Former CIA Officer Recruited by Russian SVR, Paid $300K Before 1996 Arrest

226 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS with the identities of CIA officers sent to the CIA’s special training school at Fort Peary, Virginia, which opened the door for the SVR to make other potential recruitments. Meanwhile, it paid him $300,000 before he was finally arrested by the FBI in November 1996. (After his conviction for espionage, he was sentenced to twenty-three years in federal prison.) The CIA postmortem on Nicholson, who was the highest-ranking CIA officer ever recruited (as far as is known), made clear that even a loyal American, with no intention of betraying the United States, could be entrapped in the spy game. When it comes to recruiting moles in a larger universe, intelli- gence services operate much like highly specialized corporate “head- hunters,” as James Jesus Angleton described the process to me during the Cold War era. He was referring to the similar approach that cor- porate human resource divisions had with espionage agencies. Both headhunt by searching through a database of candidates for possible recruits to fill specific positions. Both types of organizations have researchers at their disposal to draw up rosters of potential recruits. Both sort through available databases to determine which of the © names on the list have attributes that might qualify or disqualify © them for a recruitment pitch. Both also collect personal data on each qualified candidate, including any indication of his or her ideological leaning, political affiliations, financial standing, ambitions, and vani- ties, to help them make a tempting offer. But there are two important differences. First, unlike their coun- terparts in the private sector, espionage headhunters ask their candidates not only to take on a new job but also to keep their employment secret from their present employer. Second, they ask them to surreptitiously steal documents from him. Because they are asking candidates to break the law, espionage services, unlike their corporate counterparts in headhunting, obviously need to initially hide from the candidates the dangerous nature of the work they will do. Depending on the targeted recruit, they might disguise the task as a heroic act, such as righting an injustice, exposing an illegal gov- ernment activity, or countering a regime of tyranny. This disguise is called in the parlance of the trade a false flag, as mentioned earlier, By using such a false flag, the SVR did not need to find a candi- date who was sympathetic to Russia or the Putin regime. In its long | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 226 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019714