Recommended Reading: Watches And Industrial Espionage

I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about the gentleman who runs Watches Of Espionage, and that’s just the way he likes it. Watches Of Espionage – or WOE for short – is a former CIA case officer and watch enthusiast who started his Instagram account in 2021 and who brings, to put it mildly, a unique perspective to watch culture and watch writing. The CIA’s website describes the job of a case officer laconically: “Case Officers clandestinely spot, assess, develop, recruit, and handle non-U.S. citizens with access to foreign intelligence vital to U.S. foreign policy and national security decision-makers,” – which means spending a lot of time in sketchy places, dealing with sketchy people, and being in a lot of ways, a sketchy person yourself without drawing attention to the fact.

It turns out that for a number of reasons, folks in the intelligence and special operations community are often watch enthusiasts (and that smart watches, thanks to the fact that they’re connected devices, are not kosher for undercover work) and thanks to his many years dealing with, as he sometimes puts it, “hard men in hard places” WOE is perhaps the best ambassador in the entire watch world for using your tool watches as tools – as God and Hans Wilsdorf intended. Plus, as a lifelong fan of the spy novel genre, I get a big kick out of sometimes reading a note at the end of one of his stories that it’s been vetted and cleared by the CIA as not constituting a threat to national security.

There are many different kinds of espionage and not all of them involve dead drops and high-risk rendezvous – a lot of spying, maybe most of it, happens remotely these days, including industrial espionage. Industrial espionage is the illegal pilfering by one company, of another company’s proprietary intellectual property, and given how leaky internet connected computer networks can be (and how ingenious hackers can be) it can make a lot more sense to steal a company’s secrets from the comfort of your Herman Miller desk chair than to try and recruit someone in a dark back alley, with The Competition’s breath hot on your neck. It was however not always thus, and spying on the competition before computers and the internet changed the game forever, would usually require having someone on the inside and establishing a little of the ol’ quid pro quo.

You wouldn’t think nowadays that the watch industry would be a hotbed of cloak and dagger activity, but in a recent article on WOE, guest author Aaron Stark pulls back the curtain on perhaps the single most important case of industrial spying in the history of watchmaking – and one whose full details, incredibly, weren’t fully known until just last year.

Tinker, Tailor, Watchmaker, Spy

One of the (probably many) instances in which industrial espionage occurred in the watch world, was in the late 1800s, when American watchmaking was indisputably the industrial leader. Antoine Norbert de Patek is supposed to have said, when he visited New York to set up distribution with Tiffany, that it would be hard for Patek to compete with American watches which were, as he put it, accurate, durable, and above all, cheap. The American watch industry had become fully industrialized and most importantly, able to create watches with interchangeable parts, well ahead of the Swiss and in 1876, a Swiss watch trade group – the Society of Jura Industries – sent a couple of representatives to the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, in the United States, to visit the watchmaker’s exhibitions and specifically to see what Waltham had under its fingernails.

The story’s well known, but what was not well known, or really, known at all, until relatively recently, was that the two Swiss visitors – Jacques David and Theo Gribi, who tested ten Waltham watches for precision at the exhibition’s observatory, also had an inside man at Waltham. The spy they recruited was in an excellent position to spill the beans on Waltham’s manufacturing methods, and secrets – he was Ambrose Webster, who at the time of the Exhibition had only recently retired, and who had been Waltham’s assistant superintendent. More importantly, he had invented or been involved in developing, much of Waltham’s industrial machinery, which at the time allowed Waltham to produce 360 watches per day.

Aaron Stark, in his guest article on WOE, goes into deep detail about how the two Swiss visitors managed to infiltrate Waltham’s factory and also, how they courted Webster and obtained detailed information from him on Waltham’s machine tools and assembly line system. Stark writes, “Webster’s involvement remained a secret until 2022. In many pocket watch and Waltham history circles, Webster is considered one of the founding fathers who is revered, thus his involvement with the Swiss is stunning to many Waltham historians. Waltham would not have existed without Webster, but his defection through a probable quid-pro-quo arrangement with the Swiss resulted in Waltham’s eventual downfall.”

Stark is in an excellent position to cover the subject – he’s the author of Disrupting Time: Industrial Combat, Espionage, And The Downfall Of A Great American Company, in which he argues that the information the Swiss visitors gained from infiltrating Waltham’s factory, as well as from Webster (whom I guess didn’t sign an NDA when he retired) was instrumental in positioning the Swiss watch industry to become dominant world wide. It’s not widely appreciated today just how bad things had gotten for the Swiss watchmakers, who relied on foreign markets to remain solvent.

In 1887, the anarchist philosopher Kropotkin wrote, of the state of the industry in the Jura, “This was the milieu in which I spent the winter and summer of 1877, trying to improve our [anarchist] propaganda in La Chaux-de-Fonds and neighboring Le Locle. I will not say that the enterprise was very successful … Machine-made American watches were reducing the market for cheap Swiss watches, which had sold in huge numbers previously, especially in America. The best workers barely found work a few days a week … Destitution hung over the city, indeed over the region as a whole.”

It’s not too much to say that without the efforts of David and Gribi – in many ways, the real fathers of modern industrial Swiss watchmaking – things could have gone from bad to worse and we’d be talking about Patek Philippe in the same wistful tones that fans of American watchmaking now talk about Waltham, Elgin and Hamilton – if we were talking about them at all.

Read, “Watches and Commercial Espionage: The Waltham Watch Company,” on Watches Of Espionage, and check out Disrupting Time on Amazon.