Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 114

Global Security and Intelligence Studies - Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2016
Review of 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
Bryan Denson (2015). 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. London: Scribe
Publications. ISBN: 9781925106657 (pbk). 368 pages
The same motivations that compel an individual to spy for their country can
be the very things that motivate them to betray the same. Recruitment and running of
intelligence agents versus counterintelligence and the discovery of spies in our midst
have fascinated, and repulsed, those both within and without the business for centuries.
They present extremes—often the ultimate acts of bravery or treachery depending,
once again, from whichever viewpoint one sits.
In mid-1994, only 2 months after CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich
Ames was sentenced to life in prison for betraying many of the most closely guarded
secrets of U.S. intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, another CIA operations
officer, Harold James “Jim” Nicholson was offering his services to the recently emerged
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR); the newly renamed First Chief Directorate
of the KGB.
A very good case officer Nicholson had had a number of overseas posting and
deployments during his career with the CIA. Much of his case work, as explained
in the book, was focused on transnational threat issues, including counterterrorism
and organized crime, but one of his more recent postings at home was as a senior
instructor at the CIA’s training facility in Virginia—colloquially known as “The Farm.”
It was here that Nicholson would be responsible for training the next generation of
CIA case officers; he would know those who would be posted overseas in diplomatic
roles, and he would know those being considered for “nonofficial cover” (or NOC)
roles. Nicholson would have, of course, known the Ames story and surmised that the
Russians might “be in the market for another highly placed mole inside the CIA.” He
might not have direct access to the “crown jewels” in espionage parlance—how the
Americans might have penetrated Russian intelligence—in the way that Ames and FBI
mole Robert Hanssen would, but he would have the next best thing; the names of the
next crop of American spies lining up to participate in “the Great Game.”
Fifteen years after Ames’ conviction, the author Bryan Denson, an investigative
reporter with The Oregonian, first came across Nicholson as he was about to be charged
with espionage crimes for the second time. Nicholson’s youngest child, Nathan, was
also in the courthouse that day. Thanks largely to the 20-year-olds evidence, Nicholson
senior would become not just the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of
espionage, but also the only U.S. intelligence officer caught betraying his country on
two separate occasions, and the only American discovered and convicted of engaging
in espionage activities with a foreign government from within the confines of an
American federal prison.
doi: 10.18278/gsis.2.1.9
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