back to Washington four years later when Chris got a job at the World Wildlife Fund. At first, they stayed with friends in Great Falls while they looked for a new place to live. As Noel toured houses, she called Lorraine frequently to update her on her search.
Over lunch one day, the topic turned to Elizabeth and what she was up to. Noel proudly told Lorraine that her daughter had invented a wrist device that could analyze a person’s blood and started a company to commercialize it. The reality was that Theranos was already moving on from Elizabeth’s original patch idea at that point, but that lost nuance hardly mattered in the chain of events Noel’s lunchtime confidence unleashed.
When she got home, Lorraine repeated what Noel had told her to her husband, thinking it might be of interest to him as a fellow medical inventor. What she probably didn’t anticipate is how he would react.
Richard Fuisz was a vain and prideful man. The thought that the daughter of longtime friends and former neighbors would launch a company in his area of expertise and that they wouldn’t ask for his help or even consult him deeply offended him. As he would put it years later in an email, “The fact that the Holmes family was so willing to partake of our hospitality (New York apartment, dinners, etc.) made it particularly bitter to me that they would not ask for advice. Essentially the message was, ‘I’ll drink your wine but I won’t ask you for advice in the very field that paid for the wine.’ ”
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FUISZ HAD A HISTORY of taking slights personally and bearing grudges. The lengths he was willing to go to get even with people he perceived to have crossed him is best illustrated by his long and protracted feud with Vernon Loucks, the CEO of hospital supplies maker Baxter International.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Fuisz traveled a lot to the Middle East, which had become the biggest market for Medcom, his medical film business. On his way back, he usually spent a night in Paris or London and from there took the Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet operated by British Airways and Air France, back to New York. During one of these stopovers in 1982, he ran into Loucks at the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris. At the time, Baxter was eager to expand into the Middle East. Over dinner, Loucks offered to buy Medcom for $53 million and Fuisz accepted.
Fuisz was supposed to stay on to head the new Baxter subsidiary for three years, but Loucks dismissed him shortly after the acquisition closed. Fuisz sued Baxter for wrongful termination, alleging that Loucks had fired him for refusing to pay a $2.2 million bribe to a Saudi firm to get Baxter off an Arab blacklist of companies that did business with Israel.
The two sides reached a settlement in 1986, under which Baxter agreed to pay Fuisz $800,000. That wasn’t the end of it, however. When Fuisz flew to Baxter’s Deerfield, Illinois, headquarters to sign the settlement, Loucks refused to shake his hand, angering Fuisz and putting him back on the warpath.
In 1989, Baxter was taken off the Arab boycott list, giving Fuisz an opening to seek his revenge. He was leading a double life as an undercover CIA agent by then, having volunteered his services to the agency a few years earlier after coming across one of its ads in the classified pages of the Washington Post.
Fuisz’s work for the CIA involved setting up dummy corporations throughout the Middle East that employed agency assets, giving them a non-embassy cover to operate outside the scrutiny of local intelligence services. One of the companies supplied oil-rig operators to the national oil company of Syria, where he was particularly well connected.
Fuisz suspected Baxter had gotten itself back in Arab countries’ good graces through chicanery and set out to prove it using his Syrian connections. He sent a female operative he’d recruited to obtain a memorandum kept on file in the offices of the Arab League committee in Damascus that was in charge of enforcing the boycott. It showed that Baxter had provided the committee detailed documentation about its recent sale of an Israeli plant and promised it wouldn’t make new investments in Israel or sell the country new technologies. This put Baxter in violation of a U.S. anti-boycott law, enacted in 1977, that forbade American companies from participating in any foreign boycott or supplying blacklist officials any