The Death of Gus Weiss
Since the world had been told of Weiss’s major contribution toward the winning of the Cold War in its own pages, not to mention the fact that he had held high level positions under four presidents, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, one might have thought that his death would have been rather big news for the vaunted “newspaper of record,” The New York Times. It was not. In fact, here is how The Times informed the public of his death, in a notice buried deep in its alphabetical list of paid notices a full six days after the death, on December 1, 2003:
WEISS–Gus W. Of Washington, D.C. on November 25, 2003 at age 72. Beloved son of the late Gus and Natalie Weiss. Loving nephew of Lillian Weiss and dear cousin of Joan Poorvu and Claire Weisman. Services at Frank E. Campbell, 1076 Madison Ave. at 81 St. Monday, December 1st at 1 PM. Interment Beth El Cemetery. Contributions in his memory may be made to a charity of your choice.
Not only are there no details on his death, there’s nothing about his extraordinary life, either. You can be certain that they knew who he was, but The New York Times, this pillar of the U.S. establishment, this important organ of what some have referred to as our “permanent government,” in their death notice treated Gus Weiss as a mere nobody. It is so reminiscent of one of those purged Politburo members airbrushed out of the photographs of the Red Square reviewing stand for the May Day parade!
Another measure of Weiss’s continued undeserved obscurity can be found with a Google search of the name, “Gus Weiss.” As of the date of the writing of this article, the first thing that comes up is “Top Secret Adviser to 4 Presidents Dies ‘Violently’ in DC,” which is the title that Jeff Rense gave to this writer’s December 7, 2003, article, “Connected Iraq War Opponent a ‘Suicide’.” (The penultimate paragraph about the unlikelihood that a DC policeman would have been the person to find the body was added after Rense picked up the article. It appears as a postscript in the revised version reprinted later on the UK web site, The Truthseeker.)
As I understand it, Google arranges its links in order of the number of hits that a Web address receives. What this Google search outcome tells us is not so much that the Rense.com page and my article are so popular but that the life and death of Gus Weiss continue to be blacked out news in America’s mainstream press.
I will be the first to admit that the Weiss blackout had done its work on me. What caught a friend’s eye on the obituary page of the local house organ of the permanent government, The Washington Post, was that the death of this former high level but relatively unknown government official had been reported 12 days late and with no explanation for the conclusion that the death had been a suicide other than that the medical examiner had said so.** A quick Google search revealed that the Nashville Tennessean had beaten The Post to the punch by six days in reporting the death. From the article there I learned that Weiss’s friends had been “shocked” at the news of this death, that he had been a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, and that as of December 1 the Tennesseean had not learned anything about the nature Weiss’s death.
I dashed off my article on the same day the Post obituary appeared, remaining ignorant of the puny little Weiss obituary in The Times and of the hugely important Farewell dossier and Weiss’s role in its exploitation.
Now there are Wikipedia pages for both the Farewell dossier and for Gus W. Weiss. A click on their “View history” tabs at the top reveals, however, that both are of very recent vintage. The “Farewell dossier” page did not begin until January 12, 2010. This was in the year after the French had produced a major movie, L’affaire Farewell, on the subject and thirteen years after the French publication of the book, Bonjour Farewell.
The “Gus W. Weiss” Wikipedia page didn’t get started until July 19, 2011. The original poster of the page ended it with a section entitled “Death & Suspicions,” with a reference to this writer’s article as it appeared on Rense.com. One must wonder if this person would have ever heard of Gus Weiss had it not been for my article on Rense. At any rate, the reference to that article lasted all of two minutes for the reason given that “rense.com is a notoriously bad source.” (Never mind that it is I, not Rense, who is the ultimate source and that virtually all that is in my article is a recitation of the known facts in the case with my conclusion that it seems suspicious. The reader is free to conclude for himself that it doesn’t seem suspicious if he so chooses.) The day after the original posting the entire “Death & Suspicions” section was removed from the page. From July 20, 2011, until November 18, 2011, when a new “Death” section was put up, readers of the “Gus W. Weiss” Wikipedia page would have been given the impression that Weiss was still alive.
At the risk of sounding repetitious, I must say that all this avoidance of the subject of Gus Weiss’s death looks awfully suspicious. The avoidance began with the long delay in even reporting it and then with the failure of the police and the press to give us any useful details about it. Who last saw the man alive? Did anyone witness his supposed fall?*** Did anyone hear anything? What time of the day or night did it occur? What brought the policeman who supposedly discovered the body to the Watergate complex in the first place? What is his name? The most fundamental question of all: On what basis did the police rule out other causes of death such as homicide or accident? Did they search his apartment? Did they find anything relevant to his death there such as a suicide note or signs of a forced entry?
The Explanation
What in the world is going on here? The country’s news media, led by its most prominent and powerful newspapers, could hardly have done more to discredit themselves with their Weiss coverage if they had tried. One gets the distinct impression that The Washington Post would never even have told us that Weiss had died if his hometown newspaper had not gotten wind of it and broken the silence almost a week late. For its part, The New York Times is yet to run its own story about the death. One needn’t bother asking anyone at either newspaper for an explanation. There simply can’t be an innocent one.
Only one conclusion is possible. Something deeply sinister is going on. For starters, we are virtually forced to conclude that Weiss was the victim of foul play. Considering who he was and who is doing the covering up, it had to have been very high level foul play. The more important question is who was behind it, and what is their purpose? If we can answer that one perhaps we could answer the most important one of all: Who really rules us and what is their purpose? Some important clues might be found in Reed’s book and in the revised and translated version of the French book previously referred to, Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud (AmazonCrossing, 2011).
The story of the Farewell dossier constitutes only a subplot in Reed’s extraordinary chapter 17, entitled “The Queen of Hearts.” The title character of the chapter is Reagan’s wife, Nancy. From this insider’s account of the Reagan White House we learn that the Reagans’ was every bit as much a “co-presidency” as was that of the Clintons, if not more so. Reagan supplied the ideology grounded in his experience with Communist infiltration of Hollywood and the affable actor’s exterior while Nancy supplied the drive and ambition and, surprisingly, a good bit of the “people skills.”
According to Reed, it was an uneasy alliance. To an ambitious but essentially apolitical person like Nancy, achieving the White House was an end in itself. To her husband it was his great opportunity to slay the dragon of Communism once and for all. With their different concerns, the co-presidents assembled competing teams within the White House, which Reed calls the “Old Shoes” for Ronald’s crowd who went back a long way with him in California and the “Pragmatists,” for the ambitious operatives who were as lacking in any particular guiding political principles as was Nancy herself. Reed belonged solidly to the first group. From his description of the respective groups’ actions, Reed might have chosen more apt names like the “Ideologues” and the “Careerists.” The leaders of the Old Shoes, chosen by the president, were Judge William Clark and Edwin Meese. Nancy’s crowd was headed up by Michael Deaver and James Baker III. The deep rift between them is revealed by the concluding paragraph of Reed’s section on the Farewell dossier:
Through all of this, the White House Pragmatists also remained in the dark. If Nancy Reagan, Jim Baker, or Mike Deaver had known that the U.S. government was blowing up Soviet pipelines, infiltrating Soviet computers, bollixing their software, or spoofing electronic equipment—even though done with the President’s approval—they would have had a fit. As it was, they remained ignorant while the President played his trump card: SDI/Star Wars. He knew the Soviets could not compete in that league because he knew the Soviet electronics industry was infected with bugs, viruses, and Trojan horses placed there by the U.S. intelligence community. (p. 270)
Two paragraphs near the beginning of the chapter capture well what Nancy was all about:
The leaders of permanent Washington are very good at cultivating the court of whatever new ruler arrives from outside the Beltway. That establishment bends the wills of senators and congressmen with their sophistication. They urge new appointees to the Supreme Court to re-orient their moral compasses to the mother lode of Washington wisdom. They welcome new Presidents and their assistants with open arms, buffet tables, and bars.
The dean of the establishment was Katharine Graham, a personally delightful lady who was publisher of the Washington Post. Rather than attempting to dethrone her, Nancy spent enormous time and effort cultivating Mrs. Graham, and vice versa. On December 11, 1980, even before the Reagan inauguration, the first-family-to-be were guests at Mrs. Graham’s home for dinner; that, despite the deadly opposition of the Post and the rest of the mainstream media to virtually everything Ronald Reagan stood for. Nancy had selected her route to glory. It ran through Georgetown, not across the icy tundra of the Cold War. (p. 262)
The basic political infighting technique employed by Nancy’s troops is well summed up by the concluding paragraph of the section of the “Queen of Hearts” chapter entitled, “The 1983 Struggle for Control of the White House.”
Within days of the President’s return to Washington after the 1982 year-end holidays, Baker, Deaver, and their allies unleashed the furies of the media on all the Old Shoes. The Pragmatists had courted that media assiduously for two years. Leaks of the most sensitive inside information had been laid onto favored journalists in anticipation of paybacks when the time came. The Old Shoes were hopelessly outgunned; one by one we drifted away.
Near the conclusion of the chapter Reed reveals that Nancy, in the middle of the second term, even had a long-term California acquaintance and his wife deleted from the White House guest list to be “replaced by détente activist Armand Hammer, a now-documented Soviet agent.” Hammer, it should be pointed out, was also a long-term financial supporter of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., Democrat of Tennessee who never made it quite as far as his son in pursuit of the presidency.
Reflecting further on the insufficiently descriptive names Reed uses for the two factions in the Reagan White House, some other possibilities come to mind. How about “Outsiders” and “Establishment” or, even more descriptively, “Patriots” and, uh, “Permanent Government?”
Unfortunately, the second term in each case remains insufficiently descriptive. That’s because the agenda of this group remains insufficiently clear. One thing is clear. The major news media, led by The Washington Post, are at the very heart of it. We have also demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that this same crowd is at the heart of some sort of cover-up in the death of Gus Weiss, who, according to Thomas C. Reed, was very much a member of the first group.
The Washington Post also seems to have a very cozy relationship to the C.I.A. That fact is relevant to our story because of something we find in the Kostin-Reynaud book. Vladimir “Volodia” Vetrov set in motion his eventual exposure and execution when he seemed to go berserk and attempted to stab to death his KGB mistress, Ludmila Ochikina. No one knows why he did it, but one theory is that he was overcome by paranoia:
Incidentally, the hypothesis of Vetrov going through an attack of paranoia is corroborated by other reliable sources.
Among them Igor Prelin, who also believes the tension Vetrov was under at the time could have made him misinterpret a word from Ludmila, throwing him into a criminal panic.
The other source is Jacques Prévost. The Thomson representative assured us that, “according to one of his sources,” Volodia was convinced Ludmila worked for the CIA, and Vetrov believed that the Americans were about to “finger” him to the KGB because the intelligence documents produced by the Farewell operation were so sensational they were becoming an embarrassment for top U.S. officials.
What captures the attention in this fantastic scenario is not the unlikely theory of Ludmila being a CIA agent, but rather the paranoid state Vetrov must have been in to construct such an absurd story. (p. 246)
And what captures our attention is the question of what might be in the Farewell dossier beyond what we have been told. What was it that could have been so problematic for “top U.S. officials” that Vetrov could have feared that they might shut down their own extremely valuable gusher of information? Might it tell us some truly shocking things about our ruling establishment, our Permanent Government? Have they been following an “internationalist” agenda all along that some might interpret as “selling out the people of the United States?” Was his knowledge of this fact and undisguised disgust over it what eventually got Gus Weiss killed?
These questions are enough to make us take a more serious look at the experience and the conclusions of the defector from Communist Poland, Andrzej Suda. Was the Cold War and were the players in it somewhat different from what we think they were? Did we really win the Cold War after all, and who, exactly, is “we” in this case? See Suda’s personal testimonial at http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/User:Andrzej and Greg Szymaski’s story about it at http://www.rense.com/general69/iron.htm.
David Martin
December 20, 2011
*At the beginning of the section, Reed has the following note: “The tale that follows is extracted, and in some cases quoted, from unpublished notes by Gus Weiss: ‘The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War,’ 2003.” It bears a different subtitle but from the material covered one may assume that this is essentially the same as the Weiss article, “The Farewell Dossier: Duping the Soviets,” posted on the C.I.A. web site a little more than three years after its author’s death.
**We should have noticed even at the time that the obituary was a decidedly puny one for almost anyone who had been engaged in the spook business. As a longtime Post reader, I have noticed how elaborate the obituaries tend to be for deceased C.I.A. employees, in particular. It is in great disproportion to those from any other federal department. The Post generally treats them like celebrities, as though they were movie stars, politicians, or journalists. If you Google “Washington Post obituary C.I.A.” you will get some idea of what I am talking about.
***We can’t help but notice here some peculiar parallels with the reporting on the death of the “queen” of the information arm of the permanent government, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Graham reportedly fell on a walkway outside a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 14, 2001, and died from head wounds suffered in the fall in a hospital in Boise three days later. Absolutely no details about the fall have ever been reported. We don’t know if anyone was with her when she fell or if anyone witnessed the fall. If she was alone, we have never been told who found her after the fall. Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman, to my knowledge, is the only one to report that “Doctors at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center (Boise) performed a series of surgeries to repair extensive intracranial injuries.” It is difficult to imagine how anything but a spectacular slippage on ice (in mid-July?) could have caused such injuries, but in this case, as with Weiss’s fall, our press is apparently content to leave us to our imagination. The parallels between the two deaths end, of course, when it comes to the post-mortal encomiums. No one in this century so far, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs, has been more roundly eulogized than Kay Graham.
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COMMENT:
So…what did Dr Gus Weiss do?
(To Be Continued)
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