By the time Louise Howell Schuler and Jim Harper met again in 1979, she was an executive secretary at Systems Control Inc., a highly specialized defense research firm that developed everything from computerized military radar systems to esoteric theory on the probable climatic changes in the stratosphere due to military and commercial air traffic. SCI was, and is, government sources say, a prime target for Soviet espionage.
Her job gave her a high-level security clearance and access to records on virtually everything the company did. She was well liked, but everyone seemed to be aware she had a drinking problem. ”It seemed she`d just had a tough life,” one coworker says. She was also thought to be untouchable; she was having an affair with a married senior executive.
When Neil Schuler met Louise in 1966, he says, she was ”carefree, happy.” She confessed her affair with Jim Harper but said it was behind her. He says he sensed there were many things in her past that she didn`t want to talk about. ”Her father owned a grocery store, and she worked in the store after school, then went home and cooked dinner. She kinda fell into a situation of a lot of responsibility as a youngster. She had no real chance to grow up.”
He was a young salesman job-hopping up the ladder. ”I had met her just once, and then one night I was at L`Omelette–it was the hangout, everybody would go there. I came in with a date, and Louise sent us over a couple of drinks. Well, I said to myself, if you`ll pardon the expression, `This girl has more balls than anybody I`ve ever met.` I made an excuse to get up, and on my way to the men`s room I said to her, `I appreciate the gesture, but I don`t know what to say.` She said, `Well, consider it a gesture of good will . . . .` ” Then she asked him out. He was to reciprocate many times.
”We were both a little cynical about religion,” Schuler says. ”I was raised a Catholic in North Dakota. She was Southern Baptist from Alabama. But when we were married (Aug. 31, 1968), she wanted to get married in a church. Her whole family came.
”We separated in l973. This electronics business can either make you or break you. Or both at the same time. I made it financially, but it broke the marriage. I tried to include her as much as possible. We planned on a family, but she laid down a very strict condition: `Wait until the job situation stabilizes.` ”
Schuler maintains there was no one reason for the break-up. ”We had trial separations and trial togethers. We just couldn`t make it.”
In May, 1974, a few months after Louise filed for divorce, Schuler had his near-fatal car accident. Friends give Louise credit for getting him into a Veterans` Administration hospital unit that specialized in spinal-cord injuries. ”She never abandoned him,” one says. Schuler, who is wheelchair-bound, says, ”It was three years before I could get myself out of the depression. She`d come over and say, `Get dressed, damn it. You are going out. You are better than this.` ”
He blames himself for the changes in Louise`s personality. ”When I first met her, she was 100 percent all-American, God-fearing, flag-waving, apple-pie and mom. Our failure to make it was real hard on her.”
When she first was hired at SCI (about 1974), ”she was destitute (from her divorce). One of the other gals took her in and gave her furniture,”
remembers Jay Politzer, a former SCI executive who became a close friend of Louise`s. ”She seemed like a down-South girl. Very close to her roots. She was a true-blue American and very proud of it.”
To her new coworkers she seemed very bright and funny. She quickly charmed her way into an intellectual circle of Ph.D.`s and their wives. But after her divorce, Louise`s experiences with men increasingly embittered her. She became close friends with two couples through SCI. They and their multitude of kids seemed to be a refuge for her. She was always finding an excuse to cooking big family dinners for them. One SCI executive`s wife who became her friend says, ”She used to idolize (these two men) because they were faithful husbands and because of how they treated their wives.”
Many SCI executives have gone on to other companies. Many have started their own defense-contracting firms and have become responsible for their employees` security clearances. They have tried to match their knowledge of the fun-loving secretary to the spectre of a spy. One of them says, ”I`m still flabbergasted. ”Louise was Alabama, not quite a redneck but a loyal Southern girl. She was a big party girl but not the spy type. Louise used to work for (an administrator) in accounting. He wanted to fire her because she wasn`t performing. She was just going through her divorce; maybe she was partying too much. Then a top executive kind of surprised everyone when he decided she could be an executive secretary. She seemed to have few secretarial skills, but she was good at calming him down–more of an interface than a secretary. She probably didn`t type 20 things a day.” When her affair with the executive became known, it became clear why she had been promoted.
A young engineer who was recruited by SCI in 1976 recalls his first company party his first weekend in California with his wife. ”I recognized Louise as one of the executive secretaries; she had no idea who I was. My wife and I sat at the bar next to her and a man. They were talking about who in the company was available–you know, to sleep with. This person you could sleep with, this person you can`t. This one is looking to have fun. This one isn`t worth it. I said to my wife, `This is Silicon Valley?` ”
Louise`s SCI friends worried about her: ”Men were always disappointing her. At the office she`d tell me she`d been with this guy and he was a this, or with that guy and he was a that,” one remembers. ”She seemed content to dissipate. But still, at first I couldn`t believe the rumors about her and the executive. I couldn`t believe it could be a love affair. She didn`t give the impression she could love anybody.
”He couldn`t have loved her. He was the type who was always pushing the limits. He`d try some outrageous thing, and if he made it, he made it. If he got caught, he`d grin like a child and say, `Well, you caught me. This time.` I finally got out of SCI because I didn`t want to work on that executive`s team. It just seemed to me that if the guy`s wife couldn`t trust him, neither could I. One of the things I`ll always remember about Louise was having to pick her and the executive up at his country club after a drunken lunch.”
Neil Schuler worried about her, too. ”I had lunch with her in 1977, and things were still fine, but that year or soon after she must have had a real disappointment because suddenly there was a marked change in her. I know this only through telephone conversations. She refused to ever see me again.”
One of the changes was alcohol. When they were married, Schuler says, ”I saw her drunk maybe once or twice.” Now when they talked on the phone, even in the middle of the day, her words were slurred.
Debbie Beunz, another secretary at SCI and one of Louise`s best friends, says flatly: ”She was an an alcoholic. It was known to the management but nothing was ever done about it. She was cynical by then, about life in general but about men in particular. She`d had a rough life. And she`d had men problems. People just always let Louise down.”
Another of her good friends, Kelly Kelso, now in her 50s, who worked playing and singing in piano bars and as a baby-sitter, asks, ”Have you ever met anyone where you just loved them at first sight? That`s how I felt about Louise. One of the things I didn`t like about Louise was that affair (with the executive). She`d call me and boast about him lying next to her in bed when his wife called to ask when his plane would be coming in.”
Former SCI executive Politzer, a balding, heavy-set, opinionated man who has been brought in as a trouble-shooter for several Silicon Valley companies, thinks there is another explanation for ”this business about her being cynical, bitter. It was her form of humor, but she did have a lot of it. She felt a lot of the work we were doing for the defense department was nonsensical, pointless.”
By the time she got to know Jim Harper again in 1979, Louise Schuler had quite a reputation at SCI. One of the other executive secretaries there claims: ”I know for a fact she slept with more than one married man at SCI. She was the official party girl. When clients would come in from out of town
–or there was a project review with DOD (Department of Defense) bigwigs
–she was in charge of wining and dining, whatever. All the management knew she was drinking. I don`t know how they could have let her keep her clearance –except for that (the partying).”
None of Louise`s friends knows precisely how she got involved with Jim Harper in 1979. To a person, they believe it had to do with drinking. Suffice it to say that for a man who had dreams of scoring big by selling secrets to the Poles, stumbling upon a lonely, vulnerable woman who had the combination to one of the most important safes in Silicon Valley was an amazing case of luck.
”Louise had the access. Jim just brought her into this,” says one government investigator. ”She had had problems with Neil and with the executive. Here comes Jim, an old friend willing to take care of her. She went ahead with him. I don`t know how serious her drinking was in `79 or `80, but by the time we identified Jim Harper (in the spring of 1983), she was a serious alcoholic. Her motive? Probably she was disappointed by the affair with the executive. (Friends speculate that he told Louise, well into their affair, that he had no intention of leaving his wife for her.) She was getting back at him. It certainly was a way to get back at him.”
None of Louise`s friends knows, nor are any of the government investigators involved in the case willing to say for certain, whether the arrangement between Harper and Louise was strictly a cash deal or whether Louise was wined and dined into sneaking Harper into SCI on weekends and letting him photocopy classified material. Her friends, of course, believe the latter.
Even though their only knowledge of her came from the wiretap, investigators developed a sympathy for Louise. ”I felt badly about Ruby Louise,” says a veteran agent. ”When we got into the sex and the parties at SCI–well, that goes on in many other Silicon Valley companies, but here somebody took advantage of it.”
Soon after becoming involved again with Louise, Harper reestablished a contact he had made with the Poles. He called him ”The Big Man,” and made arrangements to return to Europe with evidence of the merchandise he could now get his hands on through Louise. The material was very hot–thick tomes detailing such defense projects as the Endoatmospheric Nonnuclear Kill Technology, (ballistic missile) Discrimination Decoy Performance Requirements and the Designating Optical Tracker.
The Big Man, Harper`s matchmaker with the Poles, is, according to FBI affidavits, William Bell Hugle, one of the early success stories in Silicon Valley and a former Democratic candidate for U.S. representative from California. Among the companies Hugle started were Siliconix and Stuart-Warner Microcircuits, which remain among the valley`s major enterprises. During his unsuccessful congressional race in 1972, Hugle campaigned for relaxation of U.S. trade barriers against electronics exports to communist countries. In 1975, when one of his many startup companies went bankrupt, it became apparent he had flouted these laws by transshipping embargoed electronics to Poland via a second company in Asia. One of the creditors, who made a $684,000 claim against Hugle in that bankruptcy, was a known Polish spy, Zdzislaw
Przychodzien, whose cover was working as an official in Poland`s ministry overseeing manufacturing and machines.
Harper was still married to Colleen in 1979, but the marriage–their second to each other–was again in trouble. He decided to mix business with pleasure. He ”vacationed” in Europe with his wife, stashing her in Paris while he made a side trip to Warsaw to see the Poles. He also arranged a Brussels rendezvous with Louise, who was on a business trip with the executive.
Harper kept a daily pocket dairy, and his notes tell much of the story. Friends, government investigators and prosecutors fill in the gaps.
Investigators report: ”She (Louise) went to Europe with the executive. She had a nice time with him. Then she met the other guy–Harper. The trip was mostly drinking and playing around, not spying–at least for her that time.” Jay Politzer then was running an SCI project in Brussels and invited Louise to be his house guest after her business assignment was over. Harper met her there. ”They said it was a business trip, but they stayed in the apartment most of the three days they were there . . . . When a man tells you he doesn`t want to talk about what he does, you don`t ask questions.
”Louise arrived drunk. We almost had to carry her off the plane. They drank vodka and milk with vanilla extract, and they drank it from when they got up in the morning until they went to bed. Once, she took out a wad of hundreds, peeled off a couple and sent me to the liquor store.”
According to Harper`s diary, he flew to Geneva and met Hugle on July 12, 1979. He returned to Paris, then flew to Warsaw on July 16. There he met Hugle`s Polish official friend, Zdzislaw Przychodzien. Harper and his first wife divorced for the second time a month later.
”He (Harper) knew Mr. Hugle had a relationship with the Poles,” says John Gibbons, then an assistant U.S. attorney. ”If you look at the first trip Harper made, Harper and Hugle`s conversation (according to Harper`s diary)
indicated that they were to share in the profits, Harper, Ruby Louise and Hugle. But (during) the first delivery, with Hugle present, there was no classified information passed. Thereafter Hugle was cut out. It was like a dope deal. If I`ve got the heroin, I`m not sharing the profits.”
After that 1979 trip, according to her friend Kelly Kelso, Louise ”would have done anything for Jim Harper. When she decided to marry him (in late 1980), she cut it off with the executive. I asked her once, `What`s going to happen when you tell him about you and Jim?` She said `Don`t worry, Kelly, I have enough on him. I won`t lose my job.` ”
Carin Davis, whose relatives also became close to Louise, says, ”She introduced me to Jim sometime before June, 1979. I didn`t think she was in love with him. She never said much at all about him. She knew I didn`t like him from the start. . . . He reminded me of somebody who`d try to steal a coffin from a dead person.”
Debbie Beunz was a witness to the wedding. ”It was in Reno. One of those chapels. Very casual. She had on blue jeans.”
”After the marriage, she really changed,” Politzer recalls. ”She seemed to be drinking more. She had bigger mood swings. You`d go into her office, and her hands would be visibly shaking.”
Schuler, a keen and garrulous chain smoker who still has business interests in Silicon Valley, grew increasingly worried about his former wife. ”It`s tough to admit about someone you love, but looking back–this is pure speculation–well, Harper`s a glib sorta dude. She probably was lonely. The executive wasn`t fulfilling. There was nobody to lean on, nobody to cook for, and she loved taking care of people. Jim was always an opportunist. He probably provided her a shoulder.
”When I finally found out about her marriage (to Harper), I told her,
`For God`s sake, go see a lawyer. Make sure your butt`s covered. Be sure your bank account is in your own name.` But she said: `Oh, I agree. I`ve done all those things. I`m going to make sure I keep my things separate at least.` She kept my name; she didn`t take his. That should tell you something.”
Friends were stunned by the marriage. ”It was like he came out of nowhere,” one recalls. ”I remember sometime afterward she had on this beautiful new Ultrasuede vest she`d bought for a company Christmas party. She was so proud of it. When we got to the party, she was already drunk, and there was a big cigarette hole in the front of the vest. I felt so sad for her. That this thing she treasured so and was so proud of would get messed up, just like everything else about her.”
”She must have figured it out at some point,” Schuler says sadly. ”She must have said to herself, `What kind of mistake have I made?` But instead of being able to face up to it, instead of being able to pull herself up by her bootstraps, she just sank into the abyss.”
Specifically, what Louise did was take her husband into SCI in the evenings and on weekends to photocopy classified research. His fingerprints were found on virtually every important document in the company`s safes.
”She was drunk one night, and I asked her why she married the slob. It was after he`d done one of his particularly ugly acts at a party,” Politzer recalls. ”She said there was a reason, but she couldn`t tell me. She was very matter of fact about it. They were so different. The only thing they had in common was drinking.”
Still, her friends are baffled by the espionage. ”Why? Excitement?
Money? Because she loved him? She hated SCI. She always hated SCI. She`d had a run-in with one of her bosses there,” Debbie Buenz says. ”I imagine they
(she and Harper) were sitting around over a couple of drinks, or seven or eight drinks, and she just agreed to do it without thinking of the
implications.”
An FBI source says, ”Soon after she got involved, she realized it wasn`t a good situation. What she wanted was not there. I don`t think she did it for the money, though I think Harper gave Ruby Louise her fair share.”
In 1981 Harper, for reasons not clearly understood, had a change of heart about his Polish bonanza. He began an unsuccessful attempt to strike a deal with intelligence agencies and the Justice Department to turn counterspy. It`s not known if Louise was aware of this, but one thing that did occur in 1981 was a restructuring of SCI that took Louise out of classified areas.
A year earlier, in June, 1980, after several of Harper`s trips to Warsaw and other meeting places in Western Europe and Mexico, U.S. intelligence agencies learned through a mole in the Polish KGB that an American businessman had sold the Poles a large volume of documents relating to the Minuteman missile, documents so important that a special team of 20 KGB analysts was dispatched by plane from Moscow to Warsaw to evaluate them. The source related that the KGB was ”extremely excited to have the documents . . . which the KGB had been unsuccessfully seeking through contacts all over the world.” Then, shades of James Bond, the Polish agents were given medals by the then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, according to the mole.
The security of the nation`s defense secrets is based largely on trust in the average citizen. There are only 225 federal agents to police 14,000 defense contractors, some of which have hundreds of employees. In the wake of the Harper case, the Pentagon issued a report which said that stealing defense secrets is so easy that ”a supermarket employee may encounter far more difficulty stealing a loaf of bread.”
One state department source acknowledges that the nation ”has questionable security practices.” He adds, ”The problem with high-tech espionage is one we`re trying to grapple with, but it`s damn difficult when you have a guy who makes $20,000 or $30,000 a year, has a security clearance, five kids to support and four girlfriends, some of whom like to shop at Saks.”
The first hint the American public may have had that trading secrets was easy was the 1977 case of Christopher Boyce and Andrew Lee, the basis for the book and the movie, ”The Falcon and the Snowman.” The book was among many books and newspaper articles on espionage found in Jim Harper`s apartment at the time of his arrest. It was as if he had amassed a how-to library on espionage.
Boyce was a security guard at TRW Systems Group, a giant defense contractor in Redondo Beach, Calif. His low rank notwithstanding, the satellite surveillance secrets he sold were so critical that his lawyer, William Dougherty, had to sign a secrecy oath before the trial, and much of the evidence has never been made public.
Afterward, one of Dougherty`s former law partners recounted, Dougherty would joke, ”If you know any double agents, send them around.”
In September, 1981, about the time Louise lost her access to SCI secrets, an anonymous caller made Dougherty`s wish come true. The stranger at the other end of the line said only that he wanted to help Boyce. After several calls Dougherty agreed to meet the caller in a suburban southern California bar called The Fling. When he arrived, a tall muscular man in the corner of the dim bar stood, walked toward him, held out his hand and said, ”I`m Jay.”
Dougherty wouldn`t learn Jim Harper`s real name until after Harper`s arrest nearly two years later.
”Jay” was drinking Bloody Marys. Dougherty ordered coffee. ”I want you to get me out of trouble. I`ve been spying for Polish intelligence,” the man said matter of factly. Dougherty knew enough about criminals–he had spent more than a decade with the Justice Department`s organized-crime strike force –to recognize that ”Jay” was telling the truth.
He also had been a lawyer long enough to guess what was coming: ”Jay”
wanted to deal. He wanted immunity from prosecution in return for turning counterspy for the government. ”He knew if he got caught he was facing a life sentence. He was the man in the middle and he knew it,” Dougherty says. ”He wanted out from under the U.S., and he wanted out from under the Poles. They were going to come back to see him, and he was afraid for his life.”
No one really knows why Harper decided to turn counterspy, though the removal of Louise`s security clearance may have figured into it. He no longer had a ready source of classified merchandise to sell to the Poles, but, according to his diaries, he clearly enjoyed the ”game” of being a spy and may have wanted to continue, albeit in a different capacity.
”Jay” told Dougherty of many rendezvous with Polish agents. The first was in mid-1975, when Hugle introduced him to two unidentified people with copies of a ”shopping list” of high-technology information. ”The main list never leaves Moscow,” ”Jay” said. Each Polish operative got a portion of the list and broke it down into assignments for their American shoppers. Later that year Hugle and ”Jay” flew to Geneva together to meet with Polish operatives.
(Continued on PART THREE.)
