The spy who fed CIA secrets to Russia – then betrayed the US again from prison
The handoff was quick and seamless, a coffee cup containing the DNA of a suspected Russian spy swapped for an identical one in a hallway exchange between a CIA operative and an FBI agent.
The move was textbook spycraft, but everything else about the scenario was extraordinary: The handoff went down within the bowels of CIA headquarters, and the suspected mole was one of the agency’s own – but so was the man tasked with catching him.
The target was Harold ‘Jim’ Nicholson, a charismatic career spy and devoted single dad who’d been working for the CIA for 16 years.
The CIA colleague who’d swiped the coffee cup from his desk was John Maguire, a former Baltimore cop who’d carved out a counterrorism niche within the spy agency.
Maguire had been recalled from overseas by CIA superiors – banished to HR as punishment, he’d thought, for rejecting a posting in Pakistan in autumn 1995 – before being called into a secret meeting at Langley, asked if he’d accept an unidentified job, then whisked to an off-site location.
There, in an FBI safe house in an unprecedented interagency spy-catching collaboration, he learned the details of the ask: Someone within the CIA was sneaking secrets to the Russians. Nicholson was the likely culprit. Maguire was to get Nicholson to hire him as his righthand man, spy on him from within his own department, then nail him with evidence so they could lock Nicholson up for treason.
By the summer of 1996, Maguire was working next to the suspected spy.
“There were times when I just wanted to stab him in the neck at.
