Convicted CIA Turncoat Gets 23 1/2 Years in Prison

WASHINGTON — The highest-ranking CIA officer ever caught spying for a foreign country was sentenced Thursday to more than 23 years in prison after confessing he sold out the United States for money to give his children a better life after the collapse of his tumultuous marriage.

Harold James Nicholson, a former CIA station chief overseas, appeared in federal court in Alexandria, Va., and apologized to his family for his actions. He added sorrowfully that he knows the CIA will never forgive him for his costly betrayal.

“I won’t ask for the forgiveness of my colleagues and countrymen, for I know they cannot give it,” Nicholson told U.S. District Judge James Cacheris. “I will ask for the forgiveness of my family and children because I know they will.”

He insisted that he agreed to spy for Russia in 1994 to make up to his children for years of long absences and for “failing to keep my marriage together.” Nicholson added: “I am in so many ways so very sorry.”

Cacheris rejected a request from Nicholson’s attorney for a slightly lighter sentence, and instead approved the request of federal prosecutors that Nicholson be jailed for 23 1/2 years in a federal penitentiary. But Cacheris did agree to recommend that Nicholson serve his sentence on the West Coast, near his family in Oregon. Nicholson, 47, will be almost 70 when he becomes eligible for release.

Nicholson reached a plea agreement with the government in March; he could have faced life in prison, but CIA and FBI officials wanted to avoid a trial that might have forced them to divulge classified material in open court. In return for the lighter sentence, Nicholson also agreed to debrief U.S. counterintelligence experts on what secrets he passed to the Russians.

U.S. Atty. Helen Fahey said Nicholson also has signed over his assets to the government for forfeiture. She added that he has even pointed investigators to Swiss bank accounts and other overseas holdings where he hid illegal payments from Russian intelligence. Nicholson has told the FBI that he received a total of $300,000 from Moscow, far more than U.S. investigators at first suspected.

Fahey was unmoved by Nicholson’s explanation for his actions. “There is no question he did it for money,” she said dismissively. “But he was making more than $70,000 a year, and his children were hardly in danger of going without. What’s more, an awful lot of people get divorced and don’t spy for the Russians.”

CIA officials acknowledge that Nicholson did extensive damage to some of the agency’s most sensitive espionage operations, providing information about officers working in the CIA’s deepest cover program. In a recent letter to Cacheris, acting CIA Director George J. Tenet said, “Nicholson revealed or planned to reveal the names and positions of a large number of CIA officers whose jobs depend on their ability to work clandestinely.” Some had to be withdrawn “because their missions as well as their lives were at risk.”

Nicholson was arrested Nov. 16 at Washington’s Dulles International Airport as he was about to travel to Switzerland to meet his Russian spy handlers. A 16-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine espionage service, he had served as a CIA station chief in Romania before becoming deputy station chief in a larger CIA office in Malaysia.

He agreed to spy for the Russians while he was in Malaysia in 1994, on the heels of a bitter divorce and custody battle with his wife over their three children.

Nicholson reached a higher rank inside the CIA than Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames, who was arrested by the FBI just before Nicholson began spying for Moscow. Yet U.S. officials believe that Ames did more damage to U.S. intelligence because he spied for nine years before he was caught, and for a time had access to the CIA’s most sensitive secrets in the heart of its Soviet division.