American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

20 The Last Vestiges of Cold War Espionage

221 The Last Vestiges of Cold War Espionage I feel like Rip Van Spy. I thought I had put this to bed many years ago and I never dreamed it would turn out like this. ROBERT LIPKA, former National Security Agency employee, at his 1997 sentencing for espionage during the 1960s; cited by Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 18 Jim Nicholson In 1997 CIA officer Jim Nicholson failed to heed the lessons of the past. At a time when CIA sensitivities were heightened to espionage after the Ames arrest, Nicholson decided to cure his ailing finances by approaching the SVR. Rick Ames had only been arrested a few months before Nicholson volunteered to the Russians while he was stationed in Kuala Lumpur.1 Up to that time, Nicholson had steadily progressed through the CIA operations officer ranks after overseas tours in Manila, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Bucharest. After fourteen years in the CIA, he had risen to the GS-15 level, just one step away from the senior executive ranks. But after a messy divorce that left him with alimony payments and three children to support, he landed in serious debt. Nicholson was in the waning months of his Malaysia tour when he volunteered ,sotheRussianspreparedforhisreassignmentbydesigningfuture 20 Espionage and the New World Order: The 1990s 222 plans to meet him outside the United States. Contact with Nicholson inside the United States was simply too risky after the Ames case. Over the next two years, Nicholson made a series of trips to Asia to meet his Russian spymasters in the SVR. Amazingly, his financial needs blinded him to the same pitfalls that had ensnared Rick Ames. After his travels, Nicholson deposited his spy earnings in the bank, leaving a trail of evidentiary crumbs for counterespionage investigators.2 The tracking of finances and foreign travel had proved critical in the Ames investigation; and now Nicholson, a trained intelligence officer, was blithely making the same blunders. The story of Ames’s hefty bank deposits right after meeting a Soviet in Washington was not only legend in CIA corridors but also in the public domain. If Nicholson was to embark on the risky path of spying for the Russians, common sense would have dictated that he pore over the details of the Ames case to determine the traps that might catch him. Fortunately , he did not. Nicholson was also blissfully unaware that the newly mandated cooperation between the CIA and FBI had closed gaps in the pursuit of spies. Investigators focused on his foreign travel patterns, searched frequent flyer records, and scoured his finances to establish a correlation between his trips and sizable bank deposits.3 Evidence against Nicholson began to mount rapidly. Nicholson roamed through CIA databases and asked colleagues for information on Chechnya, a topic unrelated to his instructor duties. In the new spirit of cooperation between Russia and the United States, Russian intelligence officially informed its American counterparts that they were focusing on Chechnya, the rebellious republic that was launching terrorist attacks against the government.4 Suspicions about Nicholson were soon confirmed. He was surveilled during a trip to Singapore in July 1996 and was observed getting into a car with Russian diplomatic plates.5 After his return, Nicholson gave his son a new car, paid credit card bills, and put more money in the bank. The FBI had all the evidence it needed. Jim Nicholson was arrested at Dulles Airport on November 16, 1996, as he was about to board a flight to Switzerland with classified documents in his carry-on bag. At the time of his arrest, Nicholson was the highest-ranking CIA officer convicted of espionage charges (his mediocre colleague, Rick Ames, was a GS-14). His most significant damage stemmed from his assignment as an instructor, where The Last Vestiges of Cold War Espionage 223 he had access to the identities of a fresh crop of young clandestine operations officers whose CIA affiliation was yet unknown. Nicholson, who served at the facility for two years, passed the Russians the names of hundreds of graduates of the training course.6 The Russians not only knew the identities of the new officers but could also pass the names on to other intelligence services as trinkets of cooperation to gain goodwill and frustrate CIA operations. Nicholson admitted that he had received $180,000 from the Russians for his secrets and pled guilty in March 1997. In exchange...