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<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><ul><li><strong>The fallout from the events that toppled Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and his top&#xa0;lieutenants is still in progress.</strong></li><li><strong>On Thursday, Eric Alexander, an executive who was fired as news reports emerged that he obtained access to a rape victim's medical records, filed a lawsuit against Rachel Whetstone, a well-known and powerful PR and public policy pro who was Uber's PR boss at the time he was let go.</strong></li><li><strong>And the lawsuit is remarkable, not just in the allegations being made in it, but also the mechanism being used to sue her.</strong></li></ul><p><br>The fallout from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-scandal-crisis-complete-timeline-2017-6">Uber's terrible, horrible, nasty 2017 </a>that toppled founding CEO Travis Kalanick and his top&#xa0;lieutenants is still in progress, with a surprising new lawsuit between two former Uber execs sure to raise eyebrows throughout Silicon Valley.</br></p><p>On Thursday, Eric Alexander, one of the executives who was fired from the $70 billion ride-hailing company during its tumultuous year, filed a suit against Rachel Whetstone, Uber's former public relations boss, who also left during that year.</p><p>Alexander, who was fired as reports emerged that he had personally obtained the medical files of a rape victim, is being represented by litigation firm Quinn Emanuel, whose roster of previous big name clients include the Winklevoss twins.&#xa0;</p><p>The lawsuit is remarkable, not only for juicy allegations that describe a "Game of Thrones"-like behind-the-scenes feud among Uber executives, but also for the unusual legal claim that Alexander is using to go after Whetsone.</p><p>To boil it down: Alexander is alleging that Whetstone spread false rumors about him, rumors that led to news stories that caused him to be fired. That's a big deal given that Whetstone is known in the Valley as a powerful PR person. PR people are rarely accused of this sort of thing. They typically defend companies and their execs when reporters come asking difficult questions. Whetstone could not immediately be reached for comment.&#xa0;</p><p>The lawsuit, though full of allegations as all lawsuits are, does not include documents as evidence to back up its claims, such as emails, texts or documents.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>The undisputed facts of the case are that Alexander was fired within hours of reporters coming to him and the company asking question about how he obtained the medical files of the victim of a famous rape case in India.&#xa0;</p><h2>He was fired after reporters started asking questions</h2><p>Alexander was Uber's president of Asia Pacific when an Uber driver raped a passenger in 2014, an incident which briefly caused Uber to be banned from New Dehli. After the rape occurred, Alexander worked with local police, providing them with Uber route records and testifying at the trial, all of which helped put the accused rapist in prison for life.&#xa0;</p><p>The driver had been accused before, so the rape victim then sued Uber as well.&#xa0;Alexander worked with Uber's internal legal team to hire lawyers and those lawyers obtained the police criminal records of the case which included the woman's medical records, the lawsuit says. As <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-takedown-of-travis-kalanick-2018-3">Business Insider previously reported,</a> Uber eventually settled the case with the victim for $3 million.</p><p>Fast foward two years to the summer 2017, when Uber is a world of hurt after engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post detailing the sexism and sexual harassment she experienced during her employment there. Eric Holder and his law firm had just finished investigating a litany of similar complaints and Uber had announced that 20 people were fired.</p><p>Alexander was not among those 20, but when reporters from <a href="https://www.recode.net/2017/6/11/15758818/uber-travis-kalanick-eric-alexander-india-rape-medical-records">Recode</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-07/uber-workplace-probe-extends-to-handling-of-india-rape-case">Bloomberg</a> called the company to ask how an Uber executive obtained the victim's medical files, repeating rumors they had heard about his treatment of those files,&#xa0;Alexander was summarily fired as well.&#xa0;News stories at the time reported that Uber insiders discussed if the rape incident was some sort of plot to sabotage Uber and that the medical files were peered at to cast doubts on the rape victim's story - allegations that Alexander calls "false."&#xa0;</p><p>In the lawsuit,&#xa0;Alexander's lawyers allege that they believe that Whetstone was somehow behind those rumors and news stories, accusing her of "spreading false, disparaging and misleading information about Mr. Alexander's response to the India rape." It also says his reputation has been crushed as a result of these stories.</p><h2>A 2-way non-disparagement clause</h2><p>The lawsuit delves into how Alexander and Whetstone were regularly at odds: He publicly accused accused her of making racist comments; she publicly accused him at a Davos conference of mishandling these medical files, the lawsuit alleges.</p><p>And then it says something really strange: it alleges that when Whetstone resigned from Uber, her agreement with the company included a two-way non-disparagement clause. Companies often require an employee to agree to a non-disparagement clause - a provision that restricts the employee from saying anything bad about the company in order to receive a payout. But the lawyers say that, in an unusual move, Whetstone insisted that she be protected from disparagement as well and that the clause even named specific people, including Eric Alexander.&#xa0;</p><p>Ironically, instead of protecting her, this clause is the basis for the lawsuit. Alexander is suing for breach of contract because he was named in the two-way non-disparagement clause, and his lawyers arguing that Whetstone didn't keep up her end of the agreement. The lawsuit doesn't name a hoped-for dollar figure and Alexander isn't suing anyone else, not even Travis Kalanick, who was still CEO at the time Alexander was fired.</p><p>As Business Insider previously reported, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-uber-takedown-untold-story-2018-3">during the downfall of Uber founder CEO Travis Kalanick</a>, Whetstone was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/rachel-whetstone-left-uber-2018-3">one of the major players.</a>&#xa0;<span>Before Uber, Whetstone had served for years as head of public policy and communications at Google, growing wealthy from her time there. Once at Uber, people saw her role as speaking "truth to power" and not under Kalanick's spell.</span></p><p><span>After a while Whetstone became disillusioned with Uber and her relationship with several top executives there grew contentious, multiple people told Business Insider. She left Uber to join Facebook and has</span>&#xa0;now left Facebook for Netflix, Recode reports.</p><p>Here's the lawsuit:</p><p>&#xa0;</p><div><p style=" margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block;">   <a title="View Uber Eric Alexander vs. Rachel Whetstone on Scribd" href="https://www.scribd.com/document/388539398/Uber-Eric-Alexander-vs-Rachel-Whetstone#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;">Uber Eric Alexander vs. Rachel Whetstone</a> by <a title="View JulieB188's profile on Scribd" href="https://www.scribd.com/user/188775221/JulieB188#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;">JulieB188</a> on Scribd</p></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-mock-facebook-privacy-woes-iphone-2018-9">Apple took another subtle jab at Facebook during its iPhone XS event</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div></hr>

A fired Uber executive is suing top tech PR person Rachel Whetstone, alleging she made 'disparaging and grossly misleading statements'

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Billion-Dollar-Spy-Espionage/dp/0385537603"></a></div></div></div>One of the most significant US intelligence operations in modern history took place in the heart of Soviet Moscow, during one of the most dangerous stretches of the Cold War.</p><p>From 1979 to 1985, a span that includes President Ronald Reagan's <a href="http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/speech-3409">"evil empire" speech</a>, the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-close-the-us-and-the-soviets-came-to-war-in-1983-2014-9">1983 US-Soviet war scare</a>, the deaths of three Soviet General Secretaries, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/kal-fight-007-anniversary/">the shooting-down of KAL 007</a>, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA was receiving high-value intelligence from a source deeply embedded in an important Soviet military laboratory.</p><p>Over a period of several years and 21 meetings with CIA case officers in Moscow, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer overseeing a radar development lab at a Soviet state-run <keyword id="6354810" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Defense">defense</keyword> institute, passed the US information and schematics the revealed the next generation of Soviet radar systems.</p><p>Tolkachev struggled to convince the CIA he was trustwory: He spent two years attempting to contact US intelligence officers and diplomats, semi-randomly approaching cars with diplomatic license plates with a US embassy prefix.</p><p>When the CIA finally decided to trust him, Tolkachev transformed the US's understanding of Soviet radar capabilities, something that informed the next decade of US military and strategic development.</p><p><span>Prior to his cooperation with the CIA, US intelligence didn't know that Soviet fighters had "look-down, shoot-down" radars that could detect targets flying beneath the aircraft. </span>Thanks to Tolkachev, the US could engineer its fighter aircraft - and its nuclear-capable cruise missiles - to take advantage of the latest improvements in Soviet detection and to exploit gaps in the enemy's radar systems.</p><p>The Soviets had no idea that the US was so aware of the state of their technology. Tolkachev helped tip the US-Soviet military balance in Washington's favor. He's also part of the reason why, since the end of the Cold War, a Soviet-built plane has never shot down a US fighter aircraft in combat.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Getty Images</span></p><p class="caption">A US B-52 bomber</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Pulitzer Prize-winning author David E. Hoffman's newly published book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Billion-Dollar-Spy-Espionage/dp/0385537603?tag=bisafetynet-20">The Billion Dollar Spy</a>" is the definitive account of the Tolkachev operation. It's an extraordinary glimpse into how espionage works in reality, evoking the complex relationship between case officers and their sources, as well as the extraordinary methods that CIA agents use to exchange information right under the enemy's nose.</p><p>It's also about how espionage can go wrong: In 1985, a disgruntled ex-CIA trainee named Edward Lee Howard defected to the Soviet Union after the agency fired him over a series of failed polygraph tests. Howard was supposed to serve as Tolkachev's case officer. Instead, he handed him to the KGB.</p><p><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_left float_right"><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2008-featured-story-archive/adolf-tolkachev.html">Central Intelligence Agency</a></span></p><p class="caption">Adolf Tolkachev in KGB custody.</p></div><p></p></div>Business Insider recently spoke with Hoffman, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous/dp/0307387844">The Dead Hand</a>, an acclaimed history of the final decade of the Cold War arms race.</span></p><p><span><span>Hoffman talked about some of the lessons of the Tolkachev case. Successful espionage, he said, is like a "moonshot," an enormous effort that only works when cascades of unpredictable variables are meticulously kept in check. </span></span></p><p><span><span>And as Hoffman notes, his book is a unique glimpse into how such an incredibly complex undertaking unfolds on a day to day basis. </span></span></p><p><span><span>"You can read a lot of literature about espionage but rarely do you get to coast along on the granular details of a real operation," Hoffman says, in reference to the over 900 CIA cables relating to the Tolkachev case that he was able to access. "That's what I had."</span></span></p><p>The archive, along with the scores of interviews Hoffman conducted in researching the book, yielded unexpected insights into the realities of spycraft: "I was really surprised by both the sort of quest for perfectionism" among the agents who handled the Tolkachev case, says Hoffman, "but also by the enormous number of things that can and did go wrong."</p><p>The interview has been edited for clarity and length.</p><p><strong>BI: Your book the story of a CIA triumph: They run this source in the heart of Moscow for 5 or 6 years and get this bonanza of intelligence. But it's also a story of organizational failure - about how this asset was eventually betrayed from within the CIA's own ranks. </strong></p><p><strong>Is there a message in these two interrelated stories about the nature of intelligence collection and the challenges that US intelligence agencies face?</strong></p><p><strong>David E. Hoffman</strong>: On the first point, I think the big message, which is still very valid today, is the absolutely irreplaceable value of human source intelligence.</p><p>We live in an era when people are romanced by technology, the CIA included. Between what you scoop up from people's emails and what satellites can see and signals intelligence, there always seems to be a new technological way to get various kinds of intelligence.</p><p>But this book reminded me that there is one category of espionage that is irreplaceable, and that is looking a guy in the eye and finding out what the hell is going on that isn't in the technology - that can't be captured by satellites. Satellites cannot see into the minds of people. They can't even see into a file cabinet.</p><p>Even in the cyber age, it seems to me that you still have to get that particular human source, that spy that will do what nobody else will do: to let you sort of bridge the air gap, plug in the USB thumb drive if that's necessary, to tell you something that nobody has written down ...</p><p>Tolkachev was that kind of human source, an absolutely sterling example of someone who could bring stuff that you couldn't get any other way.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Maxim Shemetov/Reuters</span></p><p class="caption">The Lubyanka in Moscow, the former headquarters of the Soviet KGB and current headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service.</p></div><p></p></div></div>The second point is, you called it institutional dysfunction but I think there's a larger factor here which is counterintelligence ...</p><p>[Intelligence] cannot simply be a matter of collection. You also have to have defenses against being penetrated by the other guys.</p><p>We live in a world where the forces of offense and defense are in perpetual motion. Counterintelligence is part of that. And counterintelligence is what really failed here.</p><p>I think it was also institutional dysfunction in the way they treated Howard. That wasn't a counterintelligence problem so much it was a sort of incompetence: They fired a guy, they said get lost, and he was vengeful.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="caption">Aldrich Ames spied for the Russian for nine years before being arrested on February 24, 1994.</p></div><p></p></div></div>But I also think that - maybe not particularly in this case but just generally - the CIA did not value counterintelligence highly enough for a long time. Really the events that followed Tolkachev - [Aldrich] Ames [see <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/aldrich-hazen-ames">here</a>], [Robert] Hanssen [see <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/robert-hanssen">here</a>], that whole period of the 1985-86 losses [see <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jJxyIb2hN4MC&amp;pg=PA263&amp;lpg=PA263&amp;dq=1985+86+cia+asset+losses&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=GMqXXPLMPm&amp;sig=Ql2X2d3e64pbq1mJJMcGvuHTWzE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAWoVChMI9dGDyeCNxwIVCT4-Ch2Gmg4c#v=onepage&amp;q=1985%2086%20cia%20asset%20losses&amp;f=false">here</a>] - were a failure of counterintelligence ...</p><p>There were really some big vulnerabilities there. In the end Tolkachev was exposed and betrayed by a disgruntled, vengeful fired trainee. But there were other losses soon to follow that were caused by essentially not having strong enough counterintelligence in place.</p><p><strong>BI: It's interesting how much the success of the operation had to do with these agents understanding Tolkachev's state of mind based on these very short meetings that would be spaced months and months apart. </strong></p><p><strong>And from that they would have to build out some kind of sense of who this guy was. </strong><strong>From the looks of it they did so fairly successfully for awhile.</strong></p><p><strong>DEH:</strong> That's my toughest question. Espionage at its real core is psychology. You're a case officer, you're running an agent - what is in the soul of that man? What's in his heart, what motivates him?</p><p>These are all questions that you have to try to answer for headquarters but also for yourself, in trying to play on his desires and understand them. Sometimes it can be a real test of will as you saw in this particular narrative. This psychological business can be very difficult ...</p><p>A couple of times early in the operation Tolkachev revealed his deep antipathy towards the Soviet system. He said I'm a dissident at heart, he describes how fed up he is with the way things were in the Soviet Union.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t5DWcA1DLU">YouTube/ITN</a></span></p><p class="caption">Joseph Stalin</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>He gives only a very very skimpy factual account of his wife's parents travails, but I was able to research them in Moscow and discovered that his wife grew up without her parents. Her mother was executed and her father was imprisoned for many years during Stalin's purges. And Tolkachev was bitter about that.</p><p>He also came of age in the time when [Nobel-prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn] and [Nobel Peace Prize-winning physicist and activist Andrei Sakharov] were also sort of coming of age as dissidents.</p><p>All of that rumbled around behind these impassive eyes. It's not as if he handed over a book saying, I'm a dissident and here's my complaint. Instead he handed over secret plans and said, I'm a dissident and I want to destroy the Soviet Union.</p><p>This psychological war and test of nerves of constantly trying to read a guy is really the most unpredictable and most difficult part of espionage. In this case, I'm not sure it was always successful.</p><p>The case officers did grasp that Tolkachev was determined. He expressed this sort of incredible determination, banging on the car doors and windows for 2 years to get noticed.</p><p>And when he's working for the CIA he gives them his own espionage plan that takes years and multiple stages that he had mapped out. He's a very, very determined guy. But what's driving that isn't always clear to the case officers.</p><p><strong>BI: How does Tolkachev's story fit in to the larger story of the end of the Cold War arms race?</strong></p><p>I don't think you could make the extravagant claim that he ended the Cold War or that he ended the arms race. But that's not to minimize what Tolkachev did do. One of the things I discovered was how uncertain we were about Soviet air defenses in that period at the end of the Cold War ...</p><p>There was always a funny thing going on with the Soviet Union. They had a lot of resources and were a very large country and the state and the military industrial complex was a big part of it. They always built a lot of hardware.</p><p>In fact they had a huge number of air-defense fighters and bases positioned all around their borders. [Air defense] wasn't such a big deal for us but for them, the enemy was at their doorstop, right in Europe. They also had the world's longest land borders. They had a lot to defend.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Wikimedia Commons</span></p><p class="caption">Thanks to Tolkachev, the US knew all about the radar capabilities of the Soviet-built MiG-29, the advanced interceptor introduced in the mid-1980s.</p></div><p></p></div></div>The US saw all the deployments but there was also evidence that Soviet training was poor, that the personnel who manned all these things were not up to it, [and] that there was a goofy system where pilots were told exactly what to do by ground controllers and had very little autonomy.</p><p>The intelligence about whether the Soviets had look-down shoot-down radar was very uncertain. Some people said no, they don't have it, some said yeah. And here's were Tolkachev stepped into the breach.</p><p>Within a few years of his work, we knew exactly what they had and what they were working on. Tolkachev was also bringing us not only what ws happening now but what would be happening 10 years from now. A</p><p>nd if you think about it in real time, if you were in the Air Force and thinking about how you were going to deal with Soviet air defenses, getting a glimpse of their research and development 10 years ahead was invaluable ...</p><p>There was also a fine line between [air defenses] and the nuclear issue. There were two aspects to strategic nuclear weapons that depended on air defenses and the kind of stuff Tolkachev brought us.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.defense.gov/photos/newsphoto.aspx?newsphotoid=456">US Department of Defense</a></span></p><p class="caption">A Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the stern vertical launch system of the USS Shiloh (CG 67) to attack selected air defense targets south of the 33rd parallel in Iraq on on Sept. 3, 1996, as part of Operation Desert Strike.</p></div><p></p></div></div>One was obviously bombers. In the early days of the Cold War [the US had] a high altitude strategy. B-52s would fly at a very high altitude and bomb from 50,000 or so feet.</p><p>Then we made a switch and we decided that the Soviets' real vulnerability was at low altitudes. And it's true. They did not have good radars at low altitude ...</p><p>The strategic cruise missile scared the living daylights out of the Kremlin, because they knew they could fly right under their radars.</p><p><strong>BI: Much of this book consists of reconstructions of scenes that were top-secret for many years but that you put together through researching the cable traffic and conducting interviews. </strong></p><p><strong>What do you see as the biggest challenge of writing about these dark spaces in American national security? </strong></p><p>There are all kinds of missing jigsaw pieces in these narratives that we think we know, say, about terrorism, or about WMD. One of the things you find out if you're one of those people who go with a pick and shovel at history and try to unearth rocks and tell stories is that pieces are missing - tiny little pieces, and also important things.</p><p>In this story there were a bunch of gaps that I had to report. I had enough to tell the story, but you never feel at the end that you know the whole story …</p><p>I still think there are big parts of what Tolkachev meant that are still in use and that are legitimately still classified. Even though this case is three decades old, it's quite likely that some of that stuff is still considered pretty valuable intelligence.</p><h2><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Billion-Dollar-Spy-Espionage/dp/0385537603?tag=bisafetynet-20">Check out the book &gt;</a></h2>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-about-russia-compared-other-countries-putin-2015-7">11 facts that show how different Russia is from the rest of the world</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RtbDU1bDra7DfSubgs0WuD4Pg0DTxjxx" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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A fired Uber executive is suing top tech PR person Rachel Whetstone, alleging she made 'disparaging and grossly misleading statements'

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