| The name Gus Weiss does not spring to mind when thinking about the great figures of the Cold War. But he was there, behind the scenes, working his craft, making connections, hatching plans. The toupee-wearing scion of a Nashville department store chain, Weiss forsook commerce to study game theory and geopolitics. As a true believer in the Reagan administration, he helped to execute one of the key efforts that brought down the Soviet Union—what he called the "goober pea simple" plot to feed defective technology to the Soviets. His most infamous caper involved the hack of a Soviet pipeline. But as Alex French writes on Backchannel this week, this larger-than-life operation gets murky on close examination. French went down a rabbit hole trying to grasp its contours: He read multiple drafts of Weiss's unpublished memoir, talked to his former intelligence colleagues, and dug through archives. What he came away with is a mesmerizing tale of how intelligence can be leveraged and manipulated—and the story of the man with "an exquisitely folded brain" who knew exactly how to do it. Vera Titunik | Features Editor |
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