years contemplating the life and crimes of Jim Nicholson, piecing together his tangled human narrative, the wreckage he left of his family and the CIA, and his unique role in the ongoing hostilities between Washington and Moscow. And I cannot possibly know that I will learn this story with the help of Nathan, his family and friends, prison inmates, former spies and counterintelligence agents, national security lawyers, public policy makers, hundreds of pages of investigative files, wiretaps, court records, prison and military papers, Jim’s correspondence, excerpts from his personal journal, and a colorful band of investigators with the FBI and CIA who twice brought him to justice.

Already my questions are many: How on earth could a man devote decades of distinguished service to his country only to betray her? Why would he reach out to Russia again? Why would Moscow still care about its former mole nearly two decades after the Cold War? What could Russian spies hope to gain by making contact with Jim a dozen years after his treachery was unmasked? And why would he send his youngest son into the breach, risking his freedom? What kind of a dad does that?

When I hustle out of the courtroom to make my early evening deadline, I run into David Ian Miller, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Portland Field Office. Dave, who has always been a straight shooter, tells me that Jim Nicholson was a skilled and worthy adversary.

At the end of the day, he says, this will prove to be a story of family, trust, and betrayal.

And, as it happens, so much more.

1

Hola Nancy

The integrity of the upright shall guide them; But the perverseness of the treacherous shall destroy them.

—Proverbs 11:3, The Holy Bible (ASV)

Eugene, Oregon, fall 2008

The morning of October 10 dawned cold and gunmetal gray in Eugene, a college town so accustomed to autumnal gloom that the young man with sleepy blue eyes gave it scarce notice. Nathan Nicholson hiked across an elevated walkway from his drafting class toward the Lane Community College library, which sat in the middle of campus in the aptly named Center Building. Behind him, a thicket of towering evergreens carpeted the coastal mountains, which stretched fifty miles west to the Pacific Ocean, clouds draping their rounded shoulders like tattered shawls.

Nathan wore his hair razor-close on the sides, with a little longer patch on top, a style his barbers back in the Army called high and tight, and which, not by accident, disguised his receding hairline. He moved with an infantryman’s gait, chest out, head and shoulders barely rising, stocky legs chewing up ground. But there was a slight hitch in his stride, as if his left leg were stepping over imaginary glass, a parting gift from the parachuting injury that ended his military career. He had turned twenty-four that summer.

The air felt cool on Nathan’s face, his strong brow and broad chin, and he could see his breath. The first rains of winter had begun early in the Willamette Valley, where even longtime residents herald the onset of the soggy season with low-grade despair. Soon would come a monotonous series of drizzles, rolling off the Pacific as if by conveyor belt, delivering the valley so many short, gray days that by February, some folks would begin to joke about eating the barrel of the nearest gun.

Nathan was not a native Oregonian, and he sometimes missed the more exciting climates of his boyhood. His dad’s foreign assignments sent the Nicholson family to punishing places. Manila, with its blistering humidity and electrical storms you could feel under your feet. Bangkok, often called the hottest city on the planet. Kuala Lumpur, where monsoons deliver a hundred inches of hard rain a year. And Bucharest, with its pipe-bursting winter freezes. He also missed the rotations, traveling from embassy to embassy, uprooting every few years to start fresh someplace new.

Outside the library, Nathan slipped a black-and-gray Alpine backpack off his shoulder and knelt on the cool brick walkway as if to tie his shoe. He hunched over the pack for an instant, letting his eyes casually sweep the commons, panning faces and forms. One intense glance from anyone and he would bail, circling back later for another try. But he saw nothing suspicious.

Nathan unzipped the pack’s front compartment and lifted out a small notebook with a blue, marbled cover. He flipped through its pages until he reached a twenty-eight-word notation that began, Hola Nancy. He studied it for a few moments and climbed to his feet, satisfied he could e-mail the message just as the Russian had dictated the previous winter in Peru.

His gut was tormenting him again. For many months, stabbing pains deep beneath his breastplate had intermittently doubled him over. He was convinced that the stress of the last year had given him stomach ulcers. His meals bunched in his belly like piles of tacks. He’d seen a doctor at the college’s health clinic, who told him to drink green tea, carry Pepto-Bismol, and avoid tomato juice. Nathan thought she’d seemed unconcerned, even dismissive of his pains, as if she considered college students exempt from the titanic stresses that produce big-boy ulcers. She had not appeared to comprehend the depth of his anxieties, nor could she. There was no way for her to know that for two years he had traveled the Americas as his father’s agent to Russia’s foreign spy service, and now feared he might be under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Inside the library Nathan followed tan-gray industrial carpet past bookshelves topped with busts of famous literary and historic figures. From across the room, the figures of Will Rogers, Benjamin Franklin, and Frederick Douglass were locked in a perpetual stare-off with Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, and Kate Greenaway. Nathan pushed through a doorway into an adjoining classroom that doubled as a computer lab, eyes scanning the room for anyone out of place. He settled in front of one of two dozen Dell monitors spread across rows of white desktops. It had taken him weeks to find this spot, the only computer lab on campus where students weren’t required to log in.

Nathan pulled up the Yahoo home page, with its familiar red logo, and tapped in the user name Jopemurr2 and the password Florida12. He typed the e-mail from memory, wincing at each word. The sentences looked more ridiculous on the screen than when he jotted them down inside a soundproof room at the Russian Embassy in Lima. His fingers froze for an instant over the keyboard as he listened to the words in his head. They sounded as if someone with clumsy English were speaking a pass-phrase in an old spy movie. Such obvious code. He resisted the urge to revise the words into something approximating authentic human correspondence. The Russian had been specific that he stick to the prescribed text, and Nathan stuck to the script. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from waking up the prose with a forest of exclamation marks:

Hola Nancy! It is great to receive your message! I love you too. I hope to see you soon!

The best regards from my brother Eugene!

—Love,

Dick

The Russian had assigned them code names. He called himself Nancy and gave Nathan the name Dick. He conferred the sobriquet Eugene on Nathan’s father, whose years spying for the Russians had brought them all together.

At precisely 9:58 a.m., Nathan saved his e-mail into the draft folder of the Yahoo account. He cleared the web page off his screen and sneaked a casual glance to his side. Earlier he had spied a woman standing behind him. She was still there, eyeing his workstation like someone stalking a stool in a crowded bar. When he stood and reached for his bag, she practically dove for his seat.

Nathan’s e-mail, safely parked in the draft file, would remain suspended in cyberspace until the Russian—God only knew where—logged into their shared account and opened the folder to read his message. The note would never travel from one computer to another, leaving a messy trail across the Internet that could link them. The draft folder served as a modern-day dead drop, a spy tool as old as espionage.

Spying, sometimes called the world’s second-oldest profession, is complicated business. But the essence of covert communications hasn’t changed since a Mesopotamian potter stuck a secret formula for glaze into the hidden compartment of a clay tablet thousands of years ago. Spies use signals—a chalk mark on a bridge, a beer can on a country road, an X on the post of a streetlamp—to let their handlers know they will meet at a prearranged spot. Now they use high-tech gadgets such as Internet remailers and codes embedded in digital photos. But new isn’t always better. Old and new tricks work, right up until they don’t.

Nathan didn’t fully comprehend the risk posed by his face-to-face meetings with the Russian. He was unaware the old man who called himself George had been tossed out of the United States, persona non grata, at the apex of the Cold War, or that the meetings George arranged exposed only Nathan to arrest.

There was genius in their Yahoo cyber exchange. It was such a simple hideaway that nearly anyone could pull it off, even a grandfatherly Russian spy born nearly forty years before the advent of e-mail.

Nathan’s note confirmed that in precisely two months, he would stand, as instructed, outside a restaurant on the island of Cyprus clenching his backpack in his right hand. There he would meet the Russian, share the latest messages from his dad, and walk away with another bundle of Moscow’s money.

Hola Nancy, indeed.

On the first Saturday in December 2008, a metal door clanked behind Jim Nicholson as he peered across a vast rectangle of scuffed linoleum looking for his youngest son. Visiting hours at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon, were just under way. Prisoners and their guests took seats on rows of blue plastic chairs, which were bolted together airport-style so that they sat thigh to thigh and faced the same direction. Uniformed guards stationed behind a crescent of painted cinder blocks kept watch over the room. Surveillance cameras spied from above, as families shared snacks and stories, the din of their conversations punctuated by the occasional squeal of a toddler leaving the adjoining playroom.

Jim Nicholson, who had recently turned fifty-eight, was serving the back end of a twenty-three-year stretch for espionage. He stood six feet and weighed 194 pounds, with sloping shoulders and strong arms. A mane of salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, fell over the collar of his khaki prison shirt, his inmate number—49535-083—ironed above the left breast pocket. He wore a tattoo on his right forearm, an Army Ranger emblem inked decades ago and now faded to a greenish glob. On the underside of the same arm was a fresh tat that read O POS, his blood type.

Jim was a bona fide celebrity among the more than one thousand prisoners at Sheridan, a medium-security prison known as soft time for its standard cohort of bank robbers, cocaine dealers, and identity thieves. The federal lockup ten minutes east of Spirit Mountain Casino has long drawn its share of celebrity prisoners. A parade of them have passed through the complex, including Stacey Koon, the ex–Los Angeles police sergeant convicted for his role in the Rodney King beating, and Marion Suge Knight, the founder of hip-hop’s iconic Death Row Records. Michael Swango, the serial-killer physician who poisoned at least four patients, turned up at the prison in 1999, the same year Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder hit bookstores. Later came Robert Spam King Soloway, whose botnets corrupted computers worldwide, and Duane R. Moore, the adult film star better known as Tony Eveready, the Gangsta of Porn.

As it happens, Jim wasn’t even the first spy locked up at Sheridan. He had served time with James D. Jim Harper Jr., doing life for selling missile secrets to Poland from 1975 to 1983, and Christopher Boyce, who sold satellite secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Boyce’s ­exploits—espionage, breaking out of a federal prison, and an audacious series of armed bank robberies—were documented in two books and a hit movie, The Falcon and the Snowman.

Jim stood out at Sheridan. He was bright, well traveled, and served as a father figure for younger inmates. He had worked as a quality control inspector in the prison furniture factory, and emceed Sunday worship services in the prison chapel. He cut a charismatic figure as a long-haired, moccasin-wearing, born-again Christian. But he suffered from the deadly sin of vanity. He spent a long time primping in his cell, especially before weekend visits with his family. One of his former cellmates, a Las Vegas bank robber named Phil Quackenbush, snickered when Jim combed dark shoe polish into his beard to look more youthful for his kids.

Nathan was a week shy of thirteen when he first came to see his dad in prison. Hundreds of times since then he had passed through the gates, topped with gleaming coils of razor wire, navigating sign-ins, a metal detector, and a hand-stamp station, to be ushered by corrections officers, room by room, into the bowels of the institution, heavy doors buzzing and slamming behind him, just to reach this scuffed-linoleum visiting room with bars on the windows to spend time with the old man. Nathan considered this his second home.

When Nathan saw Jim across the floor, he stood and hugged him fiercely, kissing his dad’s cheek. Seventy-four miles separated Nathan and Jim, save for their every-other-Saturday visits. Their phone conversations were routed through a special line at the CIA and Jim’s letters were copied and analyzed before being mailed forward. In spite of the encumbrances, perhaps because of them, father and son had grown extremely close.

Jim had missed much of Nathan’s first seven years of life. He was serving on the front lines of the Cold War, a covert operator working to derail and defeat the Soviet Union’s influence in the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia. Jim’s adversaries in the KGB dubbed the U.S. their main enemy. The competing spy services played a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse as an atomic sword of Damocles—thousands of nuclear missiles—dangled over the planet.

Jim’s blind devotion to the CIA kept him working late at night, meeting assets and writing reports. His early exploits in Manila earned him the nickname Batman, and he was thrilled by his rising star in the agency. But the demands of his work meant that he saw little of his wife and three kids.

Nathan barely knew his father until his parents’ marriage shattered in the early 1990s. He and his older brother and sister moved in with their dad in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where they witnessed a monumental shift in his personality. Jim seemed to relish his new role as single dad, joyfully making up for lost time with them.

Years later, Nathan often reminisced about his childhood days with his dad. He remembered lying in bed as Jim settled onto the floor next to him, adjusting a pillow behind his back to read the woodsy sketches of humorist Patrick F. McManus. Jim would clear his throat with comic flair, animating McManus’ comic characters with a wide range of voices. The nighttime readings often left them laughing so hard that Nathan had to grab his gut as the old man fought to get the next sentence out.

The bedtime stories would end a few years later, when the rubric of their father-son narrative would divide into the time before Jim’s arrest in 1996 and everything that followed. But Nathan would never let go of the dad he remembered in his youth, as Jim turned from U.S. intelligence officer to convicted spy, and eventually a federal prisoner.

Nathan gestured toward a bank of vending machines, which sat on the other side of a red stripe on the floor. Inmates were forbidden from crossing the line.

Hey, Pa, you want anything?

Jim ordered his usual, and Nathan trooped off with a handful of bills. He returned from a microwave moments later with two jalapeño cheeseburgers in steaming plastic bags and a pair of ice-cold Coca-Colas. He set their meal on the tray between them. Jim tore open a packet of taco sauce and got right down to business. He wanted to review Nathan’s travel plans, and make sure he was completely prepared for his trip to Cyprus. He needed every detail. Departure times. Layovers. Arrivals.

Nathan walked his dad through every leg, sounding like a determined Army clerk briefing the base commander. On Monday he would fly out of Portland to New York’s JFK International Airport, connecting in Istanbul for a Turkish Airlines hop across the Mediterranean Sea to Ercan International Airport, on the island of Cyprus. As Jim had instructed, Nathan had reserved his airline tickets with a credit card, but paid for them with $1,584.41 in cash to avoid a paper trail. Jim had told him to find a high-class hotel, which would be safer, and Nathan had used his Visa Citi Platinum card to book a room at the Cyprus Hilton, the best hotel in the capital city of Nicosia. He would pay that tab in cash, too, and ask the desk clerk to delete records of his credit card. Nathan had tucked an extra $294 into his Delta ticket papers for spending money on the six-day trip.

Jim nodded approvingly. He explained to Nathan that the Ercan airport sits in northeastern Cyprus, the Turkish side, which meant he would pass through an armed checkpoint at the Green Line on the taxi ride to his hotel on the Greek side of the capital city. He gave his son a primer on the long conflict between the Greeks and Turks, how Nicosia remained the world’s last divided city. Jim leaned closer, asking Nathan in a near whisper to walk him through his cover story.

Nathan quietly explained that if he was stopped by the feds, by anyone, he would say he had flown to Cyprus to meet Army buddies and tour a few castles.

Jim told him that when he checked into the Hilton, he should ask a desk clerk if any of his buddies—phantoms though they were—had left a message for him. He told his son to stop by the desk daily to ask about his friends, solidifying his cover. Jim reminded Nathan that throughout his stay in Nicosia, he needed to remain keenly alert for tails. It was crucial that he not be followed into his meeting with the Russian. The Mediterranean city has long been a hot spot for spies and counterspies, and Jim knew the FBI kept watch on the Russian Embassy. Nicosia had served as a key locale for Cold War spying between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, partly because of its nexus to Europe, Asia, and the turbulent Middle East. Spies on both sides liked tours there. The sandy beaches at nearby Larnaca were heavenly.

The key thing to pack, he said, was the letter Jim had mailed him that summer; it was intended for the Russian. Jim also reminded him to carry the address for his fiancée, Kanokwan Lehliem, who had served as his interpreter—and a great deal more—during a bloody 1980s border war in which Cambodian refugees spilled in waves into her native Thailand. Kanokwan had pledged to wait for Jim until he got out of prison, and he wanted Nathan to wire her some money from Cyprus.

Nathan listened obediently as the old man laid out his to-do list, but he was way ahead of him. Stuck to the fridge in his apartment was a yellow Post-it with a long checklist of things to pack, including all the items Jim reminded him to bring. The first item on Nathan’s list, however, was the Holy Bible his dad bought him for his eighteenth birthday. He carried it for inspiration.

With Christmas approaching, Jim urged Nathan to use some of the money the Russian would pay him to buy gifts. He wanted Nathan to wrap two presents with his name on them for his oldest children—a Wii game system for Jeremi, who was serving in the Air Force in Florida, and a bottle of Armani Code perfume for Star, who lived forty miles east of the prison, in Beaverton, Oregon.

Just then, Star walked into the visiting room.

Nathan and his dad shot to their feet, breaking off all talk of Nathan’s trip. They had agreed not to tell anyone about their contact with the Russians, deciding early on that Nathan—and Nathan alone—would serve as Jim’s courier. Jim told his youngest son that the Russians were paying him out of fealty for his past service, and that Nathan’s primary role was to deliver financial succor to his brother and sister, both buried under mountains of debt, and to make payments on his own car and credit card. Nathan had plunged into Jim’s scheme with no misgivings. He trusted his father, who rewarded his loyalty with praise. In a letter that summer, Jim applauded Nathan’s brave step into what he called the unseen world, one that he described as sometimes dangerous, always fascinating.

God leads us on our greatest adventures, Jim wrote. Keep looking through your new eyes.

On the morning of December 8, 2008, a Monday, Nathan stood in baggage screening at Portland International Airport, arms straight out, wearing the timeless look of the defeated traveler. A beefy Transportation Security Administration officer with a shaved head patted him down, having seen an SSSS notation on the young man’s boarding pass. The acronym stood for Secondary Security Screening Selection. When the TSA officer was finished, he began pawing through Nathan’s backpack and passed him over to the manager.

This wasn’t Nathan’s first trip through secondary, and he was beginning to think he’d been flagged because he was Jim’s son, and that maybe his luck was running out.

Officer Donald Headrick, who managed the TSA’s behavioral detection team, was middle-aged with a broad face, thinning hair, and glasses. Headrick sat Nathan down to quiz him about his travels. Where are you heading today? What’s the purpose of your visit? Are you meeting anyone?

Jim had coached Nathan on how to handle situations like these. He labored to keep his breathing even and reminded himself that the guy in the royal blue TSA uniform with the gold badge was human, too. He looked Headrick in the eyes and regaled him with a spectacular run of lies about heading to Cyprus to meet battle buddies and tour castles he’d read about. Nathan was lying for a living now, just like the old man. He used all the charm he possessed to sell his story to the TSA manager, trying to sound excited about his trip. But much as he tried, Nathan couldn’t get a good read from his inquisitor’s face.

His head swam with doubt. Was someone onto him? On the way back from his last meeting with the Russian in Peru, Customs officials in Houston put him through a half-hour search and disappeared into an office with his blue notebook and other gear. Recently, his Chevy Cavalier had begun to make unusual beep tones when he keyed the remote, an indication someone had bumped into or entered the car. A few times recently, he had returned to his one-bedroom apartment to find it marinating in the smell of human body odor, and not just any B.O., but the B.O. of someone having a really bad day. Then, just the previous Saturday, a clean-cut guy, midforties with a little paunch, had glommed onto him at the prison as they made the long trek through the metal detectors and heavy doors to the visiting room. The guy had planted himself in a row of seats in front of them, his back to Nathan and Jim, and seemed to be listening in on their their conversation.

Headrick thumbed through Nathan’s wallet, asking how much money he was carrying. Then he rummaged through his bag.

Nathan figured maybe it all ended here. But suddenly, Headrick was handing him his wallet.

Enjoy your trip, he said. Have a nice flight.

For sheer whimsy, you had to give it to the Russian. He summoned Nathan ten time zones from home, to Nicosia, a city known for its old-world cuisine, just to rendezvous in front of a T.G.I. Friday’s. Nathan stood on a wide sidewalk at 12 Diagorou Street as darkness fell over a palm-flecked shopping district choked with Greek nightclubs and restaurants. Towering streetlamps bathed him in light as he fidgeted in front of the Texas-based chain restaurant’s familiar red-and-white awnings. He looked for all the world like any other hayseed American tourist, another cultureless Yank who had stumbled into the exotic crossroads of Europe and the Middle East only to forgo the local fare and feast on Jack Daniel’s pork chops, New York Cheesecake, and six-dollar Budweisers.

He wore jeans, sneakers, and a camel-colored baseball cap. The Russian had presented him with the hat at their last meeting, instructing Nathan to wear it outside the restaurant while grasping his backpack in his right hand. He completed the tourist getup with a map of Nicosia, which he snatched from the Hilton’s front desk on his way out. When Nathan left the hotel for his appointment, he had launched himself down Archbishop Makarios III Avenue, named after the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, toward the T.G.I. Friday’s. He hiked down side streets to avoid being tailed, and he doubled back a few times, pausing at shop windows to check their reflections, making sure he wasn’t being followed.

Nathan’s walk took such a circuitous route that he blundered off course and got lost. But being the earnest sort, he had left the Hilton so early on the evening of December 10, 2008, that he still arrived an hour early for his meeting with the Russian. He stood on that wide sidewalk trying to look casual as the sun went down on a cool evening two weeks before Christmas. The moon, almost full, shone brightly in the clear island sky.

Jim had told his son that his meetings with the Russian were potentially dangerous. Risky, he had said, but not illegal. But Nathan now suspected that couldn’t possibly be true. The evidence, he knew, would show he had smuggled his dad’s notes out of the prison, then carried them to first-name-only Russians in diplomatic stations in San Francisco, Mexico City, and Lima. They had paid for the information with bagfuls of hundred-dollar bills. Both his dad and the Russian had repeatedly cautioned him to keep an eye out for surveillance, and the old man had taught him basic spy skills to avoid detection. It was abundantly clear to Nathan that he and his dad were no longer just father and son, but co-conspirators tempting fate each time he met the Russian.

At precisely 7 p.m., Nathan caught a glimpse of a short, gray-haired man walking toward the restaurant. He forced himself to look away until he heard the Russian’s unmistakably precise English, words that came almost in a whisper.

Do you know the way to the federal post office?

Nathan turned and looked at him as if they had never met. His handler stood at five-foot-six, a couple of inches shorter than he, with white hair, dark gray eyes, and a thick neck. Nathan was supposed to speak his end of the recognition dialogue, an exchange Russian spies call a parol. But it felt pointless to him. They had now met on three continents, spent hours talking in soundproof rooms. They were, by anyone’s measure, acquainted. But Nathan wouldn’t disappoint him.

It should be around here somewhere, he said, lifting the prop in his hand: the map of Nicosia. Let me show you the way.

Before Nathan could finish the line, the Russian was tugging at his sleeve to move them along. They strode in silence past the Epi Topou Café, toward the sprawling Megaland computer game store, and turned left down a poorly lit side street, where a dark European sedan hugged the curb.

The Russian leaned close.

Don’t say anything in the car, he said.

The Russian opened one of the sedan’s rear doors and instructed Nathan to curl himself into the well behind the front seat. Nathan felt the car lurch into gear and pull away. The Russian and his driver chatted in their mother tongue over the drone of the engine. It sounded like a serious conversation.

Nathan’s dad and his Army instructors had drilled him on situational awareness, the art of evaluating landscapes and keeping track of time to protect himself and complete his objective. Nathan’s immediate objective was to know where in the hell they were taking him. But he was clueless, scrooching in the back with no way of identifying

Reviews for The Spy's Son

[tmph_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sorry to say it starts off not very good, writing-wise, but damn does it get good and very, very interesting. This is the next, very big spy/traitor after Aldrich Ames, circa 1996, and I don't remember reading a single thing about it all. Hugely interesting characters in the CIA and FBI (embedded in the CIA) tasked to catch him.
Finished and delighted with the work itself; an amazing story.