THE CRAZY CHE

On October 8th, 1994 an Argentinean identified as GUILLERMO GAEDE is arrested in the woods of Ezeiza trying to bury three packages in the middle of the night. Upon examining the contents, the police officers are forced to call the S.I.D.E (Argentinian intelligence force): there are cassettes with wiretaps, diskettes with microfilmings, passports and more than two hundred photos that compromise the FBI, the CIA and INTEL, a leading American company in the manufacture of microchips. The story is leaked in the local newspapers with headlines like “EZEIZA, DOUBLE SPY FALLS”, “FROM ENGINEER TO CHIP”, “THE SIDE HOLDS DOUBLE SPY” or “I STEAL CHIPS FOR THE LOVE OF COMMUNISM”.

Bill Gaede, also known as “El Crazy Che”, is an Argentine engineer, physicist, programmer, and Cold War spy who worked for the American companies Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel Corporation (Intel). During his time at AMD, he delivered technical information on the semiconductor industry to the Cuban government, which in turn was passed on to the Soviet Bloc. Disappointed by communism, Gaede turned himself in to the CIA who referred him to the FBI. The FBI began using Gaede in a counter-espionage operation to penetrate Cuban intelligence using his contacts on the island. During this phase Intel’s security services discovered the nature of Gaede’s activities at AMD and fired him from his job, but by that time Gaede had already filmed the Pentium process through a terminal installed in his home. Gaede fled with this technology to Argentina where he allegedly sold the information.

“Nationalism is a disease that is cured by traveling. People should travel more and talk less nonsense. I am a man without a homeland” he repeats to anyone who will listen to him from his exile.