Word: nicholson
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Nonetheless, the 31-page FBI affidavit and subsequent indictment detail a series of sizable but unexplained payments to Nicholson's various bank accounts, $180,000 in all. That money, more than double his $73,000 salary, started to arrive just as Nicholson's financial circumstances were getting tighter. During the years he was posted abroad with diplomatic cover, a large house, car and private schools for his three children went with the job. When he was moved back to the U.S. in 1994, the expatriate good life disappeared. That same year he divorced his wife and won custody...
...Nicholson was paid $180,000, that would still be far less than the $2.5 million that Moscow sent to Ames over the years. But Nicholson may have been at the start of a beautiful friendship with the Russians. With one more promotion at work he would have had access to the kind of top-level agency secrets that Moscow lost when Ames went down. "I think this fellow was on the way to becoming a big spy for the Russians," says a senior CIA official. "He could have done us serious damage...
...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...