Suspected CIA Turncoat Was a Spy on the Way Up

To the spy hunters at the FBI and CIA, the most frightening thing about Harold James Nicholson--CIA officer and alleged traitor--is that he was so very normal.

Nicholson was no Aldrich H. Ames, and in a sense that is very bad news for the CIA. He was a senior officer on the rise within the Directorate of Operations, a man with a golden future as an American spy.

Ames was a classic traitor: a drunkard and burnout case, a flunky who sold out his country after being spurned for advancement.

The Nicholson case is scary to the agency because the suspect was none of the above. A former officer in the “Screaming Eagles,” the Army’s proud 101st Airborne Division, Nicholson surged through the CIA’s ranks during the agency’s heady Ronald Reagan-era boom. By the time he reached his early 40s, he had been awarded some of the most sensitive postings available in American intelligence.

But Nicholson’s professional achievements stripped him of his emotional life: More than 20 years in the military and the CIA had transformed the young patriot from Oregon into a tightly wound robot, an intense workaholic who skipped family vacations and moved his family 21 times in 23 years.

By the end, court documents and interviews this week with friends, former colleagues and other sources show, all Nicholson had left to show for his devotion to duty was an unstable, New Age ex-wife who could no longer deal with his secret life, troubled teenage children, a messy divorce and a bitter custody battle. Nicholson could find only brief moments of relief in the arms of a woman living half a world away in Thailand.

Red Flags

His excessive intensity and personal turmoil finally began to raise red flags by the early 1990s, according to senior officials at the U.S. Embassy in Romania, where he served as station chief from 1990 to 1992. They say they warned the CIA that Nicholson might be a security risk.

John R. Davis Jr., U.S. ambassador to Romania during the final three months of Nicholson’s posting there, remembers he “wasn’t keen” on having Nicholson remain at the embassy because his personal problems were so apparent and were beginning to raise security concerns.

CIA officials said Thursday that they don’t recall receiving a cautionary message from Bucharest, but are still searching CIA and State Department records to see if such a warning was recorded.

But even if the warning was received, it apparently didn’t register because the CIA quickly moved Nicholson onto a bigger overseas posting in Malaysia.

It was there, while his family was imploding, that U.S. spy-catchers say Nicholson turned to the Russians. He made a cold, grubby decision to go for the cash, they say, and ended his promising career on his knees, hiding under his desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., frantically photographing documents for Russian intelligence.

Nicholson’s attorney, meanwhile, has said his client will plead not guilty at an expected detention hearing Monday and is “going to fight the charges strenuously.”

Yet the awful truth for the CIA is that Nicholson’s personal problems were absolutely typical. To get ahead, senior CIA officers often put career first and family second. Divorce is rampant. Secrecy compounds family tensions.

“This one is really much more frightening to me than Ames,” said a senior U.S. official. “You want to know how many 46-year-old divorced guys there are at the CIA?”

What’s worse, Nicholson’s alleged espionage may be a sign of things to come for the CIA in the post-Cold War world. The old truths that buttressed American intelligence are breaking down: The United States has been left standing as the only superpower, Moscow’s nuclear missiles are targeted into the ocean instead of at New York and Los Angeles, and old enemies are new business partners.

In that new world, is it far-fetched for some U.S. intelligence officials to wonder whether a little money-making espionage on the side would really damage the national interest?

Cautionary Tale

Nicholson’s history of personal turmoil is in many ways a cautionary tale for the CIA. The son of a career Air Force officer, Nicholson grew up in a kind of “military brat” environment--but his wife did not, setting the stage for long-simmering tension that would finally lead to the collapse of his family.

As a boy, Nicholson’s constant moves reinforced his natural shyness, making it difficult for him to form friendships. “So many of the kids are here today and gone tomorrow,” says Georgia Woodland, an assistant principal at Desert High School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where Nicholson spent ninth through 11th grades.

“He seemed like an OK guy, kind of shy,” adds Lucinda Nickel-Fors, Nicholson’s classmate at Novato High in the Marin County community of Novato, where he spent his senior year. “He didn’t have a lot of friends.”

With his buttoned-down shirts and short hair, Nicholson was a “straight” kid uninvolved in the handful of small antiwar sit-ins that took place at Novato High that year, Nickel-Fors recalls.

At Oregon State University, Nicholson connected with a girl, Laura Sue Cooper. It seemed an unlikely alliance; she was a child of the counterculture and he an Air Force kid and enthusiastic ROTC student bound for the Army in the post-Vietnam era.

But after meeting in fencing class, they somehow clicked. Both shy, they “seemed to find soul mates” in each other, said one person who knew them later.

When Nicholson graduated in 1973, Laura Cooper dropped out of school to marry and follow him into his new life as an Army officer.

Army Comes as Shock

Their early years of marriage, punctuated by moves from one Army base to another--Ft. Campbell, Ky. to Okinawa to Ft. Ord, Calif.--came as a complete shock to Laura. But the Army’s transient culture was quite familiar to Nicholson, and he thrived, rising to captain and company commander. Trained in cryptography, he won a coveted staff position in Army intelligence.

Their first son, Jeremiah Dei, was born in 1978. A year later, Nicholson left the Army and moved the family to Kansas City to take a staff job with Hallmark Cards. Laura worked briefly as a bank teller before being fired, court documents show.

Greeting cards must have seemed awfully tame after Army intelligence, and Nicholson was soon itching to get back in the game. A year after leaving the Army, he was accepted at the CIA in October 1980 and moved into the agency’s top-secret training program at Camp Peary, Va., outside Williamsburg.

Nicholson completed his spy training just as the Reagan administration was pumping billions into the CIA, vastly expanding its reach around the world. Nicholson and his class of newly minted spies rode the wave upward, rising rapidly to fill new slots created by Reagan’s controversial CIA director, William J. Casey.

Nicholson dived headlong into his new career, accepting one tough foreign posting after another. His first overseas espionage assignment came in Manila, where he served as a junior CIA case officer from 1982 to 1985. Instead of giving his family time to cool off back in the United States by accepting a job at CIA headquarters, Nicholson went immediately from Manila to another two years in Bangkok, and from there to another two-year stint, undercover in Tokyo.

By then, Jim and Laura Nicholson had three children, and the strains of constant moves were wearing. In their divorce and custody case, Laura complained that, “ever since we moved from Manila, the children have told me that they are not happy with moving so much, about having to leave friends; having to go to new schools; having to go to a new country; changing wardrobes and becoming used to new climates.”

“The children are very resentful” of her husband’s absences due to his constant travel, she added.

But Nicholson kept moving around the world.

His first big break came in 1990, when he was named CIA station chief in Romania. Nicholson arrived in Bucharest in the wake of the 1989 Romanian revolution and the fall of the Ceausescu regime, at a time when the CIA was losing interest in Romania and had downgraded its Bucharest station to a one- or two-person operation.

Still, the assignment gave Nicholson a chance to run his own shop for the first time, and he tried to make the most of it.

To others at the U.S. Embassy, in fact, he seemed almost comic in his exaggerated estimates of the intelligence threat posed by the weak new Romanian regime. He was forever warning his embassy colleagues not to let down their guard.

‘Cold Warrior’

“He was still the consummate Cold Warrior,” said one government official who was there.

Added Davis, the former ambassador: “He was a very eager-beaver type. And very suspicious of the Romanians. But it seemed to me he was crediting the Romanians with bad intentions that were far beyond their capacities.”

While Nicholson immersed himself in his job, his marriage was finally falling apart. The strains of the CIA lifestyle were nearly unbearable for Laura in grim, post-Communist Bucharest.

To other Americans in the tightknit diplomatic community in Bucharest, the gap between Jim and Laura Nicholson was becoming painfully obvious.

While Jim was the tightly wrapped, gung-ho intelligence operative, Laura was a petite, increasingly bitter woman who struggled to keep up with cocktail chatter on the diplomatic circuit.

She held a part-time clerical-secretarial job at the U.S. Embassy, but complained that she was unable to obtain an adequate security clearance. She was awarded only the lowest clearance, she said, and officials “were always berating me about my security,” she said in the divorce and custody battle.

While other embassy wives dressed demurely, Laura showed up for work in sandals, jeans and out-sized shirts, and spoke fervently about her favorite environmental causes. She eschewed makeup and wore her straight blond hair long, flowing down her back--a casual look better suited for Oregon than an embassy. She resented life in Bucharest so much that she remained closeted in their home most of the time.

Laura complained in the court case that while they were living in Bucharest, Nicholson claimed he was too busy to join the family on vacations or home leave trips to the United States. After taking the children on brief vacations by herself, she said she finally forced her husband to break away for just one weekend. The best he could offer her was a weekend at a Club Med in Bulgaria.

Nicholson’s intensity on the job and his family turmoil became so glaring that some U.S. officials in Bucharest began to worry that he might be ripe for recruitment by intelligence agents from the crumbling remnants of the Communist bloc. One knowledgeable source said those concerns were reported from Bucharest to Nicholson’s superiors at CIA headquarters.

Because of his disordered personal life, he was “an ideal kind of candidate” for recruitment, a “ ‘recruit me’ poster boy,” said one person who knew him in Bucharest. “Traditionally, people are perceived to be vulnerable if they’re having emotional problems,” Davis said. “He must have had severe psychological problems to do what he did, having spent all those years on the side of the angels, then suddenly to flip like that.”

Even so, senior U.S. officials familiar with the Nicholson investigation stress there is no evidence that he began spying for Russia until 1994, during his next posting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Nicholsons’ marriage couldn’t survive. After returning from Romania to the United States, Jim and Laura Nicholson separated and filed for divorce in June 1992. Laura returned to the Pacific Northwest and underwent a dramatic personal transformation. She legally changed her name to Al Aura Jusme and went to live with her family and returned to college. Al Aura Jusme graduated from Oregon State last June.

Nicholson, however, left for another overseas posting as soon as possible, this time to Kuala Lumpur as a single father with three children in tow. Although he was only deputy station chief, Kuala Lumpur was a larger station than Bucharest--with about a half-dozen case officers--and so his transfer there was a promotion.

In addition to helping manage the CIA station, Nicholson had lots to juggle in Malaysia; his children, his long-distance divorce and custody battle, and his relationship with a Thai girlfriend whom he hoped to marry. U.S. officials say there is no evidence that either his Thai girlfriend or his ex-wife were involved in his espionage.

By 1994, his divorce was finalized, and he was awarded custody of the children after a court-appointed guardian determined that his wife was so angry at her husband that her anger--and unhappiness--made the children angry and unhappy as well. When the children were with their mother, the guardian heard them echo Laura’s complaints about him, court documents say, including that he was “stiff-mannered” and had “mistresses.”

In Malaysia, Nicholson kept to himself; with his wife out of the picture his personal problems were no longer apparent. So in June 1994, when investigators say Nicholson walked into the Russian Embassy and accepted his first $12,000 payment, no one at the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur knew what was going on in his head.

Risen and Richter reported from Washington and Morain from Oregon. Times staff writer Josh Greenebrg in Washington contributed to this story.