The son of one of the highest-ranking CIA officers to betray his country dodged a prison sentence Tuesday after making a deal with prosecutors to help build their case against his father.
Nathan Nicholson apologized in court for his role in a scheme to get his father’s Russian handlers to pay the man he once idolized: Harold “Jim” Nicholson, who is serving 24 years at a federal prison in Oregon for his 1997 espionage conviction.
U.S. District Judge Anna Brown sentenced Nathan Nicholson to 5 years on probation and 100 hours of community service after agreeing with a joint recommendation by prosecutors and defense attorneys who said he was manipulated and groomed by his father.
“Once this defendant was confronted, he did not hesitate to accept responsibility,” Brown said in court.
Nathan Nicholson had already pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of a foreign government at his father’s bidding and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and Brown said his actions will remain with him for the rest of his life.
‘I want to be my own man’
The 26-year-old told The Associated Press and The Oregonian newspaper that he had idolized his father, but “after this, I want to be my own man now. I don’t want to live in someone’s shadow.”
In a case that unfolded like a fictional thriller, from 2006 to 2008 the 26-year-old former Army paratrooper traveled the world at his father’s bidding to meet with Russian agents — in San Francisco, Mexico City, Peru and Cyprus — to collect payments the father believed were long overdue.
His father trained Nathan in CIA tradecraft, advising him to hide money from the Russians in different places, to never deposit more than $500 in his bank account, and to pay for trips in cash to avoid a paper trail.
It began in the summer of 2006 when the incarcerated Harold Nicholson asked his son to help him contact the Russian government for “financial assistance,” a sort of pension for his past work. Nathan Nicholson, then 22, was a student at Lane Community College.
The younger Nicholson was excited about the prospect of doing clandestine work for his father, according to the sentencing memo.
Harold Nicholson told his son to go to the nearest Russian consulate to make initial contact, and over the next two years, the son met with Russian agents six times. Prosecutors say Russian agents agreed to meet with the younger Nicholson because they wanted to learn how the FBI caught his father and to obtain information about the CIA.
Nathan Nicholson was paid a total of about $47,000 by the Russians.
The imprisoned ex-spy encouraged his son by praising his work, saying “he had performed as well as, or better, than some of the CIA employees” he had trained for the agency, according to the sentencing memo.
But as he jetting around to his meetings with them, the FBI was already on to the father and the son. In February 2002, a “concerned citizen” told the FBI that Harold Nicholson may have tried to contact Russian agents through other inmates and an investigation was begun, leading to an indictment in January 2009.
Harold Nicholson pleaded guilty Nov. 8 to the same charges as his son. He faces sentencing Jan. 18.
Dad caught in 1996
Harold Nicholson had risen to CIA station chief before he was arrested in November 1996 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia with 10 rolls of film he had intended to hand over to Russian agents. Federal officials say that before his arrest, he had been trotting around the globe to hand off documents to the Russians and that he was paid for his work.
Nathan Nicholson said he was about 10 when he first learned his father worked for the CIA. At the time, Harold Nicholson was an instructor at a CIA training camp in Williamsburg, Va.
The family had moved around a lot, and Nathan said he rarely saw his father but soaked up his stories about Harold Nicholson’s own military career in the Army.
In their sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said the elder Nicholson had “significant emotional power” over the son, using his skills to “groom and manipulate him” while in prison.
Nathan Nicholson said he now wants to rebuild his life — a “very frugal” existence on VA benefits and financial aid at Oregon State University, where he’s studying computer science.
“I want to restore the honor that was lost,” he said.
The privacy wagon is back in town, and justifiably irate and alarmed souls are jumping aboard, in protest against Google’s spy car as the latest in a seemingly endless stream of high-tech transgressions. Understanding this takes some unpacking.
If you’re lucky, you might have encountered a Google spy car — used to eavesdrop on your Wi-Fi signals. Google uses a variety of makes and models (in some places even bicycles). The spy car spotter should look for a sinister and obvious protruding mast — usually sticking squarely from the roof — sporting goofy lenses and antennas. Those interested might want to browse the collection of unfortunate burglars and surprised dogs who have encountered the spy car on its appointed rounds.
Google’s spying on Wi-Fi, brought to light when Google admitted it, has it facing investigations both in the United States and overseas, including a new investigation by the US Federal Communications Commission launched this month. The fracas came about because Google’s aim was to count and identify Wi-Fi signals the way you might when you open a laptop in a new location and see a list of what networks are available. But Google didn’t stop at counting Wi-Fi networks. Instead it apparently tapped some of them, too, capturing what is called “payload data.” Not content with watching the signals go by, it saved them. It’s even had the guts to claim that it has accidentally been saving them (“Quite simply, it was a mistake,” Google says). But Google’s interest in your wireless signals is well-founded in its corporate strategy.
Open your smartphone and you may be pleased to find that its mapping application now fixes your location quite accurately. Just a short year or two ago the GPS signals used by these devices were painfully inaccurate — particularly in the canyons of cities where we tend to want them most. Then came the remarkable insight (from companies like Loki) that when people buy Wi-Fi access points at Radio Shack and install them in their houses, they don’t move them around very often, or turn them off. Each Wi-Fi access point, it turns out, has a unique number that it broadcasts continuously in something called a beacon. The beacon, aptly named, flashes out with the regularity of a lighthouse.
Google wants to trawl the streets for Wi-Fi signals because if it can find these beacons and organize them, then the next time you drive by that same beacon it can guess where you are: Your phone in a pinch may use the pattern of Wi-Fi beacons near you as its local aid to navigation. All this works only if, in advance, Google has provided a proper chart.
Domestic Wi-Fi networks are very common — 86% of all Americans have one (according to the Pew Internet American Life Project) — and so they constitute a basis for more effective location-based services, notably, marketing and advertising. Location-based services are ablaze as corporations in many industries seek to turn your smartphone into a sales device.
Back to privacy, which of course in this context merits vigilant attention. “Privacy,” however, is not an adequate intellectual container for what’s happening with Google’s spy cars and with ubiquitous tracking software which, as the Wall Street Journal revealed in an invaluable investigation, is placed on web-surfers’ computers routinely by such sites as Dictionary.com and…Google.
What’s happening as each of these pinprick invasions accumulate and ramify is actually the reconstruction of the greater political economy, into what Robins and Webster decades back called “cybernetic capitalism.” Instead of probabilistic forecasts about media use and buying habits, real-time data based on records of individual behavior are increasingly the foundation for feedback into the corporate economy. Where gaps and uncertainties exist new forms of surveillance and tracking are generated. Google spy cars are one such initiative.
The forms of power and social control that are being established aren’t captured by the idea that it’s merely about the invasion of individual privacy. Why then should the infringement-of-privacy theme demonstrably possess such power to galvanize political opposition and public concern?
One little-noticed factor may pertain to pornography — with which the Internet is awash. Although it is extremely difficult to measure, by some reports more than 1 in 3 Internet users are seeking adult content. These users may be particularly concerned about revealing their surfing habits.
Google is explicit that its mission is to organize all of the world’s information. But much of that information is being created, today, for the first time — and Google is a big part of that story. The surprise is that Google has been at least partly checked by accusations that it has been reading our email — since its business for some years has been reading our email. But behind this there are, we have suggested, deeper issues.
MANAMA (AFP) – A regional centre to fight Al-Qaeda must be created to help countries join ranks and eradicate the Islamist “danger” which threatens the world, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief said on Friday.
“The danger threatens all of us and the fight against terrorism necessitates international action,” Prince Turki al-Faisal said in Manama, which is hosting a major conference on Middle East security.
“We must relaunch the idea of (setting up) a regional centre to fight” against Al-Qaeda, Prince Turki said.
“There should be no obstacles between countries on the exchange of information” about Al-Qaeda, he added.
In 2005 Saudi Arabia first floated the idea of a regional centre based in the ultra-conservative kingdom, where Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was born, to pool international resources against the Islamists.
Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi, whose country is the ancestral homeland of Bin Laden, told Friday’s meeting the “struggle against Al-Qaeda failed in part because we don’t see this as a global issue.”
“Each one of us is concentrating on their own national security. We need a unified strategy,” Kurbi said.
For his part, British Defence Minister Liam Fox said that “transitional terrorism by definition has no borders.”
“We have to learn to act together,” Fox said.
The annual Manama Dialogue organised by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies draws prime ministers, defence ministers, military officials, intelligence chiefs and private sector heads from across the region and beyond.
LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) – Pakistani police have arrested five suspects linked to an attack on a spy agency building in Lahore last year which killed 24 people, the city’s police chief said.
“The suspects have confessed their role in the suicide attack on the intelligence agency building,” police chief Aslam Tareen told reporters, adding that the group had been planning more terror attacks.
“The five were arrested a couple of days ago from Shahdara,” a neighbourhood in Lahore, the country’s eastern hub, Tareen told a press conference.
“We are in a warlike situation and this war on terror has spread across Pakistan, but we are trying to do our best to maintain security,” he said. It would take time to complete the investigation, he added.
Police said the suspects belonged to the previously unknown Al-Toheed-wa-al-Jihad faction which falls under the umbrella Pakistani militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and had trained in North Waziristan.
“They were activating themselves and planning terrorist activities in Lahore,” Tareen said.
The group was also engaged in kidnapping for ransom, an investigator said.
“They kidnapped people for ransom in 2009 in Faisalabad and Sialkot,” senior police investigator Zulfiqar Hameed told the press conference.
“Their next target was some security forces buildings in Lahore,” he said.
“Police have recovered four suicide vests, one rifle, 32 hand grenade pins, 13 number plates of vehicles, eight mortar shells and ammunition.”
At least 24 people were killed, including 13 policemen, civilians and security officers, in the May 2009 suicide attack on an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) building.
A group calling itself “Tehreek-i-Taliban Punjab” claimed responsibility for the blast in a Turkish-language statement posted on jihadist websites.
Around 4,000 people have been killed in suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan since government forces raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in 2007. The attacks have been blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks.
The state intelligence agency and the military came under fire Thursday after it became known that they did not take due measures although the agency detected signs of a possible North Korean attack on the five border islands in the West Sea in August.
National Intelligence Service director Won Sei-hoon told a parliamentary intelligence committee Wednesday that the agency confirmed the possibility of a North Korean attack on the islands through wiretapping, according to lawmakers who attended the closed-door session.
Won, however, was quoted by the lawmakers as saying, “(The agency) did not expect the North to launch an attack on civilians as it has routinely shown menacing words and behaviors. The military authorities judged that the North could mount an attack just south of the maritime border.”
The lawmakers said the content of the wiretapping was that the North instructed its artillery units in the west coastal region to be ready for firing.
The Nov. 23 artillery shelling on Yeonpyeong Island near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto sea border which the North does not recognize and claims should be redrawn further south, killed four South Koreans including two civilians.
Public criticism has been rising as the military and the intelligence agency were not properly preparing troops on the islands even when the North has recently ramped up its level of provocations and belligerent verbal threats.
The North fired its coastal artillery shells in the West Sea in January, none of which fell in waters south of the NLL.
However, when the North fired its artillery rounds in August, some of them fell south of the NLL, hinting at the possibility that it could mount an attack on the civilian-inhabited islands.
The communist state has repeatedly warned of “physical retaliatory strikes” in a series of official statements, underscoring that their warnings were “by no means empty talks.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, which holds peacetime operational control, denied what the spy chief said.
“(The NIS) obtained the intelligence on North Korea instructing its coastal artillery unit to be prepared to fire back in response to our troops’ plan to stage a live-fire exercise in August,” said JCS spokesperson Col. Lee Bung-woo in a press briefing, denying that the North was preparing for an “attack on the five border islands.”
The Marine unit on Yeonpyeong Island conducted live-fire exercises with K9 self-propelled howitzers on Aug. 6 and Aug. 8.
The North fired around 110 coastal artillery shells on Aug. 9. About 10 of the shells landed south of the NLL.
Some critics also expressed concern that there might be problems with the spy agency’s analysis of the hard-earned intelligence, saying that the agency appears to have been “lax” in drawing conclusions based on its intelligence.
During Wednesday’s session at the National Assembly, Won also said that the satellite imagery showed that out of the 80 shells the South Korean military fired back, only 45 shells were confirmed to have fallen on North Korean land ? 15 shells in Mudo and 30 shells in Gaemeori.
After the artillery attack began, the South Korean military fired 50 rounds at Mudo and 30 rounds at Gaemeori.
Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a global intelligence company better known as STRATFOR, revealed a satellite imagery showing that many of the K9 shells fell on paddy fields in the North rather than on military facilities.
On the imagery posted on its website, 14 shells were seen to have landed in paddy fields in Gaemeori. It said that imagery was taken on Nov. 26 by the Digital Globe, a satellite picture firm.
This has called into question the capability of the indigenous K9 howitzer, which the military has touted for its strong firepower although some claimed that soldiers performed quite well with the howitzers without adequate intelligence gathering equipment in the emergency situation.
“We were briefed that the K9 howitzer could devastate objects within a radius of 50 meters, but (the satellite imagery) shows just little things were strewn along paddy fields. The NIS chief should scrutinize the case and report it to the president,” said Rep. Kim Moo-sung, floor leader of the ruling Grand National Party, during the party’s Supreme Council meeting.
“I was happy to hear that our military could fire back with K9 howitzers within five minutes of the North firing and was capable of devastating North Korean artillery positions … The public should know the current situation in the military and I hope this serves as an opportunity for military reform.”
During his opening remarks at the parliamentary session, Won said there is a high possibility of North Korea making additional provocations.
“The North is trying to neutralize the NLL and make the five border islands a disputed region. By ratcheting up tensions, the North is taking great pains to secure allegiance for Kim Jong-un (the heir apparent) and support from China,” Won said.
“There is a high possibility of more provocations and (the North) is seeking to divide public opinion (in the South).”
