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Harper handed over a 1-in. stack of papers consisting of the title pages, tables of contents and first chapters of documents he had copied, as a kind of sample of what he had to sell. After ascertaining that the KGB would pay handsomely for the actual documents, the Pole invited Harper to the meeting in Warsaw in June 1980.
Back in the U.S., Harper and Schuler continued to live modestly. Whatever his motive in contacting Dougherty — repentance, fear, a desire to raise the stakes by playing double agent, or some mixture of all three — he picked the attorney's name out of a book that correctly identified Dougherty as having represented Christopher Boyce, who was convicted of selling secrets to the Soviets.
Harper seems never to have realized that the FBI was closing in on him. In telephone conversations overheard by FBI agents on his tapped phone, he bragged indiscreetly to friends that he had enough money so that he would never have to work another day in his life, and moreover that he paid no taxes on his wealth. He also spoke of going back to Europe to attend to "two very serious business problems . . . I've been putting off for damn near two years." The trip, which federal agents presume was designed to sell more secrets, apparently was delayed by a new romance; after Schuler died, Harper in September married Penny Cook in Nevada. Still, the feds were nervous and moved in to make the arrest.
A good deal of damage, however, had been done. The FBI affidavit asserts that Harper had access to documents that would give the Poles and the KGB "a windfall of intelligence information about the capabilities of our strategic forces and our present and future plans to defend them." Their value: "beyond calculation. ' ' — By George J. Church.
Reported by Dick Thompson/ San Francisco