DAILY DIARY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74-00297R001001610001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 30
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 25, 2013
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: July 2, 1952
• Content Type: MEMO

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The Wiretappers
WILLIAM S. FAIRFIELD and CHARLES CLIFT
I. Who's Listening
And to What?
WIRETAPPING, a furtive practice that
recognizes no legal bounds, has
become the uninvited, unsuspected
third party to the private telephone
conversations carried on by American
citizens of all persuasions and beliefs
from all walks of life.
In 1934 Congress passed a law pro-
viding severe penalties for wiretapping,
but only one person has ever been
prosecuted and convicted under it, and
that was eleven years ago. Wiretapping
today is actually the freest of free
enterprises, highly expensive, but in-
dulged in with virtual immunity from
Federal prosecution by government
agents, municipal police, political par-
ties, ?business firms, witch hunters, di-
i7orce lawyers, private detectives, sharp-
ers, freebooters, and blackmailers of all
sorts?all of whom practice it in the
serene conviction that there will never
be any penalties.
This boldness stems from the knowl-
edge that the Department of Justice is
reluctant ?to press wiretapping cases
to prosecution or even to gather evi-
dence for them. Admittedly sensitive
about the legality,of tapping by its own
agents, the Department of Justice hesi-
tates to risk legal action that might
focus attention on its own "extralegal"
practices.
AS A RESULT of this lack of restric-
tion, wiretapping is now a com-
mon practice in almost every troubled
area of American life. Anywhere in
this country anyone with a telephone
who fits any of the following categories
is fair game for wiretapping, most likely
for the specified purposes : a rich man
for blackmail; a businessman for com-
petitive information; a union leader
for labor espionage; a politician for fu-
ture attacks by opponents; a public ad-
ministrator for advance tips on pending
decisions; a philanderer for a favorable
divorce settlement; a criminal for ar-
rest and prosecution; a Communist or
suspected Communist for a security
check; a simple nonconformist for com-
pilation of a dossier of his unpopular
views; a member of the armed forces
or a government employee for a check
on personal associations and loose talk;
any private employee for testing his
efficiency and loyalty to the firm; a
taxpayer for information on possible
evasions.
This, although it is quite a list, seem-
ingly eliminates a good many Ameri-
cans who don't belong in any of these
categories. But so far as the ;treasured
right to individual privacy is con-
cerned, it eliminates none. For a wire-
tapper eavesdrops indiscriminately. He
catches in his net, together with the
intended victim, all those who happen
to use or to call a telephone being
tapped, however irrelevant the call to
the purpose of the tapper. And with
police today monitoring many public
pay-station phones in search of gam-
blers or prostitutes, the most innocent
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may find their private and sometimes
very personal conversations recorded
side by side with the business calls of a
booker or a procurer.
The result is that many an unwary
talker has thus provided enough in-
formation on his private affairs and
troubles to make him prey to an un-
scrupulous listener. When police or
government agents are doing the lis-
tening, any words that come over a
phone, whether or not germane to the
matter being investigated, become ipso
facto evidence for incrimination or
guilt. The words could be those of a
real criminal, of course, and then again
they could be those of the Red Cross
canvassing for new contributors?and
there are listeners to whom even the
Red Cross might be suspect.
In connection with the statement
that anyone with a telephone is fair
game for a tapper, it should be pointed
out that if a line is considered worth
tapping, and if someone has the money
(or the staff) in addition to the incli-
nation, he can have a tap installed on
that line within twenty-four hours, no
matter where in the United States it is
located, no matter what the private or
official capacities of its users. And once
the tap is installed, the chances against
accidentally discovering it would be at
least ten thousand to one.
The vast majority of wiretapping
cases will never be proved. Most of
them will never even be known, for
generally only those cases involving
well-known persons break into print.
Those whose names have cropped up
in recent wiretapping episodes range
from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to
gangster Tony Bender; from Senator
Owen Brewster to Vito Genovese, of
Murder, Inc., fame; from labor media-
tor Cyrus Ching to Howard Hughes;
from Thomas E. Dewey to Judith Cop-
lon; from Rocky Graziano to Henry
(Mystery Man) Grunewald; from
Minot F. (Mickey) Jelke to former
Governor of Rhode Island William H.
Vanderbilt. The list includes many far
less prominent citizens. And, of course,
it is still far from complete.
NEITHER Democrats nor Republi-
cans have a monopoly on wire-
tapping. Past experience has shown
that no matter which party is in pow-
er in Washington, Federal and Con-
gressional leaders have a tendency to
use their authority and the govern-
December 23, 1952
meat's ,resources, including wiretap-
ping, to pursue political feuds and per-
sonal advantage. Democratically con-
trolled Congressional committees have
been discovered employing wiretap-
pers. During the Eightieth Congress,
when the Republicans became chair-
Q. AND A. ON WIRETAPPING
(Answers by a telephone com-
pany official to questions from a
staff member of The Reporter.)
Q. What does the telephone com-
pany do if it discovers that a sub-
scriber's line is tapped? Does it
remove the tap? Does it notify
the customer?
A. Unless the tap is legal, it is re-
moved. The customer may be noti-
fied in some cases.
Q. If a customer asks a line check
and the company discovers a tap
on it, does the company notify the
customer of that fact?
A. Where an illegal tap is found
and removed, the customer is of-
ten advised.
Q. Is there any way to provide
tap-proof service?
A. While there are techniques in
the art which minimize possibilities
of a tap by direct connection or
induction we do not know of any
practicable method of assuring
tap-proof service. While an in-
dividual telephone line between
the customer's telephone and the
central office can be made reason-
ably tap-proof, such safeguarding
measures do not care for the line
and telephone instrument at the
other end of the conversation.
men of the Congressional committees,
the wiretappers found themselves work-
ing for new employers, and subsequent-
ly there were revelations about the tele-
phonic activities of one Lieutenant
Joseph W. Shimon, who had links to
Henry Grunewald and the strange far-
flung interests of Republican Sena-
tor Owen Brewster. Democrats have
tapped Republicans and Republicans
have tapped Democrats as if they were
members of the underworld rather
than leaders of a democracy. Now,
with the Eisenhower Administration
about to take over, it is important to
see whether such tactics will still pre-
vail. It is even more important to as-
certain what, if anything, the new Ad-
ministration will do about curbing
wiretapping. Among the new men of
consequence are several whose sen-
sibilities, to judge from their past
records, would not be at all offended
by the practice.
WIRETAPPING, in any form, creates
a basic American conflict. On one
side are the ideals of freedom and in-
dividual privacy, on the other the argu-
ments favoring the use of modern tech-
niques to fight crime and to protect
national security. Somewhere a line of
demarcation must be drawn.
These articles will take up the vari-
ous phases of the practice of wiretap-
ping?its history, its legal aspects, its
technique, its use by the FBI and other
government agencies and by police de-
partments, its use in political feuds, its
exploitation by all kinds of private in-
terests. But we begin with an expla-
nation of the basic facts of tapping,
both historical and technical.
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II. Some Law-Evading
Enforcement Agencies
IN 1916, the people of New York City
were surprised to learn that their
mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, had ap-
proved an investigation of local Catho-
lic charities on the ground that these
groups were out to destroy the public
Charity Commission. Surprise turned
to shock when New Yorkers read news-
paper accounts of the investigative
methods being used. With the co-oper-
ation of the New York Telephone Com-
pany, it was revealed, the Mayor had
allowed the tapping of a Catholic
priest's telephone.
The telephone company, in answer-
ing the charges leveled against it,
pointed out that it had co-operated
with city officials in this manner ever
since 1895, when the police first con-
ceived of the value of tapping tele-
phone wires to obtain evidence. In the
intervening years, the New York press
had carried stories on a dozen-odd
wiretapping cases. Some reported the
conviction of criminals ?by the use of
wiretap evidence, others private tap-
ping in divorce cases and in setting up
certain swindles. None had evoked
more than passing public interest.
The tapping of a priest's phone,
however, was too much. Overnight,
wiretapping became a subject of popu-
lar interest and indignation. A Con-
gressman from New York, George Loft,
called for a Congressional investigation
of "this gigantic scandal," and a bill
outlawing wiretapping was introduced
in the New York State legislature. Posi-
tive action was delayed, however, by
America's entry into the-First World
War, when the Federal government
took over operation of the telephone
companies. But in 1918 Congress put
an absolute ban on wiretapping for the
duration of the emergency.
Prohibition's Role
After the war, with the telephone com-
panies back in private hands and the
Congressional ban lifted, wiretapping
quickly came back into its own. The
first great anti-Red drive was on, and
10
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
ordered wiretaps regularly in prepara-
tion for his raids. In 1920, when the
Eighteenth Amendment went into ef-
fect, Treasury Department prohibition
agents also began employing wiretap-
ping as a primary weapon.
Soon public reaction set in on a na-
tional scale. Citizens who had never
considered wiretapping objectionable
when used to catch criminals found it
repulsive when applied to checking on
fellow citizens who held unpopular be-
liefs. Other citizens objected violently
to the use of tapping in prohibition en-
forcement?a few because they didn't
want to see their private bootleggers
jailed, many more because they feared
that their own telephone orders for
supplies might be recorded.
The protests reached Washington,
and in 1924 Attorney General Harlan
F. Stone, in a directive to the newly
formed Federal Bureau of Investiga-
tion, proclaimed, under the heading
"Unethical Tactics," that "Wiretap-
ping . . . will not be tolerated . . ."
NFORTUNATELY, Attorney General
Stone's orders applied only to the
FBI. Prohibition agents continued tap-
ping without pause. In 1928, a re-
percussion from their efforts finally
reached the Supreme Court. In the
case of Olmstead v. United States, de-
fense lawyers pleaded for a reversal of
a client's conviction for bootlegging on
the ground that the wiretapping used
to gain evidence violated the Fourth
Amendment restriction on search and
seizure. In its 5-4 decision, however,
the Court ruled that the Fourth
Amendment applied only to "actual
physical invasions" of privacy, and not
to "projected voices." The four dis-
senters were Justices Brandeis, Holmes,
Butler, and Stone.
The Olmstead decision only served
to intensify public demand for legisla-
tion to outlaw wiretapping. In 1929,
the first wave of a flood of anti-wiretap-
ping bills engulfed Congress, despite
J. Edgar Hoover's concurrent assur-
ance to a House committee that "any
employee engaging in wiretapping will
be dismissed from the service of the
bureau."
"While it may not be illegal," said
the FBI Director, "I think it is uneth-
ical, and it is not permitted under the
regulations of the Attorney General."
Two years later, in 1931, the Pro-
hibition Bureau?still busily tapping
aivay?was transferred from the Treas-
ury to the Justice Department and At-
torney General William D. Mitchell
found himself forced to settle the in-
ternal conflict between FBI and Prohibi-
tion Bureau wiretapping policies. Dis-
regarding J. Edgar Hoover's moral
scruples, Mitchell decided in favor of
wiretapping, subject to "authoriza-
tion" of the Director of the Bureau.
The FCC and 605
Between the Olmstead decision in 1928
and the first session of the first Roose-?
velt Congress, numerous bills to outlaw
wiretapping were introduced, and in
1933 Congress finally did force some
control of tapping by banning its use in
the enforcement of prohibition?which
went off the books that year anyway.
During the depression years, as labor
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became more and more of a political
force, its leaders complained with in-
creasing anger about the use of wire-
tapping in anti-union espionage. With
these voices added to those already de-
manding abolition of the practice, Con-
gress was not long in acting.
In 1934 the Federal Communica-
tions Commission was established as an
independent agency. -Included in the
enabling act, as Section 605, was a
provision intended to outlaw wiretap-
ping once and for all. It read in part:
"No person not being authorized by the
sender shall intercept any communica-
tion and divulge or publish the . . .
contents . . . to any person . . . and no
person having received such inter-
cepted communication. . . shall . .. use
the same or any information therein
contained for his own benefit or for the
benefit of another. . ." Violations were
made subject to a $10,000 fine, two
years in prison, or both.
WHILE awaiting court interpretation
of Section 605, Federal agencies,
still operating under Attorney General
Mitchell's 1931 approval of wiretap-
ping, continued to tap telephone lines.
Local enforcement officers and private
detective agencies followed suit.
Three years later, in 1937, the Su-
preme Court reviewed its first case un-
der Section 605, Nardone v. United
States. Several defendants who had
been found guilty of liquor smuggling
now appealed their convictions on the
ground that the evidence against them
was the product of wiretapping by
Federal agents and had thus been
gathered in violation of Section 605.
Government attorneys freely admitted
'INSTRUMENTS OF TYRANNY'
(From the late Justice Louis D.
Brandeis's dissenting opinion in
the Olmstead case.)
"The tapping of one man's tele-
phone line involves the tapping of
the telephone of every other per-
son whom he may call or who may
call him. As a means of espionage,
writs of assistance and general
warrants are but puny instruments
of tyranny and oppression when
compared with wiretapping."
December 23, 1952
the use of wiretapping, but argued that
Section 605 did ncit apply to Federal
agents.
The Court sided with the smugglers
and reversed their convictions. Section
605, it ruled, was designed "to include
within its sweep federal officers as well
as others." Since Federal agents had
violated Section 605 in intercepting
telephone conversations and divulging
their contents in court, the govern-
ment's evidence was inadmissible.
The agents who tapped were there-
fore guilty of violating a Federal law.
It was no surprise, however, that their
superiors in the Department of Justice
never bothered to prosecute. If the
Department had done so, many law-
yers feel, the courts would have upheld
conviction of the offending agents.
Department of Justice vs. the Law
Over the next three years, the Depart-
ment of Justice continued to test in
court various possible loopholes in Sec-
tion 605. While it tested, it did nothing
to halt continued wiretapping by Fed-
eral agents?not only ( as was later ad-
mitted) in cases of, national security,
extortion, and kidnaping, but also in
investigating such crimes as mail fraud,
narcotics peddling, and bribery.
The next tests of Section 605 came
in 1939 when the Supreme Court
ruled out three more possible Justice
Department loopholes in the wiretap-
ping law. The first ruling involved the
reconviction of Nardone and associates
?this time based not on direct wiretap
evidence but on evidence obtained
from wiretap "leads." Justice Frank-
furter, writing the majority opinion of
the Court, termed this evidence "fruit
of the poisonous tree." Such "fruit"
was ruled as inadmissible in court as
direct wiretap evidence, and the sup-
posed smugglers were again freed.
In another 1939 case, Weiss v.
United States, the Supreme Court
closeck, two more potential loopholes.
In one ruling, the Court stated that
Section 605 must apply to intra- as well
as interstate telephone conversations,
since there was no way for a tapper on
a line to determine beforehand whether
a given call would cross state lines. In
the other Weiss ruling, the Supreme
Court refused to accept wiretap evi-
dence when the authorization of the
"sender," as dernanded in Section 605,
was obtained after the tapping?in this
case, by confronting him with the re-
corded conversations and by promising
leniency.
In 1940, a circuit court of appeals
further tightened up Section 605, in
Polakoff v. United States, by stating
that under the law, one party could not
authorize interception of a conversa-
tion on his line unless the other party
concurred. The Supreme Court refused
to review the decision.
THus, in their first interpretations
1 of Section 605, the higher courts
consistently ruled in favor of a strong
wiretapping law. The court rulings
were so explicit, in fact, that the
Treasury Department began pressing
Congress for specific authorization of
wiretapping by Federal agents. In
1938, however, J. Edgar Hoover in-
definitely postponed chances for such
action by opposing a Treasury-drafted
bill granting Federal agencies the right
to tap. According to newspaper ac-
counts, Hoover "said he had men who
were expert in tapping wires, but if he
let them practice it . to any extent
[italics ours] they would turn crooks in
no time."
But, to some extent at least, the FBI
and other Federal agencies were all
tapping during this period. Meanwhile
the Department of Justice continued
searching for loopholes in Section 605.
On March 12, 1940, however, the
Department's search was rudely inter-
rupted by a Senate Interstate Com-
merce Committee report. The report,
approving a proposed Senate investi-
gation. of wiretapping, was submitted
by Democratic Senator Burton K.
Wheeler of Montana. Wheeler stated:
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"Wiretapping [is] especially dangerous
at the present time, because of the re-
cent resurgence of a spy system con-
ducted by Government police. Persons
who have committed no crime, but
whose economic and political views
and activities may be obnoxious to the
present incumbents of law-enforcement
offices, are being investigated and cata-
logued."
Off Again, On Again
Exactly five days after release of the
Wheeler blast, the Department of Jus-
tice banned wiretapping. After nine
years of almost unrestricted Federal
use since Attorney General Mitchell's
authorization in 1931, the practice was
now totally prohibited. "In a limited
class of cases . . ," said Attorney Gen-
eral Robert H. Jackson, "wiretapping
should be authorized under some ap-
propriate safeguard. Under the existing
state of the law and decisions, this can-
not be done unless Congress sees fit to
modify the existing statutes."
On April 9, Jackson repeated his as-
sertion that the ban on wiretapping
was not only ethically necessary but
was made imperative by court inter-
pretations of Section 605: ". . . the law
on wiretapping is now clear and pre-
cise; and all future cases of wiretap-
ping will be subject to prosecution in
the Federal courts."
At the same time Jackson indicated
why no one, even outside government,
had been convicted of violation of Sec-
12
tion 605 in the six years since its enact-
ment: "I do not feel that the Depart-
ment of Justice can in good conscience
prosecute persons . . . for a practice . . .
engaged in by the Department itself,
and regarded as legal by the Depart-
ment."
IN the light of future events, the last
statement was especially important.
The following year, the Department
embarked on its first and what turned
out to be its only prosecution of a vi-
olation of Section 605?a violation in
which an attorney named Jacob Gru-
ber induced a switchboard girl in the
Securities and Exchange Commission
to cut him in on telephone conversa-
tions involving an investigation of one
of his clients. Gruber was convicted,
and the conviction stuck.
But only eight weeks after Jackson
had declared wiretapping illegal, the
Department of Justice quietly did a
direct about-face and again authorized
the practice. Federal agents have been
wiretapping ever since. And in accord-
ance with Jackson's sentiments on
prosecuting others "for a practice . . .
engaged in by the Department itself,"
Gruber today remains the only. man
ever convicted of violating Section 605.
The National Safety
Jackson's original statement of March
17, 1940, declaring the illegality of tap-
ping, had come at an unfortunate time.
Russia had recently defeated Finland.
Germany was to overrun Denmark and
invade Norway within a month. In the
United States there was widespread
talk of national defense and of possible
sabotage.
During the Nazi invasion of the Low-
lands, in May, President Roosevelt sent
a mysterious memo to the Department
of Justice?a memo that was never so
much as mentioned until 1949 and
which has still not been made public.
According to a statement made in
1949 by Attorney General Tom
Clark, the May, 1940, memo "ap-
proved . . . wiretapping when neces-
sary in situations involving national
defense." Why such a memo has never
been publicly released is still a matter
of conjecture. The best guess is that
Roosevelt named specific suspected
pro-Nazi Americans whose lines he
wished tapped. In support of this the-
ory, Senator Gerald Nye, a prominent
supporter of the America First Com-
mittee, reportedly told a Washington
columnist at the time that J. Edgar
'BEEPS'
Mindful of the Polakoff case, the
Federal Communications Commis-
sion in 1947 issued a regulation
requiring that every telephone-
recorder attachment must emit a
"beep" warning signal over the
wires each fifteen seconds when in
operation. Today, with the pro-
duction of telephone recorders
thriving, there are at least a hun-
dred thousand in active use, mostly
in private industry but a substan-
tial number in government. Less
than ten per cent of these?the
Bell System's most recent figure is
eight thousand?give the required
"beep."
Hoover had privately informed him
(Nye) that his wire was being tapped
on orders from above.
WHATEVER the exact wording of the
President's memo, however, the
general content was enough to cause
the Department of Justice to reverse
its stand on Section 605. The law on
wiretapping was just as "clear and pre-
cise" as Jackson had proclaimed it to
be two months before, but FBI agents
were again authorized to tap wires.
Publicly, the Department said noth-
ing; but behind the scenes it was again
hunting a loophole in Section 605.
By the end of 1940, the Department
had come up with another tenuous
justification of its own activities. It had
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long been argued that, under the law,
wiretapping was of itself no crime and
that the only crime was to "intercept
and divulge." The little word "and"
made all the difference, since it meant
that both acts had to be committed be-
fore anything illegal had taken place.
In backing up this argument, the De-
partment insisted that the entire Fed-
eral government was an entity, and
thus an agent was not "divulging" to
another when he passed wiretap infor-
mation to his superior, and his superior
was not guilty of "divulging" when he
passed the information to another gov-
ernment agency or to Congress.
In March, 1941, Attorney General
Jackson made this new construction of
Section 605 public. "There is no Fed-
eral statute that prohibits or punishes
wiretapping alone . . . ," Jackson said.
"Any person, with no risk of penalty,
may tap telephone wires and eavesdrop
on his competitor, employer, work-
man, or others, and act upon what he
hears or make any use of it that does
not involve divulging or publication."
Jackson completely ignored, as the
Department of Justice has ever since,
the second part of Section 605: "and
no person having received such inter-
cepted communication . . . shall . . .
use the same . . . for his own benefit or
for the benefit of another. . . ." Ob-
viously: without either divulging or
using, tapping would be just an idle
pastime.
AFTER Jackson's statement, J. Edgar
Hoover beat a prompt retreat from
the ethical position he had publicly
maintained against wiretapping since
1929. He still opposed unrestricted
wiretapping, he said, but he thought it
should be used in some cases, "such as
December 23, 1952
espionage, sabotage, kidnaping, and
extortion."
Hoover's list reflected the views ex-
pressed on then-pending wiretap legis-
lation by President Roosevelt in a let-
ter to Congressman Thomas Eliot in
February, 1941?a letter in which
the President, perhaps prophetically,
warned of possible abuses.
The Court Retreats.
In 1942, the Supreme Court, which
had previously reaffirmed Section 605
at every opportunity, made its own re-
treat. In Goldstein v. United States, a
mail-fraud case, Federal agents had
persuaded two men, by showing them
recordings of their telephone conver-
sations, to testify in the prosecution of
three others. The Supreme Court up-
held the conviction of the three, saying
that a person who is not a party to
tapped conversations cannot object to
their use.
The Court's specific decision, of
course, applied only to a few cases. But
it was the first interpretation of Sec-
tion 605 that recognized the admis-
sibility of wiretap-derived information
in legal action. The Justice Depart-
ment was now free to experiment with
all sorts of wiretapping methods, evi-
dence from which might or might not
be admissible in court. Of one thing
at least the Department could be cer-
tain: No agent would go to jail. To
date, the Department seems quite satis-
fied with things as they are. In 1949,
it did draft a bill to sanction Federal
wiretapping. But two months later,
when the anti-wiretapping forces began
to organize, it promptly withdrew the
bill. Meanwhile, despite Section 605,
Federal wiretapping continues as a
daily practice.
STATE laws are of little help in con-
trolling wiretapping. Forty-two
states restrict tapping in some manner,
but only two?Delaware and New Jer-
sey?outlaw divulgence in court, while
at least seven others, including Massa-
chusetts and New York, permit wire-
tapping by local law-enforcement offi-
cers.
Nor is the Federal Communications
Commission any help. The Justice De-
partment, not the FCC, is charged with
enforcing Section 605, as the FCC has
had to point out to many irate citizens,
including a Detroit businessman who
wrote recently to complain about a tap
on the phone of a daughter who was
suing her husband for divorce. The
FCC could only refer him to the Justice
Department and the Attorney General.
If the Attorney General answered
the Detroiter at all, which is unlikely,
he might have quoted his predecessor
in office, Robert Jackson: "I do not
feel that the Department of Justice can
in good conscience prosecute persons
. . . for a practice engaged in by the
Department itself."
BEEPLESS TOBEY
Perhaps it's too much to expect
the average citizen to observe the
FCC's regulation requiring a
"beep" warning on his telephone-
recorder attachment when the
man who was ranking member of
the Senate committee overseeing
the FCC at the time of the order's
adoption has been guilty of its
most sensational violation.
In April, 1951, Senator Charles
W. Tobey, at a secret meeting of
the Senate subcommittee investi-
gating the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, disclosed that he
had, without President Truman's
knowledge, recorded two conver-
sations between himself and the
President concerning alleged Con-
gressional pressure on the RFC.
When the story leaked, the Presi-
dent termed Tobey's action "out-
rageous." Senator Tobey, with an
air of injured innocence, said it
was 'no secret" that he used a
recorder or that many other Sena-
tors did likewise.
Presently, Joseph C. Duke,
Senate sergeant-at-arms, after an-
nouncing that he was having a
"beep" adjustment made to the
Senator's machine, quietly secured
copies of the Fcc order and laid
one neatly on the desk of each
Senator.
13
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III. How to Tap
A Telephone
Q EVERAL years ago, a New York
newspaper columnist informed
local readers that now they too could
discover if their telephone lines were
being tapped. In New York, it was
explained, anyone could check on a tap
by dialing 711, waiting for the tone,
then dialing 6 and hanging up. If the
phone rang back, the line was free; if
it didn't ring, a tap was in.
Actually, 711 . . . 6 was just a tele-
phone-company test circuit. A ring-
back signified only that the line was in
working order. The test could not pos-
sibly indicate wiretapping. The col-
umnist's following was large, however,
and after a deluge of dialing, the tele-
phone company was forced to change
the number of its test circuit.
The 711 . . . 6 detection method may
well be the best-publicized wiretap-
ping myth in the history of the tele-
phone, but it is not the most prevalent.
That distinction belongs to the widely
held theory .that crackling noises on a
line mean the wires are tapped. Tele-
phone static is frequent and has various
causes, including, loose connections,
moisture in the line, and dust between
contact points. On the other hand, only
the most amateurish "raw" tap could
Feeder Cables-.41,
(Dozens of Pairs)
Telephone-'
Drop Wire
(One Pair)
Terminal
Box
cause static. Usually the noise disap-
pears on a second call. Seldom does it
continue for more than two or three
hours, and a wiretap is rarely installed
for so short a period.
RANKING almost with the static test
is the popular misconception that
rapping on the mouthpiece of a tele-
phone set with a pencil will make the
conversation inaudible to the wiretap-
per. A hidden microphone, or "bug,"
can be neutralized by such rapping?
as well as by clinking ice in a glass,
jingling keys, or running water. But a
Wiretapper won't be bothered by noise
in the mouthpiece any more than those .
who are holding the conversation. If
they can hear, so can he.
Other myths hold that a bad tap will
heat up the earpiece of the telephone
set and that, if the conversation is be-
ing recorded, the scratching of the re-
cording needle may be heard faintly.
The first is electrically impossible, the
second highly improbable.
As previously indicated, a sloppy job
can result in continued static. It can
also cause diminution of volume on the
line, or even a complete shorting out.
But few taps are installed by amateurs;
Earphones--
Recorder
the wiretapping business is dominated
by former telephone-company employ-
ees and by agents trained in wiretap-
ping at one- or more law-enforcement
schools.
Unfortunately, the telephone com-
pany, despite its frequently expressed
concern, has not much more chance of
discovering an unsuspected tap than
the individual subscriber has. The
company does test its lines continually,
but the testing equipment is incapable
of spotting an effective wiretap.
Occasionally, a telephone-company
,repairman on his normal rounds will
stumble upon a tap and remove it.
About as often, a private citizen will
hire a wiretapper to check his lines for
taps, the going rate ranging from twen-
ty to fifty dollars. Some Federal agen-
cies have regular tapcheckers on their
staffs. None of this, of course, precludes
a tap's being installed five minutes after
a check is made. But physical inspec-
tion, at every possible point of installa-
tion from the phone itself right back to
the "main frame" at the exchange, still
remains the only positive means of de-
tection.
OVER the years, many machines _ad-
vertised as capable of tap detection
have been placed on the market, some
for $200, some for much more. Con-
gressmen and police officers have been
among the purchasers. All have been
bilked; no machine yet invented can
positively identify a wiretap.
The simple fact is that a good tap
upsets a telephone circuit much less
than does normal line trouble, such as
* BRIDGING POINTS
Basement
Cross
Box-NI
/////////////.
Feeder Cable--
(Hundreds of Pairs)
'lidITEIESEMESIIMM4OWN
'artri ilOgg
......___ . ,
: ?
%
k I
? , I.
.....---- /
Underground Feeder Cable-'
(Thousands of Pairs)
Normal phone circuit, showing bridging (potential tapping) points
14
Main
Distributing -
Frame.
i7777
TELEPHONE
EXCHANGE
THE REPORTER
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dust and moisture seepage, corrosion,
and faulty contact points, all of which
are far more prevalent. When the "de-
tection" machine's red light glows or
its bell rings, it is indicating more dra-
matically what the telephone com-
pany's test equipment also shows?
imbalance in the circuit. Unless the
machine is extremely sensitive, it will
not register the slight imbalance re-
sulting from a tap. And if it is sensitive
enough to register a tap, it is also so
sensitive that it will continually ex-
plode into false alarms.
Tools of the Trade
Basically, the telephone circuit is not
difficult to understand once one ac-
cepts the word "circuit" for what it
means: a closed circle of wire in which
current flows, that current in turn be-
ing able to carry voice vibrations.
At one end, the circle of wire enters
the individual phone, passes through it,
and emerges at the same spot. The
entering wire and the emerging wire
are then wrapped together as a "pair"
for stringing back to the telephone
exchange. At the exchange, the circle
of those two wires is completed when-
ever the telephone is in use. In a normal
local call, the pair of wires is joined at
the exchange, through a relay, to the
pair of wires leading to another tele-
phone, and the conversation circuit is
thus established.
Electric current must flow through
the circuit, of course, in order to carry
the voice vibrations. Every telephone
exchange houses long banks of batteries
to supply direct current, that current
being thrown onto the line whenever
the telephone is in use.
The wir etapper's fundamental
equipment, based on this completed
circuit, is quite simple. He needs ear-
phones, and he needs a wire leading
through those earphones, the ends of,
which can be easily attached to each
member of the pair he wishes to tap,
thus forming an additional path for
current in the circuit.
The tapper also must interpose in his
extension wires a condenser?an elec-
December 23. 1952
trical device that blocks the passage
of direct current while still allowing
the detection of faint vibrations. Elec-
tricity always follows the line of least
resistance. Without the condenser, part
of the direct current from the exchange
would flow through the tapper's ear-
phones, by-passing the normal circuit.
The voice volume on the tapped con-
versation circuit would diminish sharp-
ly, and the wiretapper would serve
notice of his activities.
On the other hand, the tapper's con-
denser must be small in its electrical
capacity. If it is too large, it will also
attract current from the normal circuit.
A .01-microfarad condenser is fairly
standard in the wiretapping trade.
????????????????????????????????10M0+.*.M....W.M....W.?
smallest, lightest,
RIDING OR
FLYING'
(Excerpt from a sales letter.)
'Walkie-Recordall' ? world's
smallest, self-powered
Briefcase type Combination Sound-
Recorder-Reproducer picks up and
records audible speech, undetect-
ed, at a radius up to 40 feet, as well
as voices whispered into the micro-
phone or telephone?indoors or
outdoors?while stationary or mo-
bile?and in any position while
walking, riding or flying.
Along with the condenser, the wire-
tapper also hooks into his line a large
resistor?nothing more than a coil or a
wire through which current passes
with difficulty. The resistor forces even
more of the direct current in the tele-
phone circuit to follow its normal,
established path, thus further cutting
the drag from the tap. The resistor
does weaken the signal coming through
the tap extension, but the tapper can
always compensate by adding an am-
plifier to increase volume.
This, then, is the wiretapper's basic
equipment: earphones, wire, conden-
ser, resistor, and, if necessary, amplifier.
If possession of these few electrical
parts made a wiretapper, however, al-
most everyone in the nation could be
one. The parts are all contained in the
smallest home or car radio, the radio
loudspeaker substituting for the ear-
phones.
Actually, the expert wiretapper
needs much more. He needs to know
how to trace an entire circuit from the
individual phone back to the exchange,
and where to tap along that circuit
without arousing suspicion. This re-
quires a sound working knowledge of
the telephone company's entire physical
plant, as well as effective use of com-
pany lingo to obtain added information
not normally available to the outsider.
The professional tapper also needs
additional equipment, including re-
cording devices, adaptors for these
devices to permit telephone transcrip-
tion, and machines to translate dial
beats into actual telephone numbers.
He needs concealed space for himself
and his equipment?a "plant" where a
line can be monitored for days and
even weeks without observation. And
he needs assistants to help with the
twenty-four-hour-a-day job of monitor-
ing. All these?equipment, plant, and
assistants?require sizable outlays of
cash.
TN CHOOSING where to "go on" any
specific telephone circuit, the wire-
tapper is far more limited than might
be expected. He can't very well tap at
the subscriber's end of the line without
being seen. Nor can he tap at the ex-
change. In times past, the telephone
company did permit certain official
agencies to install "back-taps" on the
exchange main frame, but today, ex-
cept in very special cases, it is reluctant
to co-operate to that extent.
The tapper is limited in his hookups
to that segment of the circuit removed
from the immediate vicinity of both
the subscriber and the exchange. Such
a segment may stretch several miles.
But again, the tapper is limited.
When the pair of wires leaves the
subscriber's premises, it travels to a
nearby terminal box, or "bridging
point," where the two wires are con-
nected to twin metal posts labeled with
a pair number. The terminal box, how-
ever, also serves as a bridging point for
the pairs of various other subscribers in
the vicinity, all such pairs being simi-
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larly attached to numbered pots.
Dozens and even hundreds of subscrib-
er pairs may terminate in one box.
The pairs do not leave the terminal
box separately. Instead, many are en-
closed in a single cable for ease in
transmission to the exchange?initially
by poles in suburban areas, then by
underground cable in the city. Inside
the cable, all pairs look alike; singling
out a desired pair for tapping is prac-
tically impossible.
In the cable, the pairs generally
travel to a second bridging point,
where they are again attached to posts
bearing their pair number, where they
are joined by additional pairs, and
where the additional pairs are then
encased with? them for further trans-
mission to the exchange. Before reach-
ing the exchange office, a residential
pair may pass through five or six bridg-
ing points, a business-district pair
through three or four. The final cable
leading into the exchange office often
contains as many as 2,120 pairs.
The complete telephone exchange is
thus much like a tree, with subscribers'
phones as the outermost twigs. The
twigs combine into branches, the
branches into limbs, and the limbs into
the trunk and roots, which are the
exchange office.
Finding the Right Pair
To the wiretapper, it makes no differ-
ence whether a given cable contains
twelve pairs or 2,120 pairs. Even if he
opened the cable, he would be unable
to identify the specific pair he wanted.
His basic plan, therefore, is to learn the
pair number, find the bridging points
for that numbered pair, and then tap
in at one of those points?the choice
of which bridging point to tap being
determined by the availability of space
nearby to use for the "plant."
Because of the need for space in
which to listen unobserved, a residen-
tial-telephone job is the wiretapper's
toughest assignment. A hotel job, in
16
which a room can be taken on short
notice, is easiest, with apartment and
office-building assignments running a
close second.
The residential job is doubly difficult
because the wiretapper can't afford to
use the first bridging point?the ter-
minal box on a nearby pole, from which
the "drop" carries the subscriber's pair
into his home. That terminal box is
especially valuable to the tapper. It is
not only the easiest bridging point to
locate; it is also the only bridging point
to which the subscriber's line can be
directly traced and the pair number of
that line thus individually identified. If
the tapper were seen climbing that
pole, however, his entire efforts might
be nullified by the suspicions of his
intended victim.
I N SUCH a situation, the professional
wiretapper, unless he has access to
inside information, relies on his knowl-
edge of the telephone company, and on
the fact that in a big city the company
employees are so many that they can't
all know each other by name. He starts
only with his victim's number, obtained
from the telephone book, and with the
knowledge that the letters in that num-
ber indicate the exchange. He dials the
same exchange letters, and follows with
the series of digits he knows will con-
nect him with the exchange repair
clerk?in Washington, lor example,
9960.
To the unsuspecting clerk the tap-
per gives a false name, says he's out
checking trouble on a certain line, and
repeats his victim's telephone number
to identify that line. Then he asks for
the pair and cable numbers?the latter
mainly for effect. The clerk gives him
both.
Having obtained the pair number,
the wiretapper then calls cable rec-
ords for the location of the bridging
points of the desired pair. Again, he
must have the telephone-company lin-
go down to perfection. In the Bronx
and. Manhattan exchanges, they are
called "bridging heads." But in Wash-
ington, they are called "multiples," and
elsewhere they are known as "appear-
ances." The tapper must use the proper
expression. If he is a professional, he
will. If the cable-records clerk is no
more than normally astute, the tapper
will get the information he requests.
The wiretapper then knows the
number of his victim's pair, and he
LOCKS AND BOXES
(Report of subcommittee of the
Senate District of Columbia Com-
mittee to investigate wiretapping
in the District of Columbia, Janu-
ary, 1951)
"Your subcommittee is impressed
by the ease with which unauthor-
ized persons, such as Lieutenant
Shimon, can invade the privacy of
telephone conversations. Lieuten-
ant Shimon testified that by allow-
ing the persons on the repair desk
of the Chesapeake & Potomac
Telephone Co. to believe that he
was a telephone repairman he was
able to get the location of the tele-
phone box and the appropriate
pair number. .. . Your subcommit-
tee recommends that the Chesa-
peake & Potomac Telephone Co.
address itself to the technical prob-
lem of protecting the secrecy of
telephone conversations; for ex-
ample, the relatively simple device
of placing locks on such terminal
boxes would materially assist in pre-
venting unauthorized access to
them. Unquestionably, technically
qualified persons could develop ad-
ditional safeguards to hamper the
practice of wire tapping and more
adequate methods for detecting it
when it occurs."
knows that the pair runs from the orig-
inal terminal box to a second bridging
point on a telephone pole five blocks
east, from there to a third bridging
point on a pole five blocks south, and
that from there it dives underground
to a fourth bridging point in a cellar
three more blocks south, where it fi-
nally enters an underground cable to
the exchange. He can appear at any
one of those bridging points without
arousing the suspicions of his victim,
and he can locate the line he wants by
the pair number registered next to the
terminal posts.
As to the "plant," the tapper may
find a vacant house or apartment to
rent near one of the bridging points.
He then simply attaches his clips to the
twin terminal posts of the pair and
strings his wire inside. If he can't find
vacant space, perhaps he will find that
on of the bridging points is in a se-
cluded spot, where he can park without
attracting attention. He then strings his
wires down from the pole or up from
the cellar and into the car, 'where he
THE REPORTER
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sets up his battery-operated recording
equipment.
If neither of these plans can be
worked out to satisfaction at the bridg-
ing points in question, the wiretapper
has one other alternative: In almost
every terminal box, there are not only
pairs in active use, but also "spare
pairs." The spare pairs, like the multi-
tude of bridging points, give the tele-
phone system fluidity. If a new building
goes up, the company doesn't need to
string wires all the way back to the ex-
change. To service that building it can
install telephones merely by bridging
to nearby points and using spare pairs
for transmission.
In the meantime, however, the wire-
tapper can use these spare pairs, easily
identified because they are dead lines.
He finds the spare pair at the same
bridging point as the pair he wants to
tap. He connects the spare-pair wires
to the terminal posts of the victim's
pair. Then he calls the clerk at the
trouble desk again, gets the bridging
point locations for the spare-pair num-
ber, and checks those locations for
nearby vacant houses. Eventually, he
is bound to find an ideal "plant."
TAPPING hotel, apartment, or office-
building telephones, as noted above,
is far more simple. In a hotel, the pairs
of all the phones on any floor generally
lead to a terminal box or "house box"
in the hallway on that floor. If the tap-
per gets a room on the same floor as
his victim, he can just open the house
box, where he will find each pair
tagged by room number, and cross the
pair of his own room phone over to
the terminal posts of his victim's phone.
The wires are thus pre-strung for the
tapper; he just clamps his equipment
to the bell box in his room and "opens
the plant."
Apartment and office telephone tap-
ping follows a like procedure as long
as space can be rented in the same
building?the only difference being
that the terminal boxes in these build-
ings are generally located in the base-
ment, where a janitOr may have to be
bluffed by telephone credentials or be
bribed with money while the pair
leading to the newly rented space is
crossed to the terminal posts of the
victim's pair.
Since wiretappers are not likely to
be held to any expense allowance,
money for bribes is readily available.
December 23, 1952
And since most tappers are former tele-
phone workers, the old pass can always
be shown. "Some janitors are pretty
smart, though," one professional tap-
per remarked. "They'll ask to see your
tools, knowing they should be stamped
'Bell System.' When I went into the
business, I bought a whole rt..w set of
tools, and gave them to a guy still work-
ing for Bell in return for his used tools.
The only thing was, his old tools had
the Bell stamp on them."
Hotel, apartment, and office tele-
phone tapping may be complicated by
inability to rent space in the same build-
ing. In such a case, the wiretapper must
again go to the clerk on the trouble
desk. But bridging points for such tele-
phone circuits, while not so many in
number as in a residential area, are
generally located in the basements of
other buildings. Some of these build-
ings are certain to have space available
for a plant.
Avoiding Thhps' and Such
Before opening any plant, however, the
professional wiretapper employs a tech-
nique that is little known even in tele-
phone-company circles and that enables
him to avoid tapping in while a conver-
sation is in progress?an act which
would immediately tip off the victim.
During a telephone conversation,
direct current flows in the circuit.
If the wiretapper snaps his clips to the
terminal posts at the bridging point,
some of that current will rush back to
fill his condenser plate. And no matter
how small that condenser, the listener
will hear a "phhp" on the line as the
tapper's condenser is charged.
To avoid this "phhp," the tapper
attaches one clip to one terminal. Then,
with the tap circuit still open, he places
the other clip between his thumb and
forefinger, licks his forefinger, and
places the wet finger on the other
terminal. The tap circuit is complete,
but a wet finger is such a poor con-
ductor that not enough current will
flow through it to charge _the tapper's
condenser instantaneously. The "phhp"
is avoided, but the tapper can still hear
the conversation very faintly. Then,
testing with the finger occasionally, he
is able to delay installation of the tap
until the line is free.
THE expert wiretapper has several
other ingenious little tricks that he
uses on select occasions. One involves
getting special numbers out of the
telephone company. Actually, in many
communities there are four classes of
telephone numbers: listed (in the
phone directory) ; unlisted (public but
not yet listed) ; nonpublished (con-
fidential) ; and special nonpublished
( top secret) . The first two anyone can
discover. The third can be obtained by
tracing the subscriber's wires from his
phone to the terminal box, getting the
pair number, and then bluffing the
cable-records clerk into divulging the
"drop number," or regular telephone
number.
The records of special nonpublished
numbers are even more difficult to ob-
tain. There is one chance?by getting
the pair number, tracing it through
the bridging points to find the cable
number, picking up a dozen other cable
numbers in the process, and then call-
ing the cable department and using
the familiar language to request the
"drop numbers" of all dozen cable
pairs, including the desired one. In the
cable department the number is not
usually tagged as special nonpublished.
0 NE LAST special trick is now fairly
outmoded. But in the first days of
thee dial telephone, the wiretapper was
confronted with a serious problem.
Since the tapped victim no longer spoke
out the number he was calling, and
since no one could count the clicks of
the dial pulse accurately, the wiretap-
per found it impossible in many cases
to report on whom the victim was call-
ing. Soon a solution was discovered.
The tapper learned that if he shorted
a wire across the pair momentarily
while the dialing was in progress, the
victim would get a wrong number, or
no number at all. After two or three
misdials, the victim would dial the
operator and give his number orally.
The wiretapper could then jot down
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that number and let th6 next call go
through unmolested.
To check the name of the subscriber
at the number jotted down, the tapper
could go to friends in the telephone
company or could again bluff the
"drop" name out of the clerk on the
trouble desk. In some cities, however,
the name of the subscriber, providing
his number was published, could be ob-
tained merely by dialing the same ex-
change letters as in the number, fol-
lowed by a special set of digits. In
Chicago, this applies today, the series
of digits being 2080.
Certain Refinements
Since the days of shorting out to get
a dial number, Kenneth Ryan, a former
New. York police detective' who has
been called the top wiretapping tech-
nician in the nation, has adapted a
pulse-recording machine for intercept-
ing purposes, a machine that punches
out the pulses of the dial on tape, so
that they can be counted and decoded
into telephone numbers.
This machine, which has been sold
by some for as high as $400, is only one
of the devices an expert wiretapper
uses today in addition to earphones,
condensers, and resistors. Recording
machines are also essential, and al-
though Ryan says he can adapt the best
machine in the country for tap work
and sell it for $250, some wiretappers
pay as high as $980 for a single
machine, all possible attachments in-
cluded.
Another machine used by some wire-
tappers is the voice-activated "start-
stopper," one model of which retails
for $90. The start-stopper is designed
to start a tapped-in recording machine
whenever voices come over the circuit,
and to stop the recorder from three
to fifteen seconds after the voices cease,
depending on how the tapper sets it.
Since the more expensive recording
machines will transcribe for eight con-
tinuous hours, the stop-starter permits
the wiretapper to dispense with paid
assistants for monitoring work.
Kenneth Ryan, however, has no faith
in the voice-activation principle. He
claims that a stop-starter so activated
will start at any noise at voice level on
the line. But Ryan says he has just
developed a current-activated start-
stopper, based on the fact that direct
current only flows through the line
when the telephone circuit is com-
pleted. His machine, he claims, would
make it possible for the first time to
get efficient tap results from an un-
attended recorder.
In recent years, still another wire-
tapping device, the induction coil,
has been publicized by national maga-
zines ranging from Popular Science to
Business Week and dramatically por-
trayed as the be-all and end-all of wire-
tapping?infallible, undete9ctable, and
sinister. Actually, few self-respecting
wiretappers would have an induction
coil in their tool boxes.
The coil works on a simple principle:
Electrical impulses flow through the
pair in the completed conversation
circuit. But these impulses also set into
motion electrons in the air surrounding
the pair, forming a field of radiation.
An induction coil is so constructed that
it can pick up this radiation in the air;
and once picked up, quite normal tap-
ping equipment can translate the radi-
ation back into voices. Thus the
induction coil removes the need for
direct connection with the tapped
pair.
Business Week's piece quoted Wil-
liam G. H. Finch, an outstanding
electronics engineer, as saying that an
induction coil selling at $4.85 could
pick up telephone conversations
through a wall and up to a distance of
thirty feet. "A direct tap," said Finch,
"belongs to the horse-and-buggy days."
Finch is a technical expert, and all
but his last remark is probably true,
under ideal conditions. But the fact
is that an A.C. electric cord placed any-
where near the telephone pair in a
room will cause enough radiation to
drown out the radiation of the phone
wires.
More important, an induction coil
can be used only where the telephone
pair to be tapped is not near any other
pair. The coil will pick up all conversa-
tions from all pairs in a cable, for ex-
ample. It is therefore of use only in a
place where the desired pair exists
alone and without interference.
In most telephone circuits, there is
no such place. In a residential circuit,
the "drop" from the terminal box to
the home might be such a place, as
might be the subscriber's premises.
This, a professional wiretapper would
be forced to point out, is a hell of a
place to install a tap and open a plant.
It would be simpler to marry the sub-
scriber,.
It seems obvious that the public re-
marks of men like Finch, who are
genuine communications scientists but
seem totally unaware of the pragmatic
considerations involved in wiretapping,
do nothing but propagate the myth of
what might be called "Buck Rogers
wiretapping," enormously widespread
and impossible to contrOl. Even limited
wiretapping is not a pleasant thought
to the free man. There is no point in
exaggerating.
18 THE REPORTER
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IV. Little Politicians
Have Big Ears
Ix WASHINGTON, coffee nerves and
wiretap nerves are equally common
ailments. In the past few years hun-
dreds in the capital have complained
about their wires being tapped. Al-
though proof of the alleged wiretap-
ping has seldom been forthcoming, the
list of complainants continues to grow.
For being a tap victim has become as
important to a politician's prestige as a
duodenal ulcer is to that of a New York
advertising executive.
"Certainly my lines are tapped," one
Congressman recently insisted, as if he
feared someone might deny it. Ru-
mors of private political tapping have
mounted to the point where few high
officials feel free to talk openly over
the telephone. Such apprehensions are
frequently enough buttressed by fact
as one lurid wiretapping story after an-
other comes to light.
Cyrus Ching, the labor mediator, has
told friends that during his efforts to
settle a strike last year his wires were
tapped by agents of both the company
and the union. Charges have been
made that Robert La Borde, a New
York professional tapper, was hired by
private-utility interests to tap the wires
of U.S. Supreme Court Justices while
the Court was deciding a case involving
the Tennessee Valley Authority. Per-
the most fantastic story of arl-Tv-as
.?
the rumor recently spread by a gov-
ernment employee involved in ari Qffice
fetid that he had _tapped, the telephone
of _Walter ,Bes:lcll Smith, _head ,of the
Central Intelliience Agency.
The Lieutenant's Profitable Hobby
The career of Lieutenant Joseph W.
Shimon of the Washington police force
presents almost unparalled examples
of the intricacies of political tapping.
The Shimon case got an airing during
a 1950 Senatorial inquiry into wire-
tapping in the District of Columbia.
It had many Congressional and busi-
ness ramifications, and offered a fairly
sordid picture of what happens when
certain high legislators ally themselves
December 23, 1952
with wiretappers and other undercover
interests. Lieutenant Shimon, a police
wiretapper and investigator, has al-
ways found time to practice his trade
on the side, not only for Washington
socialites bringing divorce actions, but
also for a sizable number of Repub-
lican politicians, including Senator
Owen Brewster and former Represen-
tative W. Kingsland Macy.
Shimon, a sharp-faced man with a
taste for two-tone shoes and peaked
lapels, joined the Washington police
department in 1929, became a detec-
tive sergeant in 1933, and rose to be a
lieutenant. In 1938, he was a member
of what he has called the "strong-arm
squad." "We went into every [Negro]
dive and every joint," Shimon has ex-
plained. "We worked nights and days
and we just messed them up.. .. Where
we could not go ahead legally we
knocked the doors down and chased
them out of town."
Between lessons in this least subtle
police technique, Shimon found time
to pick up one of the most delicate?
wiretapping. From 1936 to 1940, he
was personally involved in a large num-
ber of tapping episodes, including po-
lice investigations of a safe-cracking
mob, a holdup man, a narcotics syndi-
cate, and an abortion ring. The young
detective learned quickly, and before
long he himself was installing taps with
an almost professional touch.
In 1940, Shimon was transferred to
the local U.S. Attorney's office, where
he was to remain until 1949, and where
he was immediately placed in charge
of a special investigating squad. It was
a real break. He was given a staff of his
own; he was freed from his old supe-
riors in the Washington police depart-
ment; and he found his new bosses
quite lax in their supervision.
A second important event in Shim-
on's career occurred at about the
same time, when he met Harry ( the
Dutchman) Grunewald, private inves-
tigator, political fixer, and confidant
of such men as Senators Owen Brew-
ster and Styles Bridges. Grunewald,
who is no more of a "mystery man"
than is indicated by the above-men-
tioned activities and associates, and
who was certainly no mystery to Shim-
on, offered to act as contact man for
his new-found protege. The lieutenant
was soon on his way up in the world
of political wiretapping.
Excellent References
Today, Shimon can boast of several
letters from well-known politicians
praising him for work described only
as "special" or "confidential." Owen
Brewster has written of "exemplary"
work; W. Kingsland Macy of jobs
"skillfully" done.
Shimon can also boast of a good
outside income, all built up while he
was a full-time member of the Wash-
ington police force. William Nolan, a
onetime associate in an extra-vocation-
al business venture, has been quoted as
saying: "Lieutenant Shimon never
worked on a wire job that he did not at
least get a thousand dollars, and I
worked on a wire job with him." A
former subordinate, police officer John
H. McHale, told the Senatorial com-
mittee in 1950 that Shimon had boast-
ingly displayed a $1,000 bill a couple
of days after completing a wiretapping
assignment for Owen Brewster.
Brewster has maintained that Shim-
on's services were obtained at the sug-
gestion of Senator Styles Bridges, who
had once praised Shimon's work for
him as "eminently satisfactory serv-
ices under the most difficult circum-
stances." Brewster has said that Shim-
on was hired only to watch a man who
was allegedly shadowing Brewster.
However, the Senatorial hearings
threw some interesting light on the ex-
tent of Shirnon's work.
19'
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In 1945, Pan American Airways
threw its full influence behind a so-
called "chosen-instrument" air-trans-
port bill?designed to eliminate all
overseas competition among U.S. air-
lines in favor of a single authorized line.
Pan American expected to be the line
chosen, and in attempting to pick this
luscious plum it had the full support of
Senator Brewster, who pushed the bill
in the Senate Commerce Committee,
of which he was a minority member.
At the same time, since there was strong
Congressional objection to P.A.A. get-
ting this air monopoly, the firm hired
Henry Grunewald to keep tabs on the
opposition.
The most vociferous opponent was
Senator Josiah Bailey of North Caro-
lina, then chairman of the Senate Com-
merce Committee. Bailey, a steadfast
believer in free competition, refused to
support the bill even after Brewster
hopped a special P.A.A. plane to North
Carolina on a mission of persuasion.
When it was reluctantly concluded
that Bailey could not be won over by
Brewster's logic, the "chosen-instru-
ment" men decided that it might be
possible to catch Bailey conspiring with
Pan American's chief overseas rival,
Howard Hughes's Trans World Air-
lines, which strongly opposed the bill.
At this point, through the good of-
fices of the Brewster-Grunewald-P.A.A.
axis, Lieutenant Shimon was called in.
One day in the fall of 1945 (Shimon's
friend William Nolan later testified ) ,
Nolan drove the lieutenant to an apart-
ment building in the 2500 block of Q
Street. According to Nolan, Shimon
installed, in the basement of the build-
ing, a tap on the telephone line of
Senator Bailey. Nolan recalled that the
tap was used for the better part of a
week and that it involved "something
about airplanes."
Shimon was no doubt paid for his
efforts, but otherwise the tap was hard-
ly a success. Senator Bailey continued
his opposition, and the "chosen-instru-
ment" bill was defeated.
Brewster's Flop Extravaganza
Two years later the Republican-con-
trolled Eightieth Congress was riding
high, and Senator Brewster had be-
come chairman of the old Truman Sen-
atorial committee investigating war
contracts. Brewster was still interested
in P.A.A.'s plan for an overseas air
monopoly, and began pressing again
from his new position of power. Ac-
cording to the later testimony of How-
ard Hughes, Brewster came to Hughes
privately in February, 1947, and urged
him to merge T.W.A. with Pan Amer-
ican. When Hughes refused, he testi-
fied, Brewster countered with a threat
to investigate, through his war-con-
tracts committee, Hughes's costly gov-
ernment-financed project to build an
enormous flying boat. Hughes re-
mained firm, and Brewster's committee
went to work.
So did Shimon. In the spring of 1947,
the lieutenant began installing wire-
taps with such frequency that he was
20
forced to recruit several members of
his district-attorney squad for moni-
toring duties. He confided to one offi-
cer that he was working for a "com-
mittee on the Hill." Later he asked
another subordinate to pay special at-
tention to conversations concerning
airplanes in general and Trans World
Airlines in particular.
The first tap was installed in the
2500 block of Q Street, the same block
in which Senator Bailey's line had been
tapped two years earlier. Shimon's man
had heard only one conversation, how-
ever, when telephone-company men
arrived and discovered the tap. The
victims has never been identified.
Untroubled by this setback, Shimon
proceeded to install taps at a pole box
on Connecticut Avenue, at an apart-
ment building in Sixteenth Street, and
at the Occidental Hotel downtown.
The lieutenant, who has admitted that
all four taps,involved the same investi-
gation, later blandly claimed before the
Senate committee that he was after a
"Miami fugitive," despite the totally
contradictory testimony of all his sub-
ordinate police monitors.
According to the testimony of officer
McHale, the "Miami fugitive" at the
Occidental Hotel was one Hugh Ful-
ton. Fulton had been the committee
counsel of the war-contracts investi-
gating committee when Truman had
headed it, but was, in 1947, an attorney
for T.W.A. and Howard Hughes.
On several mornings during two or
three weeks, McHale borrowed sound-
recording equipment from an electron-
ics supply house and then drove Shim-
on to the Occidental, where Fulton had
an office. The lawyer's coaersations
with such notables as Andrew J. Hig-
gins, the shipbuilder, and former Dem-
ocratic Senator James M. Mead, as
well as with T.W.A. officials, were all
faithfully transcribed. During this peri-
od, according to McHale, Shimon con-
ferred regularly with Henry Grune-
wald. Soon Brewster's committee de-
cided it had enough evidence to pro-
ceed with public hearings on the
Hughes flying-boat project.
Asleep at the Tap
On July 17, eleven days before the
hearings were scheduled to begin,
Thomas Slack, a T.W.A. lawyer, and
Noah Dietrich, a Hughes executive,
arrived in Washington to prepare
Hughes's defense. Unfortunately, Shim-
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on did not learn of their presence until
July 22. The next day the lieutenant
rented a room adjoining their suite
at the Carlton Hotel, and installed
a tap on their telephone line. For four
days, Shimon and his sub'ordinates re-
corded regular conversations over the
tapped line. But on July 26, less than
forty-eight hours before the hearings
were to start, the conversations sudden-
ly ceased.
For ten subsequent days, while
Hughes and his associates attended
hearings daily, the Brewster committee
had an unhappy time. Hughes was not
only an aggressive witness, but he made
some embarrassing allegations about
Senator Brewster. For ten days also,
Lieutenant Shimon was unhappy.
Puzzled, he maintained a silent vigil
at the Carlton. For the same ten days,
Slack and Dietrich enjoyed complete
privacy of communication only three
blocks away at the Mayflower.
When, on August 5, Shimon belated-
ly learned of the switch in hotels, he
hurriedly checked out of the Carlton.
The next day he registered at the May-
flower as Joseph W. Diamond of Roa-
noke, Virginia. A tap was again in-
stalled without delay, and for the next
five days every telephone conversation
of Slack or Dietrich was recorded. On
August 11, the Brewster hearings end-
ed, the two Hughes officials checked
out of the Mayflower, and Joseph W.
Diamond decided to do likewise.
Within a few months, Shimon was
back at work on Capitol Hill. This
time, his services were requested by
Republican Representative W. Kings-
land Macy of New York, then Chair-
man of the House subcommittee on
questionable trade practices. On Janu-
ary 8, 1948, Shimon moved into the
Graylyn Hotel, to tap wires of Advice,
Inc., a firm dealing in scarce commodi-
ties, whose office was just a few doors
down from the Graylyn. For more than
two weeks, the taps proved fruitful.
But on January 24, the line went dead
?the result, according to Shimon, of
others trying to tap the same telephone.
Although as this is written Shimon
is under dismissal charges for alleged
perjury before the Senate committee
that looked into his activities in 1950,
he still clings to his lieutenancy in the
Metropolitan Police Force, by virtue
of influential friends and by virtue of
the familiar Justice Department laxity
in prosecuting wiretapping cases.
December 23, 1952
Eavesdropping on Bedell Smith?
Within the past year, there have been
persistent rumors that certain em-
ployees of the Army Signal Corps In-
telligence Aga-Cr ( special' section
Concerned primarily with communica-
tions intelligence work) have listened
to tapped telephone conversations of
the Central Intelligence Agency chief,
General Walter Bedell Smith. This
much has been Pieced together by the
writers of this article, throngh inter-
views and newspaper accounts:
In the fall of 1951, ten members of
the Signal Corps Intelligence Agency,
several of them former CIA workers,
banded together under the leadership
of one Edwin Y. Webb to discuss their
common distrust of certain fellow em-
ployees in both SCIA and CIA. Under
the guidance of Webb, a militant
Southerner and former technician with
the Atlanta telephone company, they
complied a list of a dozen-odd people
?most of them Jewish. Some of the
dozen they suspected of being Commu-
nist spies; some they .merely labeled
"pinks." All were safe in their jobs, it
was claimed, due to the favoritism of
top officials.
Webb and his band, including six
other civilian employees, .4 lieutenant
colonel, a captain, and a lieutenant,
decided they could not press their
charges through official channels, since
such action would probably lead only
to their own dismissals. Instead, they
managed to set up a pipeline to the
political commentator Fulton Lewis,
Jr.,
In mid-December, Lewis rewarded
their efforts with two syndicated news-
paper articles entitled "Our Security
Agencies Infiltrated by Reds." The ar-
ticles were general in nature, and ap-
peared to be the opening blasts of a
long series. But for some reason Lewis
dropped the subject after the second
installment.
Webb, whom Lewis had obliquely
referred to as a "genius," then took his
information, in rapid succession, to the
Senate Internal Security Subcommit-
tee headed by Pat McCarran of Ne-
vada; the House Un-American Ac-
tivities Committee, and the Times-
Herald, Washington affiliate -of the
Chicago Tribune.
About four hours after Webb deliv-
ered his documentation to the Times-
Herald he received a call from a friend
at the Central Intelligence Agency,
who informed him that Bedell, Smith
had been told what was going on.
It was immediately after this, ac-
cording to Webb's original story, that
he listened in on Smith's telephone con-
versations, at a tap installed somewhere
along the banks of the Potomac River.
In the meantime a complete investi-
gation of Webb's accusations had been
ordered by Army Intelligence. Fifteen
agents spent six weeks checking on
each person accused by the Webb
group, after which Major General A.
R. Bolling, then head of G-2, pro-
nounced all the charges "groundless."
Webb was then eased out of SCIA, but
has since ended up in a top communi-
cations job with the Office of Civilian
Defense.
?As to the wiretapping, according to
General Bolling, Webb denied the
practice: "He laughed it off," the gen-
eral reported, "Said he'd spread the
story of tapping just to stir up public
interest." Bolling himself believes that
the tapping rumors are unfounded.
One former CIA employee closely as-
socia< ted with Webb, however, still in-
sists the tapping was done. Also', Rep-
resentative Francis Walter, a member
of the Un-American Activities Com-
mittee, reports that his check of com-
mittee files "bears out the charge of
wiretapping in this particular case."
In addition, when a reporter recently
asked Webb himself if tapping had
been involved, he replied, "And how!"
Two days later, when the same re-
porter called again, Webb was much
less committal. He asked how the re-
porter had learned of the wire work
and refused to discuss the matter fur-
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CONVERSATION PIECE
(Tapped telephone conversation
between Frank Costello and
Thomas A. Aurelio the morning
after Aurelio's nomination as Jus-
tice of the New York Supreme
Court?as reported in the New
York Times, August 29, 1943.)
AURELIO: Good morning, Fran-
cesco, how are you and thanks for
everything.
COSTELLO: Congratulations. It
went over perfect. When I tell
you something is in the bag, you
can rest assured.
AURELIO: It was perfect. Arthur
Klein did the nominating; first me,
then Gavagan, then Peck. It was
fine.
COSTELLO: That's fine.
AURELIO: The doctor called me
last night to congratulate me. I'm
going to see him today. He seems
to be improving. He should be up
and around soon and should take
the train for Hot Springs.
COSTELLO: That's the plan.
AURELIO: ? ? congrat-
ulated me. That's a fellow you.
should do something for. He cer-
tainly deserves something.
COSTELLO: Well, we will have to
get together, you, your Mrs. and
myself, and have dinner some
night real soon.
AURELIO: That would be fine, but
right now I want to assure you of
rily loyalty for all you have done.
It's undying. . . .
ther. Whether or not the tapping was
actually done thus remains a matter of
conjecture. At the same time, the mere
possibility of such an act would seem
to merit Congressional investigation.
Dewey, O'Dwyer, and Bugs
Not all political wiretapping, of course,
takes place in Washington or involves
Federal officials. Wiretapping is prac-
ticed quite extensively. in state poli-
tics. Governor Thomas E. Dewey of
New York has not been averse to using
tap-obtained information in attempt-
ing to. get the goods on his Democratic
foes in Albany. In 1940, a Congression-
al committee learned that a Demo-
cratic state legislator, Senator Ruth of
Pennsylvania, had employed state po-
licemen to tap the telephone lines of
Mayor S. Davis Wilson of Philadelphia
when the committee Ruth headed was
investigating the city judiciary. In the
same year, Frank B. Bielaski's detective
agency in New York, which had done
much work for the Republican Nation-
al Committee and for G.O.P. politi-
cians in such states as Massachusetts
_and Pennsylvania, was exposed as hav-
ing tapped the wires of public officials
in Rhode Island.
Bielaski's agents had installed four
taps, one in Pawtucket and three in
Providence. The Pawtucket tap was on
the home telephone of the Democratic
Mayor, Thomas P. McCoy. The three
Providence taps were all on the tele-
phones of the Republican State Attor-
ney General, Louis V. Jackvony, on
22
lines at his home, his private law of-
fices, and his public office in the court-
house.
Although the two officials tapped be-
longed to opposing political parties,
they had one thing in common: Each
had earned the enmity of the Repub-
lican Governor, William H. Vander-
bilt. When the taps were first discov-
ered, J. Howard McGrath, then U.S.
Attorney for Rhode Island, investi-
gated. A few weeks later, McGrath
reported that Governor Vanderbilt had
privately hired Bielaski to do the tap-
ping and had paid the detective some
$11,000 for his efforts.
POLITICAL wiretapping is also prac-
ticed occasionally on the local level.
In 1949, Clendenin Ryan, the wealthy
self-appointed New York reformer,
hired John ("Steve") Broady's detec-
tive agency to get what dirt it could on
Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York.
Broady, in turn, promptly hired the
professional wiretappers Kenneth Ryan
and Robert La Borde. Hidden micro-
phones, or -"bugs," were installed in the
homes of Fire Commissioner James
Moran and other city officials, and a
mountain of information was collected.
Then came retribution.
Police raided Kenneth Ryan's home,
confiscated an estimated ten thousand
dollars' worth of wiretap equipment,
and found a list of dozens of city offi-
cials whose lines were to be tapped.
Kenneth Ryan was taken to City Hall,
where O'Dwyer personally questioned
him. Ryan finally sneaked away from
the interview while the Mayor's back
was turned and climbed out a ladies-
room window.
In April, 1949, Kenneth Ryan and
Broady were indicted for conspiracy
to tap the wires of Manhattan Bor-
ough President Hugo Rogers, and
Ryan was further indicted for escap-
ing from custody. The next week,
Ryan and Broady were also indicted
for tapping the wires of a Brooklyn
automobile company which was alleg-
edly involved with politicians and
racketeers.
About the same time, after Robert
La Borde had blocked attempts to call
him before a grand jury investigating
the plot against O'Dwyer, he too was
indicted for wiretapping?in a Brook-
lyn divorce case.
Kenneth Ryan insisted none of the
officials on the list found in his posses-
sion had actually been tapped?be-
cause he had been arrested too soon.
Police had to admit that neither Ryan,
Broady, nor La Borde had ever been
caught in the act of tapping city offi-
cials' wires. Eventually all went free.
Soon afterward, O'Dwyer quit his post
as mayor and left for Mexico, as U.S.
ambassador.
(This concludes the first of The Re-
porter's two articles on wiretapping in
the United States. The second, which
will deal with Federal and police wire-
tapping, and the work of "lone-wolf"
wiretappers, will appear in the next
issue.)
THE REPORTER
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The Wiretappers
WILLIAM S. FAIRFIELD and CHARLES CLIFT
V. Listening In
With Uncle Sam
rr HE RECENT movie "Walk East on
1 Beacon," based on an article by
J. Edgar Hoover and produced in co-
operation with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, proved once again that
stealing United States military secrets
does not pay. In the process, the film
also offered vivid testimony as to the
technical ingenuity of the FBI, which
has apparently adapted every sort of
modern device to the needs of scien-
tific detection.
Still cameras hidden in auto spot-
lights traced the movements of Rus-
sian agents. Radar located a boat they
were using. At an indoor rendezvous
a concealed microphone and a camera
which needed no light televised en-
suing events directly to FBI headquar-
ters. At outdoor meetings movie cam-
eras with telescopic lenses substituted
for television, recording lip movements
for later translation at a school for
the deaf. Nowhere in the picture, how-
ever, was there the slightest suggestion
of wiretapping.
Generally, the subject of FBI tap-
ping was avoided by portraying the
Russian agents as too smart to use a
telephone. Still, an occasional well-
timed tap would have simplified the
FBI's task?and incidentally shortened
the picture?a good deal.
IN THE LIGHT of periodic statements
by various Attorney Generals and
by Hoover himself, all admitting that
FBI agents did -tap telephone wires, the
obvious avoidance of the practice in
"Walk East on Beacon" may seem
somewhat strange?at least until it is
Primary 6, 1953
recalled that these periodic official ad-
missions have only been made after
some public disclosure of Federal wire-
tapping. Each admission has been
quickly coupled with a claim that the
government taps only in a limited
number of especially serious cases. Fed-
eral investigative agencies are always
unhappy about disclosures of theirwire-
tapping activities, partly because they
don't want their current targets to be-
come suspicious, but mainly because
they fear the public reaction to this
particular type of invasion of privacy,
and because they have not been really
sure of their right to tap since the
passage of the Federal Communica-
tions Act of 1934.
Today the FBI is the only Federal
agency that openly admits to any wire-
tapping, and it insists that the practice
is limited to cases of kidnaping and of
espionage, sabotage, andTht.her "grave
risks to internal security." But if it is
a "fact?that -regulat-ions do restrict
tapping to certain "grave" cases, then
it must also be a fact that the question
of what is grave and what isn't is
often left to the discretion of individual
agents and officials, some of whom
seem to cruise over a wide latitude of
judgment.
There is further evidence that other
Federal agencies, includin the Cen-
tral Intellizazenyan.. various
mi1ir7intellige.dce units, have been _
avidly tapping away. J. Edgar Hoover,
Whblhould'WhOW, has said that his is
not the only Federal agency employing
wiretapping. While the others strongly
deny the practice, some will frankly
admit that they would deny it even if
it were true; others admit that they
would not hesitate to tap "in the in-
terest of national defense."
iram. 'Never Heard of? It!'
Elsewhere in Washington, official de-
nial of wiretapping is even more em-
phatic. The Treasury Department's
Alcohol Tax Unit, Narcotics Bureau,
and Bureau of Internal Revenue all
claim they haven't tapped wires since
1939, although they do say that they
gladly accept wiretap information con-
tributed by the FBI or local police.
Sometimes private professional tap-
pers are hired for specific assignments.
Sometimes the FBI or local police are
requested to do the tapping. But gen-
erally, Federal wiretapping is done by
a regular member of the agency in
question, a man whose skill is the re-
sult of former telephone-company em-
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STRAIGHT TALK
(Words of an Assis'tant United
States Attorney in a mail-fraud
case, as quoted by Supreme Court
Justice Frank Murphy in his dis-
senting opinion in a 1942 wiretap
decision.)
"I am telling you before we go
any further that there is no use
of us kidding each other. We have
watched your telephone; we have
watched all these lawyers' tele-
phones; we have had rooms
tapped. We know what is going
on. We are not stabbing in the
dark. If you want to hear your
voice on a record we will be glad
to play it. . . . You have been in
this for so many years that we feel
that in order for you to help your-
self, since you are considered one
of the principals here, it would be
wise for you to indicate to us
whether you intend to tell us ev-
erything and come clean.... That
is straight talk."
ployment or of training at the FBI Po-
lice Academy or at one of the Treas-
ury Department schools that have
taught wiretapping in Detroit and New
Orleans.
Hoover's Modesty
The FBI, which probably does more
wiretapping than any other Federal
agency, is at constant pains to depre-
ciate its use of the technique. J. Edgar
Hoover's most recent public statement
on the subject of tapping was made
before a House appropriations sub-
committee early in 1950, when the
FBI director said his agents were tap-
ping "less than" 170 telephones at the
moment. Assuming five conversations
over the average phone each ?day,
170 telephones would carry more than
300,000 tapped conversations a year.
Such a figure is merely a guess, but it
compares favorably with the concur-
rent testimony of Mrs. Sophie Saliba,
head of the record-file room of the
New York office of the FBI. Mrs. Saliba
disclosed that more than thirty-five
hundred disks of Fm-tapped conversa-
tions had been destroyed in 1949. Since
a disk can easily hold five telephone
conversations, probably these disks held
at least 17,500 conversations?all obvi-
ously the work of the New York office
alone.
As usual, the 1950 statements of
\ 10
Hoover and Mrs. Saliba followed a
public disclosure of FBI wiretapping?
in this instance as an outgrowth of the
Judith Coplon espionage case. When
Miss Coplon, a Justice Department
employee, was arrested in New York
in March of 1949, her purse was found
to contain notes lifted from twenty-
eight detailed FBI reports. In her
Washington trial later that spring, the
notes were introduced as evidence that
she had stolen government secrets.
Miss Coplon's attorneys, however,
demanded that the full texts of the pil-
fered FBI reports be introduced, so
that the jury could determine just how
weighty the information taken by Miss
Coplon really was. Reluctantly, Judge
Albert Reeves agreed. The full reports
were introduced on the twenty-eight
FBI cases from which Miss Coplon had
taken extracts. A quick review showed
that wiretap information was included
in fifteen of the twenty-eight reports.
In four of these fifteen, the FBI had
tapped home telephones; in the re-
maining eleven, the Bureau's informa-
tion came from taps on the lines of
foreign embassies and consulates and
of pro-Soviet organizations.
At Miss Coplon's Washington trial,
her attorney, suspecting exactly this
sort of widespread FBI use of wiretap
information, demanded that Federal
agents be called for questioningon the
possible use of tapping against his cli-
ent. He felt that under Section 605 of
the Federal Communications Act, evi-
dence gained through wiretapping
would be inadmissible in court. Justice
Department prosecutors called the de-
fense demands "a fishing expedition,"
and Judge Reeves concurred. On June
30, 1949, without any determination
as to whether the government had ob-
tained its evidence through wiretap-
ping, Judith Coplon was convicted of
espionage and sentenced to a maxi-
mum of ten years in prison.
In December, 1949, however, prior
to a second Coplon trial in New York
on conspiracy charges, Judge Sylvester ,
Ryan did allow defense attorneys to
examine the sources of the govern-
ment's evidence. Quickly the full story
came out. Forty FBI agents had tapped
the telephones in Miss Coplon's Wash-
ington apartment, in her office, and in
her family's home in Brooklyn. They
had tapped not only before her arrest
in March but for two months there-
after. On July 12, after the Washing-
ton conviction, they had resumed the
tapping and had kept at it until No-
vember 10. On the last date, the Cop-
Ion tap was discontinued by a directive
(dated November 7) from Washing-
ton, "in view of the immediacy of her
trial." The directive, which referred
to the tap by the code name of TIGER.
also ordered that all recordings be de-
stroyed. At the end was written:
"O.K.?H," and under that: "This
memorandum. . . to be destroyed after
action is taken."
Judge Ryan denounced the "unlaw-
ful activities of the wiretappers," and
added: "Section 605 . . . not only for-
bade such interception but rendered
its contents inadmissible as evidence
and made . . . the use of divulgence of
information so obtained a felony . . .
This is still the law."
However, the judge ruled that the
FBI had a case against Miss Coplon
completely aside from the wiretap evi-
dence. On March 7, 1950, just a year
after her arrest, she was convicted and
sentenced to an additional fifteen
years in prison.
IN DECEMBER, 1950, the New York
Circuit Court of Appeals reversed
the conviction of the lower court, part-
ly because it felt the government had
yet to prove its evidence was not the
product of unlawful wiretapping. Nev-
ertheless, the court, pointing out that
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AP ?
Miss Coplon's "guilt is plain," refused
to dismiss the indictment and sug-
gested a retrial.
Six months later the Court of Ap-
peals for the District of Columbia also
passed judgment on the conviction of
its lower court. While upholding Miss
Coplon's conviction, it remanded the
case to the lower court for hearings to
determine whether her conversations
with her attorney had been tapped?
as the report of round-the-clock FBI
tapping until November 10 certainly
indicated. Such tapping, the court
held, would have constituted a grave
violation of Miss Coplon's Constitu-
tional rights. "No conviction," the de-
cision stated, "can stand, no matter
how overwhelming the evidence of
guilt, if the accused is denied effective
assistance of counsel."
Miss Coplon remains free on bond.
To date, the FBI tapping has merely
served to protect a woman in whose
purse classified government informa-
tion was found. The evidence also
served to show how far the FBI'S tap-
ping practices had extended in invad-
ing Constitutional rights and in trying
to deceive the courts.
Some 'Routine' Taps
ttt
Today, reports persist that the FBI
,.....---- -. ---- -
maintains a constant tap on the tele-
--phone? Of all Ii-On Cmst.am. ,en,bas_j_s
?Wire-the'r the telephone company, al-
ways uneasy about wiretapping, ' has
actually co-operated to the extent of
ringing these taps into a central
switchboard makes little difference. It
usually co-operates. Quite recently,
when a company repairman found a
tap installed at the basement terminal
box in Washington's National Press
Building, he reported his discovery to
the company. "Forget it," he was told.
"That's on the_Russian news -agency--,-
lass. upstairs." Earlier, another com-
pany employee had surprised two men
at a terminal box in an apartment
building where a foreign official was
staying. When he asked for their com-
pany passes, they ran. Later his boss
called him in and introduced the two,
both FBI men.
'In the field of domestic crime, the
FBI insists it taps wires only in kid-
naping cases, although sometimes it ex-
pands this statement to include all
cases "involving life and death." But
here again, at least some agents of the
FBI seem unable to stick to the Bureau's
January 6, 1953
defined limits. In 1941, FBI men were
found to be tapping the telephone of
union leader Harry Bridges in the
Edison Hotel, New York, in the course
of deportation proceedings against him.
In the same year, it was reported that
the FBI had tapped telephones at Miami
police headquarters during a corrup-
tion inquiry?and incidentally had had
its own wires tapped in return.
In 1948, John L. Lewis, United
Mine Workers president, accused At-
torney General Tom Clark of using
FBI men to tap UMW telephones. "Sure-
ly," said Lewis, "old Tom hasn't for-
gotten the day he sent one of his gum-
shoe men in to tap our telephones in
our office and our boys threw him out
on his ear. They caught him right at
the control box in the basement, tap-
ping her up, and they threw him out."
Clark answered that no tap was nec-
essary because Lewis roared so loud.
TESS THAN two years ago, a United
i Auto Workers union official in De-
troit discovered an even more arbi-
trary reason for wiretapping by local
FBI agents. The official had been in-
N;estigating the series of bombings and
shootings that had destroyed UAW
property and had wounded UAW lead-
ers Walter and Victor Reuther. When
the FBI moved into the case, the Fed-
eral agents refused to pool their en-
ergies with the UAW man, perhaps
because he had once exposed an FBI in-
formant who was also active in labor-
espionage work. They could have got
the UAW man's information by simply
asking for it. Instead, the UAW investi-
gator surmised, the FBI agents pre-
ferred to tap his telephone line and
find out in that way what he knew.
Suspecting such a tap, he com-
plained to the telephone company.
There an official would only answer
that the requests of certain agencies
"had to be complied with."
FBIdes of April
On the last day of March, the UAW
investigator decided to find evidence
that the FBI was tapping his line, a fact
of which he was so sure that he bet a
fifth of whiskey on it. From his Detroit
office, he telephoned a friend and re-
ported that a certain hoodlum was
going to hold a celebration, in com-
pany with all those involved in the
Reuther shooting, at 11 :30 that eve-
ning in an east-side tavern. The friend,
who had been coached on what to say,
agreed that "Plan A" would be best,
and the two worked out certain com-
plex signals. On his other office line,
the UAW investigator then called a sec-
ond friend upstate, who was in on the
act, to be told that another hoodlum
suspected in the Reuther case had just
left for Detroit. The 11: 30 meeting
was again discussed along with "Plan
A." Then the UAW man went home,
from his home phone called a third
friend, and again delivered his tavern
information and discussed "Plan A."
Shortly afterward, his first friend
showed up. Together, they painted
Crude signs on paper, rolled up the
sheets, and headed for the tavern.
The tavern was hot and stuffy, but
two young men sat at the far end of
the bar in their coats?as if to hide
shoulder holsters. The UAW investiga-
tor recognized one as an FBI agent; the
other he was to meet later at the FBI'S
Detroit headquarters. The clock above
the bar ticked past 11:30 and then
reached midnight. It was April 1.
Suddenly the UAW man and his
companion unfurled their hand-paint-
ed signs. Each was inscribed with the
same two words: "APRIL FOOL."
To date, the UAW investigator is not
sure which he enjoyed more?the star-
tled expressions on the agents' faces or
the bottle of whiskey he collected
without argument the following day.
Outside the FBI, wiretapping on the
Federal level is a somewhat disorgan-
ized business. No other government
agency seems to have any set formula
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or any set method of operation. The
Central Intelligence Agency, the Office
of Naval Intelhgence, and Army G-2
( Intelligence) all "do quite a bit of
tapping," according to Kenneth Ryan,
a professioifillaThWe-r-w- E6 practiced his
trade with ONI'S "ferret" squad during
the war an who has also worked with
other Federal agencies. "But? mostly,"
Ryan says, "they tap on their own_ per-
,
sonnel or on each other."
Xvartime official in one Federal in-
vestigative agency recalls requesting
the Washington telephone company to
put a tap on someone he had under
surveillance. A week later the com-
pany's liaison man showed up with a
sealed envelope of transcribed conver-
sations. Through a strange bit of con-
fusion, however, these turned out to be
not the desired monitoring but tran-
scriptions, made for another investiga-
tive agency, of telephone conversations
between the official himself and mem-
bers of his staff.
HE CIA has also offered support for
Ryan's statement. Within the agen-
cy, employees' telephones have been
monitored for loose talk. And there is
evidence that home phones of new em-
ployees are also tapped'. Recently, when
such a-fre?rrifilqUe-was about to be sent
overseas, he looked out his kitchen win-
dow one morning to see a man tracing
his "drop wires"- into the terminal box
on a nearby telephone _pole. Since he
hrail?nOTTilarined fo tell anyone his over-
seas destination anyway, the employee
was merely amused.
The Office of Naval Intelligence is
12
also busy monitoring the lines of Na-
vy personnel, although its total wire-
tapping activities are probably some-
what diminished since the days when
the ONI used to lend its investigative
facilities to the State Department. In
those days, with a staff including men
like Kenneth Ryan,ONI reportedly even
found time to tap the phones of Drew
Pearson when the columnist beg.an
printing items unfavorable to the Navy.
Pearson is said to have rewarded ONI'S
efforts to learn his sources with a wide
variety of false leads.
Army G-2 is perhaps the most frank
'about its wiretapping practices. It ad-
',mits it would tap "without hesitation
4in any case where the national security
2,was involved." A spokesman points
out that Secretary of the Army Frank
7Pace has publicly stated his opposition
to wiretapping. "But," he adds, "Frank
has never sent any directive on the
subject to G-2, and I hope he never
will." The spokesman further admits
that G-2 has monitored all Pentagon
lines from time to time, and will con-
tinue to do so. "The only way to pre-
vent wiretapping leaks," he says, "is not
to say anything over the telephone.
These smart boys think they're talking
in code, but a child could break it after
three conversations."
Over in the Treasury Department,
tapping is vehemently denied by all
investigative branches, although most
officials will admit that Treasury once
led the Federal field in wiretapping.
In the days when Henry Morgenthau
served as Secretary, the Department
taught wiretapping at its schools, and
its Alcohol Tax Unit maintained a
highly efficient laboratory where wire-
tap-detection devices were developed.
Morgenthau believed wholeheartedly
in wiretapping: "We do not propose
to be sissies," he once said. But his own
concern with the practice apparently
backfired. In his last years as Secretary
at least one Treasury expert had a full-
time assignment checking for taps on
Morganthau's office line and on his
home phones in Washington and New
York.
Despite present Treasury denials of
wiretapping, alcohol-tax agents still
work in their electronics laboratory.
Dwight Avis, head of the ATU, is still
known to his associates as a top expert.
Sometimes the temptation to tap must
be almost too much for the frustrated
agent stymied on a tough assignment.
Regular Federal agencies have also
been known to tap the phones of em-
ployees. In 1933, Department of the
Interior officials used extension phones
to intercept conversations?a form of
tapping that was halted abruptly when
Harold Ickes, then Secretary, learned
of it some eight months later. In 1946.
when Fiorello La Guardia took over
the directorship of UNRRA, the former
Mayor of New York hired professional
wiretappers to check on a report that
bribes were being taken in letting con-
tracts. La Guardia fired underlings
revealed to be guilty; but first he called
them in, played back the incriminating
conversations, and in his inimitable
style told the culprits exactly what he
thought of them.
Congressional Committees
From time to time, various Congres-
sional committees, not to be left behind,
also have found it expedient to listen
in on telephone lines. The House Dis-
trict Committee once used Washington
police to tap phones in the Hamilton
Hotel during an investigation of milk
bootlegging in the District of Colum-
bia. The Kefauver Committee used
wiretap information inadmissible in
Federal court in its crime investigation.
Most recently, the House's King sub-
committee investigating tax scandals
hired a wiretapper named William
Mellin, who worked for the committee
in December, 1951, as a "technical in-
vestigator." Mellin has never claimed
any vocation but wiretapping.
THus the pattern of Federal wire-
tapping emerges. As many of the
details are missing as the agencies in-
volved have been able to conceal. But
enough has been uncovered to trace a
general structure. It is a disjointed
structure and not pleasant to look at?
especially since it reveals men nervous-
ly defying a law they are supposed to
be enforcing.
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VI. Cops and Robbers,
Doxies and Dicers
WHEN POLICE arrested the young
margarine heir Minot F. ("Mick-
ey") Jelke and his associates last sum-
mer on charges of maintaining a vice
ring, the New York Vice Squad could
hardly credit its triumph to the kind of
hard, plodding investigative work that
is generally the mark of a good police
force. After receiving a tip, police
merely installed a tap on the playboy's
apartment telephone, and in compara-
tive ease recorded calls until they had
enough evidence to move in and make
arrests.
The approach was not new. In each
recent year, New York police have
used wiretapping in some three hun-
dred criminal investigations. One in
1948 led to the conviction, on charges
of "loitering for the purpose of com-
mitting an act of prostitution," of one
Nancy. Fletcher Choremi. This case
provoked the New York County Crim-
inal Courts Bar Association into an in-
quiry on private and official tapping
practices. The Association's report
urged an FCC investigation, which never
materialized.
The tapping in all these cases was
specifically authorized under a New
York State statute which permits po-
lice wiretapping, subject only to the
necessity of obtaining a court order.
The technical legal question?whether
state laws authorizing wiretapping
are Constitutional?has just been
settled by the Supreme Court: Wire-
tap evidence is admissible in state
courts.
Ct TATE LAW or no state law, local po-
lice in every major city in the
United States are today tapping tele-
phone lines?from Boston to Los Ange-
les, from Chicago to Miami. While
Federal agents professedly tap only in
the most serious crimes, local enforce-
ment agencies Seem to do their tapping
mainly in the fields of gambling and
prostitution, where incriminating evi-
dence is recorded side by side with the
conversations of many who may hardly
anuary 6, 1953
be considered as criminals, where pub-
lication of the recordings can thus
?subject the innocent to extreme embar-
rassment, and where secrecy can open
the way for corrupt police to blackmail
the guilty.
State and local police can afford to
wink at the Federal statute against
wiretapping, in view of the U.S. De-
partment of Justice's well-known re-
luctance to prosecute even private
wiretappers. But there is another rea-
son why police have carried tapping
so much further than Federal agents.
Kenneth Ryan, a tapper with the
New York police for twenty-one years.
has said of his trade: "It's just a time-
saver; that's all it is." In Detroit, In-
spector Clayton Nowlin of the Vice
Squad agrees: "A lot of policemen are
lazy," he says. "You can get the infor-
mation you need if you just go out and
develop it. But some of the boys would
rather sit in an easy chair with the ear-
phones on."
Denials and Euphemisms
Laziness must be the answer, for local
police are well aware of the extra-
legal and unethical nature of wire-
tapping. When questioned, local en-
forcement officials will try, almost
universally, to deny the practice. A
reporter who called the New York
County District Attorney's office re-
cently was given a grudging admission
of wiretapping only after he mentioned
the presence on the D.A.'s staff of a
BERNARDR
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well-known police tapper named O'Sul-
livan. Some time later, the District
Attorney's office introduced wiretap
evidence against Thomas (Three-Fin-
ger Brown) Luchese in a New York
State crime investigation. In Detroit,
former Police Commissioner Harry
Toy told the same reporter that he
had used wiretapping to break up a
hockey "fix" scandal several years back
and to crack a numbers ring. For de-
tails, Toy referred the reporter to the
present Deputy Police Superintendent,
Lawrence Kennedy. Kennedy prompt-
ly denied that Detroit police had ever
tapped a telephone line.
Police forces conceal their wiretap-
ping activities by various methods.
Some use euphemisms for the practice,
such as the official term "technical sur-
veillance" in Chicago. Others give tap-
pers assignments that hide their true
duties.
In New York, for example, Kenneth
Ryan was assigned to the Bomb Squad.
In Washington, Vice-Squad men do
the wiretapping. The Washington po-
lice force also protects itself by refusing
to buy any wiretapping equipment; it
rents what it needs from private firms.
The Los Angeles force has gone one
step further; instead of having a tapper
on the staff, it hires outside profes-
sionals whenever a job comes along.
The New York City police force has
the most elaborate wiretapping organ-
ization in the nation. Perhaps fifty
lines are tapped daily, sometimes under
court orders, sometimes without such
formalities. In addition to these full-
time taps, spot checks are made regu-
larly on the lines of hundreds of
bookies.
The number of professional tappers
on the New York City payroll has
never gone higher than six, but these
men?split between the city squad and
the District Attorney's office?are suffi-
cient. They install the taps and they re-
move them. Spare patrolmen and
rookies, who know nothing about the
techniques of wiretapping, do the
monitoring.
ALTHOUGH most of the big names
in the criminal world are tapped
intermittently, ninety per cent of New
York police wiretapping involves gam-
bling and bookmaking. This in turn
encompasses not only the phones of
known bookies but also public pay sta-
tions at local baseball parks, race
14
tracks, sports arenas, and even mid-
town restaurants, from all .of which
calls to bookies are often placed. At
various times, the pay phones have
been tapped at Ebbets Field, the Polo
Grounds, Madison Square Garden,
Pennsylvania Station, and?quite re-
cently?at Toots Shor's and Dinty
Moore's restaurants.
The tap on Toots Shor's pay phones
paid off just last spring, when Phil
Regan, the nightclub singer who enter-
tained at the Democratic National
Convention, called from Shor's to ar-
range an appointment between Mayor
John V. Kenny of Jersey City and the
high-ranking mobster Anthony Strollo,
alias Tony Bender. Kenny considered
Bender the only man capable of break-
MAMA
BUSON
ing up a current dock strike on the
Jersey waterfront, and Regan set up a
midnight meeting between the two
men at the singer's apartment in the
Warwick Hotel. According to the New
York Times, detectives from the Dis-
trict Attorney's office were well staked
out in the hotel lobby to observe the
comings and goings of the principals.
The news story did not indicate how
the detectives had happened to be in
the right place at the right time.
What D'ya Hear?
Any telephone tap involves recording
the conversations of innocent people.
One New York policeman has reported
that while tapping a private line he
recorded calls to the J uilliard School
of Music, the Brooklyn Law School,
the Mercantile Commercial Bank, a
health club, a stationery store, a real-
estate company, a garage, dentists, tav-
erns, brokers, and a New York police
station. The tapping of a public pay
station obviously increases the problem
many times, since both parties to a re-
corded conversation frequently have
nothing to do with what the police are
investigating. Over a tapped pay tele-
phone, a man may hold legitimate but
highly personal conversations with his
wife, his lawyer, his doctor, his broker,
or his business associates. On that tap
sits an underpaid rookie. Suddenly he
has information worth money?either
to the man calling or to his personal
or professional rivals. The temptation
is obvious.
WIRETAPPING has brought many sur-
prises to the tappers. Kenneth
Ryan can recall the day in the mid-
1930's when he placed a tap on the
line of Vito Genovese, whose connec-
tion with Murder, Inc., was then under
investigation by New York poTice.
Genovese lived on Washington Square,
in the building where Mrs. Franklin D.
Roosevelt maintained an apartment.
To tap Genovese's phone, Ryan got
the pair number of the gunman's line,
located his terminal box, found a
"spare pair," or dead line, in the same
box, cross-connected the spare pair to
Genovese's pair, and then tapped in
on the spare pair some blocks away.
Two days later, Ryan returned to
the "plant" to see how the tap was
going. "My God!" said the patrolman-
monitor. "Do you know who we've got
on here? F.D.R.!"
Ryan checked, and discovered that
Mrs. Roosevelt had moved into her
Washington Square apartment and
had been given for her phone connec-
tion the same spare pair he was using.
At the moment, she was talking about
having a bath ready for the President,
who was due in that night.
Ryan quickly returned to the Geno-
vese terminal box, eager to remove his
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tap. But when he reached the box, he
found it guarded by Secret Service
men. "I wasn't happy about being on
the Roosevelt line," Ryan says. "I
wasn't even interested. But with the
Secret Service on guard, all we could
do was sweat it out."
Bizarre Happenings in L. A.
In spite of the prominence of New
York City in the wiretapping field, the
New York force has never gone as far
as have law-enforcement officials in
Los Angeles and Washington, who
have tapped their own staff members
in checking on police corruption.
The Los Angeles case, which came
to light in 1949, involved the tapping
of telephone conversations between
Sergeant E. V. Jackson of the Vice
Squad and the gangster "Snow White"
Mickey Cohen, and between Jackson
and Brenda Allen, directress of pro-
duction for a high-toned Hollywood
call house. Some sixty hours of selected
'NOTHING BUT THE BEST'
When the story broke in Los A
geles several years ago that the
police had had gambler Micky
Cohen's bungalow wired for soun
for twelve months, reporters ques
tioned him about a report that h
had paid $20,000 for complete
transcripts of his living-room con-
versations during +he period.
Mickey scoffed. "Why, the cops
should pay me for the three thou-
sand hours of classical music I fed
into their machine! I knew all the
time they had a bug in my rug. I
gave them fine music, nothing but
the best?Bach and Beethoven."
January 6, 1953
P 0siAP.. PT
recordings were played to a special
grand jury.
Aside from Miss Allen, the most
colorful figure to emerge from the
series of disclosures was one J. Arthur
Vaus, a stout former theological stu-
dent in his early thirties, who at the
time was the head of Electronic Engi-
neering Consultants, a firm located in
the same building as Mickey Cohen's
haberdashery shop. Vaus. who later
was to give up his work in crime and
politics after attending a Billy Graham
revival meeting, was apparently willing
to work either side of the wiretapping
street where money was available to
pay him.
Before .the grand jury, Vaus ad-
mitted that the Los Angeles Vice Squad ?
had a habit of calling on him for "rush
jobs" of wiretapping. He further testi-
fied that Sergeant Charles Stoker, like
Jackson a member of the Vice Squad,
had paid him to tap Stoker in on con-
versations between Miss Allen and
Jackson, over the wires of the Vice
Squad telephone.
A year earlier Vaus had also worked
for Mickey Cohen. Cohen, who ad-
mitted to being "bug-happy," had first
tried to hire Russell Mason, a private
Los Angeles detective and expert wire-
tapper. The gangster had offered Ma-
son $50,000 a year to become his "per-
sonal sound engineer," but Mason had
declined, because, he later said, he was
working for the police department.
J. Arthur Vaus proved to be an ade-
quate substitute. Cohen suspected that
his $120,000 Brentwood bungalow,
completed in April, 1947, had been
wired for sound by Sergeant Jackson
during its construction. A year later,
Vaus went to work for the gangster
and, with the aid of a mine detector,
quickly discovered the outlet cable
the police had buried in Cohen's lawn.
Vaus also taught Cohen the advan-
tages of wiretapping. In January, 1949,
Sergeant Jackson arrested Harold
( "Happy") Meltzler, a close Cohen
associate, on a charge of carrying fire-
arms. When the trial came up in May,
Cohen, with the able assistance of
Vaus, wag ready. The gangster ap-
peared in court one day, followed by
Vaus lugging a recording machine.
"When the jury hears these," Cohen
announced, "it will blow the case right
out of court. The recordings are dyna-
mite."
The judge, who knew his wiretap-
ping law, refused to receive the record-
ings in evidence. But the three Cohen
lawyers defending Meltzler did get a
chance to indicate what the Vaus re-
cordings, made over Cohen's own tele-
phone, would have shown. They ac-
cused Sergeant Jackson of trying to
shake down Cohen for $5,000 as a
contribution to Mayor Bowron's com-
ing re-election campaign. In return,
the lawyers charged, things were to be
squared for Mickey, who was then un-
der indictment for conspiracy to beat
up a radio-store proprietor.
Within a month, Vaus was before
the Los Angeles grand jury investigat-
ing police corruption. He testified as
to the results of his recording work for
Cohen. Then Sergeant Stoker told of
what he had heard, thanks to Vaus,
over Brenda Allen's line. Ray Pinker, a
police "technician," followed with a
report on the taps he had placed on the
Vice Squad's phone and on a nearby
pay station in April, 1948. The indict-
ment of Sergeant Jackson soon fol-
lowed, although he was later acquitted.
Some Washington Disclosures
In 1941, a somewhat similar case of
police tapping police became a front-
page story in Washington, D. C. Dur-
ing a House subcommittee investiga-
tion of the District police department,
15
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ARDA
BRYSON
Captain George M. Little testified that
nine men had been fired from his gam-
bling squad and that wiretapping, at
least in part, had led to the shakeup.
Little cited the case of a night sergeant
who was discharged after a telephone
tap showed he was consorting with
suspected criminals, one of whom had
made an appointment to meet the ser-
geant at home. The captain attributed
the tapping to a secret District police
squad that employed two former tele-
phone-company employees as "wire-
work specialists," and added that the
squad was undermining police morale.
When other officers agreed, even to the
extent of using the word "Gestapo,"
the secret squad was quickly disbanded.
Before its dissolution, the special
District squad had done a wide variety
of wiretapping and other investigative
work, not only in local cases but also
on request from The Bureau of Inter-
nal Revenue, the FBI, Army and Navy
Intelligence, the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and an assort-
ment of other Congressional commit-
tees. Because of the District police de-
partment's dependence on Congress for
operating funds, a limited number of
wiretapping requests from Capitol Hill
have continued to be honored by the
department?generally by assignment
of a roving police team.
r-F HE Federal Communications Act of
1 1934, even if it has not been en-
forced, has at least made wiretapping
more difficult. Before 1934, telephone-
company officials rarely refused to help
police tappers. The "back tap," in-
stalled as a company courtesy on the
main frame at the exchange, made po-
lice telephone interception a relatively
simple matter. But the Communica-
tions Act, along with several wiretap-
ping scandals, forced company officials
into retreat. Back taps are no longer
available, and local police forces have
learned to be satisfied if the telephone
company just maintains a hands-off
policy. "A company repairman will
stumble on a police tap, then pretend
to have something in his eye until the
tappers can clear out," a member of
the Chicago Crime Commission has
said in explaining telephone-company
policy in his area.
State police, of course, are just as
thoroughly enmeshed in w.iretapping
as are city and county law-enforce-
ment agencies. On the state level, how-
ever, the tapping generally has polit-
ical overtones. Often it is a matter of
the party in power's tapping to get in-
formation on rival machines.
Four Burning Ears
Such was the case in New York State
in 1943, when Thomas E. Dewey, the
crusading district attorney who owed
so much to wiretapping and who had
done so much to promote the practice,
moved into the Governor's Mansion at
Albany. One of Dewey's first moves
was an attempt to crack down on the
O'Connell brothers, brewery owners
and leaders of Albany's well-oiled
Democratic machine, whose power
was neatly summarized in the slogan
of their beer: "Hedrick or Else!"
Dewey, as the story has it, called in
some of his former New York City
police assistants, and a wiretap was
promptly installed on several O'Con-
nell telephone lines, state police doing
the monitoring.
One day not long afterward, the
state trooper in charge of the wire work
dropped in on Dewey's executive as-
sistant, Paul Lockwood, and remarked
that the telephone conversations of the
brothers O'Connell were something to
startle even a hardened eavesdropper.
One afternoon when affairs of state
were a bit dull, Lockwood repeated the
trooper's remark to Dewey, and the
two officials decided to hear for them-
selves.
Soon the able assistant and the dis-
tinguished young Governor were hud-
dled together at the listening post,
earsets adjusted. Both started with an-
ticipation as one of the O'Connell
brothers put in a call to a New York
State Supreme Court Justice.
The circuit was completed, and
O'Connell began discussing a business
deal?with such frankness that the
judge warned O'Connell to be careful,
since his wires might be tapped. At the
listening post, pleasure, according to
the legend, lighted the faces of Dewey
and Lockwood. But the smiles van-
ished when O'Connell replied, "I don't
give a damn what that [obscenity] little
mustachioed [obscenity] Dewey hears
me say, and that goes for his fat-prat-
ted assistant Lockwood, too!"
THE REPORTER
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VII. Lone Wolves
And Private Ears
INSIDE the Adeiphi Bar in Philadel-
phia the
an impeccably dressed man
in his late fifties. In a faintly Southern
accent he orders a succession of drinks,
?and his orders are filled with the defer-
ence accorded a steady customer. The
man's face is familiar in most of the
city's fashionable bars and hotels, but
few, even among the cafe regulars,
know his name. To most he is simply
"Gentleman Pete."
Although Gentleman Pete enjoys
? living up to his title, the drinks follow
one another with such regularity that
his benders often last for weeks and
even months.
From Taproom to Tap
Benders, of course, cost money, and
Pete is not independently wealthy.
Occasionally he must cease his pub-
crawling to build a new cash reserve.
His vocational abilities, partly the
product of a first-rate engineering edu-
cation, are quite specialized, but Pete
manages to employ them, during his
minimum periods of sobriety, for max-
imum gain. By working only a few
days, he is often able to satisfy his thirst
for several months. Gentleman Pete is,
in short, a professional wiretapper.
Eighteen years back, Pete was em-
ployed by the telephone company of a
Southern city as an extension engineer.
His progress within the company was
severely limited by his weakness for
alcohol. Then one day a married friend
who suspected his wife of infidelity
asked Pete's help.
Thanks to his technical experience,
Pete found it simple to tap the wife's
telephone and to record conversations
between her and an unknown man.
Identifying the man was more difficult.
After painstaking work, Pete finally
discovered that the man was a lumber
dealer, calling long distance but relay-
ing the calls through the branch office
of his firm so that the conversations
seemed to be local when overheard.
The grateful husband came through
with a three-thousand-dollar reward.
January 6, 1953
Gentleman Pete promptly quit his job
and took.off on a cross-country bender.
In New Orleans, Pete explained his
source of temporary affluence to ac-
quaintances, and was soon introduced
to a Lake Charles oil man. The oil man,
who believed that a Louisiana state
official was accepting bribes for grant-
ing leases on public lands to certain
business rivals, hired Gentleman Pete
to prove the charge. A tap was installed
on the official's home telephone, and
regular conversations between the offi-
cial and the bribers were recorded. The
job lasted several weeks and Pete re-
ceived better than ten thousand dollars
for his efforts?enough for quite a
lengthy binge.
Gentleman Pete's reputation spread,
and soon he could find a job whenever
his bank account ran low. At first his
employers were mostly oil men. A
Texas land speculator hired him to tap
the line of an oil-company geologist
who telephoned his findings to his com-
pany each evening. On the tips the tap
provided, the land speculator bought
heavily and successfully. A few weeks
later, Gentleman Pete was handed some
twenty-five thousand dollars.
ANOTHER Oil-company executive
hired Pete to tap the line of a com-
petitor to whom the executive had re-
cently paid eight million dollars for
certain industrial plants. The tap soon
indicated that the competitor was plan-
ning to hang onto a pilot plant in
Pennsylvania for himself. Again, Pete's
reward was far out of proportion to
the amount of work involved.
By the end of the last war, Gentle-
Man Pete had branched out into other
wiretapping fields. On a Southern visit,
he met a matron whose control of an
exclusive club was being threatened by
a social rival. Pete tapped the upstart's
line and compiled a list of her sup-
porters. Reportedly the fee was only
two thousand dollars, but Pete was able
to drink his way back to Philadelphia
and then some.
GENTLEMAN PETE HOW works HO
more than a dozen weeks a year.
He prefers jobs in or near Philadelphia,
but will go farther afield if the reward
is sufficient. Each year, in fact, he flies
to the West Coast at least once on a
specific assignment for a well-known
lawyer. And his present wiretapping
activities include a wide range of busi-
ness, political, and domestic-relations
cases. He has also on occasion under-
taken delicate assignments in Mexico
and Cuba.
In many nonalcoholic ways, Gentle-
man Pete's career closely parallels that
of practically every professional wire-
tapper in America: He was gifted in
electronics to start with. His talents led
to a job with the telephone company.
Then someone asked him to install a
tap, promising more money than a
company salary would total in months.
He accepted the offer, learned to like
the money and the hours, quit his job,
and became a wiretapper.
Pros and Prices
Gentleman Pete is apparently the
only free-lance wiretapper operating
on a national scale. However, he has his
counterparts in every major city?not
many of them, to be sure, but about
four in New York, two in Washington,
two in Chicago, one in Miami, two in
Los Angeles, and perhaps another
dozen elsewhere. These few men are
responsible for almost all the private
wiretapping done in the nation today,
although, despite stringent company
regulations, a maverick telephone-com-
pany employee will still install a private
tap occasionally, persuaded by money
or by friendship.
Usually the professionals, difficult to
find and wary of new customers, con-
fine their activities to their favorite
cities, where they have learned the local
telephone system from the inside and
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where they have enough contacts to
find enough people with enough money
and enough troubles to make wiretap-
ping pay not only well but steadily.
Few free-lance wiretappers have the
personal contacts of Gentleman Pete,
and most arc satisfied to farm out their
talents to a number of private detective
agencies that hire on a job-to-job basis.
No detective agency maintains a regu-
lar wiretapper on its staff, for tapping
assignments are not that frequent.
Even the most high-powered private
agencies employ the practice in fewer
than ten cases a year. The average
client simply will not foot the costs,
pyramided as they are by the skilled
personnel, by the special equipment re-
quired, and by the risks involved.
One New York wiretapper asks fifty
dollars a day for his services, plus such
additional funds as may be needed
for bribing janitors and renting space
for a "plant." Another New York
professional gets a five-hundred-dollar
fee for installing the tap, plus twenty-
five dollars a day for maintenance. To
such costs must be added the detective
agency's cut, and the client who ends
up paying less than seven hundred dol-
lars a week for a tapping job can con-
sider himself fortunate.
WHILE these prices hold private
wiretapping to a minimum, the
professional can make a good living as
long as he gets his share of assignments
and as long as he can supplement his
income with jobs in related fields of
electronic detection, such as installing
secret microphones and checking lines
of worried clients for the taps of others.
The private wiretapper, in fact, makes
dozens of line inspections for every tap
he installs. Competent tapchecking is
no simple matter, for each bridging
point must be personally inspected to
assure a tap-free line. But since check-
18
ing involves no elaborate equipment,
no bribery, and no law violation, its
costs are quite reasonable. The profes-
sional generally charges between twen-
ty-five and fifty dollars for a complete
line inspection, although some big
names in the underworld have volun-
teered to pay much more.
Turning the Cables
Actually, the telephone company it-
self will inspect a subscriber's line for
taps if requested to do so. But the com-
pany often refuses to disclose results of
its checks. If the tap is police-installed,
it will not even be removed. The sus-
picious subscriber, hardly satisfied with
such service, looks elsewhere.
Often he goes to a detective agency,
but occasionally he may find a tele-
phone-company lineman who will do
the job on the side. In 1951 the Kefau-
ver Committee heard testimony from
exactly such a lineman, James F. Mc-
Laughlin of New York. While working
for the telephone company, McLaugh-
lin testified, he had met one Irving
Sherman. Sherman introduced him to
Frank Costello, who paid McLaughlin
$50, $100, and even $150 to check
Costello's wires at frequent intervals
over a three-month period. McLaugh-
lin was soon also checking the lines of
such celebrities as? Dandy Phil Kastel
and Nat Herzfeld, as well as the wires
of Mayor William O'Dwyer. Sherman
made all the contacts.
Nat Herzfeld, McLaughlin said, had
a switchboard on which every line
proved to be tapped. McLaughlin re-
called telling Herzfeld of the taps and
added that Herzfeld replied: "As long
as I know they are there, I don't care.
Let them stay there."
Herzfeld's reaction is not unusual.
John ("Steve") Broady, the studiously
casual head of one of New York's more
fabulous private detective agencies,
claims he never removes a tap found
on a client's telephone line. "We can
use that tap to make the opposition
eighty per cent ineffective," he says.
"I've fed false information into a
tapped phone and sent opposition
agents all the way to California and
even overseas chasing down phony
leads. Work out the conversations with
my clients just like a movie script."
BROADY is a periodic employer of the
two leading wiretappers in New
York, Kenneth Ryan and Robert C. La
Borde. Each of these men completed
his apprenticeship with the New York
Telephone Company many years ago.
Both tapped wires for the New York
Police Department before entering the
field of private tapping. Each has since
been arrested for wiretapping more.
than once, but each has escaped con-
viction so far.
In temperament, however, the two
men are far apart. Ryan is the scientist,
quietly proud of his work and of his
contributions to the mechanics of wire-
tapping. La Borde is the artist-show-
man of wiretapping, a man who brings
a kind of rough glamour to his skill and
his accomplishments. Ryan is a boyish-
faced family man, living contentedly in
a small home in Yonkers, puttering in
his basement workshop, 4nd commut-
ing to the city only when necessary. La
Borde, large of body and florid of face,
prefers a Broadway office as the dra-
matic setting for his activities.
Many consider Ryan the top wire-
tapping technician in the country. But
even though he developed the dial-
pulse recorder and several other wire-
tapping refinements, he has never made
much money. For some twenty-one
years, until 1947 in fact, he was satisfied
to work for a police salary?"with no
extras"?and to turn his inventions
over to friends without charge.
La Borde deserted the police force
for more lucrative fields far earlier, and
has lived well ever since. His only con-
tribution to the science of wiretapping
is a machine that he claims will register
taps, but that unfortunately will also
register any other trouble on a line. La
Borde's shrewd promotion of the ma-
chine, however, has paid off hand-
somely.
"La Borde is a real publicity hound,"
a rival wiretapper has said. "Once he
THE REPORTER
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even asked the newspapers to come
take pictures of him tapping wires. I
called him up and said, Tor crissake,
Bob, cut it out. You're putting every-
body on guard against tapping.'"
Trysts and Telephones
Like other professional wiretappers,
Ryan and La Borde have employed
their talents in a wide variety of in-
vestigations. But usually divorce cases
seem to lead the list. This is especially
true in New York, where adultery is
the sole ground for divorce and where
secret trysts can often be discovered
through wiretapping, but it also ap-
plies wherever a wealthy man wishes
to shed an unfaithful mate without
paying alimony.
Generally such divorce actions are
settled privately, without embarrassing
public disclosures of wiretapping rec-
ords. But occasionally a case does come
to light.
The most notable recent divorce case
involved a socially prominent Wash-
ingtonian and his attractive wife. The
husband, suspecting his wife of a ro-
mance with a Latin-American ambas-
sador, hired Lieutenant Joseph Shimon
of the Washington police department
to tap his home telephone. Shimon set
UI) his plant in a house near the cou-
ple's estate in Virginia, and soon he
had the date of. a rendezvous between
the wife and the ambassador at the
apartment of a friend in Georgetown.
Shimon arrived appropriately late, en-
tered through a window, and flash
bulbs exploded in the faces of the
couple. The husband got his divorce
and Shimon reportedly got five thou-
sand dollars.
Harry V. Dougherty, dean of New
York private detectives and a man who
has used the services of wiretappers
since 1915, says he now handles about
six wirework jobs yearly, mostly in
divorce cases. Dougherty points out
that wiretapping has never been held
illegal in New York if authorized by a
client on his own line, but adds that the
job can still be difficult. Once, he re-
calls, his tapper, a former FBI agent, set
up the plant in a basement toilet where
an unsuspecting and flustered maid
soon caused mutual discomfort. Just
last winter, Dougherty's man rigged a
tap into an old unheated barn on a
country estate. "Almost froze to death
during the night," Dougherty says,
"only to have the woman's son walk in
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on the thing the next morning, looking
for a bicycle."
Some time ago, Dougherty installed
a tap for a Dutch importer who lived
in a Manhattan apartment and who
suspected his wife of infidelity. Unfor-
tunately, his client had not explained
that the wife carried on all conversa-
tions in Dutch, and Dougherty was
suddenly confronted with the task of
finding a Dutch monitor. Finally such
a specialist was obtained, and a few
days later the tap paid off. "We nailed
her with the boy friend," says Dough-
erty. "And you know, she begged me
to put a tap on her husband, but I said
nothing doing. Say," he added, "I've
got something a lot of people in this
business haven't?a conscience."
Ears on Business
Wiretapping is also quite common
in the world of business, as Gentleman
Pete's work for various oil interests
indicates. Like divorce tapping, busi-
ness tapping is sometimes lent an aura
of legality by a company's giving au-
thorization to tap its own lines.
Exactly this sort of legality was
trolling the agency and were getting an
abnormal share of the new cars then
so difficult to obtain. After a seventeen-
hour session, the jury acquitted Broady.
ROBERT LA BORDE has reported work-
ing on several similar cases. During
the war, he was hired by E.R. Squibb
& Sons to investigate missing consign-
ments of drug concentrates. With the
authorization of company executives,
La Borde tapped various office tele-
phones, and soon he had recorded
proof of the guilt of a handful of un-
derlings, who had simply driven the
drugs off in trucks and had then sold
the loot to cut-rate druggists. When the
guilty employees promised to repay the
loss, Squibb executives, wishing to
avoid bad publicity, dropped prosecu-
tion.
"Most corporations I've worked for
would rather settle things quietly," La
Borde says. "A little Mer, I tapped the
office phone of the treasurer of a large
corporation and got a straight confes-
sion that he'd embezzled $185,000.
When he promised restitution, the
corporation decided not to prosecute,
claimed by Steve Broady in 1949, when
he, Kenneth Ryan, and two others
were indicted in New York for tapping
the wires of Kings County Buick, Inc.,
a large Brooklyn automobile agency.
The charge against Ryan was eventu-
ally dropped, but Broady's case went
to trial. Before a blue-ribbon jury, the
suave investigator insisted he had
tapped only at the request of fifty per
cent of the company's stockholders,
who had hired him in 1947 to investi-
gate charges that mobsters were con-
but he's never repaid a cent, to my
knowledge."
UCH business tapping, of course, is
directed at discovering the plans
of competitors?in cases such as those
Gentleman Pete has handled in the oil
business, where authorization of the
telephone subscriber is certainly not
obtained and where the illegality is
obvious. The utilities magnate Samuel
Insull and David Lamar, the "Wolf of
Wall Street," both are said to have
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employed wiretapping regularly to keep
tabs on business rivals, and with very
profitable results.
Over the years, labor unions have
also been a major target of business
wiretapping. Fifteen years ago, many
union telephone lines were regularly
tapped for leads on possible strike ac-
tions. And although the tapping dimin-
ished as unions grew strong and were
able to fight back, the National Labor
Relations Board is still presented with
occasional cases of wiretapping in labor
espionage. In 1950, the Seafarers
International Union charged the Cities
Service Oil Company with using wire-
tapping to prevent labor organization,
and detectives later admitted they had
been hired by Cities Service to spy on
its employees.
pE same year, it was later brought
out at a hearing of the National
Labor Relations Board, the telephone
company itself was found to be tapping
the home telephone of one of its switch-
board operators at Weirton, West Vir-
ginia. The tap was on for eleven hours,
and the girl, who was a member of the
Communications Workers of America
(cio) and who at the time was trying
to organize the Weirton exchange, was
fired four days later. The company
admitted the tap but contended that
it was used to determine whether the
employee, in violation of a company-
union agreement, was using her tele-
phone to solicit union memberships
from other operators on duty at the
switchboard. The NLRB, while observ-
ing that "certain circumstances dis-
closed by the record cast serious doubt"
on the good faith of the company's
contention, nevertheless concluded that
there was not sufficient evidence to
refute it and upheld the girl's dismissal.
In 1951 the telephone company was
charged with tapping in Michigan
during a nation-wide CWA strike. The
strike was of the hit-and-run variety;
each day the workers at a different
Nitt2,0
exchange would walk out. The com-
pany could mobilize its supervisory
employees to fill the gap, but first it
had to know where the gap would be
each day. CWA officials, using tele-
phones they suspected were tapped,
planted information that a certain ex-
change would be out the following day.
Then, by word of mouth, they ordered
a second exchange many miles away to
go out instead. When the company's
supervisory staff showed up at the first
exchange, with nothing to do, union
officials seemed well justified in claim-
ing that their wires were tapped.
BECAUSE of its habit of using taps to
check the efficiency of its own em-
ployees at work, the telephone com-
pany has been called "the biggest tap-
per in the business." Actually, within
an exchange the work of each operator
is regularly checked by a supervisor
who taps in through a special switch-
board. On a higher level within the
company, some officials' telephones are
fitted with special test distributor cir-
cuits so that they can dial any private
number and be automatically tapped
in. The result may be efficiency, but it
can also be suspicion and uneasiness.
Blackmail
Private wiretapping also produces a
vast potential for blackmail. But al-
though many professionals will check
the lines of men of notoriety for taps,
few will tap for criminal purposes.
"I've recorded dirt on all sorts of
important people," says Robert La
Borde. "I've thrown away millions in
blackmail by turning completed tapes
over to my clients." Others might not
be so scrupulous.
One man reportedly did make a for-
tune in blackmail by tapping at various
expensive resort hotels, discovering who
were paying the bills for attractive fe-
male guests.
"I used to know this cop on the force
who later retired, bought a string of
hotels, and moved into a big estate out
on Long Island," La Borde says. "One
day he came into my office flashing a
big roll of bills, and I asked him how
come .he was doing so well.
"He just smiled and said, 'Record-
ing. How else?' "
SO ON AND ON ...
DAILY, the newspapers bring more
evidence of wiretapping. In New
York, at the trial of the wealthy gar-
ment manufacturer Sam Chapman for
procuring, Raymond Adams, a police
wiretap technician, is producing re-
cordings of conversations between the
manufacturer and one of his alleged
female accomplices, Nancy Hawkins.
The recordings, from a round-the-clock
tap on the young lady's line last June,
are being discreetly played in the
judge's private chambers: The gentle-
men with whom Miss Hawkins con-
ducted business calls inkty thus rest
secure in the knowledde that their
names will be known only to the court
stenographers, the police tappers, the
police monitors, and the staff of the
District Attorney's office prosecuting
the case.
Also in New York, a State Crime
Commission has recently been harass-
ing Thomas Luchese, alias Three-
Finger Brown, the underworld confi-
dant of numerous public officials, with
transcripts of some of his less-guarded
telephone conversations of six years
ago, including some which, the Corn-
mission charged, showed that Luchese
was part owner of the fighter Rocky
Graziano.
Captain James W. Flynn of the New
York Police Department has just pub-
licly confirmed a statement made earlier
in this article. At the police trial of
thirty officers charged with protecting
the bookie Harry Gross, Flynn brought
out that public telephones at Pennsyl-
vania Station and Madison Square
Garden had been tapped at various
times between 1948 and 1950 to get
evidence of bookmaking. People were
picked up, Flynn said, because they
acted "suspiciously." "If a policeman
stuck to what the law prescribes," he
added, "we could never do our job."
IN New York, Washington, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and other large cities,
the tapping?official and private?
goes merrily on. The conversations of
the guilty and the innocent alike are
saved for posterity on endless miles of
recording tape. Most citizens believe
that wiretapping is something that hap-
pens to others. But who, picking up a
phone, can consider himself safe?
THE REPORTER
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release @ 50-Yr 2013/06/25: CIA-RDP74-00297R001001610001-5
A SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS I-IV
WIRETAPPINC, unfortunately, is one of the
facts of modern life?an electronic in-
vader that allows others to peer into our pri-
vate lives and to overhear the words we speak
in the supposed privacy of our offices and our
homes. It is a furtive practice, impersonal
and indiscriminate as a bullet, affecting alike
the criminal and the innocent, the public
figure and the law-abiding citizen whose
business should be his own concern.
In earlier years, the legality of wiretap-
ping was vigorously questioned by such men
as Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, Harlan F. Stone,
and Pierce Butler. These interpreters of our
democratic rights maintained that wiretap-
ping was a basic invasion of the rights of
privacy enunciated in the Fourth Amend-
ment, which guarantees "The right of the
people to be secure ... against unreasonable
searches and seizures . . ." But when the
first wiretapping case reached the Supreme
Court in 1928, these four Justices lost to
their five colleagues, who stuck to a strict
interpretation of the Constitution. The
Fourth Amendment, it was held, applied
only to "actual physical invasions" of pri-
vacy, not to "projected voices."
In 1934, the first Roosevelt Congress de-
cided to recognize the electronic facts of
life. The Federal Communications Act of
that year included a section specifically in-
? tended to outlaw all wiretapping. In lay-
man's language, Section 605, as interpreted
by later court decisions, stated that no per-
son could intercept a telephone conversa-
tion and divulge the contents to another per-
son, nor could he use the contents for his own
benefit or for the benefit of another?unless
the interceptor had prior permission from
both parties to the conversation. Violators
were made subject to a two-year prison term,
a $10,000 fine, or both.
MEA NWII ILE Federal agencies, including
the Department of Justice and the
Treasury Department, had found wiretap-
ping a useful tool in crime detection. They
began to seek loopholes in Section 605?
loopholes that would allow their own
agents to continue tapping. Their early
efforts were fruitless; one attempted eva-
sion after another was blocked by the Su-
preme Court?until, in 1940, Attorney Gen-
eral Robert H. Jackson announced that
"the law on wiretapping is now clear and
precise; and all future cases of wiretapping
will be subject to prosecution in the Fed-
eral courts."
A month after Jackson's statement, how-
ever, with the United States slowly being
drawn into the Second World War, Presi-
dent Roosevelt sent a memo to the Depart-
ment of Justice which was never made
public but which allegedly approved wire-
tapping "when necessary in situations in-
volving national defense."
By the end of the year, the Department
had come up with another tenuous con-
struction of Section 605?a construction
which held that the only crime was to inter-
cept and divulge. A Federal agency that
tapped but did not divulge the information
could thus be considered within the law.
Since announcing this interpretation of
Section 605, the Justice Department has al-
lowed its Fill agents to continue tapping in
an increasingly wide variety of cases. The
various military intelligence agencies have
followed suit. And in the fields of local po-
lice tapping and private tapping, the Justice
Department, charged with enforcing Section
605, has continued to follow a principle that
Attorney General Jackson once candidly
stated: "I do not feel that the Department
of Justice can in good conscience prosecute
persons .. . for a practice ?. . engaged in by
the Department itself, and regarded as legal
by the Department." Only one man?back
in 194I?has ever been prosecuted and sen-
tenced for wiretapping, a fact that sub-
stantially increases the confidence of the
tappers who ply their trade in politics, in
business, and in private realms such as di-
vorce cases.
D
ESPITE rumors to the contrary, the tech-
] niques of wiretapping remain much the
same as they were ten years ago. The Feder-
al agent has little trouble, for telephone-
company co-operation is nearly always forth-
coming. In some cases the company will even
install taps for the agency on the "main
frame" at the exchange, stringing them to a
central recording location. But the state or
local police tapper (to whom the telephone
company today gives its full co-operation
only with extreme reluctance) can still be
assured that his tap won't be removed if
found by company repairmen. Although the
private tapper must, of course, operate com-
pletely without the company's knowledge,
he is nearly always a former phone-company
employee. He knows not only the science of
tapping but also enough company lingo to
bluff regular employees out of the normally
confidential information that will give him
the location of a certain circuit's "bridging
points"?the terminal boxes that link a tele-
phone to the exchange and offer the most
convenient locations for installing a tap.
O'Dwyertapping
The private wiretapper, whose fee often
runs as high as $1,000 a week, has in recent
years found in political rivalries the occa-
sion for some of his most lucrative em-
ployment. Republicans have found wiretap-
ping a startlingly effective method of col-
lecting dirt on Democrats, and vice versa.
The former Republican Governor of
Rhode Island, William H. Vanderbilt, once
paid a New York detective agency some
$11,000 to tap the phones of the Democratic
Mayor of Pawtucket, Thomas P. McCoy, and
of State Attorney General Louis V. Jack-
vony, the latter a political rival within the
state Republican Party.
On the city level, Clendenin Ryan, the
would-be reformer, used John ("Steve")
Broady's detective agency in 1949 to collect a
mountain of information on Mayor William
O'Dwyer of New York and his regime.
O'Dwyer learned of the scheme and later
had Broady and one of his men indicted for
tapping the phone of Manhattan Borough
President Hugo Rogers. The indictment fell
through not long before O'Dwyer resigned
as mayor and accepted the post of Ambassa-
dor to Mexico.
XTATURALLV, political wiretapping has
reached its peak in Washington, D. C.
As stated in the previous issue of The Re-
porter, Cyrus Ching, the labor mediator, has
said that during his mediation of a strike last
year his telephone was tapped by both com-
pany and union 'agents. Charges have been
made that Robert La Borde, a professional
tapper in New York, went to Washington
in the pay of private power interests to tap
the wires of Supreme Court Justices during
hearings on a TVA case.
Perhaps the most serious case?one that
wou-kl?appear?to---justify immediate ' Con--
gressional investigation?involves rumors re-
cently spread by an Army Signal Corps
Intelligence Agency employee named Edwin
Y. Webb. According to these rumors. Webb
had listened in on the telephone of Central
Intelligence Agency chief Walter Bedell
Smith after Webb had made charges of
pro-Communism against a dozen-odd fel-
low employees in setA and CIA.
The best-publicized political wiretapping
in Washington has involved the efforts of
Metropolitan Police Lieutenant Joseph W.
Shimon, who'iapped wires for various Re-
publican Congressional figures and who has
just been cleared of dismissal charges on the
ground that his superiors on the force actu-
ally knew of his tapping activities all the
time. Shimon, who met Senator Owen Brew-
ster through the good offices of Henry ("The
Dutchman") Grunewald and Senator Styles
Bridges, worked for Brewster in 1945 and
again in 1947, during which periods Brewster
engaged in a series of efforts strongly ap-
proved by Pan American Airways and just as
strongly opposed by P.A.A.'s chief overseas
-rival, Howard Hughes's Trans World Air-
lines. In 1945, Shimon tapped the borne
phone of the late Senator Josiah Bailey
when Bailey was the leading Senate oppo-
nent of a P.A.A.-favored bill. In 1947, while
again working for Brewster, Shimon - in-
stalled taps on the telephone lines of, among
others, Hugh Fulton and Thomas Slack,
attorneys for TAW.A., and Noah Dietrich, a
Hughes executive.
Wiretapping in. Washington, of course,
involves various Congressional committees
and an assortment of Federal agencies, as
will be seen in the following chapter.
THE REPORTER
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.
?
of blackmailers. We are still like children in dealing
with those extraordinary gadgets that have immeas-
urably enriched our lives; we have not learned to
master them, to defend ourselves from the harm that
they can do. We can be sucked into a mob while we
are sitting at home in. front of a radio or television
set. Eavesdroppers may tamper with our privacy or
we ourselves may thoughtlessly throw it away. The
time has come to grow up, to -learn fast what a
precious thing it is. For privacy is the negative yet
essential pole of our freedom. We cannot actively use
our freedom to make something better of ourselves
or of the world we live in unless we are left, or leave
ourselves, alone to work, brood, or just not care.
Privacy is to an active, free life what sleep is to our
waking hours.
Unless we learn to defend our privacy and obtain
from government the assistance we need, the day is
not far removed when the keys to our front doors
will become just about as symbolic as the keys to
our cities sometimes offered to visiting celebrities.
1984 in the 1950's?
Moreover, technology in the field of electronics, as
in that of atomic power, moves at its own irresisti-
ble pace. Already there are new, extraordinary
gadgets on the market. For example there is one that
offers better vision, from a central observation post,
than that of hundred-eyed Argus. "Wired televi-
sion," it is called, or "Utiliscope," produced by the
Diamond Power Specialty Corporation of Lancaster,
Ohio. In their advertisements the makers announce:
"If you have any operition too remote, dangerous,
or inaccessible to observe directly . . . or if you need
to have a single observer watch a number of widely
scattered operations. . ." the machine is available,
and it is not expensive. Obviously, there is noth-
ing wrong in such a machine. It can be of great use
to industry?and to police control. Neither is there
anything wrong with those compact television trans-
mitters, easily carried by -TV reporters, which
brought to our screens the faces and voices of many
politicians from the Convention floors.
At present, the Utiliscope is not peering through
too many cracks in the walls, and there are no secret
TV transmitters lying around. But the telephone,
when Alexander Graham Bell was struggling to get
it accepted as a reliable means of communication,
had to wait some time before it became widely used.
When Bell and his associates tried to sell their in-
vention to the Western Union Telegraph Com-
pany, they were told that Western Union could not
use "an electrical toy." Certainly, the technological
January 6, 1953
means to spy on people described by Orwell in his'
Nineteen Eighty-Four can, within a very few years,
start com,ing in mass. production from the assembly
lines.
Justice Brandeis was quite right when he wrote:
"the progress of science in furnishing the Govern-
ment with means of espionage is not likely to stop
with wiretapping. Ways may some day be devel-
oped by which the Government, without removing
papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in
court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to
a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."
The wiretapping of today is the harbinger of in-
finitely worse tools that may disastrously encroach
on our freedom. This is why it is imperative that the
intolerable abuse of wiretapping be stopped?and
only the government can do it.
The words -of the Fourth Amendment, consider-
ing the times when they were written, still offer us
the best guidance: "The right of the people to be
, secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation,
and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized." Of course the
writers of the Fourth Amendment were concerned
with "papers and effects," not with electricity.
Will freedom?will our Bill of Rights?win the
race with electronics? There is enough strength and
power in our Constitution to make it certain that
freedom will be energized rather than crushed by
technology?if only we recognize the danger that
lies ahead of us. Wiretapping and all similar devices
human ingenuity may invent must be used under
the strictest Federal supervision, and then only for
the detection of-three crimes: treason, sabotage, and
espionage. For the detection of all other crimes, no
matter how heinous, wiretapping must be outlawed
?and outlawed for good.
0 NCE more, with its own private means, without
power of subpoena, The Reporter has done an
investigating job. We suggest that a Congressional
committee, with the immensely more effective facil-
ities at its disposal, take a look at the facts, at the
latest developments of electronic technology?and at
the Bill of Rights. If the investigation is conducted
in a spirit of devotion to our freedom, there is no
doubt as to the law that Congress will finally pass.
It will be a law that, by re-establishing the purposes
of the Fourth Amendment, will show that in the race
between the two,freedpi-n and electronics?freedom
rz.. ?.4. GE 6 9 tor,
has the lead. '-'4
831108ia , u 0 ,
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