Bill Gaede

Who is Bill Gaede?

Guillermo "Bill" Gaede is an Argentine engineer and programmer who is best known for Cold War industrial spying conducted while he worked at Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corporation. While at AMD, he provided the Cuban government with technical information from the semiconductor industry which the Cubans passed on to the Soviet bloc, primarily to the Soviet Union and East Germany. In 1992, Gaede turned himself over to the Central Intelligence Agency, which placed him in contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI began working with Gaede in a counter-espionage operation intended to penetrate Cuban intelligence using his contacts on the island. During this time Gaede obtained work at Intel Corp. in Chandler, Arizona. Intel Security discovered the nature of his activities at AMD and terminated him, but not before Gaede filmed Intel's state-of-the-art Pentium process from home.

Gaede fled with this technology to South America where he allegedly sold the information to Chinese and Iranian representatives. Upon his return to the United States, Gaede was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. He was convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison on June 1996, after which he was deported. The 9th Circuit Court rejected Gaede's appeal, and the Supreme Court denied certiorari.