Gus W. Weiss

Last updated

Gus W. Weiss was a White House policy adviser on technology, intelligence and economic affairs who worked primarily on national security, intelligence and concerns on technology transfers to communist countries.

Contents

Education

Weiss graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He received his MBA from Harvard University and taught at NYU where he also received a PhD in economics. [1]

Career

The Farewell Dossier

Weiss was also one of the people that worked on the Farewell Dossier. [3] [4] The USSR collected western computer and scientific technology through espionage and used it for its own national defense. One of the KGB defectors, Vladimir Vetrov, submitted documents collected by the KGB, and potential target items to the French. French president François Mitterrand then shared them with US President Reagan. Weiss suggested that the US export whatever was on the potential targets list to the USSR, but that these items be modified, meaning sourced from the CIA, the Defense Department and the FBI. The products would look genuine, but fail once the USSR started operating them. One successful notable result was a massive fire near the Urengoi starting point of the Trans-Siberian Pipeline in 1983 that could be seen from space. [3]

Death

Weiss died on November 25, 2003 [5] under what the UK newspaper The Independent has characterized as "mysterious circumstances". [6] His body was found on the walk beneath his upstairs apartment in the Watergate building in Washington, DC. The local medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, according to The Washington Post. [7] The Post obituary, which came twelve days after the fact, was the first local report that Weiss had died. It gave no reason for the suicide determination. The Post published its Weiss obituary six days after his hometown newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, had reported his death. [8] The Tennessean did not know the cause of death. He was 72 years old. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuri Andropov</span> Leader of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician who was the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year rule, Andropov served in the post from 1982 until his death in 1984.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caspar Weinberger</span> American politician (1917–2006)

Caspar Willard Weinberger was an American politician and businessman. As a Republican, he served in a variety of state and federal positions for three decades, most notably as Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan from January 1981 to November 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yevgeny Primakov</span> Russian politician and diplomat (1929–2015)

Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov was a Russian politician and diplomat who served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1998 to 1999. During his long career, he also served as Foreign Minister, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, and chief of the intelligence service. Primakov was an academician (Arabist) and a member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergei Ivanov</span> Russian politician (born 1953)

Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian senior official and politician who has been serving as the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on the Issues of Environmental Activities, Ecology and Transport since 12 August 2016. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.

The Farewell Dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector "en place", gathered and gave to the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) in 1981–82, during the Cold War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert McFarlane (American government official)</span> American Marine Corps officer and National Security Advisor (1937–2022)

Robert Carl "Bud" McFarlane was an American Marine Corps officer who served as National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985. Within the Reagan administration, McFarlane was a leading architect of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a project intended to defend the US from Soviet ballistic missile attacks. He resigned as National Security Adviser in late 1985 because of disagreements with other administration figures but remained involved in negotiations with Iran and with Hezbollah.

At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (ISBN 0-89141-821-0) is a 2004 autobiographical book about Thomas C. Reed's experience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory through his time as an advisor to President Ronald Reagan. It reveals new details about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Farewell Dossier, and other facets of the Cold War.

Able Archer 83 was the annual NATO Able Archer exercise conducted in November 1983. The purpose for the command post exercise, like previous years, was to simulate a period of conflict escalation, culminating in the US military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The five-day exercise, which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe, was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium.

Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov was a high-ranking KGB spy during the Cold War who decided to covertly release valuable information to France and NATO on the Soviet Union's clandestine program aimed at stealing technology from the West.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas C. Reed</span>

Thomas Care Reed was the 11th Secretary of the Air Force from January 2, 1976 to April 6, 1977 under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Previously he was a senior aide to Governor Ronald Reagan in California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonid Shebarshin</span> Soviet intelligence chairman

Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin was an intelligence officer and spy for the Soviet Union. He served in the First Chief Directorate (FCD), the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB. In January 1989, he was promoted to the head of the FCD when his former boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was promoted to KGB chief. Prior to that Shebarshin had served as Kryuchkov's deputy from April 1987.

John Arthur "Jack" Shaw was an American former civil servant who held positions under several presidents: Senior Staff under Richard Nixon, White House liaison under Gerald Ford, and in the State Department under Ronald Reagan. Additionally, President George H. W. Bush gave him a recess appointment as Assistant Secretary of Commerce.

The presidency of Ronald Reagan was marked by numerous scandals, resulting in the investigation, indictment or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president of the United States.

Operation RYAN was a Cold War military intelligence program run by the Soviet Union during the early 1980s when they believed the United States was planning for an imminent first strike attack. The name is an acronym for Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie. The purpose of the operation was to collect intelligence on potential contingency plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. The program was initiated in May 1981 by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Anderson (economist)</span> American academic, economist, and policy analyst

Martin Anderson was an American academic, economist, author, policy analyst, and adviser to US politicians and presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Under the Nixon administration, Anderson was credited with helping to end the military draft and creating the all-volunteer armed forces. Under Reagan, Anderson helped draft the administration’s original economic program that became known as “Reaganomics.” A political conservative and a strong proponent of free-market capitalism, he was influenced by libertarianism and opposed government regulations that limited individual freedom.

<i>Farewell</i> (2009 film) 2009 French film

Farewell is a 2009 French espionage thriller film directed by Christian Carion, starring Guillaume Canet and Emir Kusturica. The film is loosely based on the actions of the high-ranking KGB official, Vladimir Vetrov. It was released in the United States in June 2010. It was adapted from the book Bonjour Farewell: La vérité sur la taupe française du KGB (1997) by Serguei Kostine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Seigenthaler</span> American journalist, writer, and political figure (1927–2014)

John Lawrence Seigenthaler was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights.

Seymour Weiss was an American diplomat and a high-ranking official at the United States Department of State.

Line X was a section of the KGB First Chief Directorate residency organization assigned to acquire Western technology for the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence. In the early 1980s, over 200 Line X agents were exposed or compromised as a consequence of the Farewell Dossier, collapsing the Line X operations in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1995 CIA disinformation controversy</span>

In 1995 it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered intelligence reports to the U.S. government between 1986 and 1994 which were based on agent reporting from confirmed or suspected Soviet operatives. From 1985 to his arrest in February 1994, CIA officer and KGB mole Aldrich Ames compromised Agency sources and operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, leading to the arrest of many CIA agents and the execution of at least ten of them. This allowed the KGB to replace the CIA agents with its own operatives or to force them to cooperate, and the double agents then funneled a mixture of disinformation and true material to U.S. intelligence. Although the CIA's Soviet-East European (SE) and Central Eurasian divisions knew or suspected the sources to be Soviet double agents, they nevertheless disseminated this "feed" material within the government. Some of these intelligence reports even reached Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President-elect Bill Clinton.

References

  1. ↑ "Gus W. Weiss, 72; White House Adviser". Washington Post Obituary. December 7, 2003. Archived from the original on November 6, 2012. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
  2. 1 2 Holly Edwards (December 1, 2003). "Nashville native Gus Weiss, adviser to 4 presidents, dies". The Tennessean . Retrieved May 20, 2017.
  3. 1 2 David E. Hoffman (2010). The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race . p. 35.
  4. ↑ Safire, William (February 2, 2004), "The Farewell Dossier", New York Times
  5. ↑ The New York Times, December 1, 2003;
  6. ↑ The Independent, September 17, 2009
  7. ↑ The Independent, September 17, 2009; The Washington Post, December 7, 2003
  8. ↑ The Tennessean, December 7, 2003
  9. ↑ "Gus W. Weiss, 72; White House Adviser". Washington Post Obituary. December 7, 2003. Archived from the original on November 6, 2012. Retrieved February 19, 2013.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.