CIA officials knew they had a mole in their midst—they just couldn’t prove it. The FBI was called in to gather evidence until they finally nabbed Harold James Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA agent to ever be convicted of espionage. It sounds like a scene ripped from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel, but for Marriott School alum John McClurg, it wasn’t fiction.
McClurg was part of the team that identified Nicholson and built the criminal case against him. Nicholson’s arrest was just one episode in McClurg’s career of catching criminals, terrorists, and spies, which has spanned decades, several government agencies, and two corporations. He was even voted one of America’s top twenty-five most influential security professionals and received a CSO Compass Award in 2008 for leadership in the field of corporate security.
While his career has taken on a special emphasis on cybercrime, McClurg’s foray into that specialization was accidental. One day McClurg heard his supervisor call for a volunteer who knew about eunuchs. Because McClurg had lived in Libya as a child, where eunuchs were not unheard of, he figured he knew as much about the topic as the next guy and raised his hand.
But upon opening the case file, he discovered the matter involved computer hackers and phone systems. Instead of eunuchs, he found multiple and frequent references to UNIX, a computer operating system.
“I suddenly found myself in the middle of a critical investigation and had to come up to speed quickly on both an unfamiliar operating system and an entirely new community,” McClurg recalls. “After working that case for almost three years, I was dubbed an expert by virtue of the fact that I’d weathered the experience.”
Having earned a master of organizational behavior from BYU in 1986 in addition to a BA in philosophy and a JD, McClurg has an education that may seem like an odd mix. However, he says his understanding of business, law, and the way people reason has proven an invaluable asset in his career.
“At the time I joined the FBI, it was focusing increasingly on economic espionage—the way in which the intellectual property of corporate America was being targeted and stolen away,” he says. “Understanding business was critical.”
McClurg currently serves as vice president of global security for Honeywell International in Morristown, New Jersey, and was previously vice president and director of global security at Lucent Technologies–Bell Laboratories. While at Bell Labs he developed a program to protect the company from threats by integrating security measures from both the electronic and physical worlds, using insights and skills he garnered during his decade-long FBI career.
“I started suggesting that companies converge their security strategies,” McClurg says, “but few companies had the skills to implement those strategies, so I was invited to Bell Labs to implement some of those strategies myself.”
In fact, McClurg says he has actually been involved in more counterespionage as a corporate security officer than he was at the FBI, where he investigated two separate instances of actual espionage. During his tenure in the private sector, he’s exceeded that number, including an instance at Bell Labs in which McClurg helped uncover two engineers who were stealing the source code of an important product.
When he’s not traveling the globe helping secure a corporation from some outside threat, McClurg likes to spend time relaxing at home with his wife, Jennifer, and their three children in Hampton, New Jersey. But even after all the excitement of his career, McClurg says he’s still figuring out what to do with the rest of his life.
“I tell my kids that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” he laughs, “but I trust that my old friend serendipity will present even more exciting opportunities.”
