telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (04/03/89)
Two former employees of Cincinnati Bell, who were fired by the company for 'good cause' according to Cincinnati Bell Chairman Dwight Hibbard are claiming they installed more than 1200 illegal wiretaps over a 12 year period from 1972 - 1984 at the request of their supervisors at the telco and the local police. Among the alleged targets of the snooping were past and present members of Congress, federal judges, scores of the city's most prominent politicians, business executives, lawyers and media personalities. Leonard Gates and Robert Draise say they even wiretapped the hotel room where President Gerald Ford stayed during two visits to Cincinnati; and this part of their story, at least, has been verified by the now retired security chief at the hotel. As more details come out each day, people in Cincinnati are getting a rare look at a Police Department that apparently spied on itself, and at a grand jury probe that has prompted one former FBI official to suggest that the Justice Department seems more interested in discrediting the accusers than in seeking the truth. Cincinnati Bell executives says Gates and Draise are just trying to 'get even' with the company for firing them. But disclosures thus far seem to indicate there is at least some truth in what the two men are saying about the company they used to work for. According to Gates and Draise, they were just employees following the orders given to them by their superiors at Cincinnati Bell. But Dwight Hibbard, Chairman of the Board of Cincinnati Bell has called them both liars, and said their only motive is to make trouble for the company. Cincinnati Bell responded to allegations that the company had specifically participated in illegal wiretapping by filing a libel suit against Gates and Draise. The two men responded by filing a countersuit against the telco. In addition to their suit, four of the people who were allegedly spied on have filed a class action suit against the telco. In the latest development, Cincinnati Bell has gone public with (according to them) just recently discovered sordid details about an extramarital affair by Gates. A federal grand jury in Cincinnati is now trying to straighten out the tangled web of charges and countercharges, but so far no indictments have been returned. Almost daily, Gates and Draise tell further details about their exploits, including taps they claim they placed on phones at the Cincinnati Stock Exchange and the General Electric aircraft engine plant in suburban Evendale. According to Draise, he began doing these 'special assignments' in 1972, when he was approached by a Cincinnati police officer from that city's clandestine intelligence unit. The police officer wanted him to tap the lines of black militants and suspected drug dealers, Draise said. The police officer assured him the wiretapping would be legal, and that top executives at the phone company had approved. Draise agreed, and suggested recruiting Gates, a co-worker to help out. Soon, the two were setting several wiretaps each week at the request of the Intelligence Unit of the Cincinnati Police Department. But by around 1975, the direction and scope of the operation changed, say the men. The wiretap requests no longer came from the police; instead they came from James West and Peter Gabor, supervisors in the Security Department at Cincinnati Bell, who claimed *they were getting the orders from their superiors*. And the targets of the spying were no longer criminal elements; instead, Draise and Gates say they were asked to tap the lines of politicians, business executives and even the phone of the Chief of Police himself, and the personal phone lines of some telephone company employees as well. Draise said he "began to have doubts about the whole thing in 1979" when he was told to tap the private phone of a newspaper columnist in town. "I told them I wasn't going to do it anymore," he said in an interview last week. Gates kept on doing these things until 1984, and he says he got cold feet late that year when 'the word came down through the grapevine' that he was to tap the phone lines connected to the computers at General Electric's Evendale plant. He backed out then, and said to leave him out of it in the future, and he claims there were hints of retaliation directed at him at that time; threats to 'tell what we know about you...'. When Dwight Hibbard was contacted at his office at Cincinnati Bell and asked to comment on the allegations of his former employees, he responded that they were both liars. "The phone company would not do things like that," said Hibbard, "and those two are both getting sued because they say we do." Hibbard has refused to answer more specific questions asked by the local press and government investigators. In fact, Draise was fired in 1979, shortly after he claims he told his superiors he would no longer place wiretaps on lines. Shortly after he quit handling the 'special assignments' given to him he was arrested, and charged with a misdemeanor in connection with one wiretap -- which Draise says he set for a friend who wanted to spy on his ex-girlfriend. Cincinnati Bell claims they had nothing to do with his arrest and conviction on that charge; but they 'were forced to fire him' after he pleaded guilty. Gates was fired in 1986 for insubordination. He claims Cincinnati Bell was retaliating against him for taking the side of two employees who were suing the company for sexual harassment; but his firing was upheld in court. The story first started breaking when Gates and Draise went to see a reporter at [Mt. Washington Press], a small weekly newspaper in the Cincinnati suburban area. The paper printed the allegations by the men, and angry responses started coming in almost immediately. At first, police denied the existence of the Intelligence Unit, let alone that such an organization would use operatives at Cincinnati Bell to spy on people. Later, when called before the federal grand jury, and warned against lying, five retired police officers, including the former chief, took the Fifth Amendment. Finally last month, the five issued a statement through their attorney, admitting to 12 illegal wiretaps from 1972 - 1974, and implicated unnamed operatives at Cincinnati Bell as their contacts to set the taps. With the ice broken, and the formalities out of the way, others began coming forward with similar stories. Howard Lucas, the former Director of Security for Stouffer's Hotel in Cincinnati recalled a 1975 incident in which he stopped Gates, West and several undercover police officers from going into the hotel's phone room about a month before the visit by President Ford. The phone room was kept locked, and employees working there were buzzed in by someone already inside, recalled Lucas. In addition to the switchboards, the room contained the wire distribution frames from which phone pairs ran throughout the hotel. Lucas refused to let the police officers go inside without a search warrant; and they never did return with one. But Lucas said two days later he was tipped off by one of the operators to look in one of the closets there. Lucas said he found a voice activated tape recorder and 'a couple of coils they used to make the tap'. He said he told the Police Department and Cincinnati Bell about his findings, but ".....I could not get anyone to claim it, so I just yanked it all out and threw it in the dumpster...." Executives at General Electric were prompted to meet with Draise and Gates recently to learn the extent of the wiretapping that had been done at the plant. According to Draise, GE attorney David Kindleberger expressed astonishment when told the extent of the spying; and he linked it to the apparent loss of proprietary information to Pratt & Whitney, a competing manufacturer of aircraft engines. Now all of a sudden, Kindleberger is clamming up. I wonder who got to him? He admits meeting with Draize, but says he never discussed Pratt & Whitney or any competitive situation with Draise. But an attorney who sat in on the meeting supports Draise's version. After an initial flurry of press releases denying all allegations of illegal wiretapping, Cincinnati Bell has become very quiet, and is now unwilling to discuss the matter at all except to tell anyone who asks that "Draise and Gates are a couple of liars who want to get even with us..." And now, the telco suddenly has discovered information about Gates' personal life. Well TELECOM Digest readers, *you* be the judge and decide who is telling the truth. Would a telephone company cooperate with a police intelligence unit and do these things? Could telco employees pull those things off for that many years and their superiors not be aware of it? Patrick Townson
telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (07/31/89)
In a previous issue of the Digest (Vol 9, issue 120: April 3, 1989) I wrote that two former security people of Cincinnati Bell were claiming they had had engaged in numerous illegal taps over a 12 year period at the request of their supervisors at Cincinnati Bell and the Cincinnati Police Department. Cincinnati Bell filed suit against the two men, Leonard Gates and Robert Draize, claiming both were liars out to get even with the company after they had been fired for other reasons. 'Taint necessarily so, said a judge who agreed the charges may have some merit, and permitted the class action suit against Cincinnati Bell to continue this past week. The class action suit claims that Cincinnati Bell routinely invaded the privacy of thousands of people in the area by secretly tapping their phones at the request of police or FBI officials over a twelve year period from 1972 - 1984. The taps were mainly applied against political dissidents during the Viet Nam era, and in more recent years, against persons under investigation by the United States Attorney for southern Ohio, without the permission of a court. Now says the court, depending on the outcome of the class action suit, the criminal trials of *everyone* in the past decade in southern Ohio may have to be re-examined in light of illegal evidence gained by the US Attorney, via the FBI, as a result of the complicity of Cincinnati Bell with that agency, courtesy of Robert Draize and Leonard Gates. The testimony this past week got *very messy* at times. Gates and Draize seem detirmined to tell every dirty thing they know about Cincinnati Bell's security department over the dozen years they worked there. It is a very sad story indeed. See TELECOM Digest V9 #120 dated April 3, 1989 for the full background, and hold your breath, because the stink is going to get worse than ever before it is over and done with. Patrick Townson