Cold War and Post‑Cold War Spy Recruitments Reveal CIA and NSA Insider Espionage Cases

173 mid 1960s, who was caught in a sting operation by the FBI and sentenced to 18 years in a federal prison. Ronald Pelton, an NSA analyst, was recruited after he retired from the NSA. After he was betrayed by a KGB double agent in 1985, was sentenced to life imprisonment, Finally, there was David Sheldon Boone, a NSA code clerk, who between 1988 and 1992, provided the KGB with NSA documents in return for $60,000. Boone, sentenced to 24 years in prison, was the last known KGB recruitment of the Cold War. During the Cold War, Russian Intelligence Service officers operated mainly under the cover of the embassies, consulates, United Nations delegations and other diplomatic missions of the Soviet Union. As “diplomats,” they were protected from arrest by the terms of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Their diplomatic cover greatly limited, however, their universe for finding potential recruits outside of their universe of international meetings, diplomatic receptions, UN organizations, scientific conferences and cultural exchanges. They therefore tended to recruit their counterparts in adversary services. In this regard, the successful entrapment of Harold Nicholson in the 1990s is highly instructive. From his impressive record, he seemed an unlikely candidate for recruitment. He had been a super- patriotic American who had served as a captain in Army intelligence before joining the CIA in 1980. In the CIA, he had an unblemished record as a career officer, serving as a station chief in Eastern Europe and then the deputy chief of operation in Malaysia in 1992. Even though his career was on the rise and he was a dedicated anti-Communist, he became a target for SVR when he was assigned to the CIA’s elite Russian division. Since the job of this division was to recruit Russian officials working abroad as diplomats, engineers and military officers, its operations brought its officers in close contact with SVR officers. Nicholson therefore was required to meet with Russian intelligence officers in Manila, Bucharest, Tokyo and Bangkok and “dangle” himself to the SVR by pretending disloyalty to the CIA. As part of these deception operations, he supplied the Russians with tidbits of CIA secrets, or “chickenfeed,” that had been approved by his superiors at the CIA. What his CIA superiors did not fully take into account in this spy versus spy game was the SVR’s ability to manipulate, compromise, and convert a “dangle” to its own ends. As it turned out, Russian intelligence had been assembling a psychological profile on Nicholson since the late 1980s, and found vulnerability: his resentment at the failure of his superiors to recognize his achievements in intelligence. It played on this vulnerability to compromise him and then converted him to becoming its mole inside the CIA. He worked for the SVR first in Asia then at the CIA headquarters at Langley, where he was given a management position. Among other secret documents, he provided the SVR with the identities of CIA officers sent to the CIA’s special training school at Fort Peary, Virginia, which opened up 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 23 years in Federal prison.) The CIA post mortem 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. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020325