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mid 1960s, who was caught in a sting operation by the FBI and sentenced to 18 years in a federal
prison. Ronald Pelton, an NSA analyst, was recruited after he retired from the NSA. After he
was betrayed by a KGB double agent in 1985, was sentenced to life imprisonment, Finally, there
was David Sheldon Boone, a NSA code clerk, who between 1988 and 1992, provided the KGB
with NSA documents in return for $60,000. Boone, sentenced to 24 years in prison, was the last
known KGB recruitment of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, Russian Intelligence Service officers operated mainly under the cover of
the embassies, consulates, United Nations delegations and other diplomatic missions of the Soviet
Union. As “diplomats,” they were protected from arrest by the terms of the 1961 Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Their diplomatic cover greatly limited, however, their
universe for finding potential recruits outside of their universe of international meetings,
diplomatic receptions, UN organizations, scientific conferences and cultural exchanges. They
therefore tended to recruit their counterparts in adversary services.

In this regard, the successful entrapment of Harold Nicholson in the 1990s is highly instructive.
From his impressive record, he seemed an unlikely candidate for recruitment. He had been a super-
patriotic American who had served as a captain in Army intelligence before joining the CIA in
1980. In the CIA, he had an unblemished record as a career officer, serving as a station chief in
Eastern Europe and then the deputy chief of operation in Malaysia in 1992. Even though his
career was on the rise and he was a dedicated anti-Communist, he became a target for SVR when
he was assigned to the CIA’s elite Russian division. Since the job of this division was to recruit
Russian officials working abroad as diplomats, engineers and military officers, its operations
brought its officers in close contact with SVR officers. Nicholson therefore was required to meet
with Russian intelligence officers in Manila, Bucharest, Tokyo and Bangkok and “dangle” himself
to the SVR by pretending disloyalty to the CIA. As part of these deception operations, he
supplied the Russians with tidbits of CIA secrets, or “chickenfeed,” that had been approved by his
superiors at the CIA. What his CIA superiors did not fully take into account in this spy versus
spy game was the SVR’s ability to manipulate, compromise, and convert a “dangle” to its own
ends. As it turned out, Russian intelligence had been assembling a psychological profile on
Nicholson since the late 1980s, and found vulnerability: his resentment at the failure of his
superiors to recognize his achievements in intelligence. It played on this vulnerability to
compromise him and then converted him to becoming its mole inside the CIA. He worked for the
SVR first in Asia then at the CIA headquarters at Langley, where he was given a management
position. Among other secret documents, he provided the SVR with the identities of CIA officers
sent to the CIA’s special training school at Fort Peary, Virginia, which opened up the door for the
SVR to make other potential recruitments. Meanwhile, it paid him $300,000 before he was finally
arrested by the FBI in November 1996. (After his conviction for espionage, he was sentenced to
23 years in Federal prison.) The CIA post mortem on Nicholson, who was the highest-ranking
CIA officer ever recruited (as far as is known), made clear that even a loyal American, with no
intention of betraying the United States, could be entrapped in the spy game.

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