Hold the Hurrahs in Spy Case

The directors of the CIA and the FBI have hailed the ability of their organizations to work together to expose Harold J. Nicholson, a CIA section chief, as an alleged spy for Russia. Nicholson was arrested this week more than two years after he began selling his services to Moscow, authorities said. But the fact is that apparently it was mainly Nicholson’s own reckless indiscretions, including suspicious money transfers and expensive foreign vacations, that tripped him up. Would a more prudent spy have been able to evade the tougher internal security measures the CIA put in place after the humiliating Aldrich Ames espionage fiasco?

Ames, the CIA’s worst known betrayer, was able to function as a Soviet agent for more than eight years, in part because the agency didn’t seek the counterespionage help it should have from the FBI. Ames was a stumblebum whose grand style of living and well-known drinking binges ought very early to have set alarm bells ringing. Instead, he was able to go on passing information to Moscow for six years after suspicion first fell on him.

CIA Director John Deutch credits Nicholson’s arrest to changes made in the wake of the Ames case, including the assignment of FBI agents to work within the CIA. But two years of spying can produce a lot of damage, and apparently has. Ames was blamed for the deaths of at least 10 agents working for the CIA. The best that Deutch can say for now is that no American agent is known to have died because of information that Nicholson allegedly gave to Moscow. But the identities of a lot of CIA agents are now known to Russia’s secret services.

Deutch and FBI Director Louis Freeh have used the Nicholson case to call attention to continuing Russian efforts to penetrate U.S. intelligence. True, but true too that Nicholson’s top assignment from his Russian paymasters apparently was to find out what the CIA was learning from its own spying on Russia and from which sources. So the game goes on, as it was bound to in an era when much that underlay Cold War rivalries remains unsettled. The big difference is that before, a lot of spying was motivated by ideology. Now it seems to have become a strictly cash business.