Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [30]
Across the street, members of Congress were also targets of spying. A Senate investigation revealed that a police lieutenant in Washington, D.C., Joseph Shimon, had tapped the telephone of Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, a Democrat who was chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. The question for investigators: Why did Shimon do it?
They found that the police lieutenant wasn’t working for the metropolitan police department when he’d tapped the lines; he was working on his own. Shimon had carved out a unique niche within the department. Although he was a police officer who reported each morning for roll call, he was assigned much of the time to a special investigative unit of the U.S. district attorney for the District of Columbia. He had no full-time boss, and no one in the police department knew where he was each day. By 1946, Shimon had been a lieutenant for less than five years, but he was often free to spend his time as he pleased.
And what pleased Shimon was making money on the side. As the Senate investigation concluded, Shimon was doing freelance spying for paying clients.
Shimon’s saga gets complicated, but the layers of corporate and political intrigue are crucial to understand. They underscore just how valuable a particular piece of intelligence can be in a corporate setting. The information from one wiretap, placed on the right phone at the right time, can be worth billions of dollars. As a result there were—and probably always will be—people willing to pay for the tapping, and people willing to conduct it.
In 1945, Senator Bailey’s Commerce Committee held hearings on the All-American Flag Lines Bill, which would have rolled all the major American air carriers into one national airline. Executives at Pan American Airways were desperate for information on the hearings. Pan American was pushing for the bill, which would be likely to put it in control of the most lucrative market in the world, the United States. It was going head to head with the powerful billionaire Howard Hughes and his Trans World Airlines (TWA), which opposed the bill. Pan Am wanted to know how much influence TWA had to block the proposal in the congressional committee. It had more questions than answers. What is Bailey going to do? Who is he talking to? Does our All-American proposal stand a chance?
Lieutenant Shimon went to work—on his own, without police supervision—for a private detective who in turn had been hired by Sam Pryor, a vice president of Pan American. In effect, Shimon provided the espionage component of Pan American’s Washington lobbying strategy. But that’s not what he told his fellow officers. Since wiretapping was a labor-intensive business—someone has to sit there all day to monitor the recorders—Shimon recruited several other cops to work on the case with him, explaining the wiretapping as a hush-hush investigation for a legitimate congressional inquiry.
Shimon’s team tapped the phones of Senator Bailey’s apartment complex in Georgetown, pulling into the garage of the building and setting up camp in the basement for long hours of eavesdropping. It was boring work, but the men found one way to spice it up. One participant brought a “young lady” to the basement to “keep Shimon company” while he waited.
Shimon’s little group also tapped phones at the luxurious Occidental Hotel, where the freelancing cops listened in on the conversations of a TWA lawyer who had traveled to Washington for the hearings. The attorney used his hotel phone to coordinate strategy, and those listening to the recordings of his calls had advance notice of TWA’s every move. Pan Am now knew what its rival TWA was thinking and what the chairman of the committee was planning. This was a tremendous tactical advantage. But still it wasn’t enough. The All-American Bill never passed.*
Two years later,