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Episode 1: A Wilderness of Mirrors Transcript
[Cue: “... communism and our own way of life … Silicon Valley … a classic example of take a chance … you’ve got nothing to lose …”]
[Cue, anchor: “Temperatures today way above 100 degrees inland, and even around the bay we’ve been into the 80s and 90s, downtown it’s still 85, it’s still 92 degrees in Oakland.”]
San Francisco’s infamous for its chilly, fog-whipped…
(00.30)
…summers. But on Friday, September 1st, 2017, the city was broiling.
And something really strange was happening at Russia's San Francisco consulate.
[Archival: “Chopper 5 over the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, check this out, black smoke pouring from the chimney …”
Anchor: “Well Ken, this is a significant moment … there has been a Russian diplomatic presence in San Francisco since the 1850’s…”]
The building was hard to miss.…
(01.00)
…It was perched atop a hill in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods. The location provided dizzying views of the Golden Gate Bridge and city.
I hopped in my car and drove toward the consulate, hoping to glimpse whatever was going on. As I got closer to the smoke, it became clear this wasn’t some poorly timed fireside soiree. Inside the consulate, these diplomats were, in all likelihood…
(01.30)
…setting scores of sensitive documents ablaze.
The day before… the Trump administration gave the Russians an expulsion notice. The gist was: “You have 48 hours to vacate the premises, and leave the country.”
[CUE, ANCHOR: “...The White House also sending a message to Russia: President Trump expelling 60 Russian diplomats from the US…”]
The Russians were in a frenzy. This…
(02.00)
…wasn’t merely some high-level diplomatic spat. You see… the officials inside the consulate had a problem:
They were in possession of troves of secret documents. If U.S. counterspies got their hands on these materials, it could spell disaster for Moscow’s spy operations in Silicon Valley.
Once the Russians left… U.S. officials would scour the facility for any clues about their local intelligence-gathering.
And Moscow’s spies…
(02.30)
…were not about to make that easy.
U.S. counterspies probably didn’t know precisely what secrets were hidden in the building. But they did know that Moscow had been using it as a locus of espionage for a very long time.
So long, in fact, that its decades-long history coincided with the advent of Silicon Valley itself.
My name is Zach Dorfman. I’m an intelligence and national…
(03.00)
…security journalist.
For years, I’ve covered the shadowy world of espionage, national security, and technology. After about a decade away from the Bay Area, I moved back to San Francisco, smack in the middle of its latest Gold Rush.
ARCHIVAL: “This is the new iPod nano … Welcome everyone to the Model 3 unveil … I believe the individual is the answer…”]
I looked around me and saw power. And where power flourishes, politicians, business executives…
(03.30) …and inevitably, spies—trail in its wake.
I started digging into the secret history of espionage in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And I began to unearth just how intensely foreign spies have targeted this place.
[ARCHIVAL: The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: “They're there because of the nearby area known as Silicon Valley… where more than 1,500 high technology companies are located, companies that use a lot of silicon making microcomputer chips—thus the name "Silicon Valley"— but more importantly, companies working…
(04.00)
…on technological secrets the Soviet Union wants…"]
See, the Russians—and Chinese, and Iranians, and even America’s allies—long ago realized that Silicon Valley is a rich quarry for spying.
The world of tomorrow is constantly being built here.
So when the Russian Consulate shut its doors in 2017, I knew there was a story there. But I never could have guessed just how…
(04.30)
…deep foreign spying efforts in the Bay Area went.
This world of counterintelligence was one of long shadows… where little was as it seemed.
Szady: It truly is a wilderness of mirrors. Where the reflections dazzle and confuse us. Truth are lies and lies are truth and defectors are false. So. It's a game of deception. It's a game of half truths. It's a game of creating realities that aren't real…
(05.00)
…and getting people to believe it. I use the word game, but I don't use that lightly. People's lives are in your hands.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about this history: how it had evolved, in secret, over the decades.
So I spent years tracking down many of the retired Bay Area FBI agents who led spyhunting efforts here during the cold war.
And I can tell you—they weren’t always easy to find…
(05.30)
…
They were the link between past and present, between the birth of modern Silicon Valley and its colossal presence on the world stage today. They also witnessed, firsthand, the rise and fall of the Soviet espionage threat, and the new Russian spy apparatus that took its place.
Rick Smith: You've spoken to our whole squad for Christ sake. Don Ulrich: It was the wild west then. Larae Quy: It's so dangerous. It’s so dangerous for them to work in place.
Milt Bearden: You would really love to be spying against America…
(06.00)
…because it's so freaking easy.
As I started reporting on the espionage scene in Silicon Valley, I saw just how far back these stories went.
This trendsetting wasn’t a recent phenomenon, tied to the newest dot com boom. Silicon Valley had always been a backdrop for geopolitical subterfuge. It was an espionage innovator.
To understand spying everywhere, you need to understand spying here…
(06.30)
…From Project Brazen and P-R-X… This is Spy Valley: An Engineer's Nuclear Betrayal.
Episode 1: A Wilderness of Mirrors
One spring morning, I hopped in my car and started driving north on the 101 out of San Francisco.
I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the sea shimmering to my left, sailboats speckling the Bay to my right…
(07.00)
…I was headed for Novato, a leafy suburb 45 minutes north of the city. When I arrived, I pulled into a parking lot near a local coffee shop.
I was there to catch up with Bill Kinane.
Kinane: San Francisco was not an office they sent new agents to, these guys had been FBI agents and other officers …
The Brooklyn-born Kinane spent decades as a top FBI spyhunter in San Francisco.
I’d gotten…
(07.30)
…to know him over the years from my reporting, and I always looked forward to our conversations. Kinane had tons of knowledge about cold war spying and its evolution in San Francisco. But there was always one case he’d return to in our discussions–about an American spy in Silicon Valley–a case that would eventually burst into headlines worldwide.
But Kinane said the full story had never been told. By the early 1980s, Kinane had been chasing spies… (08.00) … in the City by the Bay for a decade. He ran the FBI’s East Bloc squad–which focused on Moscow’s Eastern European proxies. Back then, the KGB effectively controlled the spy services of its cold war-era, Warsaw Pact allies. So Kinane and his team were busy tracking Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, East German, and other communist operatives. One day, Kinane received some highly-classified intelligence over official… (08.30) …Bureau channels. And when he realized where the information came from he did a double-take. Bill Kinane: I personally knew the source. I remembered the code name and everything. It was a shocking coincidence.
Kinane’s mind wandered east–to Chicago, where he had spent a few years as a young FBI agent before San Francisco.
Bill Kinane: It was around somewhere between 68 and 72.
There were some veteran…
(09.00)
…spy hunters on Bill’s squad who specialized in Polish espionage. Warsaw had a consulate there because of Chicago’s huge Polish population.
Poland used its outpost as a spy base–often acting on orders from the KGB. Though U.S. spy hunters tracked them closely, Moscow’s East Bloc allies–like Poland–could maneuver around America with less heat than the KGB. But these proxy services could also… (09.30) …be a double edged-sword for the Soviets. Bill Kinane: The KGB controlled a lot of these intelligence services, but they were easier targets for us, because most of these guys… really, they weren't Russians, let's put it that way … they were easier to talk to and recruit than a Russian. These Eastern European countries often had more connections to the West. Discontent with communism… (10.00) …and resentment over Moscow’s boot–would sometimes worm its way into their spy services. So there was good hunting for the FBI. And during Kinane’s time in Chicago, his colleagues identified one man in particular.
Bill Kinane: He was a Polish intelligence officer assigned to the Polish consulate in Chicago. He was a bald and bespectacled man, an engineer by training. He worked undercover in Chicago as a diplomat. But he was really a… (10.30) …spy, employed by Poland’s version of the KGB. The FBI believed this man was amenable to switching sides. And they were right. The Polish operative eventually agreed to become an “agent in place.” That is–a secret mole for U.S. intelligence within the Polish spy service.
Bill Kinane: The source was recruited in Chicago by the FBI there. Eventually, as diplomats do, the agent moved on to his… (11.00) …next assignment in Europe and the CIA took over his case.
Bill Kinane: He was transferred outta Chicago back to somewhere in Europe. Kinane told me the FBI codenamed him, “Caribou.” And now, sitting at his FBI office in San Francisco a decade later, Kinane was staring at a top-secret report that revealed a major problem in his backyard. The report was based on information provided… (11.30) …by Caribou, who was still working as a Polish intelligence officer and a US mole. And what Caribou told his CIA handlers must have chilled spines from Washington to San Francisco. According to Caribou… the Polish intelligence services had an American spy in Silicon Valley. A nuclear spy. And he was providing the Poles–and by extension, Moscow–with critical information on the U.S.’s… (12.00) …nuclear arsenal.
[ARCHIVAL Reagan: We maintain our peace through our strength…
Anchor: “... and most dramatic showdown between precision-guided missiles …”
Movie: “... they’re on their way to Russia…”] It was unnerving news, to say the least. And for many of the FBI’s San Francisco-based spyhunters, it would become the case of a lifetime. We’ll be back after the break… (12.30) …[BREAK] We’re back. The early 1980s were a thrilling time here. Silicon Valley had begun its explosive ascent.
ARCHIVAL: KQED: “The Silicon Valley … the center of this country's growing micro-electronics industry. A technological revolution hit the valley in the early seventies and most of us have benefited in some way…” It was also the height of the cold war, when competition between the world’s two nuclear superpowers dominated… (13.00) …the politics of the day. By chance, or by fate, the birth of the contemporary tech industry converged with another boom: The advent of the modern spy-versus-spy era in the Bay Area.
[Cue, anchor: “The Soviet Union, marking the warming American / Russian friendship … today officially opened its first consulate in the United States in 25 years.”]
In 1973, the Soviets opened their new diplomatic post atop that hill in Pacific Heights.
For the tech whizzes in…
(13.30)
…their start-ups down the peninsula; and the Soviets, in their lofty spy base in the city, the future seemed boundless.
The opening of the consulate was celebrated. Proponents applauded this new era of diplomacy over Cold War brinkmanship. But some took a dimmer view. They knew that a new era of Soviet spying in the Bay Area was just beginning.
David Major: One of the most significant places, and some of the best counterintelligence done in the FBI, was done in the West Coast...
(14.00)
…It was done particularly in San Francisco. There's a reason for that.
That’s David Major. He was a senior Bureau counterintelligence agent during the cold war.
David Major: Because the agents that we sent out there, and we sent them out because all of a sudden the Russians opened up a consulate.
Major was based in Washington, D.C. but kept a close eye on Silicon Valley.
As the number of Russian intelligence operatives under diplomatic cover increased, so did the cadre of FBI spy hunters.
David Major: And one of the smart things the Bureau did…
(14.30)
…they decided they were gonna send some of its stars. People that had been in New York, working really good cases in counterintelligence.
People like… Bill Kinane:
Bill Kinane: Literally half the people in the consulate in San Francisco had some intelligence duty.
And Rick Smith.
Rick Smith: It was an intensive assignment and we were able to put a lot of pressure on them. Obviously the whole purpose is to find out what they're doing and to neutralize what they're doing. Because they were so aggressive…
(15.00)
…The FBI’s San Francisco-based spyhunters were an unusually tight-knit bunch.
Bill Kinane: We became a good team, we stayed together for many years. You know, some guys retired off that, you know, 20, 25 years.
Zach: Is that very common?
Kinane: No.
Kinane is the absent-minded professor of the group. A natural born storyteller, quick to laugh.
Rick Smith: That’s something for Kinane … I'll say it publicly... (15.30) …He knows, I love him. I talk to him three times a week. If it happened yesterday, forget it. He's not gonna remember what happened, but if it happened 30 or 40 years ago, he's gonna remember specifics of what happened. He’s gonna remember exactly what happened. Rick Smith is sharp and affable, with a no B.S. demeanor. You can see how the two men became close friends.
Rick Smith: It was like a fraternity. We were all dedicated to what we were doing. A lot of us were former military. Kinane and Smith were buttoned-up guys with… (16.00) …traditional backgrounds. And they arrived in Northern California in an era that was anything but… San Francisco was a bastion of left-wing counterculture and radicalism. [CUE, anchor: “The aggressive determination of hippies to start a new society has made its mark upon San Francisco's Haight Ashbury … The peace movement’s gotta go into the streets and it’s gotta use the tactic of disruption…”]... (16.30) …And that’s the world in which Smith and Kinane operated. Their work in San Francisco related to the larger, secret conflict playing out between the Soviet Union and United States all over the globe.
Rick Smith: There was always a challenge in it because of what the Russians were trying to do. I mean, they were trying to steal our technology, steal our secrets and ... they'd devise all sorts of means to do it…
(17.00) …Suspected KGB intelligence officers in the United States were watched closely by their FBI counterparts. That meant it was often easier for Moscow’s Warsaw Pact allies–like the Poles–to recruit American agents to steal U.S. secrets. So when Bill Kinane read that classified report in the FBI’s San Francisco office… alarm bells start ringing in his head. Caribou, the US’s secret mole in the Polish intelligence services, said there was… (17.30) …precisely this sort of spy running around Silicon Valley. And Caribou picked up this priceless bit of intelligence – incredibly enough, at a party at his agency’s headquarters in Warsaw.
Bill Kinane: And when he met his CIA handlers, he told them the story about going to this cocktail party. And one of his colleagues received a medal…
Zach: Psychodizan?
Kinane: Psyzchodizan, yeah… (18.00) …That’s Zdzslaw Psyzchodizan, a senior official within the Polish intelligence service. A short, serious man in his mid-40s, Psyzchodizan spoke English and Russian, and had spent time as an undercover Polish spy in New York. Caribou worked with him in Warsaw. And clearly, he was doing his job well. Well enough to receive some pretty big plaudits.
Bill Kinane: He checked in at ... headquarters… (18.30) …and the guy said, ‘Hey, you ought to stay around … we’re having a party tonight for bigwig Psyzchodizan, kay? There’s a group from Moscow’s here, giving him a medal’. So, he went to the party and the only thing he learned is that Psyzchodizan had a source, somebody from the defense industry in California was cooperating with the Poles. Don Ulrich: Psyzchodizan was… (19.00) …identified, by name, if I recall…
Zach: Yes, by the source, yes. That’s Don Ulrich, a longtime San Francisco-based FBI counterintelligence agent. Ulrich worked closely with Kinane on the East Bloc squad.
Ulrich: ... I think that was an early, an early report by Caribou. That medal Psyzchodizan received? Caribou told his CIA handlers that it was from the head of the KGB himself. He got it for the extremely… (19.30) …valuable intelligence that his source–this mysterious person in California – was providing.
Bill Kinane: There might have been some information as to rockets.
Bill Kinane: They were the newest American missiles … Minuteman missiles.
THE DAY AFTER: “What’s going on? Those are Minuteman Missiles … they take about 30 minutes to reach their target.”
ARCHIVAL: KTCA: The latest in the minute men's series is this, the Minuteman III …
NAFB: If you were to see one or a hundred of them leap from their underground hiding places, up… (20.00) …through these Amber Fields of grain, then they would not have performed their true role, and we would've failed to keep the peace. Minuteman are intercontinental ballistic missiles. They’re armed with nuclear warheads and capable of striking targets across the globe. To this day, they are a key part of America’s nuclear arsenal.
Bill Kinane: The Russians were getting how they were made, and exactly what they could do. And I mean, the Russians were getting… (20.30) … everything about them because there were thousands of pages of documentation.
Bill Kinane: Everything that the . . . Polish intelligence officer sent back to the headquarters would be reviewed by somebody from the KGB. According to Caribou, Warsaw’s spies were getting reams of documents on these American missiles. It was a huge intelligence coup. In fact, Caribou reported that a team of 20 KGB specialists flew in from Moscow to pore over them… (21.00) …Caribou recalled that the stolen papers were in rough shape – it looked like they had been waterlogged, and then dried out. Keep that detail in the back of your head – it’s important. Caribou said the KGB operatives in Warsaw were elated. They had been scouring the globe for this sort of missile information. And now, they had it. So the KGB agreed to pay the American spy for these documents–and more… (21.30) …Though the source would be working with the Poles, the money for the operation would be coming straight from Moscow. This intelligence from Caribou exploded like a bomb among San Francisco’s FBI spy hunters. Don Ulrich again.
Don Ulrich: Everybody knew it was a big case. Everybody knew that. I mean, immediately.
Zach: Yeah.
Ulrich: That was only heightened as more and more information came out. The FBI knew that… (22.00) …someone was passing nuclear weapons information to the Poles. They knew this person had some connection to Zdzslaw Psyzchodizan, the Polish intelligence officer feted by the KGB chief. They knew that this spy demanded a million dollars for the stolen secrets. And they knew the spy was an American in Silicon Valley. So San Francisco's FBI spy hunters would have to launch a major manhunt… (22.30) …I wrapped up my coffee with Bill Kinane. As I drove south, back toward the city, I couldn’t get this story out of my head. The tale of Caribou – and the Silicon Valley, Soviet Bloc spy he had helped expose. I wanted to know everything about this case. But I needed to see if anyone else would actually talk to me about it. Other retired FBI agents… (23.00) …CIA officers. Federal Prosecutors. But, above all, the American spy at the center of it. I knew his name from decades-old news reports, when the story broke. And I learned that he had recently been paroled. So… I tried to track him down. I spent countless hours trying to find his phone number, last known residence, signs of life–anything. You see… when you’ve spent decades in prison, you don’t have much of a… (23.30) …digital trail. I thought I found the right address for this former spy – but I didn’t want to scare him off. So I wrote the man a letter. A real letter … through the post office. Then I waited. Reporting is like that: you send up flares, expecting that many will never be answered. And then, one day. I got a voicemail.
James Harper: Uh yeah… (24.00) …hi, Zach, this is Harper. I received your letter a couple days ago, and I thought I’d have a chat with you. I’m having a little trouble making up my mind about how we might work together so I thought that maybe a conversation with you over the phone might be helpful in that regard. Talk with you later, perhaps. And we did talk. At first, this former spy wasn’t particularly… (24.30) …enthusiastic to chat about his time as a Soviet Bloc intelligence agent… as a traitor to his country. He was more comfortable reminiscing about his childhood in California, and the early Silicon Valley hi-tech scene, of which he was a part. But soon enough, over many long and vivid phone calls, the rest came pouring out. And that’s how I learned, from his own words, the story of James Durward Harper, one of… (25.00) …America’s most notorious cold war nuclear spies.
Harper: And I’d sit down at my dining room table with a telephone and a pencil and paper … and go to work. If I needed some information, I’d call somebody and get it somehow. That’s this season on Spy Valley … An Engineer’s Nuclear Betrayal –
Spy Valley is a production of Project Brazen…
(25.30)
…in partnership with PRX.
It's hosted, written and reported by me, Zach Dorfman.
Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, are the Executive Producers. The show is produced by Goat Rodeo. To find more of Goat Rodeo’s work go to goatrodeodc.com The lead producer is Jay Venables. Story editing from Siddhartha Mahanta, Jay Venables, and Max Johnston. Executive Producers at Goat Rodeo are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright. Creative Producers… (26.00) …at Goat Rodeo are Max Johnston, Rebecca Seidel and Ian Enright. At Project Brazen, Lucy Woods is the Producer. Georgia Gee is Lead Researcher. Mariangel Gonzales is our Project Manager and Megan Dean is Programming Manager. Ryan Ho is the Creative Director. Cover art designed by Julien Pradier. Mixing and engineering by Rebecca Seidel. Music from Goat Rodeo and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and Production assistance at Goat Rodeo from Isabelle Kerby-McGowan… (26.30) …Cara Shillenn, Jay Venables and Megan Nadolski. Polish Translation and narration by Hanna Kozlowska. Narration recorded at Outpost Studios in San Francisco. Continue to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on new episodes. And subscribe to Brazen Plus on Apple Podcasts for exclusive reporting and bonus material. (27.00) ##
[Cue, anchor: “Temperatures today way above 100 degrees inland, and even around the bay we’ve been into the 80s and 90s, downtown it’s still 85, it’s still 92 degrees in Oakland.”]
San Francisco’s infamous for its chilly, fog-whipped…
(00.30)
…summers. But on Friday, September 1st, 2017, the city was broiling.
And something really strange was happening at Russia's San Francisco consulate.
[Archival: “Chopper 5 over the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, check this out, black smoke pouring from the chimney …”
Anchor: “Well Ken, this is a significant moment … there has been a Russian diplomatic presence in San Francisco since the 1850’s…”]
The building was hard to miss.…
(01.00)
…It was perched atop a hill in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods. The location provided dizzying views of the Golden Gate Bridge and city.
I hopped in my car and drove toward the consulate, hoping to glimpse whatever was going on. As I got closer to the smoke, it became clear this wasn’t some poorly timed fireside soiree. Inside the consulate, these diplomats were, in all likelihood…
(01.30)
…setting scores of sensitive documents ablaze.
The day before… the Trump administration gave the Russians an expulsion notice. The gist was: “You have 48 hours to vacate the premises, and leave the country.”
[CUE, ANCHOR: “...The White House also sending a message to Russia: President Trump expelling 60 Russian diplomats from the US…”]
The Russians were in a frenzy. This…
(02.00)
…wasn’t merely some high-level diplomatic spat. You see… the officials inside the consulate had a problem:
They were in possession of troves of secret documents. If U.S. counterspies got their hands on these materials, it could spell disaster for Moscow’s spy operations in Silicon Valley.
Once the Russians left… U.S. officials would scour the facility for any clues about their local intelligence-gathering.
And Moscow’s spies…
(02.30)
…were not about to make that easy.
U.S. counterspies probably didn’t know precisely what secrets were hidden in the building. But they did know that Moscow had been using it as a locus of espionage for a very long time.
So long, in fact, that its decades-long history coincided with the advent of Silicon Valley itself.
My name is Zach Dorfman. I’m an intelligence and national…
(03.00)
…security journalist.
For years, I’ve covered the shadowy world of espionage, national security, and technology. After about a decade away from the Bay Area, I moved back to San Francisco, smack in the middle of its latest Gold Rush.
ARCHIVAL: “This is the new iPod nano … Welcome everyone to the Model 3 unveil … I believe the individual is the answer…”]
I looked around me and saw power. And where power flourishes, politicians, business executives…
(03.30) …and inevitably, spies—trail in its wake.
I started digging into the secret history of espionage in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And I began to unearth just how intensely foreign spies have targeted this place.
[ARCHIVAL: The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: “They're there because of the nearby area known as Silicon Valley… where more than 1,500 high technology companies are located, companies that use a lot of silicon making microcomputer chips—thus the name "Silicon Valley"— but more importantly, companies working…
(04.00)
…on technological secrets the Soviet Union wants…"]
See, the Russians—and Chinese, and Iranians, and even America’s allies—long ago realized that Silicon Valley is a rich quarry for spying.
The world of tomorrow is constantly being built here.
So when the Russian Consulate shut its doors in 2017, I knew there was a story there. But I never could have guessed just how…
(04.30)
…deep foreign spying efforts in the Bay Area went.
This world of counterintelligence was one of long shadows… where little was as it seemed.
Szady: It truly is a wilderness of mirrors. Where the reflections dazzle and confuse us. Truth are lies and lies are truth and defectors are false. So. It's a game of deception. It's a game of half truths. It's a game of creating realities that aren't real…
(05.00)
…and getting people to believe it. I use the word game, but I don't use that lightly. People's lives are in your hands.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about this history: how it had evolved, in secret, over the decades.
So I spent years tracking down many of the retired Bay Area FBI agents who led spyhunting efforts here during the cold war.
And I can tell you—they weren’t always easy to find…
(05.30)
…
They were the link between past and present, between the birth of modern Silicon Valley and its colossal presence on the world stage today. They also witnessed, firsthand, the rise and fall of the Soviet espionage threat, and the new Russian spy apparatus that took its place.
Rick Smith: You've spoken to our whole squad for Christ sake. Don Ulrich: It was the wild west then. Larae Quy: It's so dangerous. It’s so dangerous for them to work in place.
Milt Bearden: You would really love to be spying against America…
(06.00)
…because it's so freaking easy.
As I started reporting on the espionage scene in Silicon Valley, I saw just how far back these stories went.
This trendsetting wasn’t a recent phenomenon, tied to the newest dot com boom. Silicon Valley had always been a backdrop for geopolitical subterfuge. It was an espionage innovator.
To understand spying everywhere, you need to understand spying here…
(06.30)
…From Project Brazen and P-R-X… This is Spy Valley: An Engineer's Nuclear Betrayal.
Episode 1: A Wilderness of Mirrors
One spring morning, I hopped in my car and started driving north on the 101 out of San Francisco.
I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the sea shimmering to my left, sailboats speckling the Bay to my right…
(07.00)
…I was headed for Novato, a leafy suburb 45 minutes north of the city. When I arrived, I pulled into a parking lot near a local coffee shop.
I was there to catch up with Bill Kinane.
Kinane: San Francisco was not an office they sent new agents to, these guys had been FBI agents and other officers …
The Brooklyn-born Kinane spent decades as a top FBI spyhunter in San Francisco.
I’d gotten…
(07.30)
…to know him over the years from my reporting, and I always looked forward to our conversations. Kinane had tons of knowledge about cold war spying and its evolution in San Francisco. But there was always one case he’d return to in our discussions–about an American spy in Silicon Valley–a case that would eventually burst into headlines worldwide.
But Kinane said the full story had never been told. By the early 1980s, Kinane had been chasing spies… (08.00) … in the City by the Bay for a decade. He ran the FBI’s East Bloc squad–which focused on Moscow’s Eastern European proxies. Back then, the KGB effectively controlled the spy services of its cold war-era, Warsaw Pact allies. So Kinane and his team were busy tracking Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, East German, and other communist operatives. One day, Kinane received some highly-classified intelligence over official… (08.30) …Bureau channels. And when he realized where the information came from he did a double-take. Bill Kinane: I personally knew the source. I remembered the code name and everything. It was a shocking coincidence.
Kinane’s mind wandered east–to Chicago, where he had spent a few years as a young FBI agent before San Francisco.
Bill Kinane: It was around somewhere between 68 and 72.
There were some veteran…
(09.00)
…spy hunters on Bill’s squad who specialized in Polish espionage. Warsaw had a consulate there because of Chicago’s huge Polish population.
Poland used its outpost as a spy base–often acting on orders from the KGB. Though U.S. spy hunters tracked them closely, Moscow’s East Bloc allies–like Poland–could maneuver around America with less heat than the KGB. But these proxy services could also… (09.30) …be a double edged-sword for the Soviets. Bill Kinane: The KGB controlled a lot of these intelligence services, but they were easier targets for us, because most of these guys… really, they weren't Russians, let's put it that way … they were easier to talk to and recruit than a Russian. These Eastern European countries often had more connections to the West. Discontent with communism… (10.00) …and resentment over Moscow’s boot–would sometimes worm its way into their spy services. So there was good hunting for the FBI. And during Kinane’s time in Chicago, his colleagues identified one man in particular.
Bill Kinane: He was a Polish intelligence officer assigned to the Polish consulate in Chicago. He was a bald and bespectacled man, an engineer by training. He worked undercover in Chicago as a diplomat. But he was really a… (10.30) …spy, employed by Poland’s version of the KGB. The FBI believed this man was amenable to switching sides. And they were right. The Polish operative eventually agreed to become an “agent in place.” That is–a secret mole for U.S. intelligence within the Polish spy service.
Bill Kinane: The source was recruited in Chicago by the FBI there. Eventually, as diplomats do, the agent moved on to his… (11.00) …next assignment in Europe and the CIA took over his case.
Bill Kinane: He was transferred outta Chicago back to somewhere in Europe. Kinane told me the FBI codenamed him, “Caribou.” And now, sitting at his FBI office in San Francisco a decade later, Kinane was staring at a top-secret report that revealed a major problem in his backyard. The report was based on information provided… (11.30) …by Caribou, who was still working as a Polish intelligence officer and a US mole. And what Caribou told his CIA handlers must have chilled spines from Washington to San Francisco. According to Caribou… the Polish intelligence services had an American spy in Silicon Valley. A nuclear spy. And he was providing the Poles–and by extension, Moscow–with critical information on the U.S.’s… (12.00) …nuclear arsenal.
[ARCHIVAL Reagan: We maintain our peace through our strength…
Anchor: “... and most dramatic showdown between precision-guided missiles …”
Movie: “... they’re on their way to Russia…”] It was unnerving news, to say the least. And for many of the FBI’s San Francisco-based spyhunters, it would become the case of a lifetime. We’ll be back after the break… (12.30) …[BREAK] We’re back. The early 1980s were a thrilling time here. Silicon Valley had begun its explosive ascent.
ARCHIVAL: KQED: “The Silicon Valley … the center of this country's growing micro-electronics industry. A technological revolution hit the valley in the early seventies and most of us have benefited in some way…” It was also the height of the cold war, when competition between the world’s two nuclear superpowers dominated… (13.00) …the politics of the day. By chance, or by fate, the birth of the contemporary tech industry converged with another boom: The advent of the modern spy-versus-spy era in the Bay Area.
[Cue, anchor: “The Soviet Union, marking the warming American / Russian friendship … today officially opened its first consulate in the United States in 25 years.”]
In 1973, the Soviets opened their new diplomatic post atop that hill in Pacific Heights.
For the tech whizzes in…
(13.30)
…their start-ups down the peninsula; and the Soviets, in their lofty spy base in the city, the future seemed boundless.
The opening of the consulate was celebrated. Proponents applauded this new era of diplomacy over Cold War brinkmanship. But some took a dimmer view. They knew that a new era of Soviet spying in the Bay Area was just beginning.
David Major: One of the most significant places, and some of the best counterintelligence done in the FBI, was done in the West Coast...
(14.00)
…It was done particularly in San Francisco. There's a reason for that.
That’s David Major. He was a senior Bureau counterintelligence agent during the cold war.
David Major: Because the agents that we sent out there, and we sent them out because all of a sudden the Russians opened up a consulate.
Major was based in Washington, D.C. but kept a close eye on Silicon Valley.
As the number of Russian intelligence operatives under diplomatic cover increased, so did the cadre of FBI spy hunters.
David Major: And one of the smart things the Bureau did…
(14.30)
…they decided they were gonna send some of its stars. People that had been in New York, working really good cases in counterintelligence.
People like… Bill Kinane:
Bill Kinane: Literally half the people in the consulate in San Francisco had some intelligence duty.
And Rick Smith.
Rick Smith: It was an intensive assignment and we were able to put a lot of pressure on them. Obviously the whole purpose is to find out what they're doing and to neutralize what they're doing. Because they were so aggressive…
(15.00)
…The FBI’s San Francisco-based spyhunters were an unusually tight-knit bunch.
Bill Kinane: We became a good team, we stayed together for many years. You know, some guys retired off that, you know, 20, 25 years.
Zach: Is that very common?
Kinane: No.
Kinane is the absent-minded professor of the group. A natural born storyteller, quick to laugh.
Rick Smith: That’s something for Kinane … I'll say it publicly... (15.30) …He knows, I love him. I talk to him three times a week. If it happened yesterday, forget it. He's not gonna remember what happened, but if it happened 30 or 40 years ago, he's gonna remember specifics of what happened. He’s gonna remember exactly what happened. Rick Smith is sharp and affable, with a no B.S. demeanor. You can see how the two men became close friends.
Rick Smith: It was like a fraternity. We were all dedicated to what we were doing. A lot of us were former military. Kinane and Smith were buttoned-up guys with… (16.00) …traditional backgrounds. And they arrived in Northern California in an era that was anything but… San Francisco was a bastion of left-wing counterculture and radicalism. [CUE, anchor: “The aggressive determination of hippies to start a new society has made its mark upon San Francisco's Haight Ashbury … The peace movement’s gotta go into the streets and it’s gotta use the tactic of disruption…”]... (16.30) …And that’s the world in which Smith and Kinane operated. Their work in San Francisco related to the larger, secret conflict playing out between the Soviet Union and United States all over the globe.
Rick Smith: There was always a challenge in it because of what the Russians were trying to do. I mean, they were trying to steal our technology, steal our secrets and ... they'd devise all sorts of means to do it…
(17.00) …Suspected KGB intelligence officers in the United States were watched closely by their FBI counterparts. That meant it was often easier for Moscow’s Warsaw Pact allies–like the Poles–to recruit American agents to steal U.S. secrets. So when Bill Kinane read that classified report in the FBI’s San Francisco office… alarm bells start ringing in his head. Caribou, the US’s secret mole in the Polish intelligence services, said there was… (17.30) …precisely this sort of spy running around Silicon Valley. And Caribou picked up this priceless bit of intelligence – incredibly enough, at a party at his agency’s headquarters in Warsaw.
Bill Kinane: And when he met his CIA handlers, he told them the story about going to this cocktail party. And one of his colleagues received a medal…
Zach: Psychodizan?
Kinane: Psyzchodizan, yeah… (18.00) …That’s Zdzslaw Psyzchodizan, a senior official within the Polish intelligence service. A short, serious man in his mid-40s, Psyzchodizan spoke English and Russian, and had spent time as an undercover Polish spy in New York. Caribou worked with him in Warsaw. And clearly, he was doing his job well. Well enough to receive some pretty big plaudits.
Bill Kinane: He checked in at ... headquarters… (18.30) …and the guy said, ‘Hey, you ought to stay around … we’re having a party tonight for bigwig Psyzchodizan, kay? There’s a group from Moscow’s here, giving him a medal’. So, he went to the party and the only thing he learned is that Psyzchodizan had a source, somebody from the defense industry in California was cooperating with the Poles. Don Ulrich: Psyzchodizan was… (19.00) …identified, by name, if I recall…
Zach: Yes, by the source, yes. That’s Don Ulrich, a longtime San Francisco-based FBI counterintelligence agent. Ulrich worked closely with Kinane on the East Bloc squad.
Ulrich: ... I think that was an early, an early report by Caribou. That medal Psyzchodizan received? Caribou told his CIA handlers that it was from the head of the KGB himself. He got it for the extremely… (19.30) …valuable intelligence that his source–this mysterious person in California – was providing.
Bill Kinane: There might have been some information as to rockets.
Bill Kinane: They were the newest American missiles … Minuteman missiles.
THE DAY AFTER: “What’s going on? Those are Minuteman Missiles … they take about 30 minutes to reach their target.”
ARCHIVAL: KTCA: The latest in the minute men's series is this, the Minuteman III …
NAFB: If you were to see one or a hundred of them leap from their underground hiding places, up… (20.00) …through these Amber Fields of grain, then they would not have performed their true role, and we would've failed to keep the peace. Minuteman are intercontinental ballistic missiles. They’re armed with nuclear warheads and capable of striking targets across the globe. To this day, they are a key part of America’s nuclear arsenal.
Bill Kinane: The Russians were getting how they were made, and exactly what they could do. And I mean, the Russians were getting… (20.30) … everything about them because there were thousands of pages of documentation.
Bill Kinane: Everything that the . . . Polish intelligence officer sent back to the headquarters would be reviewed by somebody from the KGB. According to Caribou, Warsaw’s spies were getting reams of documents on these American missiles. It was a huge intelligence coup. In fact, Caribou reported that a team of 20 KGB specialists flew in from Moscow to pore over them… (21.00) …Caribou recalled that the stolen papers were in rough shape – it looked like they had been waterlogged, and then dried out. Keep that detail in the back of your head – it’s important. Caribou said the KGB operatives in Warsaw were elated. They had been scouring the globe for this sort of missile information. And now, they had it. So the KGB agreed to pay the American spy for these documents–and more… (21.30) …Though the source would be working with the Poles, the money for the operation would be coming straight from Moscow. This intelligence from Caribou exploded like a bomb among San Francisco’s FBI spy hunters. Don Ulrich again.
Don Ulrich: Everybody knew it was a big case. Everybody knew that. I mean, immediately.
Zach: Yeah.
Ulrich: That was only heightened as more and more information came out. The FBI knew that… (22.00) …someone was passing nuclear weapons information to the Poles. They knew this person had some connection to Zdzslaw Psyzchodizan, the Polish intelligence officer feted by the KGB chief. They knew that this spy demanded a million dollars for the stolen secrets. And they knew the spy was an American in Silicon Valley. So San Francisco's FBI spy hunters would have to launch a major manhunt… (22.30) …I wrapped up my coffee with Bill Kinane. As I drove south, back toward the city, I couldn’t get this story out of my head. The tale of Caribou – and the Silicon Valley, Soviet Bloc spy he had helped expose. I wanted to know everything about this case. But I needed to see if anyone else would actually talk to me about it. Other retired FBI agents… (23.00) …CIA officers. Federal Prosecutors. But, above all, the American spy at the center of it. I knew his name from decades-old news reports, when the story broke. And I learned that he had recently been paroled. So… I tried to track him down. I spent countless hours trying to find his phone number, last known residence, signs of life–anything. You see… when you’ve spent decades in prison, you don’t have much of a… (23.30) …digital trail. I thought I found the right address for this former spy – but I didn’t want to scare him off. So I wrote the man a letter. A real letter … through the post office. Then I waited. Reporting is like that: you send up flares, expecting that many will never be answered. And then, one day. I got a voicemail.
James Harper: Uh yeah… (24.00) …hi, Zach, this is Harper. I received your letter a couple days ago, and I thought I’d have a chat with you. I’m having a little trouble making up my mind about how we might work together so I thought that maybe a conversation with you over the phone might be helpful in that regard. Talk with you later, perhaps. And we did talk. At first, this former spy wasn’t particularly… (24.30) …enthusiastic to chat about his time as a Soviet Bloc intelligence agent… as a traitor to his country. He was more comfortable reminiscing about his childhood in California, and the early Silicon Valley hi-tech scene, of which he was a part. But soon enough, over many long and vivid phone calls, the rest came pouring out. And that’s how I learned, from his own words, the story of James Durward Harper, one of… (25.00) …America’s most notorious cold war nuclear spies.
Harper: And I’d sit down at my dining room table with a telephone and a pencil and paper … and go to work. If I needed some information, I’d call somebody and get it somehow. That’s this season on Spy Valley … An Engineer’s Nuclear Betrayal –
Spy Valley is a production of Project Brazen…
(25.30)
…in partnership with PRX.
It's hosted, written and reported by me, Zach Dorfman.
Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, are the Executive Producers. The show is produced by Goat Rodeo. To find more of Goat Rodeo’s work go to goatrodeodc.com The lead producer is Jay Venables. Story editing from Siddhartha Mahanta, Jay Venables, and Max Johnston. Executive Producers at Goat Rodeo are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright. Creative Producers… (26.00) …at Goat Rodeo are Max Johnston, Rebecca Seidel and Ian Enright. At Project Brazen, Lucy Woods is the Producer. Georgia Gee is Lead Researcher. Mariangel Gonzales is our Project Manager and Megan Dean is Programming Manager. Ryan Ho is the Creative Director. Cover art designed by Julien Pradier. Mixing and engineering by Rebecca Seidel. Music from Goat Rodeo and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and Production assistance at Goat Rodeo from Isabelle Kerby-McGowan… (26.30) …Cara Shillenn, Jay Venables and Megan Nadolski. Polish Translation and narration by Hanna Kozlowska. Narration recorded at Outpost Studios in San Francisco. Continue to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on new episodes. And subscribe to Brazen Plus on Apple Podcasts for exclusive reporting and bonus material. (27.00) ##