I. Obituary
The legend of Gus Weiss, hero of the Cold War, ends 11 stories listed below the veranda of his condo at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, on November 25,2003 A damaged corpse on the pathway.
In life, Weiss had liquidy blue eyes and an aristocratic air. He stood 5′ 7″ and in later years developed a minor inkling. He spoke with a breezy Southern accent and wore J. Press matches. The autoimmune disease alopecia, which he established as a teen, left him hairless from head to toe. He wore a chestnut-colored wig and smelled slightly of toupee adhesive. He drifted off into visions at inopportune moments. He chuckled with a high-pitched giggle. “A wonderful storyteller,” remembers one long-lasting buddy. “He ‘d talk to you in tales.” Weiss kept practically everyone at a range. Just a handful of people ever really was familiar with him. Richard V. Allen, his onetime employer on Richard Nixon’s National Security Council, calls him “among the most discreet men I ever knew.”
Around Washington, insiders slightly comprehended Weiss as a mysterious but dazzling eccentric with a thinly veiled penchant for insubordination. Obituaries remembered him as an adviser to four presidents, executive director of the White Home Council on International Economic Policy, assistant for space policy to the secretary of defense. According to his obit in The Washington Post, “Much of his federal government work fixated nationwide security, intelligence organizations and concerns over innovation transfers to communist countries. As a consultant to the Central Intelligence Company, he served on the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and the Signals Intelligence Committee of the United States Intelligence Board … His honors consisted of the CIA’s Medal for Benefit and the National Security Firm’s Cipher Medal.” France granted him a Légion d’Honneur and NASA acknowledged him with an Exceptional Service Medal. The Post noted that the medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
A Washington, DC, lawyer called Wayne Keup determined a picture of Weiss’ body at the morgue. They ‘d met years earlier at the gym in the Watergate, where they ‘d choose morning soaks. Keup as soon as worked for the Defense Intelligence Firm and Naval Intelligence Command, and their navigation of secret worlds served as the glue to their relationship. “He felt he might speak with me due to the fact that at one time I had clearances at the highest level too,” Keup says. Weiss told Keup about his role as a National Security Council economic expert, controling export controls over the transfer of high tech hardware and copyright to communist nations.
Weiss could expound on subjects from Soviet ICBM accuracy to year-over-year wheat production in Bulgaria. A shrewd operator, Weiss browsed and controlled government administration, floating flawlessly between agencies and departments. He dealt with America’s the majority of valuable tricks and schemes every day. Ultimately, Weiss informed Keup how his expertise in the realms of computer system technology and export policy and his affinity for mischief led him to mastermind a huge case of commercial sabotage that cost the Soviets unknown millions.
Despite years of relationship, Keup understood little about Weiss’ individual life. Days after determining the body, Keup ventured for the very first time into Weiss’ apartment, to set the left’s affairs in order. Weiss had a wacky perceptiveness– modern furniture juxtaposed with Herend porcelain and American craft pottery. He had a prodigious collection of music– classical and opera and college fight tunes and Soviet military marches– and his bookshelves were so overloaded that he had taken to stacking volumes on the floor. A toupee pushing the unmade bed looked like a sleeping feline. Keup had actually entered the home of a man who had actually forecasted his inner life onto his physical surroundings.
Right After Weiss’ obituary appeared in the Post, Keup got a call from the spouse of among Weiss’ old intelligence community colleagues: “After what he and my other half did to the Soviets,” she stated stiffly, “there’s no chance they would let that pass. If you think Gus dedicated suicide, then you think in fairy tales.”
In March 2004, months after Weiss’ death, previous Flying force secretary and Reagan consultant Thomas C. Reed published a memoir entitled At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War In one passage Reed describes Weiss’ role as the architect of an extraordinary program of Cold War tech undermines that culminated with the damage of a gas pipeline deep in the wilds of Siberia. According to Reed’s book, the blast, categorized by NORAD as the biggest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history, had gone unreported for 20 years.
A handful of news outlets, including Reuters and WIRED, immediately got the amazing tale, though not without a note of suspicion. The story of the pipeline operation gathered momentum. William Safire, Weiss’ old Nixon administration coworker, composed a column in The New York Times explaining his friend Gus’ genius. A Canadian filmmaker made a documentary about the caper. Tim Weiner, New York City Times reporter, discussed the operation in his national book award winning CIA history A Tradition of Ashes and after that once again, years later, for Reuters.
Conspiracy theorists and historians alike paid eager attention to this previously unknown bureaucrat– his private exploits and his mysterious death. Following Stuxnet, the terrible 2010 cyberattack that briefly hobbled the Iranian nuclear program, Bret Stephens, in a Wall Street Journal viewpoint piece, held up Weiss’ tactical analytical work against the Soviets as the gold standard of resourcefulness. Gus Weiss became a cult hero.
II. Gus Weiss’ Brain
” Gus possessed the most remarkably folded brain,” says Suzanne Patrick, a retired marine reserve officer and Weiss’ close friend and protégé. “He had an astonishing ability to believe around corners and make connections across vast complicated disciplines. What made him favorably gleeful about the work he did in intelligence was that feeling of being the little kid creating that puzzle with diverse pieces, and how he might accomplish truly dramatic effect.”
Weiss grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, a precocious only kid in a prominent Jewish household. As a young boy, his auntie Dede doted on him, offering him developed atlases and the definitive Jane’s series of airplane recommendation books. Weiss studied those texts cover to cover, over and over once again, establishing an obsession with planes.
His future had been mapped out: He would go to Vanderbilt University and one day take control of the family business, a chain of popular women’s clothes stores called Gus Mayer. Weiss had other concepts. In the early 1950 s, he registered at Harvard Service School. His classmate Cock Eskind remembers not being at all shocked when Weiss hardly pulled a passing grade in his retailing course. Weiss’ driving ambition ended up being to not spend his life at Gus Mayer chatting up the ladies, fitting them for blouses and girdles. Instead, he took classes in the new computer sciences, the emerging field of video game theory, functional science, and strategy.
He eventually made his method to New York City to pursue a PhD in economics at New York University. He fixed his gaze on video game theory, concentrating on geopolitical antagonisms. Weiss matured as the Cold War intensified: the Bay of Pigs, building of the Berlin Wall, strategic weapons in Cuba, conflagrations in Africa, coups and political assassinations in South America, China going nuclear, a conflict in Vietnam heightening every day. A brand-new world of strategic analysis took form, and young intellectuals like Weiss energetically approached creating a field that was intellectually thrilling and deadly serious.
The core of nuclear policy at the time, the Madman theory, held that irrationality and volatility could be wielded by American leaders to keep the peace; fearing an unreasonable response, our enemies would avoid provocation. Weiss believed that approaching nuclear theory in this method was careless. An inescapable miscalculation or miscommunication in between rivals could cause armageddon. Weiss’ 1966 argumentation analyzed geopolitical strife through a financial lens, arguing for restricted, tactically used force. Economic warfare (arms races, embargoes, sanctions) and even limited military strikes could be a potent technique for “expressing dispute” while avoiding “excessively pricey” fights.
Weiss ultimately caught the attention of Herman Kahn, the Cold War intellectual who had thought up the Madman theory and other ideas Weiss rebelled versus. Kahn ran the Hudson Institute, a defense think tank headquartered on the school of a defunct psychiatric healthcare facility in Croton-on-Hudson, New York City. Kahn, who weighed 300 pounds and struggled with narcolepsy, had actually gotten renown with his book On Thermonuclear War, in which he thought about every facet of nuclear catastrophe: how to prevent it, how to win, and how to reconstruct civilization afterward. He later served as a motivation for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove During the Nixon administration, Kahn had easy, frequent access to the similarity Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff. Weiss inhabited the opposite end of the Cold War philosophical spectrum. He wished to defeat the Soviets without firing a shot; when a strong message required sending, it ought to be strongly worded and written on stylish stationery. Weiss, nevertheless, went to operate at the Hudson Institute as Kahn’s executive assistant.
III. Bellhops in the Watch Factory
In 1972, Gus Weiss, then in his early forties, accepted a position on Richard Nixon’s National Security Council as director of research study on the White House Council on International Economic Policy (CIEP). Though an economist by training, Weiss rapidly found he was a spy by disposition. While producing reports for CIEP on worldwide trade, he worked with the CIA to figure out how foreign governments bought technology. The task was straightforward but the details difficult to come by. Weiss caught the intelligence bug.
One day a year into his tenure, the phone called as Weiss labored away in his third-floor nook in the Old Executive Workplace Structure. When he addressed, the voice on the other end of the handset said, “My name is Helene Boatner. If management understood I called, I ‘d be fired. Do you know what’s going on with the computer system delegation?” Weiss understood quickly that Boatner worked for the CIA. He knew everything about the delegation: A couple of lots of the USSR’s leading computer researchers, dressed in gray wool slacks and navy blazers–” suggestive of a convention of bellboys,” according to Weiss– were en route to tour the Uranus Liquid Crystal Watch Business in Mineola, on Long Island.
Both Weiss and Boatner discovered the option of destination suspicious. Uranus was a fairly inconspicuous business that neither gotten approved for the Fortune 500 nor had a track record as a landing area for Nobel laureates, as Weiss wrote in his unpublished monograph, The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War (An Expert’s Untold Secret Story)
Boatner called Weiss due to the fact that he was understood to invest his days on the security council worrying over something called “innovation transfer”– the transfer of innovation from one nation to another. Weiss’ mantra: “As computer systems go, so goes the Cold War.” The integrated circuit provided the United States a