http://archive.today/2026.08.21-231410/https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9
Joe Romello and Jeff Harris , working for what was known as the CIA’s “Program B,” a classified initiative to develop satellite reconnaissance, believed Jobs, who had formed his new company in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple, could help supply crucial technology for the intelligence community.
In addition to starting NeXT, in February of 1986 Steve Jobs had acquired the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilms, which made the Pixar Image Computer. Jobs’s controlling interest in the newly spun out company came with an unexpected piece of technology: Pixar had been working with ESL, a Silicon Valley defense company, and had custom-built a computer for intelligence analysts to assess satellite images.
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. 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.”
Jobs would not have been totally surprised to learn the CIA was asking to speak to him. But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his company’s future to spies?
“How many units are you prepared to deliver on an annual basis?” Romello asked. “Is it more than 20,000? That’s what I want to buy: 20,000 units,” Romello said. “And I want ’em this year, but I want ’em with two modifications.”
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 never told him what we were really after,” Romello said. “We didn’t give him a copy of the chip. They were done aftermarket by us, by our proxies.”
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.
The CIA brought in a team from Sun Microsystems, which had already had dealings with the spy agency, to help Jobs ramp up manufacturing. The first month of production yielded a hundred workstations. Then NeXT boosted output to 1,500 machines a month—then 5,000.
The computers rolling off the line were loaded on unmarked trucks arriving at NeXT’s warehouse in the early morning and transported to a CIA front company where the modified chips and visual processors were installed. Once assembled, the units went back on trucks bound for Moffett Field, a military installation, where they were loaded into hulking C- 5 transport planes and flown to their final—classified—destinations.
Jobs still didn’t know precisely where his NeXT Computers were going, or why, at least according to those on the intelligence side. 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.
The computers went to analysts at the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, who used NeXT’s high-resolution screens and specialized chips to scan satellite imagery—to detect whether a country had moved its military, say, or if it was building a missile silo. The workstations also allowed analysts to create and share briefings, whether for lawmakers or the president, incorporating voice-over-video, still images and annotations.
Equally important, the NeXTcubes, as they were called, allowed data to be shared across intelligence networks, putting freshly collected images in the hands of military personnel around the world, thus allowing them to do analysis in real time. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, but thanks to the NeXT, the intelligence community essentially had its own functioning internet. “We didn’t use the word internet back then, but we called it just a ‘wide area network,’ or what have you,” Romello said.
As more members of the military started seeing the images themselves they no longer had to rely solely on analysis from intelligence agencies. NeXT put raw intelligence into the hands of battlefield commanders at bases around the world, images they could interpret “though their eyes in near real time,” Romello said.
The effect was to challenge the CIA’s longstanding culture of centralized intelligence. This, Romello said, was “the biggest unintended consequence” of the new computers.
He may not have known exactly what the CIA was planning to do with his computers, but Jobs was eventually granted a top-secret security clearance so he could visit classified facilities.
The work with spy agencies 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,” said Ehring, who left the intelligence world in 1990 to work with Jobs at NeXT.