A CIA employee spied for Russia: after being caught, he recruited his son and continued to harm the United States

Harold James "Jim" Nicholson, a 16-year CIA veteran, was sentenced to more than 1997 years in prison for espionage in 23, but he continued his mischief from behind bars - tasking his son with maintaining contact with the Russians on the outside. Nicholson was convicted a second time but is being released this month. This unusual spy story was told by the publication Independent.

Photo: IStock

An unprecedented operation

The transfer of information was quick and seamless: a coffee cup containing the DNA of an alleged Russian spy was exchanged in the hallway for an identical one between a CIA operative and an FBI agent.

This move is textbook, but everything else about this scenario was unusual: the transfer of information took place in the bowels of CIA headquarters, and the suspected mole was tasked with catching him.

The target was Harold "Jim" Nicholson, a charismatic spy and devoted single father who had worked for the CIA for 16 years.

Jim's colleague, who stole the coffee cup from his desk, was John Maguire, a former Baltimore police officer who had carved out a niche in the spy agency as a counterterrorist.

Maguire was recalled from overseas by CIA superiors (as he believed as punishment for turning down an assignment to Pakistan in the fall of 1995), after which he was summoned to a secret meeting at the CIA, asked if he would accept an unknown job, and then transferred to another place.

There, at an FBI safe house, as part of an unprecedented interagency collaboration to catch spies, he learned the details of the request: someone in the CIA was secretly passing secrets to the Russians. Nicholson was the likely culprit. Maguire had to persuade Nicholson to hire him as his right-hand man, spy on him from his own department, and then find evidence so Nicholson could be imprisoned for treason.

By the summer of 1996, Maguire was working alongside the alleged spy.

“There were times when I wanted to stab him in the neck at the table and just say: that’s it, he’s dead, it’s over,” admitted Maguire, now retired from the agency.

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However, he resisted the urge - and in just a few months, using an arsenal of techniques, from old school detective work to lunchtime information hunting, Maguire completed the task. Never before had a spy been used to capture a spy within the CIA, and no such operation has been reported since.

After more than two decades behind bars, Nicholson will be released from prison on November 26. In 1997, he was sentenced to 23 years and 7 months for conspiracy to commit espionage, one of the most senior CIA officials ever convicted of the crime. But the turncoat spy didn’t end there: while in prison, he deceived his youngest child, his 20-year-old son. He idolized his father and for a long time believed that his parent was forced to confess, but he forced his son to continue his treacherous relationship with the Russians.

They were caught and both were convicted, with the younger Nicholson avoiding jail time thanks to a plea deal and his father getting an additional eight years. The former CIA officer was transferred from the comfort of a prison in Oregon to a harsh Colorado prison known popularly as Supermax, from which he is scheduled to be released after Thanksgiving.

“Jim Nicholson was, as they say, a double murderer: he committed a crime for which he was caught, went to prison, and then from prison he organized a second crime,” stated writer Brian Denson, who for his book “Son of a Spy,” published in 2015 year, conducted many interviews with Nathaniel Nicholson, Maguire and other characters from this story.

Denson believes the release will be a "gut-testing moment" for the spy, who turns 73 days before he is set to be released.

“Jim may be better than he showed himself there. Perhaps he will show devotion to his family and want to spend his old age in peace. But he’ll be broke if he does that,” Denson said.

Maguire, who has first-hand knowledge of Nicholson and his personality, is convinced "he's going to run."

"He's not going to stay here," Maguire said. “He will leave in a couple of weeks after his release.”

There have been very few defectors released from prison in recent years - Robert Hanssen died behind bars earlier this year, and Aldrich Ames is still serving a life sentence without parole. Ana Montes, who spied for Cuba and was released in January, moved to Puerto Rico, and Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel, moved there after his release in 2015.

Denson, who covered Nicholson for years and literally wrote the book about him, says the spy's future actions remain a "big question" for him.

“Will he really just go to Moscow, where the money is waiting for him? — Denson wondered. “Or will he stay here and do right by his family?”

Because Nicholson, when you get right down to it, betrayed everyone and everything in his life that was dear to him: his country, his colleagues, his career and, most importantly, his family and his children.

It's all a far cry from the life Nicholson imagined, who idolized James Bond while growing up on an Air Force base with his mother, former Army codebreaker Betty, and his stepfather, Air Force man Marvin "Nick" Nicholson.

Betty's first husband and Jim's biological father left the family, and Marvin married her when the boy was seven years old, officially adopting the child.

Inspired by his family's military history and the spy stories he read, young Nicholson joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) while attending college at Oregon State. There he met his future wife Laurie, who later bore him three children. Nicholson worked in military intelligence but left the military in 1979 and briefly worked in a civilian job before joining the CIA the following year.

He transported his growing family to various overseas posts, from the Philippines to Romania to Thailand. His marriage became increasingly turbulent due to accusations of infidelity on both sides. By 1992, Laurie, tired of her husband's selfish ambitions and infidelity, returned to the United States and filed for divorce. She later told Denson that "one of Jim's biggest flaws... was that he somehow taught himself to taste champagne on a Budweiser budget," he wrote in Son of a Spy.

High-ranking mole

Two years later, Nicholson walked into the Russian embassy in Kuala Lumpur, where he was stationed, and the CIA was under the impression that he was trying to recruit their intelligence chief. Instead, the veteran operative offered his services to the FSB (Russia's foreign intelligence agency, which was preceded by the KGB) for a fee - just weeks after the notorious CIA traitor Ames was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Denson explained this action in his book: “Nicholson decided that when Ames got out of the way, the FSB would want to find another high-ranking mole in the CIA.”

And so it happened. Then began a deeply destructive espionage that continued in various guises for more than ten years.

However, Nicholson performed his most harmful work. After winning primary custody of his children, he moved his family to Virginia in 1994 and began working as an instructor at a CIA training facility colloquially known as "the farm." There he collected intelligence information on future recruits and sold it to the Russians, rendering future American spies virtually useless in the future. He photographed and compiled top-secret files and reports for transmission to the Russians—from information about U.S. policy to foreign cables and Ames reports that could be useful to the Russians.

By 1996, American intelligence realized it had a problem and began frantically trying to figure out the mole.

That's when senior management turned to Maguire, who, after years of exciting and effective work in the field, was unhappy in his temporary job at the CIA. He was recalled from abroad when the authorities identified the “mole” Nicholson, and, as he himself admitted, he did not know that his superiors were preparing him for the enormous task of internal corporate espionage.

“It’s not for nothing that the HR department is located exclusively on the second floor,” he joked. “You can’t even jump out of the window because it’s high enough, otherwise you might land in the bushes, break your legs and end up in HR in a wheelchair.”

He's one of those people who doesn't like to joke when he talks about how he destroyed one of the most dangerous spies in history. I learned the details at a safe house after taking a polygraph from “first echelon officers, senior officers... people who know their job.”

Eventually, according to Maguire, "the head agent said, 'We've got another Ames.'

"Extremely intense mental work"

He was tasked with "persuading Nicholson to choose himself as his deputy" and using this position to spy on him, and quickly.

“You have to catch him in a year; we can’t afford to wait five years,” Maguire was told. “You need to catch him doing something.”

Real life espionage, he said, is “not some dashing James Bond,” although he noted that Nicholson, captivated by 007 as a child, was “a real womanizer,” tall, dark, handsome and “very, very , very cunning."

Spy work, Maguire admitted, is actually more routine. It is a “methodical game of the mind in four-dimensional chess, where you need to plan and role play.”

“I had to hold operational meetings for eight to nine hours a day and not make a single mistake, not screw up,” Maguire noted. “You had to keep an eye out for clues that Nicholson was getting ready to do something.”

“I had to be sure that I didn’t miss anything,” he said. “It’s very stressful, extremely intense mental work.”

Nicholson's pattern was to track down young officers and gather information about them to exchange with the Russians in order to later persuade them to share information during foreign missions.

“He was a smart guy and a son of a bitch because he didn’t care what happened to these kids, these young officers,” he noted. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Nicholson's predecessor, Ames, Maguire said, committed "horrific" crimes, "but he didn't headhunt the CIA."

Maguire's efforts paid off after a dinner at Georgetown in October 1996, shortly before Nicholson was due to depart on an overseas trip:

“He had a case of beer on the floor of his car, and I drank beer in his car on the way into the building; We were driving through rural Virginia and I ask, 'Are you lost?' “And he said, ‘No, no, no, there’s a place here, it’s one of those days when they issue unique editions of stamps.’”

Nicholson popped out to the country post office, bought some stamps, got back in the car, and they returned to the CIA, with Maguire initiating a meeting with the FBI to tell them that it appeared his boss was preparing to "do something operational."

“They just put everything on the line. They had a huge number of people deployed and trained,” Maguire explained. “And, of course, he left the house late at night, left his children alone at home and went. And they actually caught him mailing something. There was a stamp that he bought and he licked it so it had DNA on it. He dropped it in the mailbox and before sunrise it was processed and entered into the evidence system, then returned to the mailbox and sent to an overseas address. Thus, we managed to establish a direct connection with the KGB.”

Arrest and recruitment of son

Nicholson was arrested on the eve of his 46th birthday and sentenced to 1997 years and seven months in prison in June 23. His children's lives were unceremoniously upended, the family home in Virginia turned upside down, before the eldest, Jeremy, who was attending college in Oregon, flew to the West Coast with his younger sister Star and brother Nathaniel.

The younger Nicholson was only 12 years old when his father was arrested. The spy's mother and stepfather refused to believe that their favorite and patriot had committed any wrongdoing. They and the children visited the imprisoned ex-CIA officer in the Oregon prison where he was being sent, and it was there that Nathan remembered his father apologizing and explaining that he “just wanted to help you kids,” Denson writes in Son of a Spy.

“Nathan never parted with the memories of that painful conversation,” we read further. “Seeing his father so sad, literally with his head hanging low, he could not calm down. He convinced himself that perhaps the government was pressuring him to admit—even to his own children—that he had been a spy for Russia.”

Nathan followed in his father's footsteps into the military, but injury derailed his military career and he returned to Oregon, where he attended community college in 2005 while visiting his father in prison every other Saturday. Nicholson was figuring out how to renew contacts with the Russians and soon recruited his son.

During one visit, he told Nathan “that his old friends in Moscow were holding an account in his name and that together they could withdraw the money early,” Denson writes. Jim had lost his freedom serving the Russian Federation, and now he believed it was Russia's turn to help support his children while he was away. He wanted to know if Nathan was ready to serve in his place when he was free.”

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His junior agreed "on the spot" - he soon established contact with the Russians by visiting the consulate in San Francisco, and then traveled to meetings in remote places from Mexico to Cyprus, transmitting messages and accepting money between 2006 and 2008. until he was caught. The younger Nicholson, then 26, avoided prison time in a plea deal that helped him build a case against his father, who received an additional eight years.

“I think the guy was really heartbroken for a while when he finally realized what his father had done,” Denson suggested. “The parent spoke as if there was nothing wrong with it - and this, of course, was said by Nathan himself. His father spoke as if he was just doing him a small favor, but he had to keep the secret.”

“I think deep down Nathan probably knew it was wrong, but he's a pleaser,” Denson explained. “He loves his close circle of friends and family and shows it. Nathan Nicholson is fundamentally a decent man.”

Denson and Maguire, both fathers, could not believe that the spy had involved his son in criminal activities.

“It was the most selfish act,” Maguire said. “He used his son and destroyed the foundation of trust that a child has in his father.”

This ruthless streak and verbal loyalty only confirms Maguire's theory that Nicholson will leave America as quickly as his traitorous legs can take him.

“He will behave himself for a couple of weeks, make a plan and decide what to do,” Maguire assured, adding that each officer has a “long-term plan for breaking contact,” which investigators never found among Nicholson’s belongings.

“He's a traitor. He's a spy. He doesn't believe in the country. He hates the system, and he signed a contract with an enemy country,” the officer concluded. “And if he wants to be loyal to this particular country, then send him there and return a good innocent man in his place.”

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