When the CIA dropped in unannounced at the headquarters of Steve Jobs’s new computer company, NeXT, the Cold War was in full swing.
In 1996, Apple announced that it was buying NeXT, and Jobs returned to the company he had co-founded.
Kohler, a former senior CIA official, told Jobs that what the NeXT computer had been designed to do “for college students and professors and researchers, that’s what the intelligence community does behind the door. “We never told him what we were really after,” Romello said. Publicly, NeXT said it had a contract with the federal government as part of a partnership with ESL. Even inside the government, the CIA’s involvement was shielded; the National Security Agency was the official buyer, according to Dain Ehring, who worked with Romello on the NeXT contract. Jobs still didn’t know precisely where his NeXT Computers were going, or why, at least according to those on the intelligence side.
When Jobs eventually met with ESL’s president, Robert Kohler, the two men hit it off, recalled Garry Fuller, who worked for ESL at the time and later joined NeXT. The customization Romello had in mind wouldn’t be handled by Jobs or NeXT. The intelligence customer wanted a faster chip, supplied by Motorola, and a special graphics card, from Intel. “We didn’t give him a copy of the chip. They were done aftermarket by us, by our proxies. That left primarily the contract with the CIA, which almost no one knew existed. The truth was that even the people responsible for buying them—including Romello himself—didn’t fully anticipate how the computers would end up being used. A few years later, Jobs regained control of the entire company, putting it on a trajectory to become the world’s most valuable brand—and, as promised, redefining the music industry with the advent of the iPod and iTunes.
