The Fruity Cargo Cult, Apple’s modern empire may owe more to CIA cash than it will ever admit.
Without a secretive US intelligence contract keeping NeXT alive, company co-founder Steve Jobs might have remained a Silicon Valley footnote rather than returning as messiah. The Wall Street Journal reports that the CIA turned up at NeXT in 1986, when Jobs was still licking his wounds after being booted from Job’s Mob.
The Cold War was roaring, Ronald Reagan was shovelling billions into defence and spy agencies wanted Silicon Valley kit before it became fashionable. CIA Program B types Joe Romello and Jeffrey Harris thought Jobs could supply workstations useful for satellite reconnaissance.
They wanted to discuss “defence-related issues, specifically intelligence,” but could not explain much because the whole thing was classified. Jobs later told Romello: “Don’t tell me anything that I’m not supposed to know because I won’t remember to forget.”
The pitch soon became a purchase order. Romello wanted 20,000 NeXT machines with two modifications, a faster Motorola chip and a special graphics card from Intel, with Chipzilla helping supply part of the spy-friendly upgrade.
NeXT badly needed sales because Jobs, with the sort of business sense that got him into trouble at Apple, had built a beautiful, expensive machine that his target market, universities,  could not afford. Publicly, the deal was described as a federal government contract through ESL, while the CIA’s role was kept neatly tucked away.
Inside NeXT, mysterious Washington visitors arrived without business cards, watched demonstrations and said almost nothing. Dan’l Lewin recalled: “And nobody had business cards. They all smiled, and we gave them demonstrations, and there were people from ESL in the room because ESL was going to shepherd the whole thing.”
The CIA brought in Sun Microsystems to help Jobs scale production, with output rising from 100 workstations in the first month to 5,000 a month. Unmarked trucks hauled the machines to a CIA front company for upgrades before they were shipped through Moffett Field to classified destinations.
The National Reconnaissance Office used NeXTcubes to study satellite imagery, spot military movements and push intelligence across networks. Romello said: “We didn’t use the word internet back then, but we called it just a ‘wide area network,’ or what have you.”
In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs returned to the company he had co-founded. NEXTSTEP became the foundation for Macs and later the iPhone, meaning Jobs’ Mob’s sacred software bloodline runs through a spy-funded lifeline.
Dain Ehring, who worked with Romello and later joined NeXT, said the intelligence work gave Jobs “another five-year runway to harden and grow the business; to prove himself to shareholders and the market that he was a legitimate business leader, not just a kid who got lucky and could sell.”
All this means that without any CIA cash, there would have been no NeXT comeback, no Jobs return and no fruity cargo cult.