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The Russians Are Coming | 225

Union. As "diplomats," they were protected from arrest by the terms of the 1961 Treaty of Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Their diplomatic cover, however, greatly limited their field for finding potential recruits outside 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 operations in Malaysia in 1992. Even though his career was on the rise and he was a dedicated anti-Communist, he became a target for the SVR when he was assigned to the CIA's elite Russian division. Because 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 feigning disloyalty to the CIA.

As part of these deception operations, Nicholson 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. The Russians played on this vulnerability to compromise him and then converted him to becoming its mole inside the CIA.

Nicholson worked for the SVR first in Asia; then he was given a management position at CIA headquarters, which is located in Langley, Virginia. Among other secret documents, he provided the SVR

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