Word: nicholson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...agency insists that Nicholson's arrest is a vindication of safeguards put into place after Ames had evaded detection for so long. For years the CIA ignored signs that Ames was on the Soviet payroll. Now any personal troubles or financial windfalls are noted in an officer's file as "anomalies." Those can cluster into an incriminating "matrix" that might lead to a full investigation. "At any given time we have literally dozens and dozens of cases at every agency that raise questions," says FBI Director Louis Freeh. "Sometimes it's just a polygraph, and sometimes someone has plunked down...
Officials say the new procedures alerted them to potential trouble with Nicholson months before the full criminal investigation began in January. But for most of his career, Nicholson had few of the markers that are supposed to identify a soft spot in the ranks. He lived moderately and got first-rate performance evaluations. He was congenial but, as a good spy should be, inconspicuous, "kind of a gray figure," one CIA senior official recalls...
...Force brat, Nicholson moved constantly as a kid. Friends remember him as conventional, ambitious and, in a time of student rebellion, deeply patriotic. At Oregon State University, he earned a degree in geography and learned how to interpret satellite reconnaissance data. At graduation, he married and went straight into the army. With his wife Laura, he resumed the life of perpetual motion he had always known, moving frequently among military bases while he served as a cryptologist and rose to the rank of captain...
...Nicholson joined the CIA. After almost two years of training, he was posted to Manila, then Bangkok and Tokyo, stations where young agents generally played the complicated game of recruiting spies from among the Soviet and East bloc officials. Some of them were intelligence officers themselves, who attempted in return to recruit the Americans. Within 10 years, fast progress by agency standards, he had landed a station chief's job in Bucharest, Romania...
...Malaysia, where Nicholson arrived in 1992, he was what the CIA calls a declared asset, meaning the U.S. informed the Malaysian government, though no one else, that he was a spy. In the expatriate community, he made little impression except as a genial neighbor and a leader of the Eagle Scout troop that included son Jeremiah. During Nicholson's two years in Kuala Lumpur, one of the main jobs for American intelligence agents was tracking leads in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. The suspected mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Yousef, had passed through...