How a Harvard Academic Secretly Blunted a Daring Cold War KGB Op
Derek Leebaert recounts his double life at Harvard spying on Russians for the FBI
In the grim depths of the Cold War, Yuri Andropov, the tall, gaunt chairman of the Soviet KGB, came to a stark realization: Moscow had to do something to cope with the West’s accelerating technological superiority. Without some quick and decisive remedy, he reckoned, the Soviet Union's vast military capacities—from intercontinental ballistic missiles to main battle tanks—could become irrelevant.
Andropov, a future general secretary of the Communist Party, recognized In 1970 that the Soviet Union was at least six years behind the United States in computers and software. Modernizing the communist giant’s technology base overnight was impossible, of course. But there was a well honed KGB tool he could turn to: espionage.
To that end, he opened a new directorate, “T,” with an operating arm known as Line X. Its mission was to steal the West’s latest technical and scientific advances, particularly in America, including the designs of sophisticated weaponry. Moscow’s Military-Industrial Commission helped write the collection requirements.
By 1975 Andropov had at least 77 agents and 42 trusted contacts working for Directorate T within U.S. companies and laboratories, including defense contractors. Back then, Boston’s famed Route 128 was America's Silicon Valley, a target-rich environment that included corporations like Data General, Digital Equipment, and Wang, as well as labs at MIT and Harvard. IBM, the unrivaled computing behemoth of that day, had a presence as well. It was there that Andropov plotted a big bite.
A supposed thawing of tensions among the two superpowers provided access for the KGB and GRU (military intelligence). Between the summers of 1972 and 1974, Moscow and Washington signed 29 treaties and agreements covering trade, finance, the arts and arms control—including a thousand-word U.S.-Soviet code of conduct regarding the “Basic Principles” of bilateral relations. Each side pledged to renounce “efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other.”
However, according to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s memoir, In Confidence, Andropov, the Kremlin’s spy master, was the “cosponsor with [Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei] Gromyko of the major foreign policy proposals.” Andropov intended to weaken the United States, he wrote, “by means of negotiations” while strengthening Russia’s economy and armed forces through theft and espionage.
Either unaware of, or discounting Andropov’s hidden hand in Moscow’s strategy, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed a “degree of interdependence” with the Soviets was essential, as he avers in his Years Of Renewal. The idea was that “interdependence” might dissuade Moscow from using “its conventional superiority to spark a crisis” in Europe while the United States was hamstrung by Vietnam. Besides, as Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt recalled in his own memoir, Kissinger told him America had “passed its high point like so many other civilizations” and needed “to persuade the Russians to give us the best deal we can get” in an arms-control treaty. Whatever the reasons, a grave incaution characterized much of Washington's political-military thinking about détente. There were but a few exceptions.
One alert official was the Harvard-trained economist Gus Weiss. At 44, he was a member of the White House Council on International Economic Policy and responsible for managing exports of militarily significant technologies. In spring 1974, he spoke to the chief of the Soviet/East European Division of the CIA’s clandestine service about troubling patterns he was observing among Soviet trade and cultural missions.
Besides other problems, he explained, Soviet delegates were often showing up at defense-related facilities that had nothing to do with either their official itineraries or ostensible expertise in, say, music or agriculture. Weiss knew that during the 1960s, Soviet efforts to catch up with the West had depended largely on espionage. This time he was detecting another well-organized KGB or GRU enterprise.
Weiss later recalled that U.S. intelligence had “no evidence and no sources” reporting on the existence of an overarching KGB plan for technology theft. Indeed, an intelligence official, most likely CIA, told him, that infiltration of that sort was “not usual Soviet practice.”
So Weiss took it upon himself to launch critically important, off-the-books operations to blunt the Soviet espionage initiative, according to a retrospective he contributed in 1996 to the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. A quarter century after that, his contribution to the Soviet Union’s collapse was the subject of a Smithsonian Channel documentary, “How the CIA Turned the Tables on Soviet Industrial Espionage” (for which I was a commentator). The film was followed by a feature piece in Wired, “The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind.”
Yet there is still much more to reveal. Weiss’s initiatives within the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and eventually the Reagan administrations became entwined with similar ad hoc projects to thwart Directorate T that were occurring around the Boston epicenter. Those have never been reported, and, at the start, Harvard University was Ground Zero.
The Hub
In 1975 I joined Harvard’s Program for Science and International Affairs as a 23 year-old research fellow. It was a postdoctoral role, my having studied Soviet affairs and traveled extensively in the Soviet Union. Two of those trips had led to my debriefings by Vernon Walters, the renowned U.S. Army officer and linguist, first in 1970, when he was military attaché in Paris, where I was a student and, three years later at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., when he was serving as the spy agency’s deputy director. At Harvard, my occasional travels to Eastern Europe also interested the FBI’s Boston Field Office, which often asked returning scholars and business people for interviews in hopes of collecting useful details.
Two FBI special agents already maintained relationships with some Harvard faculty members who would agree to see them, among them E. O. Wilson, the world-famous biologist, who shared insights on Russian scientists he would encounter overseas or during their visits to the U.S. After the agents had a meeting with him, they’d cross Divinity Avenue to my office in the Coolidge Laboratories building.
They told me of their concern about the increased number of Soviet academics who were showing up in Cambridge—for instance, an arms control expert from Moscow’s Institute of World Economy who had given a planned speech at Harvard, only to surface a few days later as an impromptu guest at the R&D facilities of Digital Equipment Corporation, a leading computer manufacturer at the time. In the era’s spirit of détente, company officials gave him a genial tour and dutifully answered his questions.
In parallel, at the White House, Gus Weiss was grasping the details of KGB machinations.
Deception
Someone in Moscow seemed to have studied new, détente-era U.S. regulations for the visits of scientific, computing, aviation, and other delegations, as well as individual experts—enough to know precisely what was allowed by the legalistic Americans. Last-minute changes to itineraries were both permitted under the rules governing friendly exchanges and timed deftly enough so that the departments of State or Defense couldn’t object.
Despite noble intentions, the FBI was out of its league. In Boston, just eight or nine good-natured agents carried a heavy burden of counterintelligence work. And they were demonstrating little comprehension of anything involving international affairs. The fastest route to promotion in Boston, meanwhile, came from fighting organized crime. Therefore, agents from the Boston Field Office approached selected people at Harvard and MIT with an appeal to their patriotism, asking for help monitoring the influx of Soviet visitors to the laboratories, startups, universities, and corporations of the Route 128 “Tech Highway” conurbation. In time, they showed up on my doorstep.
In 1976, I co-founded the journal International Security with Paul Doty, Harvard’s Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry. He had worked on the Manhattan Project and kept up defense advisory roles in Washington. Editing IS opened doors to global figures, as well as to more obscure overseas visitors to Cambridge and the Tech Highway region. It was natural for me to reach out to prominent Russians with requests for interviews or potential articles.
To this end, the two FBI agents with Harvard relationships asked me to meet with certain Soviet visitors who intrigued them: a lecturer on world affairs from Moscow’s Institute for the Study of the USA, or the supervisor of a Russian manufacturing plant—enrolled in a month’s course at Harvard Business School—who, for reasons unknown, had recently met with a mathematician from IBM’s Watson Research Center who had driven up from New York. I offered the agents insights about the work, plans, and contacts of these Russians, including whatever beliefs they might disclose.
Unexpectedly, I found myself in the spy-vs-spy business.
Action Agent
After several months of such amiable encounters, the FBI engaged me in a more ambitious step: It asked me to organize personal, Faculty Club dinners, which they would secretly fund, for other Soviet visitors to Harvard, such as a dean of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Diplomatic Academy, a man who proved to know much about the rising stars of the Soviet foreign service. It also provided me with questions to raise over dinner.
Around the table would be other guests, such as Professors Wilson or Doty, Professor Richard Pipes from the Russian Research Center, Wellesley economist Marshall Goldman, or electrical engineer Robert Lucky, dispatched from Bell Labs in New Jersey. Some of my senior colleagues realized the purpose of these delicate interrogations and FBI agents would also debrief them the next day. Others did not. Harvard administrators were unaware of the clandestine arrangements.
Meanwhile, FBI technical experts had extensively wired the old Elliot Hotel on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, which was frequented by Soviet visitors. I learned that two female graduate students, from Harvard and MIT, had somehow gotten involved in that aspect of the FBI operation, though who knew to what ends.
There was a third step in all this subversive socializing: My FBI contacts requested follow-up visits to Moscow. That was a whole different order of seriousness. The attorney general of the United States would have to approve it—and he did. In 1976, that was Edward Levi. Ostensibly, I went to Moscow to attend a conference, give my own lectures, or seek authors. However, the priority was to build ties with several of these former visitors, including, when possible, their families.
FBI debriefings followed in Boston. The value of such Bureau-financed journeys into Kremlin officialdom is unclear, but sometimes I was able to report that a certain Soviet visitor to the U.S. was not who he or she said they were. On one occasion, background information that I provided would help the CIA, four years later, to compromise an official of the Soviet foreign ministry, while in London away from his wife.
A lot of this activity crossed onto the CIA’s turf, which was making it displeased, especially when the Bureau would not share what it had learned.
Secret Pact
In 1975, Helene Boatner was the 40-year-old manager of the CIA’s operations center. Like Weiss, she was an economist and knew him by reputation as a rich, brilliant, eccentric bachelor who had used social connections to get himself a political appointment at the White House. She wasn’t surprised to learn that he had been brushed off at Langley.
Yet she had her own suspicions about how Moscow was manipulating détente. She worried about powerful computers being shipped East, legally, and had been horrified that it wasn’t until 1974 (thanks to Weiss) that U.S. regulators began to associate computing capacity with Soviet military use. Moreover, she shared Weiss’s alarm at what seemed to be Kissinger’s ignorance of basic economics, compounded by an indifference to fast evolving information technologies.
Boatner telephoned Weiss from her house in Georgetown, and introduced herself by saying right off that she could be fired for contacting him. Then she explained the strange patterns that she was observing among small groups of Soviet scientists, or otherwise top-credentialed individuals, who were turning up in the United States. Like Weiss, she had become aware that the travel plans the Russians were required to submit to Washington kept changing at the last minute. Then they’d appear at unexpected places like a social club adjacent to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
Langley appeared to have no official interest in the problem, but Boatner and Weiss learned that FBI headquarters was spotting the threat. Eventually, I would befriend Weiss and Boatner in this small world at the nexus of national security policy, intelligence, and high-tech. I saw close up the counteroffensive they were spearheading.
Secret Society
By 1975, Weiss had started an informal group of some 20 mid-level intelligence professionals to resist what only later would be identified as Directorate T. They came from within NSA, the Defense and State departments, the Air Force, and, like Boatner, the CIA. An FBI assistant director shared insights one-on-one with Weiss. Completely outside the org charts, they called themselves the Tradecraft Society. No records or files were kept. They just exchanged information orally so that their planning could be kept completely secret from the organizations where they worked. Using such methods as were underway with me in Boston, they identified the bad actors from Moscow who were riding the wave of détente.
Also unknown until reported here, they began to urge U.S. corporations to tighten security procedures—and fast. Weiss insouciantly telephoned CEOs, puffed up his White House credentials and offered “advice.” The recipients of his calls included the CEOs and chairmen of the major Route 128 companies.
After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, Weiss moved to the Pentagon but kept working on the same issues of export controls. Behind the scenes, he ran his hyper-unconventional “society”—blocking, tackling, and arm twisting corporate bosses into buttoning up their intellectual property. By 1981, he was also running “the Washington end” of a French counter espionage operation, known as “l’affaire Farewell,” which, starting that summer, and using a mole in Directorate T, exposed and wrecked the covert Soviet technology acquisition plan.
In 2020, Wired magazine described him as having floated “seamlessly between agencies and departments….dealing with America’s most precious secrets and schemes.” Of course, Weiss knew what was going on in Boston, and at Harvard, his alma mater. A U.S. attorney general wasn’t going to approve practices so irregular at the mere request of a Bureau field office.
In time, Weiss became the first outsider to receive the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit. As for Boatner, she became the agency’s powerful comptroller, and eventually was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.
Meanwhile, they were on their own. Bureaucratic superiors, they believed, would impede their work, given all the official enthusiasm during much of the 1970s for détente.
By 1981, however, Ronald Reagan’s presidency brought change. The Harvard-FBI-Moscow counterintelligence initiatives became unnecessary, though not yet the thrusts of Weiss’s Tradecraft Society.
Harvard’s Richard Pipes—ever alert to Soviet espionage—became senior director of East European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council. Norman Bailey, recently a professor of economics at the City University of New York, arrived as his counterpart for International Economic Affairs. Each had a remit to coordinate new measures for halting both technology thefts and the bank loans, which Moscow was fraudulently obtaining (i.e., by using the same oil and gas reserves as collateral for multiple financings). Weiss came to the NSC as well.
The French operational breakthrough, known in Washington as the Farewell Dossier, documented the full scope of Soviet subterfuge and galvanized Weiss’s efforts. More certain than ever, the new administration began to disrupt Soviet access to both hard currency and to Western technology. For the first time in the Cold War, the United States took the offensive both ideologically and strategically.
Yet still, as Weiss would recall in his article for Studies in Intelligence, “American science was supporting Soviet defense, whether in radar, computers, machine tools, or semiconductors.” And KGB boss Andropov kept succeeding across the board. For example, some Soviet weaponry, like the Kirov-class cruiser, debuted sooner than the American models from whose plans they were copied. No surprise there: Throughout the 1970s détente era, Washington’s policy mandarins had avoided a concerted response to the Soviet duplicity.
On the upside, several Tradecraft Society irregulars would rise to become key officials within the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon. This allowed extraordinary interagency collaboration—an advantage of such unconventionality that has been overlooked. Their final step against Moscow would be industrial sabotage.
Salting the Exports
During January 1982, Weiss took it upon himself to propose to William Casey—Reagan’s audacious and eccentric CIA director—that some of the technology which the Soviets were targeting be “altered.” Products such as chip-testing devices and gas turbine designs were modified, beginning with the cooperation of Texas Instruments’ president, physicist J. Fred Bucy. The minutely deformed results were subtly made available to Line X collection channels.
Sundry destruction followed in the Soviet Union due to power overloads from defective chips and to chaos from malware. A huge gas pipeline explosion in Siberia in 1982 was rumored to have resulted from such schemes. Whatever the cause of such mishaps, Soviet technology espionage crumbled. Moscow was unable to detect the real from the poisoned, just at the time, in November 1982, when Andropov rose to become paramount leader of the Soviet Union.
In January 1983, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 75. It laid out the steps to compel “anti-totalitarian changes within the USSR,” the very opposite of Kissinger’s fatalistic “interdependence.” NSDD 75’s impact would be summed up in the title of Norman Bailey’s book, The Grand Strategy That Won the Cold War, for which I wrote the conclusion.
Richard Pipes, Casey, and the President himself emphasized NSDD 75’s five tactics. One priority was to cut off Andropov’s access to Western high-tech. There were four others: Moscow was deprived of hard currency cash flow; its international legitimacy was challenged; the price of empire was raised further by expensive confrontations in the third world; and, finally, the Kremlin had to face the prospect of an enormously costly all-out arms race.
The Smithsonian Channel documentary cited above skipped over the agency’s official unhelpfulness of the mid-1970s. No matter. I was able to emphasize that Weiss had filled the gap, and that his obstruction of Directorate T was pivotal to the crippling of Soviet power.
But the sabotage, or what was more politely called a deception operation, was short lived. Washington began to realize, Weiss told me, that some of the defective chips might end up in the Soviet strategic missile program. And the prospect of that happening at what had become a time of acute nuclear tension was unthinkable.
Andropov would rule for 15 months as General Secretary of the Communist Party, yet his room for political-military maneuvering was being cut off. As he knew from his vantage point atop the KGB, the Soviet economy had barely grown in twenty years. His protégé, the sharp apparatchik Mikhail Gorbachev, who would follow in March 1984, knew that, too. Still, Gorbachev initially boosted military spending by a third, expanded Russia’s arsenal of deadly pathogens, and tried cracking down in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan (before he realized it was futile). Nonetheless, he recognized how grievously U.S. policy was choking the Soviet Union.
Ultimately, Gorbachev was smart enough to give in. He didn’t just smack his forehead one day and exclaim “How could I have been so wrong about Marxism-Leninism?” Without a modern computing capacity, he couldn’t even think of holding up a decrepit centralized economy, much less competing with the West militarily. He faced the hopeless alternative of courting risks with the West that would have been even more devastating to his regime.
Aftermaths
My science and international relations program became part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1978 and is today the Belfer Center. However, the public policy generalists who ran KSG at the time still embraced idealistic visions of détente. Moreover, within a year the FBI’s presence was sufficiently apparent for the deans to impose a rule: any regular contacts with U.S. intelligence agencies had to have written approval. (Nothing was said, chuckled the profs, about registering ties that one might have with foreign intelligence agencies.) But no one who had such “regular contacts” seemed to comply, and the clandestine work continued through spring 1981.
Come 2002, I was the first to chronicle Weiss’s profoundly unconventional role at the heart of intelligence and high-tech.
Alas, in 2003, in the third year of what would become Vladimir Putin’s murderous presidency, Weiss committed suicide under “mysterious circumstances,” according to The Independent. He fell six stories from the balcony of his apartment in the Watergate complex, where we were neighbors.
We had gotten to know each other well. I had edited his 1996 article for the CIA, “Duping the Soviets,” and an unpublished memoir. I heard him reflect on a shadow war fought and won, and we would discuss how his strange initiatives had helped undercut a truly malignant empire.
Ultimately, Weiss had grasped a truism that seemed to have escaped the attention of many eminent figures atop the NSC staff, the State Department, and for a time, the CIA.
“Having no evidence,” he wrote, “does not mean that something is not true.”
Technology executive Derek Leebaert is the author of Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made and To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles to Al Qaeda among other books.