The Team House - KGB Spies in Silicon Valley | Zach Dorfman | Ep. 247

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Zach Dorfman is a former Senior Staff Writer at the Aspen Institute’s Cyber and Technology program and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He founded The Brush Pass/Project Brazen and they have released a podcast series called "Spy Valley", chronicling nuclear espionage in silicon valley.Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJfVbuA0vFshttps://thebrushpass.projectbrazen.com/--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsors:Factor Meals For 50% off your order ⬇️https://www.factormeals.com/teamhouse50---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#kgb #espionage #siliconvalleyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 247 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Zach Dorfman. Zach is a national security journalist, author of many great articles in the national security and espionage field.

And he also recently did the podcast series Valley of Spies with Project Brazen reporting on a previously unknown to the public trader in our midst. somebody who worked for the U.S. National Security Complex in Silicon Valley and sold secrets to the enemy during the Cold War. So we're very happy to have Zach here tonight on the show. Thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate your patience with us tonight. Of course, man. Great to be back. Absolutely. So, you know, just to kick it off, I mean, talk to us a little bit about your podcast series, Valley of Spies.

I mean, before we get into like the production of it, I'd really like to hear how this story even came on your radar. Because I recently read, for instance, there's a journalist who wrote the book from Warsaw with Love, whole history about the Polish-American intelligence relationship. And I don't recall your story being in there.

I mean, this is something that I had never heard of before. Yeah, I mean, that's a great book, by the way, John Pompfret's book. And I read that before I, I started, yeah, it was about the same time I embarked on the podcast. So basically, Spy Valley, the genesis of Spy Valley was one of those great kind of kismet things that you have with your sources. And I know that, you know, you've had this too. I was sitting with a longtime FBI counterintelligence official from San Francisco named Bill Canane.

and Bill was an awesome guy. He got out to San Francisco in the early 70s and worked counterintelligence in San Francisco until the mid-90s. He was one of the capstone to his career was he was one of the first FBI attaches in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. So he was kind of renowned in the Bureau.

I mean, that was like his last thing he did, but he spent basically his entire career working on the Soviet squad, then the Russia squad. And then in between what was known as like the East Block squad, the East Block squad during the Cold War was, you know, every communist country in Eastern Europe that wasn't Russia, basically, but it was all the satellite states. So the Poles, the East Germans, the Czechs, the Hungarians,

the Romanians, the Bulgarians. And, you know, they weren't as, you know, big of a deal, but they're a pretty big deal. They're very, very active in the valley. mostly for economic espionage. And Bill, Bill was awesome. He was an Irish guy from Park Slope,

who grew up in Park Slope, was a Marine. And then after he got out, he ended up in the FBI. He worked in New York for a while. And then he moved out to San Francisco in the early 70s. And Bill and I would have coffee from time to time. And we would like,

we'd hang out, we would chat. He would kind of shoot the shit about, about like all the spy, you know, stuff that he did, the kind of, you know, spy hunting he did in the valley. And, and one day he said to me, oh, have you ever looked into the James Harper case? And I was like, not really. I heard a little bit about it. And he goes, oh, that should be a book. And he said, well, by the way, I was the squad supervisor on that case. And of course, you know, as a reporter, you're like, wait, huh? You had a squad supervisor? You oversaw the

whole case from the investigative side. And he said, yeah. And we start to, you know, we start to talking about it. And I was like, well, if Bill says this is a book, there might be a book. And so I started reading everything I could about the case. It was a big deal at the time, but it had been completely memory hold. You know, it was one of those great Cold War stories that for various reasons had just been completely forgotten. And much of the story had never been told because, you know, the FBI guys weren't talking at the time, obviously, when the case broke in 1983, the prosecutors wouldn't have talked, the documents I got and wouldn't have been able to get,

and of course I wouldn't have been able to talk to James Harper himself. So that was a real genesis of the story. And then that was 2019. And the story came up in 2023. So it was on and off reporting the story for half a decade and a book proposal ended up becoming a narrative podcast. And Bill also has like the most FBI voice ever in the podcast. We arrived at San Francisco 1973.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had just very, and it's funny because he had this, you know, I think it's this old, I think it was this old school Brooklyn Irish thing that he had going on. And he was so disarming because he was, he was, you know, but then, but then you'd be like, oh, Bill, can we meet for coffee tomorrow? And he'd be like, oh, I can't. I got to go to James Joyce Day, you know, down at the, you know, he was like a really

literary guy. He, he was famous in the bureau in San Francisco because every morning he would get to the office. and then he would go across the street and read the New York Times cover for like three hours. Like he would read the New York Times every day. And some of his colleagues were like, what's this guy doing? This isn't his job. But Bill's thinking was that like to do his job well, he had to understand what the world, how the world worked, you know, in a kind of like geopolitical way.

Not, you know, because it's very easy when you're working cases just to think about it in this narrow context. But Bill, to his great credit, I think, understood that you couldn't separate counterintelligence worked from the larger political and geopolitical situation that was going on at the time. And so, yeah, I mean, once I knew I had the squad leader ready to talk, I was like, that's one big piece. Little did I know that it was going to be a podcast. And Bill at the time was a hardcore, like, can't record me, you know, can't record me even on background, even to take notes, can't record me ever.

and of course I thought there was going to be a problem with this but you know years went by and when I came back to him and said hey this isn't going to be a book one more it's going to be a podcast would you lend would you be willing to have a microphone in front of you and talk about this case he was kind of like okay maybe it was COVID maybe it was like you realize that this was the one this was the one best shot to have this story told and I was like look it's not going to be a book and I need it it's not as powerful you know right you know how this is right obviously it's not as powerful you know how this is right obviously it's not as powerful for you to narrate somebody else's story, you want them to be able to narrate a little bit. So it was really special and I think wonderful having people like Bill and a lot of his colleagues in the bureau who, you know, were, they were long retired at that point and they were willing to talk about the work they did. So yeah, that was really, really cool. And as we kind of like get into this story itself, can you tell us a little bit about the history of Silicon Valley and why that part of America is such a huge target for foreign intelligence services? Yeah, I mean, going back to the post-war period, basically the Valley always had

a tight connections to the U.S. military industrial complex. A lot of missile technology was being developed both in Silicon Valley and then down in the South Los Angeles area. If you know, there's a lot of military, very, very large military contractors are still based out there. And then, of course, the Valley by the 1970s, the microchip revolution, and, the picture. And computing power became important for everything from missile guidance systems to tanks, to satellite systems, to big data analysis, what we call today big data analysis, you know, computing power. The idea of like networked computing was something that obviously had civilian importance, but was primarily, as you know, like DARPA was, the internet was

a military project, you know, it was about military connectivity. So as soon as the microchip revolution, the semiconductor revolution kicked off by the 70s, 60s and 70s, you know, it became, the valley became, and it still is, but it really became a central front in the kind of Cold War, espionage war. Back then, it was primarily the U.S. versus the Soviet Union and its allies. Now it's a more complex picture of you have the Russians, obviously, but you also even more so probably have the Chinese. The Iranians are there. I mean, everybody's playing around in the valley. And I think there's a way in which people don't necessarily associate it with being rich terrain for espionage because they think of espionage is something that happens in government buildings, you know, or at the UN, you know, places that you think of as like seats of power.

There's a lot of power in the valley. and there's a lot of technology that foreign states want to steal in order to replicate, to understand better. And that's always been the primary kind of espionage you get in the valley as that is, like, tech-focused economic espionage. You also get political stuff, right, because it's California. So you can't discount the fact that, like, foreign governments want to know what's going on in California, I mean, particularly the Chinese.

So that's a part of the picture, too. but it's really tech focused here. You're probably the only person I know of offhand who's really kind of pointed out the importance of California and specifically Miami as like hubs for intelligence because of the way the United States projects itself out into the world from those particular parts of America. Yeah, I mean, the Miami scene, man, I wish there was somebody.

If there's somebody out there, and I apologize if I don't know them, but I'm not aware of any dedicated full-time intelligence reporter down in Miami. The Miami Herald did amazing stuff back in the day. They did. I mean, they used to have, I mean, just kind of like how the, yeah, it's a longer conversation about the loss of national security reporting as a national enterprise as opposed to like 99% of people being based in D.C. I mean, you're even, you're in New York, right?

And that should be the most obvious place in the world. for national security reporters to be playing around it, but it's so DC football. I mean, Miami, obviously, you have, I mean, not only do you have, you have Socom in Florida, but you also have, you know, the Cuban and Venezuelan and Russians,

and the Russians down in Miami. There's always a, there's a ton going on down there. I mean, what I'm more familiar with, of course, is the Bay Area scene. And look, you know, there's always a data point that I was told by a former senior intelligence official that always stuck out to me, which was that the MSS had a unit, a political intelligence unit for two American entities. One was Washington, D.C., and the other one was California. You know, like they literally set up like a team or like a unit to understand politics in D.C. And then they're like, what's the only other place that we carry enough? I mean, it's not like they don't care about what's going on. other states, but they literally set up a unit, you know, for that. I mean, it is a, is a top priority for them. And it's long been a priority for the Russians, too. I mean, the Russians have

been, I've been mucking around in California for a long, long time for all sorts of reasons. And it just never got, you know, I think that's why also this case, the spy, the, this, the case in Spy Valley, uh, kind of got forgotten. Because it was a California case, right? And it wasn't, it wasn't a, it wasn't a guy who was, it's not Hansen or. Ames, right? It's not a guy who was an FBI agent, CIA officer. It's a dude who worked in in high tech, whose girlfriend worked for a missile contractor, you know? So it's it and in a way, though, it's actually more representative of where espionage is going or has gone, right? Where it's like, it may not always be that guy in Langley, right? It's probably going to be somebody with

access to classified information of like a narrowly tailored type, but nonetheless has a crazy value, you know, for for states, right? I mean, that's that's the irony, right? Is that you have all these nameless buildings, these nameless companies, these tech firms that have classified contracts and they're doing stuff that is like wild, that nobody really understands and is kind of a softer target, right? It's much harder to walk into the Pentagon or,

foggy bottom and like get what you want. Whereas like in the valley, nobody really even like nobody really understands the kind of geography of the classified world in the valley, right? It's not like you can point to five buildings and say they have these contracts. I mean, probably there are a couple of big firms, right? But like there are small firms all over the valley that have some overlapping relationship to the Pentagon or the IC and it's just nobody really understands it. So it's not being guarded the same way.

So tell us about John Harper. Who was this guy who's kind of the focal point of your story? So James Harper was a guy who was a native Californian. He went through he was a, he was trained in electronics by the military. He entered the military to try to avoid. being drafted into Korea. So that places him in time, right? I mean, so he graduated in high school in the early 1950s.

He wanted to basically choose where he would get routed, so he didn't end up like on the front lines, I guess. And he had a facility of electronics, and he was like a kind of like first generation archetype of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a dude who was like really, really good at math and science, really ambitious, really greedy, wants to strike you big,

sees that there's this kind of gold rush going on in San Francisco by the 60s and 70s, and 70s, that first generation of high-tech gold rush, guys who are just like, I can make millions in a few years. I can like hit it big, right? This guy thinks he's going to like make it. And the process, he ends up, you know, working at these kind of storied Valley firms. At some point he has a clearance. He's working on missiles. He's working on missile related technology. But then he's like, he does other stuff that's not classified. He ends up in Alaska for a bit working on something called the White Alice Project, which was like setting up telecommunications relays in case the Soviets shot a ICBM or something. It was this, at the time, the technology

required like actual physical relay systems from very, very rural parts of Alaska. So he went up to Alaska for a few years and did that. And his whole life was kind of defined by the Cold War that way, like the intersection between high tech and the Cold War. So he does that. And he does like non-classified contracts, but still in the high-tech space. One day he decides, I want to strike out on my own. I want to do something. Apparently, he told me he had four daughters, and he told me one day he was watching one of his daughters at a swim practice.

And they saw, he had someone at a stopwatch. And he was like, why isn't there an electric stopwatch? Oh, I should invent the electric stopwatch. So he does. Like the main spy in this story in Spy Valley, James Harper, is like he is the inventor of the electric stopwatch. The digital stopwatch that we all use. Yeah, digital. Like it's literally called AccuSplit.

It's a company that still exists, digital stopwatch. I mean, and he starts the company up. It starts doing really well. But like Harper is a man of appetites, right? he was a cheat, you know, he was a compulsive gambler. He, he, like, partied really, really, really hard. And he embezzled funds from his company. And so he got kicked out of his company.

He got kicked out of his own company. And this is by, like, the early 1970s. And when he gets kicked out of his company, he's like, shit, I got to find a way to make more money. And so he starts, he starts basically, he hooks up with a other Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bill Hugal. And Bill Hugal was a, you know, a kind of pioneer of the semiconductor industry in the valley. And Bill Hugal at the same time had a secret. Bill Hugo's secret was a basically was an agent of the Polish intelligence services, right, like, which were then a core ally of Moscow, literally the Warsaw Pact, right? I mean,

Warsaw. So like he, Bill Hugal was this kind of proto Valley libertarian guy who was like, free love, like legalized pot, out of Vietnam, but also like free trade. And free trade for Bill Hugo also meant free trade with the Soviet bloc because he just believed like there shouldn't be any

prohibition. Impediments. Yeah. Impetiments on him making money, right? And just, you know, for the, you know, your listeners, I mean, well, given who they are, they probably know all this. But like, there's there's a lot of technology that is

that is export prohibited, right? There's stuff that has dual use, dual use technology, which means that it has civilian purposes, but also potential military or intelligence purposes. Things like microchips, things like computer systems that would allow American adversaries to build better and faster supercomputers or missile systems. I mean, this is going on today, right? There's like there's been a real squeeze both on the Chinese in terms of certain kinds of computer technology, but then also the Russians now, particularly after the Ukraine war. That's why the Russians are ripping microchips out of washing machines and refrigerators, you know, because they can't get this technology other ways. It's like it's kind of incredible. Well, this is the same case in the sentence, right?

So Bill Hugel was not a traditional spy in the way that we think about spies, but he was an agent of the Polish intelligence services and the polls would get lists of high tech that they wanted from the KGB. The KGB would pass them a list. The list would be like we want this kind of chip, this kind of chip, this kind of chip. kind of thing, this kind of thing, this kind of thing, it's got a processing technology, a replicator of some sort, you know, all this stuff in the 70s. They hand it to the polls, the Polish intelligence services would then hand those lists out to their agents. Can you get me X? Can you get me Y? And Bill Hugal was one of those guys, right? He was like a principal agent for the polls. Now, as a good principal agent,

he subcontracted, he contracted out to sub agents, right? And James Harper enters Bill Hugal's world and becomes a sub-agent. So, he becomes a guy who works for Bill Hugal finding technology that is technically illegal to export to the Soviet bloc. That's how he begins to get into spying. Again, it's interesting, right, because it's not how we think of spies, right? If I, it's adjacent to spying. It's certainly, it was illegal. I mean, Hugo knew he was working for like an adversary intelligence service. He knew that basically the computer chips and the material. that he was providing was eventually going to make its way to Moscow.

But it was like different, right? They looked at these guys looked at it as just another play, right? It was like the Silicon Valley idea of like, this is just another way. Way to make money. To make money. And we're just, we're free traders. We're just advancing free trade. Like, we don't really care, you know, beyond that.

So that's how Harper got into that world. But of course, it didn't end there. Okay, Zach, I'm going to do this ad read real quick before we move on to the next point. Thank you to our sponsor. for tonight show, it's a factor. So this holiday season, you might be looking for nutritious, convenient meals to keep you energized on jam-packed days. Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service can help fuel up your breakfast,

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And this November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed meals delivered to your door, ready in just two minutes, no prep, no mess. So head to factormeals.com slash teamhouse 50 and use the code team house 50 to get 50% off. That's team house 50 at factor meals.com slash team house 50 to get 50% off of your meals. So thank you to Factor for sponsoring the show. And Zach, so that's a little intro into who James Harper was and sort of his entry into the world of espionage. I guess, you know, his erstwhile handler had identified him as someone who would be useful to him.

Did he have to pitch him? Like, how did that work? Honestly, the way that Harper told it to me was just that, you know, Bill Hugo, like, these guys, you got to step back to it. These guys are all just drinking buddies, right? I mean, at the time, at the valley scene, there was like a couple bars down the peninsula from San Francisco in the heart of the valley. that was where all these entrepreneurs are just hang out. And it was like a really boozy scene, right? It was the 70s and 80s.

Like everyone was thinking a lot all the time, right? And so there was a lot of like, there was just a lot of like wheeling and dealing that would go on at these, a couple of these bars that everybody knew that like basically every night of the week there would be people in the scene there, right? It was a small enough scene then for that to happen.

So at some point, Bill Hughes, you know, the semiconductor pioneer, you know, the primary agent, the Polish intelligence services befriends Harper at one of these bars. And they just start talking. They just start shooting the shit. And that's how it ended up happening. I don't think it took a lot of convincing. Let's put it that way, right? Like he was not, he was knocking on an open door, you know. He was like, hey, you want to make money? And he was like, and Harper was like, yeah, I'd love to make some money. How? And he's like, well, you got to get some stuff from me. Oh, who is it for? Oh, you know, well, it's for some friends of mine in the Eastern block.

All right, whatever. Like, they didn't, like, they didn't, you know, it's funny because in the world, in the world of the USG, right, there's this kind of like, there's this attitude that, well, you know, these are, they are adversaries. These are, you know, how could you betray your country like that? And it's a valid perspective, but it's not the way, it's not the culture that these guys came up. Right, right.

They wanted money. money. They wanted global, they wanted global networks. They were not thinking like their value hierarchy was not like the idea of like this, this competition between these two global behemoths being the thing that they woke up every day thinking about and worrying about was like that was just not there. Well, I mean, I think what really gives away the banality of it is just how little money he sold his country out for. It's like this wasn't like a retirement fund. It's just like chump change really at the end. end of the day. Oh yeah. I mean, the stuff he was doing for Hugo, finding the microchips and stuff, that was like a couple thousand dollars each time. I mean, he really, like, what? That was it. I mean, that was it. He was just, he was making a, he was, he was making like pocket change, you know, rent money basically. Right. Low level spine, you know, and in a way, he realized that that was enough. I mean, it's like almost odd. Like he did that for enough. He did that for, I don't know,

on and off from roughly 1975 until 1979, which is when Harper's like big scheme begins. And that was, that was like when he discovered that his girlfriend at the time, whose name was Ruby Louise Schuller, was working for a company that was a specialist in ballistic missile defense, right? And, you know, again, I know your listenership is like pretty up on this stuff, but like in the late 70s and early 80s, this is a huge topic of discussion because it was all about mutually assured destruction. It was all about like the idea of like, can we can we survive a second strike? Like, can we survive a first strike? And the idea that like American, like if the

Soviets attacked first, America might be basically destroyed before we could, you know, we could counterattack? Could we could we actually stop many Soviet missiles from coming in? So there was a huge amount of money and energy and DOD projects put into trying to somehow destroy Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles before they reached the U.S. mainland. And Harper's girlfriend, Harper didn't even know this. I mean, Harper was just like, oh, yeah, cool. Yeah, you're an executive assistant to the president of this company down the valley. And she was like, yeah, and you're like, oh, what are they work on?

Well, this isn't this. Oh, and also ballistic missile defense. And it was kind of like his ears perked up, you know, and he was like, wait, what? You're working on what? It's like, oh, is it a classified contract? Oh, yeah, this classified contracts. Well, where are the classified documents? Oh, they're in the safe.

Oh, well, who has access to the safe? Oh, I do. You know, like, that was literally it. He was like, I mean, it was, it was, it was. And most people, right, you hear that. You're like, oh, that's good for you. Like, you know, that must be interesting work, right? but his thinking went right to, oh, I could steal those.

Cash money. I could sell them for a lot of money because there's such nuclear weapons documents, right? This is literally U.S. ballistic missile information, right? I mean, that is like, and it's stuff that was like, and Harper was an engineer. So he was a mathematician. He understood this, you know, these documents were, these aren't like analytic products, right? They're not things that have narratives. You know, it's literally documents of like mathematical formulas, right?

And stuff about, you know, because ballistic missiles have to go into the atmosphere and come back down again. It's like highly technical, mathematically oriented. It's a mathematically oriented field that requires PhDs and engineers. So it's like funny because for most of us, it's gobbledy cook, right? I mean, for me, it certainly is. like, I don't, you couldn't hand me a document and be like, is this interesting or valuable to you? I'd be like, I have no idea. Like, why would I know anything about that, right?

But he knew. So he started going after the after hours, he and his girlfriend would go to their, her office, unlock the safe, look through documents, take them back to their apartment and photocopy them. And then bring them back before the end of the night. And that's how they amassed like literally hundreds of pounds, hundreds of pounds of missile-related documents. Now, he was like, I got to sell these now, right? I got to find a buyer. So he went back to his, you know, principal handler, this guy, Bill Hugal, also a, you know, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and was like, can you broker an introduction to the Soviets or the polls? And that's how he started.

Like, he was fully self-actualizing, right? He didn't have somebody come up to him and be like, I heard you're having some money troubles, you know, like, or, you know what I mean? Or like, I heard your boss is a dick, you know? And like, wouldn't you like to show him by giving me some documents? Like, he literally, he initiated the entire process, you know. He was a, he was a volunteer, if there ever was one. He was a greedy guy who looked at spine the way he would look at any other kind of entrepreneurial

Silicon Valley play. And that's what's one thing that's super interesting about him, right? It's like it doesn't mean there aren't greedy people in D.C. or New York or Brussels or wherever. But like there's something about their culture out here that he is exemplary of, right? Like a guy who was like just viewed spying as like basically another kind of small business which started up. Yeah, he's not ideological. He's just a tech bro.

Let's make some cash here. Let's do business. Yeah, he's 100% of tech, bro. I mean, he was like, he literally was like a football job. in high school and he loved like sports cars and he was good at math and science you know and kind of like hands-on-away he's an engineer like not a nerd at all like big brawny dude and was just a tech bro who decided to get in the spine I mean and he brought that attitude like kind of like tech bro like you know um like fat fat pro tech bro vibe to spine yeah and so did he uh did he make those

introductions for him to, you know, actual intelligence officers in the Eastern Bloc? Yeah. So see, so. Yeah, no, Eastern Block. I mean, Hugo, Hughel, Hughle knew real players. I mean, Hugo's main contact was a very senior Polish intelligence officer under, he worked for the, it was like totally Soviet. He worked for a Polish ministry of like machine industry and tools, which is extremely extremely like, you know, Eastern Block ministry title.

But he was a real player. I mean, this guy was a very senior intelligence officer who was undercover as a Polish government official in a different institution. And Hugo was like basically told Harper, hey, cool. I will, I'll broker the intro, but I want to cut because everyone wants to cut, right? All these guys are viewing this again as a moneymaking opportunity. So they go to Europe and they talk it all out. and they, you know, Harper brings a couple classified documents with him or like,

he actually brings a, he brings like a, a couple documents, but he kind of makes almost like a skeleton key of like all the documents that he has and with the description of them to be like, it's literally like a, would you like this, sir? Would you like this sir? Would you like this sir? Like it's like he's like, I have all this to offer you. You know, what are you going to pay for it? And they make an agreement that, Harper is going to come back with more documents. So the first meetings are happening in Vienna and in Warsaw. And that's how he starts.

I mean, literally, you know, this Polish, this senior Polish intelligence officer, whose name was Sejoujin, says, let me talk to my people. I got to talk to my tech, my science guys, my S&T Intel officers, because I don't know enough about this to tell you what the value is. And I'll get back to him. And they're like, they said, great. I want you to bring, you know, I want you to bring all of these documents back. And Harper wanted a one-time payout of a million dollars.

This is 1979, right? So that's worth about $4 million today. So that's a significant sum of cash. I mean, it's, I mean, it's not a great, great fortune, you know, but it's a fortune, especially a guy who was edging on being broke. He looked at it as like, this is going to be my, this is like it for me. I'm going to move down to Mexico or do whatever. Like, I'm going to be.

done, right? I'm going to spy once and be done. But of course, if you know anything about intelligence officers, they don't ever want that, right? They want to keep you on the hook. You know, they want to give you a little bit and a little bit and a little bit and a little bit and then keep tasking it for more and more and more. Harper didn't want to do that. But he was desperate and he was willing to go along with it for a little while, right? Where, you know, guys says, well, I'll give you, I'll give you $50,000. And then you come back again, I'll give you another $50,000. And that's how the polls kind of kept them on the kept them on. And they even, if I recall right, they even kind of like dicked them over on the bill the first time around, right?

Yeah, they did actually. They were fake. So they they specifically, and I know this because when I was researching the Spia Valley podcast, I actually worked with a Polish researcher. And what's really amazing is that Poland and some of the other former. Soviet-Black countries allow researchers to get access to unredacted intelligence documents. And I managed to find all the files from this case. I mean, there was no blackouts, no redactions, like literally the unexpurgated documents, including the like strategic reports of the Polish

intelligence officers writing about their thinking in the case and like how they were going to try to play this guy, right? And part of that was them saying, basically, when we want to go hot and cold with him. We want to say we're incredibly interested. And then when he gives us something, we want to basically say, you know what? This isn't what you promised us. This isn't the ghost. You know what? You kind of overpromised and underdelivered. And to keep him basically wanting, you know, in a position of dependency. I mean, it was like some pretty subtle psychological games at the polar plan good intelligence work on their part.

And that like made Harper irate. And it made him willing, it made him, but it also like made him willing to like give them more for less, right? Because he became so needy. And like, he needed, he needed the money.

So he was fine, you know. But then eventually there's like, there's like one major payday that, that happens where Harper, Harper leaves, right? He goes back to Warsaw. he has this blowout argument basically where the polls are like we're not going to pay you this is garbage Harper like goes back to California and he's like what am I going to do with all these documents again

he's got hundreds of pounds of documents in his apartment these are physical documents this isn't like stuff on a on a thumb drive like it's like stacking up he's like you know and so he goes out to the San Joaquin delta which is just east of San Francisco he gets on a on a sailboat with his best friend and buried all documents in like a muddy island in the middle of the delta to be like, I can't keep this stuff on to me. It's like too hot. It's too hot. And then he tries to like get, he tries to get contact again at some point with the polls because he's desperate. So he has to go back and dig it all up again. And they're all waterlogs. He's to dry out these documents. And then literally, and there's stinking waterlog documents that he's like basically like,

hanging up, you know, all over his clothespins. Like, exactly. He's like classified documents, like they're like their Christmas ornaments or something. And he literally stuffs these dried like moldering documents in giant suitcases and just walks into SFO and gets on a plane to Europe to then go back and resell them. You know, like it was very basic. Like there was no trade craft. You know, There was really very little tradecraft in this story. It gets back to Warsaw. He gets spirited out of Warsaw to this country estate.

And he provides these documents to the polls who are like ecstatic because they actually all of a sudden are like, oh yeah, this is the good stuff. You know, this is like really valuable ballistic missile stuff. The polls immediately contact their overlords in Moscow. The KGB flies in towards. science and technology officers to pour over the documents overnight. They literally spend like an entire day just laying the documents out like one page by a time.

And I'm looking through them and like it's valuable, it's valuable, it's valuable, it's valuable. And so he gets his big payday. They pay him like a couple hundred thousand dollars. You know, this is like his big, big payday. And then they're like, we want more. but so that's you get these kind of false starts and stops but that's the big one that's like that was like the big one and um so when i was going through the polish intelligence files i knew what harper's handwriting looked like from other u.s. quirk documents so i knew what i was

looking at so i'm going through it and i'm seeing everything's in polish obviously right you're seeing everything in polish you had to get translated all of a sudden i come across a bunch of stuff. And it's dated. It's dating lines up perfectly with when I knew Harper was at this estate, you know, basically under watch,

under the watch of the KGB. And it's limericks. Like drunken limericks that that guy that he wrote about spying. And he left it there. He left it there. And they put it in his file. And I was like,

this is the dumbest man ever. Like literally the limericks were like, you know, I'm sitting here by the fire thinking about spying. Like it's like I don't remember them by heart anymore. But like if people are watching or listening, like listen to Spy Valley, the podcast, I mean, it's incredible. You know, like he made up limericks about spying

and he left it there and I was like, this is the best blackmail material that's like ever been made, you know? Again, he viewed it as like a lark, right? I mean, he was drunk and just partying. And like for him it was just like an adventure almost, you know, which is incredible how greedy he was and how incautious he was about being a spy. And on the return trip, similarly, it was like just so half-assed as I recall. I mean, didn't he tape some of the money to his ankles and the rest of it was just in a suitcase and just flies back to the United States?

I'm 100% out. He literally, he taped, he taped half of it to his ankles. and then he put the rest of it underneath his shoes. This was way before you to take off his shoes at the airport, right? There was many, many decades before. But he literally was like, well, he tried to put it in a bank account in France. And they were like, where did you get this money from? Like they had like a paper trail here because we can't just take this money without some kind of receipt, you know?

And he was like, I can't provide you with that. So he just thought, ah, you know, like whatever. I'll literally just, he literally got duct tape and just taped it to his, to his ankles and just walked. walked onto the airplane in Geneva and then walked out at JFK with hundreds of like 150 $250,000 taped to his ankles and his feet.

So yeah, I mean, again, no tradecraft. Like, I know it's harder today with like the digital, you know, there's like a more ubiquitous digital trail, but it just goes to show you that like if you have the drive, you have the access, you can get a lot. if people aren't watching. Yeah.

I mean, it could easily happen today. They can't search everybody that goes through customs. No, of course not. And, and,

you know, the thing about him, too, was that he didn't have, he didn't have a clearance at the time, right? He didn't work for a company that, that was... There's good plausible deniability all around.

It was his girlfriend, and then his wife, and he married her over the course at this scheme, from which lasted from 79 to 81. So he, you know, that was part of the issue

when the Bureau finally started investigating this case, they were looking for people who had access to classified documents for their job. And he didn't, you know. And so that took effect that that was a stumbling block for them. So how did that come about because, I mean, did the Bureau have some inkling that there was a spy out there? Did they have some idea of who they were looking for? Did they have a defected KGB agent who gave gave up that there's a spy somewhere in the United States. I mean, how did that investigation come about? So this is actually one of my favorite parts of the story.

And it's kind of, this whole story is kind of larger than life. And I, you know, I can't do. It's, it's to hear the people who lived it, telling their own world words is, I think gives it a lot more vividly than I can. But I will say this, like two things happen. The first thing that happened was is that the CIA had a, mole in the Polish intelligence service

whose codename was Caribou. And Caribou was one of the most important Eastern Block recruitmentments in place that the I.C. had in the 70s and 80s.

Kind of an unsung guy, even to this day. I mean, very, he's, you know, he comes up in that book you mentioned from Morsal Would Love because he was actually critical in Busting Marion Sikarski, who was a Polish intelligence officer, who was an illegal, who was operating down in Los Angeles at this time.

I remember that one. The Fed's almost lost that case, like, by hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That case came very close, too. I mean, and that was a big, big, big deal. And so this guy, Caribou, who he was a Polish intelligence officer under diplomatic cover in Chicago in the mid-1970s, obviously Poland has a big, interest in Chicago because it has a huge Polish population there. And at some point, probably he was either fully recruited or his recruitment began in Chicago in the early to mid-1970s.

He rotates back out to Warsaw because, you know, people, that's the whole thing. You rotate in, you rotate out. And he was also an engineer. He was an S&T focused by science and technology. And at some point, he gets in touch with his CIA handlers. And he says, this is probably 1980 or so, maybe 1981. And he says, look, I don't know the name of this guy, but you've got a serious spy in Silicon Valley. I was at my work. We were having a holiday party, I think. And I was told that we were to come hang out because one of my coworkers, this intelligence officer named Seahogen, was getting an award from the head of the KGB, from the head of the KGB, because he had recruited an incredibly valuable nuclear spy, right?

That's us. Yeah. Like, right. And he was like, oh, you know, like, so he's there. He's watching this award. being given out, you know, and you know how compartmentation is in intelligence agency. So he doesn't know the name of the guy, you know, the recruitment. He just knows that this senior intelligence officer named Sehogen has a, has some kind of, has some guy

in Silicon Valley who's providing incredibly sensitive nuclear documents to the polls, which are, of course, going directly to the KGB. I mean, actually, it was very interesting reading those documents, the Polish intelligence documents. There's a lot of discussion about who's going to pay? Because they're like, well, this is all just, like, the polls don't care. Like, the polls don't have a ballistic missile program. This is all going to the Soviets, right? So it's like, so there's a lot of like back and forth between them and the KGB about like,

hey, you can't afford to pay this guy. Like, you're going to pay this guy, right? And the KGB was like, yeah, sure, we'll do it, basically. So, I mean, Harper was working directly for the polls, but his payment was coming from the KGB. So this secret CIA penetration of the Polish intelligence service gets in touch and is like, that's all I got for you. Engineer, Silicon Valley, nuclear secrets. Oh, and this guy, this this eight, this, this, this secret source that that we have somehow is connected to Bill Hewkel.

okay so then the it gets Bill Hegel's name CIA gets the basic parameters of what's going on they pass it on to the FBI that's where like Bill can name and the rest that like they're you know

like reading the you get you get this highly classified memorandum that comes in right and it's like here's what we know like you know it's like a you know trusted source whatever says XYZ you don't even get the name you don't even get the name of the source necessarily at the beginning you just get

information that says X, Y, and Z from somebody that's, like, considered a, like, a very, very highly trusted source. That's the first thing. So the Bureau, of course, goes, oh, man, like, we have a real problem, right? We got Hugo. Okay, that's a good lead, right? We know that, like, that's been going on. We've had our eye on Hugo for a while, in fact. But, so they start investigating Hugel, including, like, wiretaps and stuff like that. But there's not, at this point, Harper and Hewlett had a falling out. So they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, They're not getting much from them, right? They're not getting much from them. At the same time, this is happening. Harper gets cold feet about spawning. Like, he decides he doesn't want to be a spy for the Eastern Bloc anymore. And he decides to get in touch with a lawyer to serve as a go-between so he can offer his services to become a double agent for the CIA. And he wants to get paid for it. Right? So like, this dude that just the last three years passing nuclear secrets to Moscow is now basically trying to negotiate a get-out-jail-frey card for himself, where he works for the CIA now against the Soviet bloc and wants to be paid handsomely for it.

To do that, he starts providing information on himself and his scheme and what he knows and who he knows. And of course, DOJ and the Bureau are like, yeah, we're interested. Yeah, okay, we're interested. Keep telling us more. Keep telling us more. They're like, keep telling us more. And of course, they never had any inkling whatsoever that they were ever going to deal with this guy. They just wanted him to give him more investigative leads so they could find him. So these two streams are coming together simultaneously, right? You have Harper anonymously through a lawyer. Dimbing himself out. I made himself out. And then you have the secret source within the Polish intelligence services. So these two intelligence streams come together. And that is eventually how the Bureau identifies him. I mean, it's an interesting question, right?

Like if Harper had not, if he hadn't come forward and tried to negotiate a sweet deal for himself, I don't know if they would have caught him. I mean. Yeah, because I mean, engineer, Silicon Valley, like, that's a pretty wide net. It's wide and it's wide. And again, at that point, Harper and Hugo were not. talking anymore. So there was no like nothing on an open line, no mention of it. I mean, obviously, every time Hugo was like talking about somebody they were wheeling and dealing with, they were like, we got to check up on that guy, you know. But Hugo wasn't talking about Harper at

that point, you know. Huel had moved on. He had the other schemes going on. So yeah, I mean, in the end, it was probably Harper that, that, that, I mean, he never, the Bureau definitely had to, had to do some really good, solid investigative work to make those final leaps. I mean, Harper was never like, and my real name is James Harper. They had to figure out who he was and they did because he started naming all these people that he knew in the background. Right. And at some point, somebody he names is going, like the Bureau would very gently start interviewing people in a way that didn't reveal what they actually wanted, right? because they were afraid of spooking.

Right. They were like, we don't know who he is. And if we make it seem like we're asking questions about a potential spy, that guy might, you know, take off and head to, head to Moscow. We'll never hear from him again.

So they very skillfully managed to get the name Harper out of one of his contacts in the valley without that guy in the valley knowing that they wanted to get in touch with him because of his spying, right? that they were identifying him as a potential lead in that. And that's how they ID Harper. And then, of course, they got to open up an investigation on him. They got a FISA. They tapped his phone lines.

They followed him around everywhere. And that was also hard because they didn't have, like, he wasn't necessarily talking about spying at that point either. So they had to build that case against him. And that was not easy to do, actually. You said that in the interim, while they're listening in on Mr. Harper's, life that he had a very spicy lifestyle that he pursued.

He had a very spicy lifestyle. He was a, he was a man of, I don't know, he was a libertine, right? I mean, he he, he was a total cheat. I mean, he liked, he liked to

like booze it up. He, he would like get into hot tub parties with like Hugo back when they were still talking and they would have girls. Like, you know, it got, It got, I think that there's a character in this story and that character is basically booze. Like, a lot of the story could be explained or understood from the perspective of like dudes who are just drunk all the time and like just were like didn't care about. They were just like caution to the breeze.

Don't care. Like I'm going to go out and find some girls. I'm going to go spy for the Soviet block. Like I'm going to do whatever. know, like they just didn't care. You know, that was kind of his attitude. And so that's, that really drove a lot of what he did, you know, and Hegel too, honestly. I feel like he's almost like, J. Edgar Hoover's, you know, caricature of a communist spy, like just a total degenerate, even though he wasn't ideological. I mean, in fact, yeah, I mean, communist, he was like a, he,

he would probably think of himself as a, as a, as a, you know, the paradigm of a, of a capital. Right. Right. He was like, I'm a. Yeah, yeah. I'm here. I'm like, that's what I do. Like, I'm trying to find new angle. I'm trying to find new revenue streams.

You know, like I'm thinking outside the box. I'm like, I'm not breaking things, right? Like, it's that Silicon Valley ethos of just like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

like dealing and dealing, right? He's got far from communist. I mean, that's the irony, right? These guys, right? Yeah.

These were like, these were really aggressive, capitalist, small businessmen who just viewed spine as another play. You know, so he was very, very much that. I mean, he's an extreme example of that, right? Like, there are, of course, the vast majority of people in that world would not end up in that place, but he's a symptom

of that culture out here. And so as this investigation is ongoing, how did they actually start to like zero in on him to the point that they're able to, you know, make an arrest? I mean, it was just literally... interviewing a guy very, you know, very, uh, obliquely. And then they, they tap his stuff, like I said, and they try to, um, they try to like, uh, they try to, uh, they try to get a smoking gun. That's like really, really hard. You know, it's really hard for them to get a smoking gun. Um, but they eventually decide that they have enough evidence. to bring it to trial.

You know, there's a great story that's a near-miss that Bill Canaan told me where tapping his line and they get a call. Harper gets a call from Europe and it's like,

it's like in 7, 8 p.m. at night gets a call from Europe and it's a cutout for the Polish intelligence service, right? It's a woman who's a cutout who's like, oh, we miss you. We haven't heard from you in a while. Like trying to be oblique,

but it's like obvious that they're talking spy talk, right? and Harper's like slashed like he is just drunk off his face and so the cutout for the Polish intelligence service is like here let me give you my number call me back tomorrow and we'll talk about getting you back out to Europe

you know and Harper says okay and he writes down the number well he writes down the wrong number so here I sell the wrong number so so the bureau is listening to him write down the wrong number. And the next day, he gets up and he calls the wrong number. He calls the wrong number. And the Bureau is losing their mind. They're like, this is it. This is it. This is the call. This is him going to be talking about spying on the phone, a tapped line. And he literally

does not. And so he never calls the woman back because and so the Bureau is like, how do we get him the number? Do we like get into, do we enter his apartment and somehow like put the number on the table so he'll call back like like that's i mean that's the level that this case was at what really led them to um decide to arrest him was that uh caribou the cia mole within the polish intelligence service uh decides to defect like defect for good and that is in the summer of 1983 because the the doj folks are getting a ton of pressure from the bureau and the CIA to prosecute, prosecute, prosecute, prosecute. The DOJ people are like, we don't have the evidence and we don't want to risk arresting this guy and then losing this case. That would be a

disaster for us, right? I mean, it's all where you sit in the government, right? If you're a prosecutor, you want to prosecute it. If you're the FBI, you want to investigate and make an arrest. If you're CIA, you're playing the world of, you know, cloak and dagger, spy versus spy. You want to get an American spy off the streets. It's part of this larger game. you have no, you know what I mean? Like everyone was playing their role, right? Right, right. So at that time, Caraboo is out of Warsaw.

He is now under diplomatic cover, the spy under diplomatic cover in Stockholm, Sweden. He escapes with his family, gets infiltrated out to the U.S. And the prosecutors think that, okay, great. Like, our star witness is here, you know. He's going to see, he's going to appear at trial. And we're going to, we're going to,

you know, we got this. We got this on lock. This is, this is now, and Harper gets arrested in October 1983. So now that this star, this star witnesses here, this star CIA agent is now out of danger. He's now going to be resettled in the U.S. with his family and we're going to put Harper on trial. That's how the case all came together was around as one key witness. Yeah, I mean, I've read cases and I'm sure you have as well.

where it seems like a pretty cut and dry slam dunk case of espionage that you think, you know, someone would get thrown in prison for quite easily. You know, there's a handoff of money. There's an exchange of intelligence with a foreign intelligence officer. But the bar to convict somebody of espionage is quite high in the United States. And, you know, the feds lose a lot of these cases, as we've seen more recently with Chinese espionage. I mean, how did this one play out in a court of law?

I mean, was it, was it a slam dunk case or was it, you know, kind of, you know, could it have gone either way? Well, I mean, this is what is amazing about it is they didn't have all the information that I'm, you know, I've described. They didn't have at the time. They, they had the sketches of it, right? They knew that Harper was the guy. I mean, but there was nothing, there was, there really wasn't a lot of hard, tangible evidence. that they had. That was the whole problem is that they needed this Polish intelligence officer who was broadly a part of this operation, or at least was aware of it as an intelligence officer,

to carry it out to bring the case home. But the problem was, was that as soon as he got to the States and he started being debriefed by the prosecutors on the case, who I spoke with, who are great guys who were incredibly hardworking and really wanted to do this right, the CIA started walking back their promise to allow him to testify immediately. Like, CIA was like, we'll bring him to the country, we'll get him out, he will testify, we'll put Harper away. They were like, great. DOJ was like, great.

Then we will arrest him on the condition that this happens. The moment he got to the states, the CIA was like, actually, we're not really sure we want to testifying more, right? And so that caused a huge blowup between DOJ and CIA. And if you think about it, how many times have you heard of of a defector from a foreign intelligence service testifying in a criminal trial for espionage in the U.S. as a witness? I can't think about you. I can't think of a single time, right? Because they don't want, they don't want those folks having any heat or light on them. For some of the reasons that are good, right?

But they just generally don't, like, you know, the way it was put to me was, in the end, CIA just wanted to stay in the shadows. That's it. Like, that's their imperative. That's the way they view the world. They don't want their agents showing up in courtrooms pointing to somebody and saying, yes, that is the man who passed me the document. Right.

Like, they don't want it. So the prosecutors felt like they had been. and lied to, basically. And there was a big blowup in Langley where they walked into the, you know, they walked into the room, this senior CIA operations officer who offers them a drink at like 11 o'clock in the morning and is like, please sit down, you know, and then basically proceeds to tell them that like, you know, ain't happening, you know, after the promise.

So the prosecutors are irate and they're also really scared because they're like, we were, this entire trial was predicated on this witness. And if we don't have that, we may not be able to get Harper. You know, we might not have enough. So they did, they very smartly did probably, they probably pursued their best path forward, which was leaning on him really hard to plea to make it seem like they had an. Oh, on Harper to get him to plea bargain out. Yeah.

Yeah. That's what they did. You know, they started walking in there like all, you know, piss and vinegar and telling him like you're going to get the needle for this you bastard we're gonna like we're gonna put you away forever and let's be guilty so you better sign on the dotted line right now or like you know you like literally a prosecutor says me like your ass is grass you're a dead man that's it's done you know that's it and it worked it worked it worked and it worked and it worked because the prosecutors who worked you know worked the case were very very smart convincing people and and he's the kind of guy

who saves his own skin every time. Exactly. And also he got a, he got a, he got a judge who was a notorious hard ass, whose name was hanging Sam Conti. Because he was for basically asking for the death penalty for everything. He was like an old, he was like a truly crazy old school law and order judge. It was like Harper could not have gotten a worse judge. So, you know, he gets into the courtroom and Sam Conti's like, What are you accused of?

It's like, espionage. And he's like, are you pursuing the death penalty? You know? I'm the process. Like, no, you know? So this is, this is not the bleeding heart liberal California legislature we hear about nowadays. This was a wild west. He was a Nixon appointee.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, his nickname was literally hanging Sam. Like, that was, you know, he was a, he was like an institute. So when the prosecutors get this guy, they really. realize like, you know, the judge is going to scare Harper as bad as they could and Harper, Harper, please. Because at that point, you can't, you can't get the death penalty for espionage anymore. Right. Yeah. But, but literally the judge is arguing with the prosecution about why he

can't get to. He's like, why can't I have that? And they're like, listen, sir, I'm sorry, the Supreme Court. And he was like, make sure, you know. So Harper's just standing there. And it's like, I'm not, you know, like, you're a dead man walking. Literally, he's like, I'm like, I'm going to die. So he decides to play out, and he plays out and he thinks, all right, you know, I'm going to avoid the electric chair. And I'm going to hopefully get a relatively lenient sentence, but he doesn't. Conti gives him the max, of course, which is a life sentence. And Harper spends 33 years in prison.

He gets out in the mid-20s. and I managed to reach out to him and get him to talk to me and tell me his life story. And for folks interested in listening to the podcast by Valley, I mean, that really is the heart of a lot of the story. It's hearing about an American trader in their own words. As difficult as that can be sometimes, it's also a really valuable and, I think, fascinating character study. because Harper, he didn't lie to me as far. And I tried to check every little detail I could about his case. And everything I could find seemed highly credible based on other sources, corroborating sources out there.

And so he told me his whole story from the time he was a kid to his time as a spy. Yeah, there's a real aspect of like sociopathy and narcissism in that he's like, even after all of this, he's almost like bragging to you about what he did. I think it's a lot of it. Yeah, I mean, I think sociopathy is the right word for it. Extreme narcissism also. There are points about asking questions and you're right. He was kind of like, well, I did this and I did that. And I said, I got away with this.

I'm like, I couldn't believe it. And all of a sudden I had all this money burning a hole in my pocket. Like he was, I think, proud of like cheating the system. Right. I think that was something that really made him, I think that made him I don't know even after having spent

30 plus years in prison I think it made him feel good in a way that he had that he had I mean it's incredible and he's not a normal person right like you hear him sometimes you're like oh this is like a good time

good time boy really you can just tell like oh he's he's a dude you could like drink some beers with and he would like tell dirty jokes and it'd be fun and then like it goes from that to like much much darker you know like real quick with him, you know, where it's clear, like, oh, I can see how you could be kind of like a charming sociopath. You told me like he was pimping at his wife at one point or something like that. That wasn't him. That was that was you. I mean, yeah, he, he wasn't doing that. What Harper did was,

I mean, when his wife, Ruby Louise Schuller was his co-conspirator and wife, the woman who, who worked for the company with the classified contracts, she was an extreme alcoholic. She was like basically dying of alcoholism by her like late 30s, like bedridden. And he would tell his, his like bedridden, co-conspirate or wife that he's going out for a jog. He'd be like, I'm going up for a jog, sweetie. And he had another girl like five blocks away. And he would just jog to her place and like do his thing.

And then he would like come back all sweaty and be like, man, what a great jog, you know. Like, that's the kind of level this guy was, like, operating at. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of guy. That kind of guy. And so what was his life like after prison? Sad.

I mean, I don't know how else to put it. Sad. His life was sad. He got out of prison. He was in his mid-80s. He was a sad. He was a sick old man. Most of his family had long since disowned him because he was not a good.

He was not a good. I mean, he betrayed everybody who was around him, everybody who meant anything to him, everybody who was close to him. He betrayed his family. He betrayed his lovers. He betrayed his business partners. He betrayed his country. He was left with very little. He spent most of his years in federal prison up in Oregon.

And he got out and he ended up chasing some old flame of his who had since long moved to Arkansas. And he moved out there with the idea that maybe he was going like, I don't know. know, live with her, mooch off her, I'm not sure, but that did not work out. And he ended up kind of marooned in northwest Arkansas, California boy, and was just trying to get better and trying to kind of live and eke out a living. He wasn't working, but just, you know, living on probably disability at that point. And he wasn't doing much, you know, and so I think I found him in the right time. But he was in a sad state, you know, he was like really ill. And he was lonely. You know, he was ill, he was lonely.

It was sad. It was, you know, it was interesting talking to him then. I mean, he looked back on his life, but he never really seemed to exhibit much regret for what he did. And then as you were, you know, producing this podcast, I mean, he passed away, didn't he? He did. Yeah. He actually, well, before he passed away, he stopped responding to me. It was actually very interesting.

He, excuse me, sure. he we would talk a lot intensively and he we'd have these long conversations he was like very very exuberant and then he would like just drop off the face of the earth you know like he would talk I talked to him like twice a week for hours and then all of a sudden he would just like stop picking out the phone he was a very difficult interview that way one day he just doesn't pick up the phone and I don't hear from him for like a year and a half and I was like okay look he was in and out of the hospital

he's in his late 80s at this point you just kind of assume right like all right he probably passed and then out of nowhere I got a call from him and he was like hey just wondering how you're doing like I'm thinking to come into California do you want to like have coffee and keep talking and I was like okay

and that's it. And then I tried to get in touch with them again and I couldn't and I couldn't and I couldn't and I found out that he passed after some pretty gruesome health stuff. He never made it back to California. He died at age 89, I believe,

and because he had served in the military, he is buried in a U.S. military cemetery in North West Arkansas. which is amazing, right? That the guy who, like, was a Soviet block spy just got, like, because he used to be like, I got to go to the VA to, like, do my PT. And I was like, what? He's like, I get VA services.

And I was like, oh, yeah, all right. Like, so. What a world. Yeah, what a world, right? That's like a little irony at the end of that. So that's where he's buried. That's what happened to James Harper. I, and I, so the podcast, Spy Valley, I mean, it's really incredible because you were

able to get the FBI side. You're able to get these through the archival research, some of the documents from the Polish intelligence service pre, you know, wall coming down. And then, you know, the man himself, James Harper, what was the response when this podcast came out? I mean, was there any interesting feedback you got from it or any other sources that kind of popped out of the woodwork? I didn't have any sources that popped out of the woodwork. And so it's always what you want, right? As a journalist is like somebody's like, I have another amazing story from this time. I will say like the most common response I got was kind of something you alluded to at the

beginning of the interview, which is like, I had no idea that this happened, which always as a journalist is like kind of great. You know, like yeah. Yeah. Like I've opened up a different world. Like I've peeled back like this crazy thing. And something you talked about maybe before we started the stream, which was almost the the kind of like almost comedic

like Cohen brothers burn after this thing because that's that there is a real sense of the story that it's like it's just it's very very serious but it's at the same time like undoubtedly a funny and bizarre story of like a guy kind of a crazy dude that did a crazy

it was a terrible thing what he did but it's also like a cast of characters that you can't believe are real you know but it's like it's a very much a real story about real wild people doing some wild stuff and they you know most of them face the consequences for it but that's that was the primary reaction was like I didn't know the respying in Silicon Valley I didn't know about this story and like I didn't know that like spy real life spy stories could be this funny well I think it was great I'm glad it worked out um and I hope people will go and check

out. So the podcast is Valley of Spies. You find wherever, Spy Valley, wherever podcast are available. I actually just listened to it on YouTube, found it on there. Yeah, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, yeah, wherever you get your podcast. It's six episodes, each episode. I think it's like 30 minutes long. So I mean, you can listen to it over, you know, an afternoon if you want to. It's not like some podcast, like this one sometimes where it's like three hour long shows. It's very listenable and I hope you guys will check it out. And so I mean, while we have you here, Zach, I have to probe the wire and see like what's next on the horizon for you. Oh man. I got some stuff, but I can't talk about a lot of it yet because it's not out.

But I have some long form investigative reporting that I've been working on. for a long, long time, years that is nearing completion, some very deep dives into stuff that goes back a lot of years, kind of U.S. intelligence community stories, kind of back to the core reporting that, you know, that you and I do. So I'm really, really excited about that. I don't want to give too much away for a whole bunch of reasons. But like definitely some.

revelatory stories from the world of the post-9-11, post-9-11 intelligence world. That's great. And I hope, you know, we'll have you on the show again, you know, a year down the line and we'll have some more topics to talk about. For sure. Happy to be here anytime. Is there anything else that you want to plug or anything you want to tease out there, tell people about?

Where can people find you? Where can people find you online? That can at this point. I don't know. I mean, Zach Esdorfman at Twitter. I'm not calling it X. And blue sky, same thing at blue sky.

And yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I can't even talk about where some of these stories are going to be appearing yet. But I would say Twitter, first and foremost and and yeah and we'll all come back on and we'll

we'll talk about some of these investigative pieces. Awesome. And so next week, next Friday, we're going to have our first interview. It's the first of two parts. So on December 1st, we're going to have Mike Vickers on the show to talk about

his career. He's coming on before Mike Vickers? Yeah. Hey, man. Scheduling we like to mix it up. So Mike Vickers is next week. We're going to talk about his time in the military and his stint in CIA, his career there, working on the covert action program in Afghanistan. And then we'll have him back for a second episode on December 8th.

And we'll talk about his time at USDA and ASD Solic and some of those more like high-level appointments that he had. So we're looking forward to doing that. That's going to be incredible. I mean, that, I mean, Vickers is a living legend. And wow, that sounds amazing. You're doing a two-party with him? I'm going to look at. Yeah, yeah, two Fridays in a row.

He's been quite generous with his time. You know, we really appreciate that. And he has a book out. I think it's called By All Means Available. I read a couple months ago. Worth checking out for anyone who hasn't yet. So yeah, I guess, Zach, barring any final thoughts, man, I guess that wraps it up.

Anything else you want people to know about? Or any final thoughts about this wild story that you told? the Cone Brothers working on the screen adaptation? No, well, I wish. That would be great. No, I'm going to plug you, man. I'm going to plug you and Sean's work on the high side, man. Oh, yeah, thank you.

Yeah, that stuff's incredible. The story that you did, you beat all the major publications on the U.S. Special Operations Forces, getting ready to potentially deploy to NASA and the kind of back and forth on that. I mean, that was a great story, and you beat all the big. the big papers on that one. Yeah, thank you. And the next story we're working on, I don't want to get Sean angry with me,

but I'll just say it's a biographical piece about someone who's essentially a CIA legend, a legend of the CIA in the Special Forces community, and we're working on a pretty extensive piece about him. So we're excited to get that out, hopefully, you know, in the next month or so. I've heard a little bit about that from Sean And without going into any detail, obviously, I can vouch that that is going to be an amazing story.

Yeah, yeah. It's a slice of an amazing person, but also through his own experiences, it's a slice of history as well. It's pretty incredible. So, yeah, hopefully I'll be able to, we'll be able to have that discussion on another episode. So until next Friday, we'll see all you guys then. Zach, again, thank you for taking some of your Friday evening with us. And we will see you then. Bye now. Thanks again.