The son of a career Air Force officer, Nicholson found it difficult to make friends, due to his innate shyness and the constant relocation of his father's change in duty station.
While attending Oregon State University, he met fellow student Laura Sue Cooper (born April 1, 1955) in a fencing class.
She later admitted she was a half-hippie who had some countercultural leanings and concerns against US involvement overseas, whereas he was taking Reserve Officers Training Corps classes in an attempt to go into his father's line of work.
Nicholson joined the CIA in October 1980, and entered a top-secret training program at Camp Peary, Virginia, and soon began to accept overseas postings and espionage assignments.
[4] At this point, Nicholson's personal family problems and his workaholic lifestyle raised red flags, and ensuring security concerns.
[3] Despite Nicholson's career success, his personal life had suffered, as his constant reassignments weighed heavily on his wife and three children, eventually leading to a difficult divorce and a custody battle.
The post may have appeared as a sort of promotion, as this was a larger station than Bucharest, and a position where he met with and targeted recruitment of Russian intelligence officers.
As his wife was no longer present, any personal turmoil was less apparent to his superiors, and he was free to continue his relationship with a Thai girlfriend, whom he wished to marry.
In July 1996, he was assigned as a branch chief in the Counterterrorism Center, Directorate of Operations, at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
On June 30, 1994, one day after his last reported meeting with the SVR officer, financial records showed that $12,000 (equivalent to $25,000 in 2023)[6] was wired into Nicholson's savings account at Selco Credit Union in Eugene, Oregon; the FBI was unable to trace this money to any legitimate source of income.
[4] Nicholson later admitted to providing the Russian intelligence service with national defense information, including photographic negatives, between June 1994 and his arrest on November 16, 1996.
The CIA examiner noted that Nicholson appeared to be trying to manipulate the test by taking deep breaths on the control questions, which he stopped after a verbal warning.
The FBI also retrieved mail sent from Nicholson to his handlers from local public mailboxes, where he signed postcards with code words under the alias "Nevil R.
The FBI conducted a search for Nevil R. Strachey through phone books in the District of Columbia and adjacent counties but found no listing.
One postcard was written "I will not be in your neighborhood as expected, still the work is beneficial, I know you will find it very attractive", which was likely code words telling the SVR he had recently been rejected from a chief of station position he had applied for, instead getting a management job at CIA headquarters.
[citation needed] That same month he was scheduled to travel to Europe on official CIA business to meet with European intelligence officers.
[8] Although his case received far less publicity than that of Aldrich Ames, and apparently caused less damage to US national security, Nicholson was said to be the highest ranking CIA official ever convicted of spying for a foreign power.
At the end of 2008, Nicholson's youngest son Nathaniel was arrested; prosecutors said Jim Nicholson had used his son to collect more than $47,000 from Russian officials in Mexico, Peru, and Cyprus for past spy work: between December 2006 and December 2008 Nathaniel had met with representatives of the Russian Federation six times, including twice at a consulate in San Francisco.
[5] Nicholson was transferred to the United States Penitentiary, Florence ADX, the federal supermax prison in Colorado, and was incarcerated there until his release on November 24, 2023.