When is espionage classified as terrorism?

If I were Russian, I imagine I would think the Canadians and Americans were terrorists. But we think this is fine heroic stuff.

A new book says a Canadian company was at the centre of an elaborate Cold War scheme in which a Soviet agent was allowed to steal gas pipeline software that had been secretly designed to fail on a catastrophic scale.

The ruse led to a June 1982 explosion in the Siberian wilderness -- "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," according to Thomas C. Reed, former secretary of the U.S. Air Force and author of At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War.

...Gus Weiss, a former special assistant to the U.S. Defence Department and director of international economics with the U.S. National Security Council in the 1970s and 1980s...[who] is widely credited with masterminding the plan to trick the Soviets by letting them acquire faulty technology, published a brief account of the project in 1996 called Duping the Soviets: The Farewell Dossier.

"Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory," Weiss wrote. "The program had great success, and it was never detected."

Reed apparently picked up the rest of the pipeline story from Weiss, who recently died.  article

The article moves on.

But let's not. Because Gus Weiss didn't simply just recently die.

Gus Weiss died a suspicious death. A fall from a tall building. Two weeks after an intelligence officer fell from the State Department building. Both were immediately ruled suicides.

And just maybe they were.