Reply #141: John Kokal has been mentioned above, but here's another name: Gus Weiss

[GliderGuider]

Less than three weeks after Kokol's death, former CIA officer Gus Weiss died under similar circumstances:

Gus W. Weiss, 72, adviser to four presidents on top secret policy matters, died violently in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2003, but his death was not reported by The Washington Post until December 7, 2003, in the obitiuary section at the bottom of page C12. His home town newspaper, The Nashville Tennessean, was only a week late in reporting his death, but at that late date all they could say was, "The circumstances surrounding his death could not be confirmed last night."

Readers of The Tennessean http://www.tennessean.com/obits/archives/03/11/43368774.shtml?Element_ID=43368774 might have had their suspicions aroused not only by the delay in the reporting of this important man's death, but also by the very next sentence in the article: "Friends of Mr. Weiss expressed shock at his death."

But the article is not at all clear as to why that might have been the case. The man was already two years past our allotted three score years and ten, after all. Subsequent passages in the article only heighten the mystery:

"Driven by an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a desire to solve foreign policy problems, Mr. Weiss devoted his life to his career, friends recalled. He served as assistant to the secretary of defense for space policy and on the Pentagon Defense Science Board and the U.S. Intelligence Board under President Carter. Mr. Weiss was a foreign affairs officer and member of the National Security Council under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan."

"Mr. Weiss...was involved in numerous intelligence projects, and friends said there were many aspects of his career he could never discuss with them."

'''He was wired into the intelligence community, and there were a lot of mystical secrets we weren't privy to,' said Harris Gilbert, a Nashville attorney who had been friends with Mr. Weiss since childhood. 'He was very interested in diplomatic strategy and was VERY, VERY OPPOSED TO THE IRAQ WAR. It was the first military action he ever opposed, but he believed we shouldn't go to war in the Middle East without knowing what we were getting into.''' (emphasis added)

http://www.dcdave.com/article4/031207.html

Others have already linked these deaths, though without the context we have been afforded in the last couple of days:

The U.S. intelligence community has suffered a spate of mysterious and surprising suicides since the onset of the Iraq war. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Iraq analyst John J. Kokal, former CIA officer Dr. Gus Weiss, and Washington's politically and diplomatically connected lobbyist Edward von Kloberg, who once counted Saddam Hussein among his clients, all jumped from the tops of buildings or out of window between November 2003 and May 2005. In addition, CIA officer Ben Miller was told to jump out of an open window at the National Security Council by Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams, who is now an Assistant National Security Adviser.

NSA has apparently been no exception to the suicide epidemic. Before his departure from NSA to serve as Negroponte's deputy, Hayden sent a letter to all NSA employees in which he urged everyone to recognize "stress factors" at work. The letter also described the grief of losing a member of the NSA family from stress. NSA employees took the letter as an indication that there had been a recent suicide among the NSA ranks but no mention was made of the individual's identity.

http://cryptome.org/nsa-heroes.htm

Von Kloberg sounds to me like he's outside the stream of murders directly connected to the discovery of the attempted WMD planting, mostly because of the timeline - he died earlier this year as opposed to late 2003. But his connections to Iraq and the intel community, as well as his means of suicide (jump, jump, jump - don't any of these guys use a gun or pills?) make it a possible candidate.

It sounds to me like there was a cleanup crew working overtime. 21st century Plumbers of you will, desperately plugging leaks.