Economist John Koehler was cybersecurity expert
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John E. Koehler, a Yale-educated economist whose varied career included serving as a CIA deputy director and founding the first company to offer two-way, high-speed Internet access over satellite, has died. He was 60.
Mr. Koehler, a native of Olympia, launched San Diego-based Tachyon in 1997 shortly after being diagnosed with cancer. He died Dec. 14 at his home in Carlsbad, Calif.
Although declining health forced Mr. Koehler to resign as president and chief executive of the data networking-services company last December, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks spurred him to offer his services as a government adviser through the Rand Corp., where he once worked.
Mr. Koehler last met with government officials in Washington, D.C., to discuss cybersecurity two weeks ago, according to Susan Koehler, his wife of 10 years.
And because of his experience in the late '70s and early '80s as a CIA deputy director responsible for developing the budget for all of the government's intelligence-gathering functions, she said, he was asked to help develop the budget for the White House Office of Homeland Security.
Mr. Koehler filed what became his final report to Rand the day before he discovered that his cancer had spread to his brain. He died two days later.
"He was a remarkable man; he just kept going," his wife said. "To call him patriotic is not the right word. He just really cared about there being a peaceful world. God had given him special talents, and he really felt he needed to share them."
Mr. Koehler, the son of a baker, earned a scholarship to Yale University and graduated summa cum laude in 1963. After doing postgraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned a doctorate in economics at Yale in 1968.
Recruited to work in the economics department at Rand, he worked on policy analyses in national and international security.
Charles Wolf, the Rand senior economics adviser who hired Mr. Koehler, still marvels at Mr. Koehler's ability to take an elaborate World Bank forecasting model of the Indonesian economy and turn it into something that made sense by condensing 300 equations down to eight.
"He was a very well-trained economist, a highly competent and creative guy," Wolf said.
After becoming the economics department's associate director, Mr. Koehler left Rand in 1975. He then became assistant director of the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C., where he established the National Security and International Affairs division and directed studies of U.S. defense policy.
He next served as a CIA deputy director and director of the Intelligence Community Staff from 1978 to 1982 — during which he oversaw procurement of advanced satellite communications and computing systems for the federal government and managed the budget for the National Foreign Intelligence Program.
After leaving the CIA, Mr. Koehler joined Hughes Electronics and became president of its Tokyo-based Asia Pacific Operation. He later became president and chief executive of Hughes Communications, helping Hughes launch DirecTV as a satellite-broadcasting system and establishing American Mobile Satellite and other ventures.
In the mid-1990s, he served as chief operating officer of San Diego-based Titan, maker of satellite equipment for commercial and government customers. Then he founded Tachyon.
"He was an absolutely brilliant guy," said Jeremy Guralnick, senior vice president of strategic marketing and chief scientist at Tachyon. "He's very well known worldwide in the satellite industry, and most people who spent any amount of time with him would say he was one of two or three people in the entire industry who could see three or five years out to the next big thing."
In addition to his wife, Mr. Koehler is survived by a daughter, Maggie of Carlsbad; sons Matthew of Carlsbad and Andrew of Santa Fe, N.M.; his mother, Frances Koehler of Seattle; a sister, Mary Ellen Rapp of Seattle; and a brother, Richard of Marietta, Ga.