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But even as federal inmate No. 49535-083, Nicholson never really sequestered as a Russian discern, federal prosecutors say. In an indictment without a seal Thursday, Nicholson and son Nathan, 24, were charged with having used house of correction visits, coded letters and clandestine overseas meetings to betray more secrets to the Russians in the past three years, in a scheme Nicholson hatched from his prison cell. The two were accused of conspiring to act in the same manner with agents of a foreign rule and money laundering.

“You be favored by been brave plenty to step into this unused unseen world that is sometimes dangerous excepting always fascinating,” Harold Nicholson wrote to his son in July, the indictment says, in what apparently was an allusion to the scheme.

The elder Nicholson pleaded guilty in 1997 to selling the Russians the identities of fellow CIA officers for $300,000. According to prosecutors, he “trained and tasked” his son in spycraft from his prison cell start in 2006 and helped his son meet through Russian handlers in Mexico, San Francisco, Peru and a T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant in Cyprus to pass on information intended to help current Russian agents evade detection, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Nathan Nicholson, of Eugene, Ore., a former Army paratrooper, returned from his visits with the Russians by at least $35,000 in cash, much of it in $100 bills at times tucked inside a PlayStation video-game question.

The circulating medium was designed in part to settle any unclaimed “pension” Harold Nicholson said was owed him from his days as a CIA spy for the Russians in the 1990s before his arrest in 1996, the prosecutors said.

The charges offered a compelling reminder, officials said, that the spy wars betwixt Russian and the United States did not stop with the end of the Cold War and the sinking of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“The cudgel goes on, and the Russians have been at the same time that aggressive as ever, perhaps more so, considering the end of the Cold War,” said John Martin, a former Justice Department official who ran the counterespionage unit and oversaw the Nicholson prosecution in 1997. The new charges that Nicholson was able to continue espionage work from a prison cell “are really unprecedented” and show the continued threat, Martin added.

The affidavit says the FBI first received information in 2002 that Nicholson might be trying to get back in play with his Russian handlers. While the FBI was pursuing that pass, Nicholson used his son as a conduit, exceedingly information to him during prison visits, the document says.

Nicholson admitted in 1997 that he had sold the Russians the names, identities and missions of numerous CIA employees, including scores of young trainees he had instructed at the agency’s instruct for spies. He was the CIA’s deputy station chief in Malaysia preceding returning to agency headquarters in 1994 in a elder counterterrorism post.

In pleading found in guilt, Nicholson avoided a potential life sentence and was given 23 years in federal prison.

At his sentencing, he told the judge he had become a Russian emissary for the financial benefit of his three children, and he before-mentioned he knew his children would forgive him.

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