[2] Vetrov was a 52-year-old engineer assigned to evaluate the intelligence on capitalist hardware and software collected by spies ("Line X") for Directorate T. He became disillusioned, and at the end of 1980 volunteered his services to France for ideological reasons.
After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the US and Japan, Weiss counselled against deportation.
That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate US$8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research.
Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia — all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss — helped us win the Cold War.
[a] Information from Vetrov also led to the arrest in New York of the spy Dieter Gerhardt, a South African naval officer who had been passing secrets to the Soviets for 20 years.
[7] His handler, Vitaly Shlykov, was arrested and subsequently imprisoned in Switzerland while attempting to meet with Gerhardt's wife, Ruth, who was acting as his courier.
[citation needed] According to Reed, another result was that the United States and its NATO allies later "rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the US and overseas."
[9] First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Fidel Castro wrote in a 2007 article that the campaign of countermeasures based on Farewell's dossier was an economic war; that although there were no deaths in the gas pipeline explosion, the Soviet economy was significantly damaged; and that between 1984 and 1985, the United States and its NATO allies had put an end to the technology spying operation, which had destroyed the capacity of the USSR to capture technology when Moscow was caught between a defective economy on one hand and a US President determined to prevail and end the Cold War on the other.