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226 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

with the identities of CIA officers sent to the CIA’s special training
school at Fort Peary, Virginia, which opened 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 twenty-three years
in federal prison.) The CIA postmortem 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.

When it comes to recruiting moles in a larger universe, intelli-
gence services operate much like highly specialized corporate “head-
hunters,” as James Jesus Angleton described the process to me during
the Cold War era. He was referring to the similar approach that cor-
porate human resource divisions had with espionage agencies. Both
headhunt by searching through a database of candidates for possible
recruits to fill specific positions. Both types of organizations have
researchers at their disposal to draw up rosters of potential recruits.
Both sort through available databases to determine which of the
names on the list have attributes that might qualify or disqualify
them for a recruitment pitch. Both also collect personal data on each
qualified candidate, including any indication of his or her ideological
leaning, political affiliations, financial standing, ambitions, and vani-
ties, to help them make a tempting offer.

But there are two important differences. First, unlike their coun-
terparts in the private sector, espionage headhunters ask their
candidates not only to take on a new job but also to keep their
employment secret from their present employer. Second, they ask
them to surreptitiously steal documents from him. Because they are
asking candidates to break the law, espionage services, unlike their
corporate counterparts in headhunting, obviously need to initially
hide from the candidates the dangerous nature of the work they will
do. Depending on the targeted recruit, they might disguise the task
as a heroic act, such as righting an injustice, exposing an illegal gov-
ernment activity, or countering a regime of tyranny. This disguise is
called in the parlance of the trade a false flag, as mentioned earlier.
By using such a false flag, the SVR did not need to find a candi-
date who was sympathetic to Russia or the Putin regime. In its long

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