Harold James Nicholson

On January 18, 2011, Nicholson was sentenced to eight more years in prison, having pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit money laundering; five other charges had been dropped as part of the plea deal. Nathaniel Nicholson had been sentenced in December 2010 to five years on probation after making a deal with prosecutors to help build the case against his father.

At the end of 2008, Nicholson's youngest son Nathaniel was arrested; prosecutors said Jim Nicholson had used his son to collect more than $47,000 from Russian officials in Mexico, Peru, and Cyprus for past spy work: between December 2006 and December 2008 Nathaniel had met with representatives of the Russian Federation six times, including twice at a consulate in San Francisco. Jim Nicholson was pulled out of prison to plead in court on charges of conspiracy along with his son.

Nicholson was convicted of selling US intelligence to Russia for $300,000 and was sentenced to 23 years 7 months of imprisonment on June 5, 1997. He did not get a life without parole or death sentence as prosecutors said he had cooperated fully with them after his arrest. Prosecutors believed that he had sold the identities of all US intelligence officers stationed in Russia, as well as the identities of his trainees at the CIA school. He told the court that he had intended for the money he received from the Russians to benefit his children.

Nicholson later admitted to providing the Russian intelligence service with national defense information, including photographic negatives, between June 1994 and his arrest on November 16, 1996.

The FBI also retrieved mail sent from Nicholson to his handlers from local public mailboxes, where he signed postcards under the alias "Nevil R. Strachey." One such postcard had code words requesting a meeting with the SVR in Switzerland in November 1996. That same month he was scheduled to travel to Europe on official CIA business to meet with European intelligence officers. Nicholson told the CIA he planned to take a personal vacation to Zurich afterwards. On November 16, 1996, the FBI arrested Nicholson at Dulles International Airport. He had a ticket to Zurich, a bundle of exposed film and a computer disk bearing classified information from CIA files.

The FBI affidavit implies that the investigation of Nicholson's espionage for Russia was triggered following his failure of three polygraph examinations administered by CIA polygraphers as part of his routine security update in October and December 1995, when questions "Have you had unauthorized contact with a Foreign Intelligence Service?", "Since 1990, have you had contact with a Foreign Intelligence Service that you are trying to hide from the CIA?" revealed a high probability of deception or were marked as "inconclusive". The CIA examiner noted that Nicholson appeared to be trying to manipulate the test by taking deep breaths on the control questions, which he stopped after a verbal warning.

From 1994 to July 1996, Nicholson worked as an instructor at the classified CIA's Special Training Center at Camp Peary, Virginia (also known as "The Farm"), teaching CIA trainees intelligence tradecraft. In July 1996, he was assigned as a branch chief in the Counterterrorism Center, Directorate of Operations, at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. That position carried a pay grade of GS-15, his salary being approximately US$73,000.

An FBI affidavit submitted at Nicholson's first espionage trial suggests that, while in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during 1992–1994, as Deputy Chief of Station/Operations Officer, Nicholson might have been recruited by the Russian intelligence service (SVR) while meeting with an officer of the Russian intelligence service in Kuala Lumpur on four occasions during his final months there; three of those meetings took place in the Russian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Those meetings were authorized by the CIA and reported by Nicholson. On June 30, 1994, one day after his last reported meeting with the SVR officer, financial records showed that $12,000 was wired into Nicholson's savings account at Selco Credit Union in Eugene, Oregon; the FBI was unable to trace this money to any legitimate source of income.

From 1992 to 1994, Nicholson was the Deputy Chief of Station/Operations Officer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he met with and targeted recruitment of Russian intelligence officers.

In his career with the CIA, Nicholson was assigned duties throughout the world. He worked for the CIA as an operations officer specializing in intelligence operations against foreign intelligence services, including the intelligence services of the USSR and later, the Russian Federation. From 1982 to 1985, he worked for the CIA in Manila, where he had direct contacts with targeted Soviet officials; from 1985 to 1987 he worked for the CIA in Bangkok, from 1987 to 1989 in Tokyo. From 1990 to 1992, he was the CIA Chief of Station in Bucharest, Romania.

Harold James "Jim" Nicholson joined the CIA in October 1980, after having served as captain in a US Army intelligence unit.

Harold James "Jim" Nicholson (born November 17, 1950) is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and a twice-convicted spy for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). His recruitment to the SVR appears to have occurred in the wake of a much publicized arrest of senior CIA officer and Moscow mole Aldrich Ames in February 1994 which, in the words of CIA veteran and author Tennent Bagley, had "exposed extraordinary slackness of CIA security procedures."