Codename Tinsel Tyrant | FBI
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This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. When you bring a certain kind of personality in a certain kind of culture, you get almost like a sociopathic result, and that's what happened with Harper. In the spring of 1980, a trimaran sails deep into the Sacramento River Delta.

The Delta is 1,100 square miles of complex inland waterways, the largest estuary on the west coast of America. Alongside the skipper are two passengers, James Derwood Harper and Ruby Louise Schuller, both residents of San Francisco's Silicon Valley.

Harper and Shula are also lovers. But these aren't sightseers out for a romantic day trip. They are transporting a hoard of cardboard boxes. They stop near a small island deep into the delta. Grabbing a shovel, Harper disembarks. As the skipper and Shula look on, he starts to dig. When he's about three feet down into the mud, Harper offloads the boxes from the boat.

Boxes that he knows contain over 2,000 documents, and he buries them. This is a huge amount of physical paper, right? And, you know, again, this stuff is not being, this is not being stored on a hard drive, you know, or a thumb drive. These are physical documents, right? It's quite damning and quite obvious if anybody happened to stumble upon what he was doing.

The documents are, in fact, complex plans for the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile system, as well as a raft of other military tech intelligence. Were they to fall into the wrong hands, they would represent the biggest breach of U.S. nuclear secrets since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of leaking details of the U.S. nuclear weapon program to the Soviets in 1951.

But that is exactly what Harper intends to do with them. His aim is to sell them to the Polish intelligence service, who will in turn fence them to the Soviets. And he wants a million dollars in return.

Harper was not working for a government agency. He wasn't, you know, a CIA officer. He wasn't in the State Department. He wasn't working for a major military contractor in Washington. He wasn't in the orbit of the United Nations. James Harper was an electronics engineer. He'd worked his way into California's Silicon Valley, a fledgling global tech center located in the southern part of San Francisco's Bay Area.

When most of us think of military secrets, our thoughts drift eastwards to Virginia and the Pentagon. Silicon Valley hardly factors in as a center for martial espionage. But for a period in the mid to late 1970s, that's exactly what it was. And James Harper was its most notorious traitor. This is the story of the man U.S. intelligence codenamed Tinsel Tyrant.

He grew up in central California with two other brothers. And all three of the Harper boys, including James, were kind of electronic savants. They were extraordinary and precocious and just good with working with their hands, working with complicated technologies.

Our guide to this extraordinary tale of spycraft in the Sunshine State is investigative journalist Zach Dorfman. Zach's the producer of Spy Valley, a long-form audio series that tells James Harper's story.

Dorfman gained unique insight into this case through exclusive access to Harper himself, who, just before he died, agreed to tell all to Dorfman. Most of the time, those folks either go to prison for their whole life and or never ever want to talk to the press. And having Harper tell his story in his own words was just really extraordinarily unusual and I think enriched the story greatly.

A native son of Fresno, California, James Harper's life seemed mapped out from the start. Surrounded by a family of skilled engineers, it was a given that he would find his way into a career doing actual rocket science, like his older brother, Rowan.

But Harper himself was kind of the wild child of the bunch. I remember reading an article where he said that one of his talents in high school was that he could spot a police car from across the town, basically. Like, he thought it was a talent of his that he knew when the law might be near. It was a skill that would feed into his paranoia, a quality that would one day lead to his undoing. But all that is to come.

By the early 1950s, it was all ahead of him. James Harper had come of age and was doing his national service in the U.S. military.

So he decides to enlist instead of being drafted so he can actually kind of shape where he goes in the war. But he never actually goes to Korea. Instead, he gets put into electronics training. And the U.S. military then pays for Harper's schooling. This period of his life was to provide Harper with essential training and insights into military weapons programs, insights he would deploy to a whole other purpose later in life.

So he has some real knowledge and understanding, even on the margins of the way that early, early Silicon Valley is enmeshed, intertwined with U.S. missile defense, the U.S. military more broadly. But Harper's brief military career came to an abrupt end when he was almost decapitated in a fuel explosion at a rocket testing facility. He was now a civilian again.

Looking to make some real money, Harper turned his attention to Silicon Valley. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work,

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And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

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Since the Second World War, a combination of increased defense spending, permissive government regulation, new university research facilities, and a ready supply of venture capital had all made this pocket of Northern California a global center for tech innovation.

Like many aspiring entrepreneurs, Harper quickly tired of working for other people and sought for ways to make his fortune in this exciting new world. He founded a transformer company called Harper Magnetics. By this time, he was married to his first wife, Colleen, and they'd started a family.

But beneath this seemingly straightforward facade, Harper's wild and reckless spirit was still seeking the thrills that had defined his youth. This time, it led him into an affair with a young woman called Louise Howell. Like Harper, Louise loved a drink or two, and they started a passionate but ultimately toxic affair. The relationship ended when Louise headed off to get married to someone else.

But this is not the last we will hear of Louise Howell. Meanwhile, Harper Magnetics Financial Health nosedived and the company went bust. This was in no small part due to Harper embezzling money from his own company. He was forced back into the labor market and ended up working for another company called Fairchild Semiconductors. And it's there that he had his eureka moment.

He goes back to work for a Bay Area, Silicon Valley tech firm. He gets an idea one day that stopwatches could be digitized. So he sets out to invent, and he does in fact invent, the digital stopwatch. He had a company called Harper Time and Electronics. Once again, he gets financing. Once again, it appears that he embezzles. Once again, he gets kicked out of his own company.

Getting thrown out of his own company sent Harper into a depressive spiral. His drinking, gambling, and philandering went into overdrive. He's got a family. He's got four daughters. And yeah, he's getting older, right? He's getting older. He hasn't had that big payday.

Enter Bill Hugel. If anyone could find Harper his pot of cash, it was Hugel. Bill Hugel is a guy who Harper knows from Valley Circles. At this point in the Valley, it's still a relatively small community. People are drinking in the same bars. They're networking. People know who other folks are. And Bill Hugel was a pioneer in the semiconductor industry who had been in the Valley for years, who also had been a serial startup founder.

He was kind of a proto-libertarian of the type that you also recognize in the valley today. He actually ran as a Democrat for a local congressional seat in 1972. He lost the primary, but he was endorsed by some very prominent Democratic politicians. He was anti-Vietnam War, pro-marijuana legalization, and pro-free trade.

This was the mid-70s. The Cold War was at its peak. Free trade came with heavy caveats. There was a wide variety of technologies that were prohibited for export to countries that were adversarial to the United States. Despite these heavy restrictions, Hugel took it on himself to circumnavigate these trade barriers.

Hewgill did not believe that the US should be permitted to prevent trade between the US and the Eastern Bloc. So what did he do? He just ignored it. He just ignored it. He broke the law. He actively engaged with prohibited trade with the Eastern Bloc, selling them hundreds of thousands of dollars in microchips and other computer parts.

One night, at the Town Oak, one of the valley's most popular watering holes, Harper and Hugel's paths crossed. Harper is desperate. He's looking for a new source of cash. The kind of cash that Hugel seemed to have a steady access to. That same night, Hugel's wife, Beverlyn, was being hassled by a leery guy at the bar.

Seeing his chance to impress Hugel, Harper stepped in and threw the guy out. The men became fast friends and even faster business associates. Hugel's illegal trade racket required a team of agents he could deploy to transport the stolen tech and liaise with his buyers. To Hugel, Harper seemed ideal.

He gets lists from Poland because his main contacts are in communist Poland. These lists are assembled in concert with, in communication with the Soviet KGB in Moscow. So KGB says, we need X, Y, and Z. They pass that on to their subordinate services in the Eastern Bloc. Those folks in the Eastern Bloc intelligence services then go out and try to find KGB

those prohibited parts, that prohibited technology. Bill Hugel was one of those guys who was given a list, passed from Moscow to Warsaw to agents all over the world. Harper slotted into Hugel's racket with ease.

Having earned himself the reputation of being something of a tough guy, Harper was also deployed by Hugel as an enforcer, putting pressure on contacts who were slow to pay or who reneged on promises. The Soviet intelligence and military services were keenly interested in increasing their processing power so they could do their own, you know, analytic work, right? And that was the kind of stuff that Harper was being asked to steal or to find to

to then ship out to the Eastern Bloc. And the two men agreed a split of the proceeds that enabled Harper to become financially solvent again. But Harper's ambitions were for more than to work as a lackey for a big shot. In his mind, he was the big shot.

True spies listeners will be familiar with this pattern. When it comes to betraying your country, an oversized ego seems to be a prerequisite. Harper took a entrepreneurial approach to spying. He realized that he was getting paid a little here, a little there for helping procure these prohibited pieces of technology. But he realized that there was potentially a much bigger score.

Hugel's illegal trade with Polish intelligence had provided the Poles with so much tech that they had been able to build a computer factory. And it had also made Hugel rich. But in 1975, the FBI and Commerce Departments had become aware of his activities and had launched an investigation. Hugel quickly decamped to Europe to lay low for a while, which was when Harper's opportunity to capitalize on Hugel's absence revealed itself.

Or, should we say, herself. While still technically working for Hugel, Harper's personal life was in tatters. He was separated from his wife, living alone, drinking too much and gambling again. One night, he was drowning his sorrows in another local bar, Chez Yvonne, when he spied a pair of green eyes staring at him. Eyes that were all too familiar.

It was 13 years since he last saw them, but they had lost none of their charm. The person in question was Louise Howell, now Louise Shuler, Harper's old girlfriend and just maybe the only woman he'd ever really loved. Louise tapped him on the shoulder and asked if she could buy him a drink. Harper's response was typically louche. If you play your cards right, you can spend the night with me.

They resumed their affair, but this time it was to bring more than romantic fulfillment into Harper's orbit. Shuler is also in the tech company scene, but she's an executive assistant. She works for a company called Systems Control Incorporated. Now, behind that incredibly bland name is a company that was doing highly technical research into ballistic missile defense.

At this stage of the Cold War, mutually assured destruction was the one overriding factor that guaranteed that no side would launch a preemptive nuclear strike. What that meant in practice was that if either the US or USSR fired the first ICBM, the response would be instantaneous, probably leading to the complete annihilation of the known world.

But the U.S. military was hell-bent on breaking this deadlock by developing nuclear defense systems that could allow the U.S. to defend itself successfully against a counteroffensive. It was a program that was to be made public a few years later, in 1983, by President Ronald Reagan. The initiative was instantly dubbed the Star Wars Programme.

Harper was first exposed to this program as early as 1957, before his move to Silicon Valley, when stationed at the project's main site in Alaska. Since then, the continuing evolution of early warning defense systems had become one of the most important, and sensitive, strands of missile development in the entire U.S. military.

This is the kind of stuff that Ruby Louise Schuller's company was working on. And she was the executive assistant. She was also having an affair with the president of that company who gave her total access to the company safe, which included all of these classified, highly, highly restricted documents.

The president of the company, a man named Robert Larson, had even used Louise's date of birth as the code to the safe. Once Harper had found out the scale of information Louise had access to, a plan formed in his mind. And it seems he was also willing to overlook the affair. The big score was all that mattered.

Most people would say, oh, that's interesting. And they would move on with their life. Well, not Harper. Harper's inclination was, oh, my girlfriend has access to this treasure trove of highly technical classified nuclear documents. I'm going to see if I can sell those to the Soviets because that will be my payday. However, at this stage of his career, Harper still needed Hugel. So?

Using a family vacation as cover, he flew to Geneva to meet his boss and to lay out the plan. Carrying with him a summary of the goldmine of documents Shula had access to, Harper asked Hugel to facilitate a meeting with his Polish contacts. This is like two entrepreneurs at a tech meeting. Let's go to Europe and pitch it. Let's pitch it to this Polish intelligence officer and see what he thinks. And this is exactly what happened.

A few weeks later, Hugel had arranged a meeting with his Polish handler. Zdzisław Szyhożyn was a slick operator who seemed to work for Polish intelligence and the military simultaneously. He was suave, experienced, and no fool when it came to espionage. So Hugel tells Harper, hey, I've reached out to my contact in the Polish intelligence services. He wants to meet Ryszard.

We're going to meet in Vienna. And of course, anybody who knows anything about Spine in the Cold War knows that Vienna was like the world capital of Spine. So they meet at a fancy hotel in Vienna and they start hashing it out. And Sihogin, the senior Polish intelligence officer, is obviously very, very interested in what Harper has to offer. So they go to Warsaw and they start talking even more, right? They're getting deeper and deeper and deeper into it.

While Shihoujin was the consummate professional, Harper was more chaotic in his approach. It was by now the late 70s, and Harper, like many men back then, dressed like a cheap Burt Reynolds ripoff. He always wore dark glasses and had his hairy chest on display, complete with a compulsory chain necklace to draw the eye. But whatever he looked like, his eye remained on the prize.

Harper is trying to sell as many documents as he can in one go. He wants a million dollars. In 1979, right? So that's, I think, three to four times as much today. While Sheehojan was not about to hand over a small fortune under any circumstances. They want to keep him on the hook. So they want him to slowly provide them stuff over time so they can keep asking him for more stuff. So this becomes like a bone of contention between him and his Polish spy handlers.

Sheehojin offered Harper $15,000 for the abstract, which gave a schedule of the documents available. Despite his reservations, Harper agreed and offered to split the money three ways between himself, Hugel, and Louise, whose name he had kept well out of his dealings with either man. Harper didn't have to wait long. Once they reviewed the abstract, the polls were hooked. Their instructions to Harper? Get as much as you can.

Sensing that their million-dollar payday was within reach, Harper and Louise quickly went to work.

So because she was able to walk in after hours, she and Harper would drive to the company, walk in, take the stuff out of the safe, go back to their apartment in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. They'd spend the entire night photographing the documents, drive back to the Systems Control Incorporated headquarters, put the documents back in the safe, drive away, and then she would walk into work the next morning like nothing had happened. And that's how they did it.

In our world of cell phones, thumb drives and encryption, it's hard to imagine how analog things were back then. But despite the rudimentary nature of their methods, Harper and Shuler managed to copy thousands of pages of classified material.

I mean, look, when Harper went abroad, he was just stuffing those documents in suitcases, you know? There was no tradecraft. There was no extra sexy spycraft. Amazingly, and owing no small thanks to Sheehojin's status, Harper would arrive in Warsaw with all these cases and be swept through customs, no questions asked. But Harper's greed had already got the better of him.

Rather than be satisfied with a potential deal on the table, he couldn't resist trying to rip them off. Just a little bit.

It all came to a head when Harper returned to Poland for the next rendezvous. They go back and forth. And Harper mixes really, really valuable missile documents with garbage, basically unclassified stuff that the Poles don't care about. And, you know, the Poles are nobody's fool. They know what's going on. So they essentially say, hey, we're not going to pay you as much as you're asking for because this is, you know, this stuff is garbage.

Harper had, indeed, padded out his haul with material that had little or no value to the Poles. He had also upped his price. In October 1979, Harper and Hugel met with Shihoujin and his analysts at the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, a notorious spy hangout. Remember, Shihoujin still owed Harper $15,000, let alone the $1 million that Harper is anticipating.

It's clear that there is a lot of extremely useful material in the documents. But then, without any warning, Shihojin calls the whole deal off. It's October 1979, and James Harper's dream of striking it rich by supplying the KGB with top-secret nuclear intelligence is in tatters.

Having promised a once-in-a-lifetime haul of documents, Harper has compromised the deal by padding out the cash with useless material to try and up his price. But the polls haven't fallen for it, and the deal is suddenly off. We find ourselves where we started.

With over 2,000 documents to store and the ever-present threat of the authorities finding out what he's been up to, Harper and his girlfriend-slash-accomplice, Louise Shuler, need to get the evidence away from prying eyes. The year is 1980, and they've hidden the classified material under three feet of sand on a small island in the Sacramento River Delta.

Harper was in the worst position of all. He had self-funded his trips to Europe. He owed Hugel and Schuller $5,000 each, and Polish intelligence no longer trusted him. And worse still, he had actual intelligence of actual value just lying there, unused. With nothing left to lose, he made another attempt to contact Polish intelligence.

He reaches out to Seehojin again through an intermediary. And to his surprise, Seehojin is all of a sudden extremely amenable to meeting with him again. With the deal apparently back on, Harper headed back out to the Sacramento Delta to retrieve the stash. He goes to the island again, only to find out that there was a huge storm and a flood

The island where he buried the boxes had been submerged. He frantically dug in the slimy sand, pulling at it until he finally located the material. But in the time since he stowed them away, the boxes had rotted and the papers were completely waterlogged. He takes it back to his apartment and he realizes that even though it's all been water damaged, a lot of it isn't entirely destroyed, but it's all soaked through and moldy. So...

He then has to dry out these dozens or, you know, 100 pounds of documents that are just molded through in his apartment. With the majority of the material salvaged, Harper breathed a sigh of relief and booked a flight to Warsaw. This time, the meeting went very differently.

Sheehojin took Harper to a secure villa outside of Warsaw, where Polish agents began to review the material. And they go through this document dump that he brought with him, and the Poles are ecstatic. This is a ton of classified missile-related document stuff. This is so important that the KGB sends a team of 20 people

science and technology experts to fly in instantaneously to Warsaw to pour over the documents. They worked the entire night. Shihojin paid Harper the money he owed him and offered him $100,000 for the complete haul of documents. While this was way off the million bucks Harper had originally asked for, he was delighted and quickly agreed to the deal.

Shihojin also made it clear that, if Harper could obtain any more documents, there would be similar payments to come.

When Harper tried to extract from Szyhozian why he changed his attitude, Szyhozian hinted that he staged the original walkout to cut Hugel out of the deal. It appeared that Hugel had got on the wrong side of the Polish intelligence agents, and Szyhozian was also aware that until recently, Hugel had effectively been in exile to avoid the FBI agent who'd been sniffing around his business operations.

After weighing up the risk and the reward, they decided to sever their ties with him. But Harper now had a new problem. How to smuggle $100,000 in cash back to the U.S.? His solution was one that only James Harper could come up with.

He strapped the money to his legs and stuffed it into his shoes. Harper returned home and, incredibly, managed to get the money through customs. However, he'd heard that Hugel had contacts in the Chinese mafia. Some caution was in order. Rather than cut him out altogether, he gave Hugel 20,000 and split the rest between himself and Schuller.

To most people, this would be the time to get out. Harper had scored a small fortune and got away with it. But Harper wanted to be rich. To be really, really rich.

The promise of further payments was just too good to turn down. From a very young age, that was his goal, right? I mean, you see, even as early as the 1960s or the 1970s, people in the Valley were aware, engineers in the Valley were aware, developers, experts were aware that some of their contemporaries were amassing extraordinary fortunes, right? It was like, it's a new gold rush, right? That's what San Francisco is, right?

Through his own greed and disregard for the law, Harper had failed in his attempts to strike it rich in Silicon Valley the conventional way. He'd lost the right to his one big break, the digital stopwatch. What better way to get his revenge than through selling Silicon Valley out to the Soviets?

And he was just an example of he's an edge case, right? Of when you bring a certain kind of personality in a certain kind of culture, you get almost like a sociopathic result. And that's what happened with Harper. Harper readily agreed to obtain more documents for Sheehojan. But his and Louise's rampant alcoholism was starting to undermine their efficacy and worse still, feed their paranoia that the authorities were onto them.

I think a lot of the decision-making that both she and Harper were engaged in was made very much under the influence. But beyond that, it seems like she wanted an exciting life. You know, that was Harper's take. She wanted an exciting life. She wanted to be a part of exciting things. And, you know, a man who was offering, I guess, looked at from one perspective, a life of, you know, swashbuckling adventure by being a spy was somehow an attractive proposition for her.

Whichever way Harper tried to rationalize his and Louise's behavior, it was quite extraordinary they got as far as they did. Setting aside their amateur methods, Harper confessed to Zach Dorfman that he conducted most of his meetings with Shiojin blind drunk.

And he also did other strange things, like compose poetry, which he would then send to his Polish handler, as if that was in any way appropriate to the image he was trying to convey of a solid, dependable agent.

On the Polish side, despite Harper's incredible access to invaluable material, they were also beginning to worry about the likelihood of the CIA or FBI picking up the trail. So he gets crabby about having to go to Europe over and over again from the West Coast, and he starts asking to meet somewhere more local.

So they settle on Mexico. Harper wants to meet in Tijuana. The Poles are like, we can't meet in Tijuana because there's U.S. agents all over Tijuana. Harper is given a new handler, a man codenamed Jacques. Jacques.

There's another series of meetings in Mexico where Harper continues to deliver highly classified documents to Polish intelligence officers in Mexico, including Mexico City, Guadalajara, Matamoros.

Harper was still making good money at this stage. He managed to accrue at least another $150,000 for his efforts, but his alcohol-driven paranoia was taking over. Then Harper starts to get really skittish. He starts to go a little, he gets a little unwound.

He starts showing up for meetings without documents, demanding to be paid more for prior documents he's provided. He starts quibbling over money. This erratic behavior was not lost on his Polish contacts. So Harper starts spying for the Poles in 1979. This is now 1981, so it's three years in, right? At this point, the Poles are saying, what's going on with this guy? At the same time, the political situation in Poland was becoming more volatile.

The working people in the country had started to mobilize against their Soviet-controlled government. A military coup to stave off a Russian invasion brought in a new period of anxiety and totalitarian repression. So Harper and the Polish intelligence services are starting to distrust one another more acutely. Meanwhile, the situation in Poland is rapidly devolving into what becomes military law.

Harper was summoned by Shehozhin for another meeting and another document handover, where Shehozhin intended to get Harper back in line. But this fell apart when Harper, drunk and aggressive, refused to hand anything over and demanded yet more money.

Sheehojan sent him packing, and the relationship was all but over. When a follow-up in Mexico was also cancelled at the last minute, Harper realized his career as an agent for Polish, and in turn Soviet, intelligence, was finished. Which, for anyone sensible, would well and truly mean the end of the line, right? Not for James Harper.

Still chasing those elusive millions, he plotted his next move. He decided to offer himself as a double agent to the American authorities. His price? Not one, but $5 million.

For the next year, using a fake identity, James Harper attempted to negotiate through a proxy, a well-known lawyer named Bill Doherty. True to form, Harper would meet Doherty in a dive bar called The Fling in Southern California, and wearing dark glasses and drinking Bloody Marys, would talk and talk.

Convinced he was getting closer to being granted immunity, Harper passed more and more information over to Doherty, even naming names in an attempt to convince the FBI he was the right man to employ as a double agent. And every time he named somebody, the Bureau surreptitiously tries to get in contact with that person and kind of tease them out to figure out who that person might have had a conversation with. But this outlandish plan was a step too far.

Rather than wanting to cut a deal, the FBI and CIA were in fact stringing Harper along as far as possible, as far and as long as it would take to unmask him. They had been tipped off to the existence of a traitor in Silicon Valley for some time, but the investigation had stalled, owing to the fact they had so little else to go on, until Doherty approached them. Here's the truth. If Harper had not tried to negotiate...

a deal with the U.S. government to become a double agent and work against the Soviet bloc, the evidence that the U.S. had would not have been enough to identify Harper. What the U.S. agents who were eventually responsible for bringing him in also discovered through extensive surveillance of the Harper home was just how low Harper and Shuler, now married, had sunk.

Shula's alcoholism was killing her. She had been drinking hard since she was eight years old, and it had all but destroyed her. Her liver was giving out, yet she was still drinking heavily, as was Harper. And now, with Louise bedridden and dying, Harper was trying to negotiate his out with the US authorities, with what appeared to be zero concern for Louise's own safety or protection.

And what Harper had no conception of was that the CIA were obtaining information from a real double agent they were running. Embedded deep with Polish intelligence, an agent codenamed Karabu

Karabu was originally stationed at the Polish consulate in Chicago. Once he had been recruited by U.S. intelligence, he was posted back to Warsaw, where he started to feed critical intelligence back to the U.S. Secret Service. It was Karabu who'd alerted U.S. intelligence to the existence of the Silicon Valley spy in the first place. And now the FBI has both streams, right? So first they got the Karabu stream, then they're getting the Doherty stream, the tinsel tyrant stream.

You heard that right. Along the way, Harper had acquired a codename of his own: Tinsel Tyrant. And I was told that it was because Doherty would speak to Harper and then, I guess, re-record what he had heard in his own voice and give it to them on reel-to-reel. So they called it Tinsel Tyrant. But while the net was closing in on Harper, the crucial evidence needed to arrest him eluded the authorities.

This is a huge case. And so all of these folks are running around trying to find Harper, identify Harper. Once they identify Harper, it's about surveilling Harper to accumulate enough evidence to then arrest Harper. And the longer it takes, the more chance there is of the already paranoid Harper getting wind of the surveillance operation.

And there's some fear because they're tapping Harper's lines, right? There's some fear that Harper might be going abroad again, maybe to do more spying. And also maybe he would go abroad because he somehow picked up his surveillance and never come back. With time running out, federal agents put pressure on the U.S. Attorney's Office to authorize an arrest. But John Gibbons, the lead prosecutor, responded.

refused to bow to this pressure. John Gibbons gets into some knock-down, drag-out fights with senior bureau officials in Washington about saying, look, we don't have the case yet. We can't arrest him yet. We're not in a position to do that, so we're going to have to take our chance and hopefully gather more evidence with him. The pressure was mounting. The FBI had no option but to step up its surveillance.

Bill Kinane, the FBI squad leader, told me an incredible story about they're listening to Harper's line and Harper gets a call from Europe. And it's somebody who is clearly acting as a cutout, as a go between for the Polish intelligence services, calling him at home. They're calling him at home.

And they're calling him to say, hey, you know, we haven't heard from you in a bit. We know if you want to come and do some more spying for us, you know, that kind of thing. And but the woman who calls realizes that Harper is drunk off his face and so says, all right, you know, Jim, why don't you take my number down and call me back tomorrow morning?

But Harper writes down the wrong number. So the next day when he calls back, he's calling back and it's the wrong number over and over and over. And the FBI officials listening to this have the right number in their hands because they actually I mean, they are recording the call. They heard the call and they are losing their minds because they're desperate for him to get the right number, because if he gets the right number...

He'll call the woman back. And if he calls the woman back, he's probably going to talk about doing espionage on the phone, which is the silver bullet. The FBI also tapped Bill Hugel's phone, but he and Harper weren't speaking to each other at this stage and nothing came of it.

With Harper still in the country for now, the authorities decided to switch tactics. Prosecuting Harper was dependent, in the U.S. prosecutor's opinion, on having the CIA's star Polish agent, Karabu, testify, which meant that Karabu had to escape from Europe with his family and come to the U.S. to be resettled as a defector.

which is exactly what happened. In 1983, he goes. He was stationed in Sweden at the time. He had been transferred away from Warsaw. He went to Sweden. He was stationed as a diplomat. He was a spy, but he was stationed under diplomatic cover in Sweden. And he escapes with his family. And prosecutors say, OK, great. Now that Caribou is in the U.S., we have corroborating evidence. We have a star witness. We can move forward with the case.

On the morning of October 15th, 1983, James Harper woke up, collected his newspaper and sat down to read. By this stage he was living on his own, as Louise Shuler had died of liver failure, aged 39, just a few months before. There was a knock on the door. Harper opened up to find a pack of FBI agents staring back at him. Quickly realising the game was up, Harper surrendered without a fight.

The tinsel tyrant was finally in federal custody.

But there's one more twist in the tale. As soon as they make that arrest, as soon as they start preparing for Caribou to testify, the CIA in particular starts walking back its promises to allow Caribou on the witness stand. The CIA had suddenly got cold feet. The thought of a high-profile trial would force the agency to air its dirty laundry, something it wanted to avoid at all costs.

And Karabu himself has just been sentenced to death by the Polish security forces for his defection. If he revealed his whereabouts in public, it was surely only a matter of time before either the Poles or the Soviets came for him, however good his protection was.

With the prosecuting authorities tearing their hair out at losing their star witness, the trial judge came to the rescue. He wasn't a slammin' Sam or hangin' Sam. He was a fanatical proponent of the death penalty. Faced with such a formidable presence in court, Harper buckled, agreed to confess everything. He also opted for a plea deal, hoping it might reduce his sentence. But no such luck.

He gets a life sentence and he ends up spending 33 years in federal prison. After his release in 2016, Harper ended his days in relative obscurity. He ends up in Arkansas, you know, thousands of miles away from home in California, chasing an old girlfriend. Doesn't work out and ends up

old man, sick man, kind of marooned in Arkansas. And that is when I managed to track him down and we begin our conversations. And that's the long arc of James Harper's career as a spy for the Soviet bloc.

And what of Harper's feelings towards Louise, the one great love of his life, and the woman who'd made his adventures in espionage possible? I never heard him mention her in any way in connection with his scheme with Doherty. I never heard any FBI agent mention her in connection with his scheme with Doherty. I never saw any evidence from the voluminous declassified records that showed he had ever mentioned her in connection with his scheme with Doherty.

in concert with his scheme with Doherty. I think it's pretty clear who he's looking out for, and it was one person. James Harper died alone in Arkansas in August 2022. Owing to his brief stint in the military, he was granted a soldier's burial. I'm Rhiannon Nees. Join us next time for another dangerous liaison with true spies.

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San Francisco, 2003. A nail bomb explodes outside the San Francisco offices of a nutrition company. The next morning, a group called the Revolutionary Cells Animal Liberation Brigade claims responsibility for the attack. The FBI came and said that the ALF are the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States. And the man who planted both bombs?

The Bureau eventually get an ID. Daniel Andreas San Diego. His actions mark a watershed in American law enforcement. He was the first domestic terrorist to ever be on the top 10 FBI list. I think everybody thinks, well, these little vegans are just saving the world. But the truth was they were burning things down and doing $50 million worth of damage.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.