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Episode 2: The Shadow of the Valley of Wealth Transcript
James Harper: Uh, Mr. Dorfman. This is James Harper. I received your letter and would like to have a chat with you about it. Uh, gimme a call when you get a chance, thank you.
That’s James Harper, one of the cold war’s most notorious nuclear spies… leaving me a voicemail.
(00.30)
I’d written him a letter to see if he’d speak with me about his story. To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes. Hell, I wasn’t even positive that I had the right address.
But, to my surprise, Harper responded. And we got to talking. A lot.
HARPER VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach this is Harper again. I thought I’d just call you back in case you had just stepped out. I called you a few minutes ago…
VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach. It’s uh, almost 8 o’clock…
(01.00)
…Saturday night, uh here. I’ve been working on [FADE]...
VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach. It’s uh, Friday night. Give me a call when you get a chance. Talk with you later. Buh bye—it’s Harper!
When we began our conversations in 2019, Harper was marooned in northwest Arkansas. He had vague plans of reuniting with an old flame who lived in the area.
Things didn’t work out with the ex-girlfriend. But Harper was an old man…
(01.30)
…in poor health, so he stayed out there in Arkansas–a world away from his hometown of San Francisco.
James Harper: It's Arkansas, 2000 miles away from where I grew up. And I miss California something fierce.
Harper and I spoke frequently for a while. He was a born charmer. Chatty, backslapping, eager.
It was easy to imagine him as a great salesman.
Or as a top-notch con-artist.
The first time we spoke, he said he had just…
(02.00)
…sat down to begin writing his memoirs, and maybe we could collaborate?
I was never able to tell if that was a con, either.
Despite myself, I liked him sometimes. He was a great storyteller. He was a kind of “honest liar”. He really did try his best to answer my questions, to recall tiny details about his espionage odyssey. And I was taken aback at just how precise his memory was, all those years later…
(02.30)
But Harper could be revolting, too. And I’m not just talking about his spying. He was frequently misogynistic, casually bigoted, sometimes flippantly cruel.
Harper often seemed unaware about how he might appear to others. Or he simply didn’t care.
When I first spoke to Harper, he said something that I’ve never been able to forget.
He said, “When I commit to something, I do it fully and completely…
(03.00)
…even espionage.”
And then, I remember him laughing.
Harper: <laugh> if I needed some information, I'd call somebody and get it somehow.
I’m Zach Dorfman.
From Project Brazen and PRX.
This is Spy Valley.
Episode 2: The Shadow of the Valley of Wealth.
(03.30)
James Harper was born in 1933, the middle child of three boys. His father hailed from Arkansas. His mother grew up in a huge ranch house in the San Joaquin valley in California. Harper was raised nearby, in Fresno.
He and his brothers were all engineering savants of sorts. They were just born with a grasp of this stuff. Particularly his older brother, Roland.
James Harper: We all got into technical stuff…
(04.00)
…one way or another. And, uh. And my older brother… Roland, Roland was a real genius of the crew.
But Roland’s facility with electronics got him into some trouble at a very young age. When he was 11… Roland started broadcasting a pirate radio station from the house.
Harper: And one night when my dad was sitting in, in the living room, reading the paper, the FBI knocked on the door and says, “Hey, you know, what's going on around here?...
(04.30)
…Your son's got a radio station that can talk to people all around the world.”
ZD: [Laughter]
Harper: The FBI made him take all that radio equipment out in a vacant lot near the house and bust it up. So uh, put him off the air. ZD: Wow.
If that was Roland’s last run-in with the FBI, it certainly wouldn’t be James’s.
Because of World War II, Harper’s family moved around a lot. They eventually settled in Fairfield, California…
(05.00)
…on the fringes of the Bay Area. That’s where Harper went to high school. He was a football jock and muscle car buff.
James Harper: I consider Fairfield my hometown. And, and the city… San Francisco, my big hometown <laugh>.
By the time graduation rolled around, Harper was eligible to get drafted into the Korean War. But combat ended by the time he got through bootcamp. So instead of fighting in Korea, Harper spent his military service comfortably stationed in California…
(05.30)
…where he honed his engineering and electronics skills.
James Harper: I was always kind of, uh, inclined towards complicated stuff like electronics and, and mechanics, that sort of thing. But I got some real schooling at it.
Harper’s life had a way of reflecting both the history of the cold war and the evolution of Silicon Valley.
Fresh out of military service, Harper got a job in the booming aerospace industry in Southern California. An industry that was inextricably tied…
(06.00)
…to the cold war and the threat of nuclear conflict.
The company Harper worked for had lucrative Pentagon contracts. And it was designing America’s nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Harper worked on rocket engines. But he didn’t last there long.
James Harper: They were experimenting with different solid rocket propellants, and they never knew exactly what was gonna happen.
One day, Harper was almost decapitated by a fuel explosion at a rocket testing…
(06.30)
…facility.
James Harper: I says the hell with this. I'm going back up to Northern California and find myself a nice, quiet job in electronics.
But “quiet” wasn’t really in James Harper’s nature. His new job had him working on nuclear warning systems.
Harper, an electronics savant, happened to be a native son of the region where this hi-tech revolution was poised to explode, at precisely the moment of its ignition…
(07.00)
ARCHIVAL: KUT (1985): The San Jose area has been transformed… We have gone from what the poets call the Valley of Heart's Delight to Silicon Valley.
KQED (1975): I don't think there's any place in the world that has the capacity and the technique and the uh, expertise that we have here in Silicon Valley for microprocessor chips.
KQED: This same basic chip can do everything from switching on a roast to guiding missiles.
KQED: Silicon Valley today has the capacity to supply the brain for our electronic warfare systems.
(07.30)
By the mid-1960s, Harper was living the life of a young Silicon Valley comer. Around this time, he married his first wife, Colleen. And they soon started a family.
He founded a small firm of his own, Harper Magnetics.
Harper: When I got my, uh, my transformer company, Harper Magnetics… My main customer was Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics, in Palo Alto. And guess who worked in the accounting…
(08.00)
…department <laugh> at Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics?
Louise Howell. She was a woman whose entanglement with Harper would define both of their lives.
Howell was in her twenties when they met. She had green eyes, blond hair.
And Howell gravitated toward extremes: she drank heavily, then would exercise excessively. In high school, she and her drinking buddies would speed around in their cars…
(08.30)
…racing through the streets.
Sometimes, she was the gregarious “class clown,” but she could also be sullen and withdrawn.
Howell had moved to California from Mobile, Alabama. She went West with a close friend, dreaming of bigger and better things.
Harper: They left Mobile and came out to California to set the world on fire… and over a period of time, I got to know her that way. And then we dated for a while…
(09.00)
Harper and Howell had an affair. But soon enough - Howell wanted to put some distance between herself and Harper. She got a new job, and moved up to San Francisco. She married a man named Neil Schuler, taking his last name.
In that time, Louise Schuler and James Harper… fell out of touch.
Meanwhile, Harper Magnetics went bankrupt. And so Harper went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor…
(09.30)
The very firm that had helped invent the silicon-based microchip. Thus the “silicon” in Silicon Valley.
Harper: (34:55): At that time, that's when I was working for Fairchild. I worked for their microwave and optoelectronics division, and they were big in these electronic LED, light emitting diode digits.
But Harper–like any good Silicon Valley entrepreneur–was already plotting his next move…
(10.00)
Harper: (35:19): And I, I got to think, boy, they were using those little small handheld calculators and stuff. Just, you know, why, why doesn't somebody make a digital stopwatch <laugh>?
That’s right: James Harper–future nuclear spy for the Soviet Bloc–is the inventor of the digital stopwatch.
In the early 1970s, Harper founded “Harper Time and Electronics,”...
(10.30)
…selling his signature “Accusplit” stopwatches.
It could have been huge—the windfall that Harper had been chasing for years.
But Harper’s business partners said he embezzled tens of thousands of dollars for personal use.
And he was unceremoniously booted from the firm.
James Harper: Oh, man, you know, well, they, they threw me out of, of my own company. It's still operating many years…
(11.00)
…later and very successfully, and it's still still with my Accusplit digital stopwatch. I thought of that goddamn name.
We’ll be back after the break.
[AD BREAK]
We’re back.
Harper’s ejection from his namesake company caused something bleak and latent in him to bubble to the surface…
(11.30)
He drank to excess. He gambled compulsively. He had affairs upon affairs.
Harper was a kind of “early model” tech bro, a hard-partying, science-oriented jock, more than willing to “move fast and break things.”
By the mid-1970s, Harper’s appetites began to undo him. And the promise of a potentially-brilliant career began to dim.
It was around this time…
(12.00)
…that Harper began circling the orbit of a man named Bill Hugle.
Ulrich: Hugle was—his name had come up.
Kinane: The case on Hugle? He’s such a low life, he’s probably a spy.
Farmer: With Hugle, what motivates him? Evil.
Ulrich: We zeroed in on Bill Hugle.
Hugle was a symbol of the promise of early Silicon Valley. He and his first wife were pioneers in the semiconductor industry.
Here’s FBI counterintelligence…
(12.30)
…agent Don Ulrich:
Don Ulrich: It was the wild west then. It was, just burgeoning, burgeoning industry you know. Hugle just talked ad infinitum with everybody in Silicon Valley at that time about, you know, getting venture capital.
Hugle was better connected than Harper. He co-founded a global semiconductor trade association. It’s still thriving today. He even ran…
(13.00)
…albeit unsuccessfully, for Congress as a Democrat in Silicon Valley in 1972, earning some big name endorsements along the way.
Hugle was a proto-libertarian of sorts. A self-styled iconoclastic “free-thinker” that Silicon Valley seems to continually produce. He was anti-war, pro-environment–and an evangelist for free trade. Including with the Eastern Bloc.
But Bill Hugle had a secret…
(13.30)
…Because, in addition to being an archetypal Valley entrepreneur, he was secretly working for the Polish intelligence services.
The Poles gave Hugle the codename, “EAGLE.”
Harper’s life would change once they crossed paths. At first, Harper viewed Hugle as a kind of… mentor.
James Harper: There were two hangouts in Silicon Valley, two main hangouts in Silicon Valley at the time…
(14.00)
…that all this took place, one of them was Chez Yvonne. And, uh, the other one was The Town Oak. In Sunnyvale.
That’s where Harper befriended Hugle–and his then-wife, Bevelyn Hugle. It all went down at the Town Oak.
James Harper: One time in the, in the Oak…
Harper: He and Bevelyn were in there. And there was just, uh, kind of drunken guy was giving Bevelyn a bad time. And Bill…
(14.30)
…didn't know what the hell to do about it. And so I saw what was going on. And I, I grabbed that guy that was giving Bevelyn a bad time…
Harper: …and, uh, threw him out that side door at the Oak. And, and Bill felt that he was forever grateful for me. For taking that guy off of, off of, uh, Bevelyn's back.
From then on, Harper and Hugle became quick allies. Hugle started using Harper as an enforcer of sorts. Harper even…
(15.00)
…traveled to LA once to threaten someone, on Hugle’s behalf, over a business deal.
James Harper: And he wanted me to go down to LA and point out to ‘em that if they didn't square away and do what he wanted them to do, uh. He was gonna fuck him up real good. Anyway so I, I went down there and, uh, I gave this guy that stuff and, and they, they backed off on that deal. And, Hugle thought I, I was…
(15.30)
…forever useful in that capacity from then on. Evidently, I, I, at that time I looked a lot more formidable and I think I really was <laugh>.
But Hugle was running bigger schemes–like helping ship prohibited technology to the Soviet Bloc. Hugle’s Polish contacts would provide him “shopping lists” of prohibited hi-tech they wanted. Then, Hugle would task two of his close buddies to secretly obtain that tech…
(16.00)
James Harper: His two uh, stooges, they had like, a shopping list from the Eastern Bloc. Exactly how they got it, I don't know. It might’ve been from Bill. But anyway, somebody put 'em onto me as a source of information for, uh, to fill items on that shopping list. So, um, I got, and I got to working with them.
If Hugle was a witting agent of the Polish…
(16.30)
…intelligence services, Harper was a sub-agent. Someone to advance Hugle’s illicit activities.
The KGB would assemble these shopping lists, and pass them to the Poles and their other Eastern Bloc allies.
Moscow was using Warsaw, like Hugle was using Harper…
Moscow wanted cutting-edge computer technology, but also clearly military items. Like plans for a new tank-launched rocket.
In theory, Harper’s…
(17.00)
…job was pretty simple. Obtain things from the KGB “shopping list” and get paid for it, without dealing with the Poles themselves.
James Harper: Basically what I did was, they, they'd say, well, we, we need a manufacturing process document. I had so many contacts there in, uh, in the Valley. I'd just, I’d just uh, take the lead from them about what they wanted. And I'd sit down on my dining room table with a phone and a pencil and paper and go to work <laugh> if I needed some…
(17.30)
…information, I'd call somebody and get it somehow. And I'd put this document together and then they'd take it over to the Eastern Bloc and sell it to the Poles, and they would pay me for it.
For Harper, the work was easy enough. And while it was lucrative, he wasn’t making a fortune from it. 2,500 bucks here, 5,000 there.
But Hugle, meanwhile, was operating on a much grander scale. He had connections all over the world.
He’d use them to ship…
(18.00)
…prohibited technology onward to Poland.
James Harper: I knew that he had some contacts that they used to transfer that, uh, that equipment into the Eastern Bloc.
By 1975, the FBI and Commerce Department also knew about Hugle’s transshipment scheme. They opened up an investigation into his activities.
Hugle was providing the Poles with enough technology for them to construct an entire computer factory. That way, they wouldn’t…
(18.30)
…need to rely on stealing these items piece-by-piece.
But all was not rosy in Hugle’s relationship with Warsaw.
Here's FBI counterintelligence agent Don Ulrich.
Don Ulrich: It turned out, it was never all that successful because, uh, by the time they got it, uh, up and running, it was, you know, out of date. And so I always like to say that Hugle screwed somebody else. He screwed the Poles, as well as other folks [ZD INLAY: THAT DOESN’T SURPRISE ME]...
(19.00)
Some of Hugle’s dealing with the Poles were secret, but some… were overt.
At one point… one of Hugle’s Polish government contacts tried to recoup over a half million dollars from him, even suing Hugle in a U.S. court.
That Polish official? None other than Zdzislaw Psyzchodizan, the Polish intelligence officer we met earlier. The same Polish spy who would later be feted by the KGB for his role in obtaining Harper’s…
(19.30)
…nuclear docs.
From that point on, Hugle was definitely on the FBI’s radar. In San Francisco, they even gave his case a codename: “Starfish.” But for whatever reason, they couldn’t nail him.
If Hugle was a big shot in the Valley, Harper was a bit player at best. A failed entrepreneur who occasionally performed under-the-table work for Hugle…
(20.00)
…and his “stooges”.
One night at Chez Yvonne, the notorious Silicon Valley watering hole, would change all that.
James Harper: And then one night around in, in April . . . I’m at the Chez, bending my elbows with my cronies and having a drink.
And that’s when he saw her: his old girlfriend, Louise. 13 years had passed since they were an item.
James Harper: And Louise came in and sat at the other end of the bar.
(20.30)
Harper tried to play it cool. After all, Louise hadn’t seemed interested in keeping up their affair all those years ago.
James Harper: And I gave, I gave her a casual wave and she did too. Um, and, uh, I, we, well, I, I just kinda left it at that. I had tried to date her several times and she'd turned me down. I just figured, well, here’s a moment when two people know each other…
(21.00)
…and that’s it and say hi, and go their own way.
But tonight… was going to be different.
James Harper: I was standing there at the other end of the bar. Drinking. And Louise tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, Mr., can I buy you a drink? And I, I said, yeah, you can buy me a drink. I says, you play your cards right. Uh, you can [laugh]... you can spend the night with me.
(21.30)
A lot had changed since Louise Schuler and James Harper were last together. Schuler had been married and divorced. Harper had separated from his wife.
And Schuler had a new job, working for a tech company–and military contractor–called Systems Control Incorporated.
Systems Control was an archetypal Bay Area tech firm. It did highly classified research for the U.S. military on ballistic missile defense.
(22.00)
In particular, on how to shoot down nuclear-armed Soviet missiles that could be launched at the U.S.
The company’s work was part of what the spy novelist John Le Carre once called “the higher mathematics of the balance of terror.”
Schuler had landed a plum job as the assistant to Robert Larsen, the president of the firm. For a decade, she had also been his mistress.
James Harper: Uh, they had a, uh, mistress, uh, relationship going for, for 10…
(22.30)
…years when, uh, when, on that night at the bar, she came up and, uh, offered to buy me a drink and… <laughter>.
Harper and Schuler fell in quickly with one another. And they eventually moved in together. But their relationship soon took on a whole different, darker, dimension.
James Harper: Then, uh, Louise starts telling me what she's doing, and I'm thinking, my God… I find out that, um, what she's got is, uh…
(23.00)
…related in, in large part to ballistic missile defense.
James Harper: And I said, Jesus Christ, she's working right in the middle of a berry patch for me. I got to think, well, I'll find out what the hell she's got over there. And, uh, I'll, I, I gave her some, uh, I gave her some guidelines on what to look for.
James Harper: So she starts bringing me stuff right and left <laughs>. And I, I'm looking at it and…
(23.30)
…and kind of sorting it out. And one thing and another, I said, Jesus Christ, I bet you, I bet you, I, I can sell this to the Eastern Bloc through Hugle.
Harper knew that Bill Hugle was already involved in illicit trade with the Soviet Bloc. And he knew that there was nothing more valuable in cold war spying than information on nuclear weapons.
And he wanted to make a deal.
And that’s how James Harper–native son of California…
(24.00)
…Marine Corp veteran; engineer and alumni of some of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms; inventor of the world’s first digital stopwatch; embezzler and thief; boozer and cheat–embarked on becoming one of the most notorious U.S. nuclear spies of the entire cold war.
Next episode, on Spy Valley: Harper goes to Europe–and makes a deal with the Soviet Bloc.
(24.30)
–
Spy Valley is a production of Project Brazen 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…
(25.00)
…and Max Johnston.
Executive Producers at Goat Rodeo are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright.
Creative Producers 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…
(25.30)
…by Rebecca Seidel.
Music from Goat Rodeo and Blue Dot Sessions.
Editorial and Production assistance at Goat Rodeo from Isabelle Kerby-McGowan, 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.
(26.00)
##
That’s James Harper, one of the cold war’s most notorious nuclear spies… leaving me a voicemail.
(00.30)
I’d written him a letter to see if he’d speak with me about his story. To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes. Hell, I wasn’t even positive that I had the right address.
But, to my surprise, Harper responded. And we got to talking. A lot.
HARPER VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach this is Harper again. I thought I’d just call you back in case you had just stepped out. I called you a few minutes ago…
VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach. It’s uh, almost 8 o’clock…
(01.00)
…Saturday night, uh here. I’ve been working on [FADE]...
VOICEMAIL: Yeah, hi Zach. It’s uh, Friday night. Give me a call when you get a chance. Talk with you later. Buh bye—it’s Harper!
When we began our conversations in 2019, Harper was marooned in northwest Arkansas. He had vague plans of reuniting with an old flame who lived in the area.
Things didn’t work out with the ex-girlfriend. But Harper was an old man…
(01.30)
…in poor health, so he stayed out there in Arkansas–a world away from his hometown of San Francisco.
James Harper: It's Arkansas, 2000 miles away from where I grew up. And I miss California something fierce.
Harper and I spoke frequently for a while. He was a born charmer. Chatty, backslapping, eager.
It was easy to imagine him as a great salesman.
Or as a top-notch con-artist.
The first time we spoke, he said he had just…
(02.00)
…sat down to begin writing his memoirs, and maybe we could collaborate?
I was never able to tell if that was a con, either.
Despite myself, I liked him sometimes. He was a great storyteller. He was a kind of “honest liar”. He really did try his best to answer my questions, to recall tiny details about his espionage odyssey. And I was taken aback at just how precise his memory was, all those years later…
(02.30)
But Harper could be revolting, too. And I’m not just talking about his spying. He was frequently misogynistic, casually bigoted, sometimes flippantly cruel.
Harper often seemed unaware about how he might appear to others. Or he simply didn’t care.
When I first spoke to Harper, he said something that I’ve never been able to forget.
He said, “When I commit to something, I do it fully and completely…
(03.00)
…even espionage.”
And then, I remember him laughing.
Harper: <laugh> if I needed some information, I'd call somebody and get it somehow.
I’m Zach Dorfman.
From Project Brazen and PRX.
This is Spy Valley.
Episode 2: The Shadow of the Valley of Wealth.
(03.30)
James Harper was born in 1933, the middle child of three boys. His father hailed from Arkansas. His mother grew up in a huge ranch house in the San Joaquin valley in California. Harper was raised nearby, in Fresno.
He and his brothers were all engineering savants of sorts. They were just born with a grasp of this stuff. Particularly his older brother, Roland.
James Harper: We all got into technical stuff…
(04.00)
…one way or another. And, uh. And my older brother… Roland, Roland was a real genius of the crew.
But Roland’s facility with electronics got him into some trouble at a very young age. When he was 11… Roland started broadcasting a pirate radio station from the house.
Harper: And one night when my dad was sitting in, in the living room, reading the paper, the FBI knocked on the door and says, “Hey, you know, what's going on around here?...
(04.30)
…Your son's got a radio station that can talk to people all around the world.”
ZD: [Laughter]
Harper: The FBI made him take all that radio equipment out in a vacant lot near the house and bust it up. So uh, put him off the air. ZD: Wow.
If that was Roland’s last run-in with the FBI, it certainly wouldn’t be James’s.
Because of World War II, Harper’s family moved around a lot. They eventually settled in Fairfield, California…
(05.00)
…on the fringes of the Bay Area. That’s where Harper went to high school. He was a football jock and muscle car buff.
James Harper: I consider Fairfield my hometown. And, and the city… San Francisco, my big hometown <laugh>.
By the time graduation rolled around, Harper was eligible to get drafted into the Korean War. But combat ended by the time he got through bootcamp. So instead of fighting in Korea, Harper spent his military service comfortably stationed in California…
(05.30)
…where he honed his engineering and electronics skills.
James Harper: I was always kind of, uh, inclined towards complicated stuff like electronics and, and mechanics, that sort of thing. But I got some real schooling at it.
Harper’s life had a way of reflecting both the history of the cold war and the evolution of Silicon Valley.
Fresh out of military service, Harper got a job in the booming aerospace industry in Southern California. An industry that was inextricably tied…
(06.00)
…to the cold war and the threat of nuclear conflict.
The company Harper worked for had lucrative Pentagon contracts. And it was designing America’s nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Harper worked on rocket engines. But he didn’t last there long.
James Harper: They were experimenting with different solid rocket propellants, and they never knew exactly what was gonna happen.
One day, Harper was almost decapitated by a fuel explosion at a rocket testing…
(06.30)
…facility.
James Harper: I says the hell with this. I'm going back up to Northern California and find myself a nice, quiet job in electronics.
But “quiet” wasn’t really in James Harper’s nature. His new job had him working on nuclear warning systems.
Harper, an electronics savant, happened to be a native son of the region where this hi-tech revolution was poised to explode, at precisely the moment of its ignition…
(07.00)
ARCHIVAL: KUT (1985): The San Jose area has been transformed… We have gone from what the poets call the Valley of Heart's Delight to Silicon Valley.
KQED (1975): I don't think there's any place in the world that has the capacity and the technique and the uh, expertise that we have here in Silicon Valley for microprocessor chips.
KQED: This same basic chip can do everything from switching on a roast to guiding missiles.
KQED: Silicon Valley today has the capacity to supply the brain for our electronic warfare systems.
(07.30)
By the mid-1960s, Harper was living the life of a young Silicon Valley comer. Around this time, he married his first wife, Colleen. And they soon started a family.
He founded a small firm of his own, Harper Magnetics.
Harper: When I got my, uh, my transformer company, Harper Magnetics… My main customer was Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics, in Palo Alto. And guess who worked in the accounting…
(08.00)
…department <laugh> at Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics?
Louise Howell. She was a woman whose entanglement with Harper would define both of their lives.
Howell was in her twenties when they met. She had green eyes, blond hair.
And Howell gravitated toward extremes: she drank heavily, then would exercise excessively. In high school, she and her drinking buddies would speed around in their cars…
(08.30)
…racing through the streets.
Sometimes, she was the gregarious “class clown,” but she could also be sullen and withdrawn.
Howell had moved to California from Mobile, Alabama. She went West with a close friend, dreaming of bigger and better things.
Harper: They left Mobile and came out to California to set the world on fire… and over a period of time, I got to know her that way. And then we dated for a while…
(09.00)
Harper and Howell had an affair. But soon enough - Howell wanted to put some distance between herself and Harper. She got a new job, and moved up to San Francisco. She married a man named Neil Schuler, taking his last name.
In that time, Louise Schuler and James Harper… fell out of touch.
Meanwhile, Harper Magnetics went bankrupt. And so Harper went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor…
(09.30)
The very firm that had helped invent the silicon-based microchip. Thus the “silicon” in Silicon Valley.
Harper: (34:55): At that time, that's when I was working for Fairchild. I worked for their microwave and optoelectronics division, and they were big in these electronic LED, light emitting diode digits.
But Harper–like any good Silicon Valley entrepreneur–was already plotting his next move…
(10.00)
Harper: (35:19): And I, I got to think, boy, they were using those little small handheld calculators and stuff. Just, you know, why, why doesn't somebody make a digital stopwatch <laugh>?
That’s right: James Harper–future nuclear spy for the Soviet Bloc–is the inventor of the digital stopwatch.
In the early 1970s, Harper founded “Harper Time and Electronics,”...
(10.30)
…selling his signature “Accusplit” stopwatches.
It could have been huge—the windfall that Harper had been chasing for years.
But Harper’s business partners said he embezzled tens of thousands of dollars for personal use.
And he was unceremoniously booted from the firm.
James Harper: Oh, man, you know, well, they, they threw me out of, of my own company. It's still operating many years…
(11.00)
…later and very successfully, and it's still still with my Accusplit digital stopwatch. I thought of that goddamn name.
We’ll be back after the break.
[AD BREAK]
We’re back.
Harper’s ejection from his namesake company caused something bleak and latent in him to bubble to the surface…
(11.30)
He drank to excess. He gambled compulsively. He had affairs upon affairs.
Harper was a kind of “early model” tech bro, a hard-partying, science-oriented jock, more than willing to “move fast and break things.”
By the mid-1970s, Harper’s appetites began to undo him. And the promise of a potentially-brilliant career began to dim.
It was around this time…
(12.00)
…that Harper began circling the orbit of a man named Bill Hugle.
Ulrich: Hugle was—his name had come up.
Kinane: The case on Hugle? He’s such a low life, he’s probably a spy.
Farmer: With Hugle, what motivates him? Evil.
Ulrich: We zeroed in on Bill Hugle.
Hugle was a symbol of the promise of early Silicon Valley. He and his first wife were pioneers in the semiconductor industry.
Here’s FBI counterintelligence…
(12.30)
…agent Don Ulrich:
Don Ulrich: It was the wild west then. It was, just burgeoning, burgeoning industry you know. Hugle just talked ad infinitum with everybody in Silicon Valley at that time about, you know, getting venture capital.
Hugle was better connected than Harper. He co-founded a global semiconductor trade association. It’s still thriving today. He even ran…
(13.00)
…albeit unsuccessfully, for Congress as a Democrat in Silicon Valley in 1972, earning some big name endorsements along the way.
Hugle was a proto-libertarian of sorts. A self-styled iconoclastic “free-thinker” that Silicon Valley seems to continually produce. He was anti-war, pro-environment–and an evangelist for free trade. Including with the Eastern Bloc.
But Bill Hugle had a secret…
(13.30)
…Because, in addition to being an archetypal Valley entrepreneur, he was secretly working for the Polish intelligence services.
The Poles gave Hugle the codename, “EAGLE.”
Harper’s life would change once they crossed paths. At first, Harper viewed Hugle as a kind of… mentor.
James Harper: There were two hangouts in Silicon Valley, two main hangouts in Silicon Valley at the time…
(14.00)
…that all this took place, one of them was Chez Yvonne. And, uh, the other one was The Town Oak. In Sunnyvale.
That’s where Harper befriended Hugle–and his then-wife, Bevelyn Hugle. It all went down at the Town Oak.
James Harper: One time in the, in the Oak…
Harper: He and Bevelyn were in there. And there was just, uh, kind of drunken guy was giving Bevelyn a bad time. And Bill…
(14.30)
…didn't know what the hell to do about it. And so I saw what was going on. And I, I grabbed that guy that was giving Bevelyn a bad time…
Harper: …and, uh, threw him out that side door at the Oak. And, and Bill felt that he was forever grateful for me. For taking that guy off of, off of, uh, Bevelyn's back.
From then on, Harper and Hugle became quick allies. Hugle started using Harper as an enforcer of sorts. Harper even…
(15.00)
…traveled to LA once to threaten someone, on Hugle’s behalf, over a business deal.
James Harper: And he wanted me to go down to LA and point out to ‘em that if they didn't square away and do what he wanted them to do, uh. He was gonna fuck him up real good. Anyway so I, I went down there and, uh, I gave this guy that stuff and, and they, they backed off on that deal. And, Hugle thought I, I was…
(15.30)
…forever useful in that capacity from then on. Evidently, I, I, at that time I looked a lot more formidable and I think I really was <laugh>.
But Hugle was running bigger schemes–like helping ship prohibited technology to the Soviet Bloc. Hugle’s Polish contacts would provide him “shopping lists” of prohibited hi-tech they wanted. Then, Hugle would task two of his close buddies to secretly obtain that tech…
(16.00)
James Harper: His two uh, stooges, they had like, a shopping list from the Eastern Bloc. Exactly how they got it, I don't know. It might’ve been from Bill. But anyway, somebody put 'em onto me as a source of information for, uh, to fill items on that shopping list. So, um, I got, and I got to working with them.
If Hugle was a witting agent of the Polish…
(16.30)
…intelligence services, Harper was a sub-agent. Someone to advance Hugle’s illicit activities.
The KGB would assemble these shopping lists, and pass them to the Poles and their other Eastern Bloc allies.
Moscow was using Warsaw, like Hugle was using Harper…
Moscow wanted cutting-edge computer technology, but also clearly military items. Like plans for a new tank-launched rocket.
In theory, Harper’s…
(17.00)
…job was pretty simple. Obtain things from the KGB “shopping list” and get paid for it, without dealing with the Poles themselves.
James Harper: Basically what I did was, they, they'd say, well, we, we need a manufacturing process document. I had so many contacts there in, uh, in the Valley. I'd just, I’d just uh, take the lead from them about what they wanted. And I'd sit down on my dining room table with a phone and a pencil and paper and go to work <laugh> if I needed some…
(17.30)
…information, I'd call somebody and get it somehow. And I'd put this document together and then they'd take it over to the Eastern Bloc and sell it to the Poles, and they would pay me for it.
For Harper, the work was easy enough. And while it was lucrative, he wasn’t making a fortune from it. 2,500 bucks here, 5,000 there.
But Hugle, meanwhile, was operating on a much grander scale. He had connections all over the world.
He’d use them to ship…
(18.00)
…prohibited technology onward to Poland.
James Harper: I knew that he had some contacts that they used to transfer that, uh, that equipment into the Eastern Bloc.
By 1975, the FBI and Commerce Department also knew about Hugle’s transshipment scheme. They opened up an investigation into his activities.
Hugle was providing the Poles with enough technology for them to construct an entire computer factory. That way, they wouldn’t…
(18.30)
…need to rely on stealing these items piece-by-piece.
But all was not rosy in Hugle’s relationship with Warsaw.
Here's FBI counterintelligence agent Don Ulrich.
Don Ulrich: It turned out, it was never all that successful because, uh, by the time they got it, uh, up and running, it was, you know, out of date. And so I always like to say that Hugle screwed somebody else. He screwed the Poles, as well as other folks [ZD INLAY: THAT DOESN’T SURPRISE ME]...
(19.00)
Some of Hugle’s dealing with the Poles were secret, but some… were overt.
At one point… one of Hugle’s Polish government contacts tried to recoup over a half million dollars from him, even suing Hugle in a U.S. court.
That Polish official? None other than Zdzislaw Psyzchodizan, the Polish intelligence officer we met earlier. The same Polish spy who would later be feted by the KGB for his role in obtaining Harper’s…
(19.30)
…nuclear docs.
From that point on, Hugle was definitely on the FBI’s radar. In San Francisco, they even gave his case a codename: “Starfish.” But for whatever reason, they couldn’t nail him.
If Hugle was a big shot in the Valley, Harper was a bit player at best. A failed entrepreneur who occasionally performed under-the-table work for Hugle…
(20.00)
…and his “stooges”.
One night at Chez Yvonne, the notorious Silicon Valley watering hole, would change all that.
James Harper: And then one night around in, in April . . . I’m at the Chez, bending my elbows with my cronies and having a drink.
And that’s when he saw her: his old girlfriend, Louise. 13 years had passed since they were an item.
James Harper: And Louise came in and sat at the other end of the bar.
(20.30)
Harper tried to play it cool. After all, Louise hadn’t seemed interested in keeping up their affair all those years ago.
James Harper: And I gave, I gave her a casual wave and she did too. Um, and, uh, I, we, well, I, I just kinda left it at that. I had tried to date her several times and she'd turned me down. I just figured, well, here’s a moment when two people know each other…
(21.00)
…and that’s it and say hi, and go their own way.
But tonight… was going to be different.
James Harper: I was standing there at the other end of the bar. Drinking. And Louise tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, Mr., can I buy you a drink? And I, I said, yeah, you can buy me a drink. I says, you play your cards right. Uh, you can [laugh]... you can spend the night with me.
(21.30)
A lot had changed since Louise Schuler and James Harper were last together. Schuler had been married and divorced. Harper had separated from his wife.
And Schuler had a new job, working for a tech company–and military contractor–called Systems Control Incorporated.
Systems Control was an archetypal Bay Area tech firm. It did highly classified research for the U.S. military on ballistic missile defense.
(22.00)
In particular, on how to shoot down nuclear-armed Soviet missiles that could be launched at the U.S.
The company’s work was part of what the spy novelist John Le Carre once called “the higher mathematics of the balance of terror.”
Schuler had landed a plum job as the assistant to Robert Larsen, the president of the firm. For a decade, she had also been his mistress.
James Harper: Uh, they had a, uh, mistress, uh, relationship going for, for 10…
(22.30)
…years when, uh, when, on that night at the bar, she came up and, uh, offered to buy me a drink and… <laughter>.
Harper and Schuler fell in quickly with one another. And they eventually moved in together. But their relationship soon took on a whole different, darker, dimension.
James Harper: Then, uh, Louise starts telling me what she's doing, and I'm thinking, my God… I find out that, um, what she's got is, uh…
(23.00)
…related in, in large part to ballistic missile defense.
James Harper: And I said, Jesus Christ, she's working right in the middle of a berry patch for me. I got to think, well, I'll find out what the hell she's got over there. And, uh, I'll, I, I gave her some, uh, I gave her some guidelines on what to look for.
James Harper: So she starts bringing me stuff right and left <laughs>. And I, I'm looking at it and…
(23.30)
…and kind of sorting it out. And one thing and another, I said, Jesus Christ, I bet you, I bet you, I, I can sell this to the Eastern Bloc through Hugle.
Harper knew that Bill Hugle was already involved in illicit trade with the Soviet Bloc. And he knew that there was nothing more valuable in cold war spying than information on nuclear weapons.
And he wanted to make a deal.
And that’s how James Harper–native son of California…
(24.00)
…Marine Corp veteran; engineer and alumni of some of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms; inventor of the world’s first digital stopwatch; embezzler and thief; boozer and cheat–embarked on becoming one of the most notorious U.S. nuclear spies of the entire cold war.
Next episode, on Spy Valley: Harper goes to Europe–and makes a deal with the Soviet Bloc.
(24.30)
–
Spy Valley is a production of Project Brazen 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…
(25.00)
…and Max Johnston.
Executive Producers at Goat Rodeo are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright.
Creative Producers 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…
(25.30)
…by Rebecca Seidel.
Music from Goat Rodeo and Blue Dot Sessions.
Editorial and Production assistance at Goat Rodeo from Isabelle Kerby-McGowan, 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.
(26.00)
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