Harold James Nicholson
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Harold James Nicholson was a senior CIA officer at the Counterterrorism Center during John Kiriakou's tenure there, and subsequently station chief in Singapore. He is the third major modern CIA mole for Russian intelligence, after Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

Volunteered to the KGB

Kiriakou gives the motive in two layers. The first is grievance: Nicholson "had been passed over for promotion and was angry. He believed that he wasn't appreciated." The second is a piece of reasoning he calls foolish, that with the KGB's mole caught, Moscow would now be hunting for a replacement. So Nicholson "flew overseas, walked into the Russian embassy, said, 'I'm a senior CIA officer and I want to work for the KGB.'"

Told at greater length elsewhere, drawing on Nicholson's own statements at trial: "When Ames got arrested, he thought, 'Hey, the KGB probably needs another mole. I'm going to volunteer.' He was the station chief in Singapore. And so he just found the KGB station chief and said, 'Hey, listen. You want to recruit me? I want this much money and I want, you know, X, Y, and Z and diamonds.'" He did it strictly for the money, divorced multiple times, paying significant alimony.

Before he was caught, Nicholson had identified and burned to the Russians hundreds of CIA officers operating undercover, all of whom had to be permanently withdrawn from Russia. He was sentenced to 31 years and seven months. Kiriakou has since put a number on it, and placed himself inside it: "he outed more than 200 CIA officers, including me."

The from-prison son operation

What distinguished Nicholson's case from Ames's and Hanssen's was what he did inside prison. Per Kiriakou: "He calls his even stupider son and says, 'Listen, here's this number. I want you to call this number. This is the KGB. And tell them that I'm going to give you information and you're going to give it to them and I want them to put it into a secret account so when I get out of prison I can still be rich.' And of course the kid just walks right up to the Russian embassy in Washington and the FBI grabs him."

Kiriakou's gloss: "How can they be so naive? Being a CIA officer, you spent 20 years in the CIA and you're that stupid? You deserve to get caught just for stupidity."

See also

- Robert Hanssen, the FBI mole prosecuted contemporaneously
- Eric O'Neill, the FBI analyst who posed as Hanssen's assistant
- Brian Kelley
- John Kiriakou
