A Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia.

• Author: Ball, Rhys
• Position: Book review

A SPY'S SON: The True Story of the Highest Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia

Author: Bryan Denson

Published by: Scribe Publications, London, 2015, 368pp, $32.99.

The same things that motivate an individual to spy for their country can be the very things that motivate them to betray the same. Recruitment and running of intelligence agents versus counter-intelligence and the discovery of spies in our midst has fascinated, and repulsed, those both within and without the business for centuries. They present extremes--often the ultimate acts of bravery or treachery depending on, once again, from whichever viewpoint one sits.

In mid-1994, only two months after CIA counter-intelligence officer Aldrich Ames was sentenced to life in prison for betraying many of the most closely guarded secrets of US intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, another CIA operations officer, Harold James ('Jim') Nicholson, was offering his services to the recently emerged Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR): the newly renamed First Chief Directorate of the KGB.

A very good case officer, Nicholson had had a number of overseas postings and deployments during his career with the CIA. Much of his case work, as explained in the book, was focused on transnational threat issues, including counter-terrorism and organised crime, but one of his more recent postings at home was as a senior instructor at the CIA's training facility in Virginia--colloquially known as 'The Farm.' It was here that Nicholson would be responsible for training the next generation of CIA case officers; he would know those who would be posted overseas in diplomatic roles, and he would know those being considered for 'non-official cover' (or NOC) roles. Nicholson would have, of course, known the Ames story and surmised that the Russians might 'be in the market for another highly placed mole inside the CIA'. He might not have direct access to the 'crown jewels' in espionage parlance--how the Americans might have penetrated Russian intelligence--in the way that Ames and FBI mole Robert Hanssen would, but he would have the next best thing: the names of the next crop of American spies lining up to participate in 'the Great Game'.

Fifteen years after Ames's conviction, author Bryan Denson, an investigative reporter with the Oregonian, first came across Nicholson as he was about to be charged with espionage crimes for the second time...