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.
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman has been blasting WikiLeaks over the past week and successfully pressured Amazon.com to kick the organization’s content off its servers.
Lieberman kept up the attack on Tuesday. During a Fox News interview, Lieberman claimed that WikiLeaks is responsible for the “most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history” and should be indicted in a U.S. court. But Lieberman then suggested that news organizations that published leaked material — originally obtained by WikiLeaks — may have also violated the Espionage Act.
“I’m not here to make a final judgment on that,” Lieberman said. “But to me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.” You can watch a clip of the Lieberman interview here, via Business Insider.
“We believe that our decision to publish was responsible journalism, legal, and important to a democratic society,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Cutline, noting that the paper’s editors addressed such issues in their note to readers that accompanied the WikiLeaks stories.
Lieberman and other politicians have been grabbing headlines lately for denouncing WikiLeaks and talking about throwing the site’s editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, in jail. But legal scholars are quick to point out the difficulty in actually shutting down the online organization or successfully trying Assange for espionage.
Lieberman isn’t the only senator talking about espionage. California’s Diane Feinstein similarly argued in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that Assange should be tried under the 1917 act.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald shot back at the Assange critics who are invoking the Espionage Act. Greenwald pointed out that “every line of pro-prosecution rationale cited by Feinstein applies equally to journalists … especially the newspapers from around the world which are publishing all of the same diplomatic cables as WikiLeaks is, and which are publishing them before WikiLeaks even does.”
There’s a common misconception in the coverage on WikiLeaks — that the organization simply dumped 250,000 State Dept. cables online. That’s not the case. WikiLeaks has published less than 1,000 cables, and Greenwald is correct in noting that news organizations actually vetted the cables and published them before WikiLeaks put them online.
For that reason, Greenwald asked, “how can it possibly be that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted for espionage, but not the New York Times, or the Guardian, or any other newspaper that publishes these cables?”
Assange also questioned Tuesday why his organization— rather than news organizations publishing the material — is the one dealing with the “most vicious attacks and accusations from the U.S. government and its acolytes.”
WikiLeaks, a shadowy organization operating primarily overseas, is an easy target for U.S. political leaders. But Lieberman and other senators talking up the Espionage Act may find it much tougher getting support to go after the Times, or any news organization that relies on leaked documents to inform the public.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation.” Others familiar with the probe said the FBI is examining everyone who came into possession of the documents, including those who gave the materials to WikiLeaks and also the organization itself. No charges are imminent, the sources said, and it is unclear whether any will be brought.
Former prosecutors cautioned that prosecutions involving leaked classified information are difficult because the Espionage Act is a 1917 statute that preceded Supreme Court cases that expanded First Amendment protections. The government also would have to persuade another country to turn over Assange, who is outside the United States.
But the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is rapidly unfolding, said charges could be filed under the act. The U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria – which in 2005 brought Espionage Act charges, now dropped, against two former pro-Israel lobbyists – is involved in the effort, the sources said.
The Pentagon is leading the investigation and it remains unclear whether any additional charges would be brought in the military or civilian justice systems. Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst suspected of being the source of the WikiLeaks documents, was arrested by the military this year.
Holder was asked Monday how the United States could prosecute Assange, who is an Australian citizen. “Let me be very clear,” he replied. “It is not saber rattling.
“To the extent there are gaps in our laws,” Holder continued, “we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say . . . that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that’s ongoing.” He did not indicate that Assange is being investigated for possible violations of the Espionage Act.
Although the Justice Department has taken the position that media organizations could be prosecuted for printing leaked classified information under the legislation, that prospect is unlikely because of official aversion to running afoul of the First Amendment, experts said. Indeed, the Justice Department has never brought such a case, they said.
“Whenever you’re talking about a media organization, the department is going to look very closely to ensure that any prosecution doesn’t undermine the valid First Amendment functioning of the press,” said Kenneth Wainstein, former assistant attorney general in the national security division.
But when it comes to Assange, Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel, said: “I’m confident that the Justice Department is figuring out how to prosecute him.”
Smith noted that State Department general counsel Harold H. Koh had sent a letter to Assange on Saturday urging him not to release the cables, to return all classified material and to destroy all classified records from WikiLeaks databases.
“That language is not only the right thing to do policy-wise but puts the government in a position to prosecute him,” Smith said. Under the Espionage Act, anyone who has “unauthorized possession to information relating to the national defense” and has reason to believe it could harm the United States may be prosecuted if he publishes it or “willfully” retains it when the government has demanded its return, Smith said.
If there is one thing wikileaks is actually guilty of is threatening all those intelligence jobs the world over – which is a pretty mean thing to do in a recession.
Yet that is a small price to pay for its potential to finally bury the cold war.
A spectre is haunting Europe— the spectre of Wikileaks. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope Obama and Tsar Putin, China and South Korea, liberals and police-spies.
Wikileaks has indeed become the new Communism – the first truly international phenomenon since Marx and Engels that has been able to successfully unite the world; not East vs West, North vs South, Left vs Right – but States vs People. In doing so, it has starkly revealed the previous divisions to be mere red herrings, not worth wasting one’s time with. All states, Wikileaks reveals, are as bad as each other, and all are more interested in preserving the status quo than serving their people (indeed, are willing to sacrifice their own people to preserve the status quo). Assange can make us all into anarchists.
And just as during the first Red Scare, one’s support of wikileaks has become a litmus test of responsible debate, separating the respectable liberals (the former ‘anti-communist left’) from the ‘lunatic fringe’.
In the old days of Blunt and Burgess, well-placed people who had serious qualms against their countries, societies or ‘the system’ at large had only one sure-fire recourse: provide their secrets to the ‘other side’ – the USSR.
Sure, some people who did this were committed Communists who supported the Soviet Union, but in general it was a very diverse bunch: persecuted gays, stifled bureaucrats, people with petty office grievances, people who were blackmailed and most importantly, people who through their positions had found out so much about the crimes and abuses committed by their government in their name, and usually with some degree of personal involvement (through their work in intelligence or defence) that their conscience compelled them to speak out, and often the only voice that was listening were the Russians.
The downside to this was that when they were unmasked, the dirty secrets these people had revealed about their own governments were overshadowed and invalidated by the fact that they had been ‘enemy spies’, even though few of them particularly cared for Russia, and were just driven into Soviet arms by their anger, powerlessness and sometimes, a misguided sense of civic duty.
Enter wikileaks. Now, those same people – the misfits, the disappointed zealots, the bitter and the dissidents – no longer have to compromise themselves through being used in the interests of a foreign country. They can upload the dirt onto a value -neutral platform. Those who yesterday would have been driven to espionage have instead become whistleblowers. And whistleblowers are always good guys. Why? Because no matter what their intentions or motivations, it’s what they blow the whistle on that counts.
That’s why most governments are now so busy trying to tarnish the messengers – to distract attention from the message itself – spelled out in black and white on screens worldwide.
The U.S. is under attack by an enemy within. Skilled at game
theory warfare, this foe targets the most sensitive realm of U.S. national
security: its relations with other nations.
The online publication of a quarter-million documents
chronicling diplomatic exchanges is notable both for whats omitted and whats
included. To determine whether this latest release was a form of espionage,
analysts need only examine how this treasure trove of trivia was peppered with
documents certain to damage U.S. relations.
To identify its origins, analysts must answer a key
question: Cui Bono? To whose benefit?
One clue: the release of degrading and insulting language
about Turkish leaders soon after they insisted in late October that the U.S. no
longer share Turkish intelligence with Tel Aviv.
That request from a valued ally marks a critical step in
isolating Israel by requiring that the U.S. shut down Israeli operations inside
its 16 intelligence agencies, the White House and the Intelligence Committees
in both the House and Senate. Tel Aviv was not pleased.
Turks remain outraged at the lack of accountability for the
execution-style killing by Israel Defense Forces of nine Turkish citizens
aboard a humanitarian ship that was boarded in international waters while
sailing to Gaza with provisions to relieve an Israeli siege.
Was this release a tit-for-tat, Tel Aviv style? Is WikiLeaks
the visible face of an Israeli disinformation campaign? Whose interests were
served by disrupting U.S.-Turkish relations?
Intent is determinative
A leak on this scale is only a leak if it is a random data
dump. If items were purposely included or excluded based on their intended
effect, its an intelligence operation. Former National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski points out how this release is seeded with information
that is surprisingly pointed.
Take for example the cables indicating that Chinese leaders
are inclined to cooperate with the U.S. in reunifying North and South Korea
under the leadership of the south. That information was guaranteed to embarrass
Chinas leaders, damage U.S. relations with Beijing and make reunification more
difficult.
From a game theory perspective, that damaging result was
fully foreseeable. With the U.S. economy teetering on a meltdown, the creation
of a rift with Americas largest trading partner was also an assault on the
economic strength required for the U.S. to sustain a viable defense.
Similarly, the pointed references to Arab leaders were
destined to weaken their political credibility at home while complicating
relations abroad. By exposing Arab displeasure with Iran, this operation also
sharpened the divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a source of ongoing
tensions and a key barrier to forming a viable government in Iraq.
The effect was certain to complicate U.S. disengagement and
raise Americas costs in both blood and treasure.
The cables involving Saudi leaders were released soon after
Washington agreed to allow Riyadh to purchase $60 billion in U.S. aircraft and
armaments over a multi-year period. Tel Aviv was not pleased.
By targeting the credibility of both Saudi Arabia and the
U.S., this operation targeted the two nations pressing hardest for an end to
Israels occupation of Palestine.
Transparency is the biggest
threat
Has Tel Aviv panicked? After more than six decades of
nonstop provocations while routinely portraying itself as the perennial victim,
has Israels storyline lost traction?
Zionism faces an existential threat though not from Iran or
those Tel Aviv portrays as Islamofascists. The threat lurks in the
fast-emerging transparency that confirms pro-Israelis as the source of the
intelligence that took the U.S. to war on false premises.
A critical mass of disinformation persuaded the U.S. to wage
war in pursuit of an agenda long sought by Zionist extremists.
Steve Rosen, a former employee of the Israel lobby, has
promised to testify on the lobbys routine receipt of classified U.S.
intelligence. Is this massive release of classified materials meant to make the
lobbys intelligence-gathering operation appear routine?
Whats included in the WikiLeaks release is pointed. Whats
excluded is even more so: the lack of facts chronicling the role that Israel
has long played in undermining U.S. interests.
Israel has escaped accountability for more than six decades.
Was the WikiLeaks release seeded to discredit the U.S. at this time-critical
juncture? The evidence suggests that what we see is not a data dump but a
disinformation operation.
Last week, Israeli resistance to a peace plan was front-page
news. This week the news is all about war with Iran. The Jerusalem Post immediately crowed that WikiLeaks vindicated
Israel by citing Arab leaders concerns about Iran.
These latest releases even enabled Tel Aviv to suggest that
if U.S. intelligence was flawed on a nuclear-armed North Korea, how can anyone
trust America to contain a nuclear Iran?
To whom should this release be attributed? Who benefitted?
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association —
How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. See www.criminalstate.com.
