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Convicted spy continued from jail cell, U.S. says
WASHINGTON: Since 1997, Harold Nicholson has been locked up in a federal prison in northwest Oregon, the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency ever convicted of espionage.
But even as federal inmate No.49535-083, Nicholson never really retired as a Russian spy, federal prosecutors say. In an indictment unsealed Thursday, Nicholson and his 24-year-old son, Nathan, were charged with having used prison visits, coded letters and clandestine overseas meetings to sell even more secrets to the Russians over the past three years, in a scheme that Nicholson hatched from his prison cell.
"You have been brave enough to step into this new unseen world that is sometimes dangerous but always fascinating," Harold Nicholson wrote to his son in July, the indictment says, in what was apparently an allusion to the scheme.
The elder Nicholson pleaded guilty in 1997 to selling the Russians the identities of fellow CIA officers. According to prosecutors, he then "trained and tasked" his son in spycraft from his prison cell beginning in 2006, and helped the son meet with Russian handlers in Mexico, Peru and Cypress to pass on information intended to help current Russian agents evade detection, the prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said that Nathan Nicholson, a former army paratrooper, returned from his visits with the Russians with at least $35,000 in cash, much of it in hundred-dollar bills that were sometimes tucked inside a PlayStation video game case.
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The money was designed in part to settle an unclaimed "pension" that Harold Nicholson said was owed him from his days as a CIA spy for the Russians in the 1990s before his arrest in 1996, the prosecutors said.
The charges offered a compelling reminder, officials said, that the spy wars between Moscow and Washington did not come to a close with the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
"The beat goes on, and the Russians have been as aggressive as ever, perhaps more so, since the end of the Cold War," said John Martin, a former official in the Justice Department who ran the counterespionage unit and oversaw the Nicholson prosecution in 1997.
The new charges that Nicholson was able to continue espionage work from a prison cell "are really unprecedented" and show the continued threat, Martin added.
The affidavit shows that the FBI first received information in 2002 that Nicholson might be trying to get back in touch with his Russian handlers. But while the FBI was pursuing that lead, Nicholson was still eventually able to use his son as a conduit, passing information to him during prison visits, the document shows. It does not address whether lax security at the prison might have contributed to the success of the scheme.
Nicholson admitted in 1997 that he had sold the Russians the names, identities and missions of numerous CIA employees, including scores of young trainees he had instructed at the agency's school for spies. He was the CIA's deputy station chief in Malaysia before returning to agency headquarters in 1994 in a senior counterterrorism post.
In pleading guilty, Nicholson avoided a possible life sentence and was given 23 years in federal prison.
At his sentencing, he told the judge that he had become a Russian spy for the financial benefit of his three children, and he said he knew that his children would forgive him for what he had done.
Nicholson had sole custody of his three children after a divorce. The children, including Nicholson's youngest child, Nathan, then 12, went to live with their grandparents in Eugene, Oregon, after their father's imprisonment. Nicholson asked to be imprisoned near his family so he could see them and was moved to the medium-security lockup in Sheridan, Oregon.
Nicholson's mail at the prison was heavily monitored, and initially, officials said, he sought to use other inmates to pass messages to the Russians through their own outside mailings.
In February 2002, the FBI first learned from someone who had been in contact with another prisoner that Nicholson was apparently trying to use his fellow inmates to communicate with the Russians, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Oregon by Jared Garth, an FBI agent on the case.
That led the FBI to interview a cellmate at the prison, who told investigators that Nicholson had confided to him a concern that the information he had from his days at the CIA would become "stale" and "no longer have value to a foreign government." He also reportedly said that he had a "pension" awaiting him in Russia and planned to repatriate there after his release from prison.
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