Basement Operators

Illegal Surveillance and the History of the Spies Among Us

“If I had a conscience in this business I couldn’t stay in it.”

“There is literally no place within the United States safe” from “illegal snooping of the CIA...and the many other government agencies known as the ‘Intelligence Community,’” author Tad Szulc wrote in his July 1975 article, “The Spy Among Us,” which described how widespread domestic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies violated citizens’ privacy rights. In one example, Szulc detailed a secret operation in the Oval Office circa 1969-1970, code-named “Easy Chair,” in which a laser device had allegedly been found to have transmitted conversations between President Nixon and his aides, apparently without the White House’s knowledge. The intelligence community was already well aware of these types of devices and used them to monitor Americans and collect personal data without court orders. By the 1970s, it became apparent that agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA had been conducting extensive surveillance on activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens under the guise of “national security.”

Szulc’s article also suggested the CIA and other agencies kept files on notable Americans, including civil rights activists, artists, and even members of Congress, for potential subversion, sparking concerns of unchecked governmental power. Despite President Ford’s orders to disclose intelligence practices to investigative panels, certain top-secret details were withheld, maintaining an ongoing cover-up of spying activities. According to the article:

CIA sources say that many “enemies” on the BIGOT list [made up of persons who are regarded as “bigoted” against the agency] have been targets of agency bugging by “Easy Chair” laser devices. The advantage of such devices is that they are usually untraceable and do not constitute actual wiretapping for which, at least in theory, either a court order or a “national security” clearance by the attorney general is required.

The U.S. Congress was interested in the matter of the White House secretly being bugged, apparently without the President’s knowledge, since the laser beam device had been discovered and removed by the Secret Service. The device, according to Szulc, was “implanted in the wall of the Oval Office of the White House...from the inside under an extra coat of paint. It is a very small device about the size of your nail.” Szulc declined to name publicly the foreign-born White House worker he accused of being involved in planting the device “to avoid causing suffering and embarrassment to persons innocently involved in this operation.” Congress would put Szulc under oath and would want to know the name and details of the accused government employee in this White House operation. A new era of mass surveillance was emerging and Congress did not know how to address it, with both private sector operators and law enforcement taking part in the practice of violating the privacy of American citizens.

George Nantes

Another name involved in surveillance was withheld to protect the guilty. The 1976 report of the National Commission for the Review of Federal and State Laws Relating to Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance was the results of two years of work ordered by the U.S. Congress to evaluate the effectiveness of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which governed the use of wiretapping and bugging in the United States, except in cases involving national security, where there were seemingly few, if any, limits. Buried in the giant report and appendices sent to U.S. President Gerald Ford was the story of a man named George Nantes, a pseudonym created to protect his “personal health.” This was an account, the commission promised, that provided “a rare and valuable glimpse into a basement operator’s world.” The commission lacked a window into the world of the private sector electronic surveillance operator and Nantes was more than willing to share his bizarre story, the type of which was not typically included in official government reports.

In May 1975, he spoke with commission staffers for seven hours and explained his history as a self-taught builder and installer of electronic eavesdropping equipment. He was a “man of the street,” “a professional,” they recorded, with craftsmanship that rivaled that of “the big electronics firms” and personal business ethics that followed those of “the straight business world.” The story began to take a strange turn as the staffers relayed his early experiences with working in electronics, one in particular he relished with enthusiasm in the early 1950s: “The boss took us to a whorehouse every morning before work. He brought girls over during business hours, too. We sure worked hard for that guy.”

Perils of Marriage

For some unexplained reason, the commission thought it prudent to delve into the vagaries of Nantes’ personal life. He was married by his early 20s: “What a mistake that was,” he recalled. After two years, he left home by becoming a merchantman, occasionally sending his wife money home “to pay her booze bill.” Returning six months later, he discovered his wife had “scored” with his business partner and forced him out of his company, apparently with the help of his own mother. “After that I was in a real depressed state,” he remembered. “I took up with a girl who was an addict and she turned me on to heroin for five or six years, 1959 to 1964. I supported the habit by stealing and robbing, and they busted me a dozen times or so. Usually I got a suspended sentence, but the last time they sent me to jail. I did 10 months there. I just sat around and cold-turkeyed it, cleaned myself up from the H and it was then that I first got to know the police.” A year after release, Nantes was married for a second time to a “nice” woman whose father had worked under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s European Recovery Program, a foreign aid program for Western Europe commonly known as the Marshall Plan. Nantes founded his own TV repair company, attracted a wealthy clientele and earned slightly over $300 ($3,000 today) per week. This work continued until Nantes was lured away by the promise of larger payouts in the electronic surveillance industry.

At the time of the interview, Nantes was still married but also having an affair with the divorced wife of a famous novelist. “I divide my time in half,” he explained. “Now and then one woman yells about the other, but I just dismiss it from my mind. My wife is not very earthy, not sexually attuned. She floats through life. The other one screams and hates my wife and threatens to kill me if I don’t divorce her.” The irrelevant personal details and opinions continuing to flow, he expressed no remorse about his activities and personal relationships: “I do what I want. They’re all creatures of emotion. In a crisis women break down, cry and sob. They aren’t bright enough to work with me on bugs. My wife says what I’m doing is right because it slows down the drug traffic. The other one says, ‘Wow, your life sure is exciting!’ I say, ‘Come on down to my basement and see just how exciting it is.’” No interviewer of the subject or after-the-fact editor of the written piece thought to interject in the midst of these thoughts on marriage and his sexual preferences with a reminder of their purpose: This is a congressional commission; we are evaluating the omnibus crime bill of 1968. Instead the transmission of immaterial, salacious, and personal details continued unabated.

Personal History vs. the Law

Born in 1928, Nantes grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the son of a second-generation Bolivian father who married a Bolivian woman. They led a “marginal life,” his father working as a restaurateur and exporter-importer. Nantes showed an interest in electronic gadgets at an early age, building his first crystal radio receiver at age 12 and a professional radio the next year. He left high school in 1944 to join the RCA Institutes, an electronic school where he could further study his field of interest. He bribed his way in by giving the organization’s director foreign postage stamps in the hopes that he would ignore Nantes’ young age. By the end of World War II, he sold radios to sailors and joined the U.S. Army in 1947. After being on the receiving end of a racial slur from a sergeant, he went AWOL. He turned himself in after 10 months, spent a year in a military prison, and was released from military service on a bad conduct discharge. Over the next 18 years, Nantes worked his way through several jobs in electronics: doing TV repairs, writing technical documents, and working on radio transmissions. His average take-home pay was between $100-$300 ($945-$2,830 today) a week during this time.

Nantes came to the attention of the commission by way of his illegal activities. He was busted for selling bugging equipment illegally to an undercover officer across state lines in violation of the Federal Wiretap Act, officially known as “Title III.” Nantes was in the middle of drinking coffee at home when several agents appeared and invited him downtown. “They had me cold,” he stated. “I figured I hadn’t done anything wrong and could beat it in court, but I didn’t want to lay out the money. So I talked to them. I gave them a few cases.” He assisted in cases involving the Mafia and enjoyed the experience of testifying and becoming an informant. “I don’t owe the law a thing, but I enjoy wising them up. They told me it would endanger my personal health. Well, I’m not constituted to have a quiet life.” Under condition of anonymity, Nantes agreed to speak with the commission. “Oh, I don’t have any heart-throbbing motivation,” he admitted. “You guys might even revise the law in a way that hurts me, but I’ll still tell you things other guys wouldn’t. It breaks up my week.”

Narcotics Squad

Commission interviewers noted Nantes was chain-smoking during their conversation and wore “beltless navy blue trousers, a half-mod blue jacket and a flowery blue sports shirt open at the neck.” He first became a “basement operator” (or professional wiretapper) in 1967 through an introduction to a policeman working for a county prosecutor’s office. The two discussed surveillance technology and the police officer showed him X-ray images of equipment he wanted Nantes to copy from a well-known basement operator named Zebra. With his curiosity piqued and a large payment promised, Nantes got to work on creating his own surveillance device. “The X-rays were too crude to help,” he explained. “I spent many sleepless nights working out my own design. Finally, after three months, I developed a free-running oscillator with an audio amplifier. It was a little over an inch in diameter, ran off a nine-volt battery for about 30 hours, and transmitted at 115 megahertz. I’d never seen another bug or schematic before, just invented my own.”

Since payment for the device never came through, Nantes sought out another buyer: one of the detectives who had busted him for drug possession. That detective looped in his boss, Sergeant Harry Whorton, and soon Nantes was selling $25 bugs to Whorton’s special narcotics unit. “The narc unit was my bread and butter for nearly two years,” Nantes recalled. “Little by little all the cops in the unit came knocking on my door. I sold them $25 room bugs that cost $6 to build. After a while I studied Zebra’s bugs real well, and some of Jim Zayres’, and some of Century’s. Mine were the best. They wiped out all the rest. And so I progressed into phone bugs, the same oscillators with a trigger switch. Ninety-nine percent of my business came from the narc unit and other city police. I raised my price to $100 for a device that took me 20 minutes to make. The components could have gone into anything—TVs, radios. They were easy to get. The capacitors and transmitters came from Mouser Corp. in California, the mikes from Tibbeths in Maine, that’s just about it.”

His business expanded as the police had more demands for his services, and like the practices of the FBI, Nantes quickly learned that following the law was not a matter of concern when it came to surveillance of targets: “One day the cops asked me to install a telephone device. I did. During 1969 and 1970 I put in lots of phone bugs, taps and a few room bugs for the narc unit. They never mentioned court orders. I figured that was their business. Later I learned they had no court orders, but I never asked them if they were doing illegals. I must have done a half-dozen wiretaps for the narc unit from 1968 to early 1970, and I sold them about $10,000 worth of equipment. They usually paid cash up front. Only once did I take a cop’s personal check, but I took quite a few checks from the unit itself. They kept coming back for more even after they had a whole shitload of the stuff. They said it was hard to get to. This was after 1968. It was like Title III never happened.”

Nantes’ work with the narcotics squad turned him into a cynic regarding the conduct of the police: “One night Danny Alvaroa of the narc unit came to my place. They always wanted things done at inopportune times. Alvaroa took me downtown to a plant they’d set up in a basement. They’d forced the apartment superintendent to let them use the room after they caught him making it with some broad-getting fellated, you might say. The tap they’d put in wasn’t working. I fixed the wiring in 10 minutes and went home. The next morning Alvaroa woke me up and said. ‘We’ve got them!’ Using information from the wire, they’d picked up about 100 kilos of H from Argentina. Later it turned out that they’d pocketed some of the money but arrested the dealers anyway.” Nantes explained how police corruption was widespread in his experience: “Nearly every narc guy I dealt with is in jail now or heading there,” he stated. “That’s 30 or 40 of them. Wharton is in jail. Alvaroa is in jail. Two other guys have killed themselves.”

Nantes’ business partners in the police force ended up being convicted on charges of illegal wiretapping and shaking down suspects for money. “Cops are human,” he explained. “They smoke marijuana like anyone else. I’ve often seen them high at my place. And they turn their back on crimes their informants commit. If a cop earning $15,000 to $20,000 gets offered a bribe worth 10 years’ salary, he’ll take it for sure. Why should he be different from the rest of us, even with the oath he takes? But cops do have a mentality of their own. You ask them why they steal money from a dope dealer and they say it’s ‘dirty’ money. If they shake down a whore or a bookie, who are they hurting? Police departments are closed corporations. Sons learn from their fathers. They think they’re fighting crime when they steal money from a bookie.”

Illegal Business

Through his association with Wharton, Nantes came into contact with two private detectives, pseudonymously referred to in the report as Rooney and Cummings. The ex-cops visually resembled the comic strip police detective Dick Tracy and his sidekick Pat Patton, according to Nantes, who referred to them as “slimy” individuals. He worked with the corrupt private eyes for several years, beginning in 1968, after Title III took effect. Nantes pretended to be a telephone repairman on a wiretapping job for them; soon after entering the target building, someone saw him and asked for identification. “I didn’t know Bolivians worked on telephones,” the man said, surprised. Nantes replied: “Oh, there’s more of us all the time.” The phone that was to be tapped was not functional and consequently, Nantes was not paid. He got his revenge on Rooney and Cummings on the next job, where he installed a faulty drop-in microphone in the house of an old woman whose son had reportedly embezzled millions of dollars. Nantes was paid $300 and Rooney sat listening to the inoperative bug for a few days. Rooney happened to see the main target enter the home one day and tailed him to the Bahamas; Nantes refused his offer of $500 to drug the man and bring him back to the United States.

Unaware that Nantes had tried to undermine them, Rooney and Cummings continued to offer him work, including the bugging of a dispatcher phone in a warehouse. “The two dimwits tripped a police alarm and I found myself staring into a .38 revolver,” Nantes remembered. “I acted like Cummings was my boss and we were working late at the warehouse. When Cummings played his part okay, the cops left. We bugged the phone at the request of the foreman and put a tape recorder in his office. The foreman never caught the dispatcher doing anything wrong. One day he called me, though, to say he was depressed by all the bad things he overheard his men saying about him in the dispatcher’s office.”

The last non-police job Nantes told the commission about had to do with a leader of a musical ensemble whose wife was “screwing everybody in the neighborhood.” The bandleader brought the idea of bugging his wife’s bedroom to a telephone repairman. The repairman introduced the husband to Nantes, who in turn brought in his two shady private eyes to facilitate the illegal job. Nantes was paid $2,000 and conceded that “it was a bad job. The problem with illegals is you can’t handle the accidental crap—in this case it was a radio station lobe (signal) that interfered with my transmitter. For $50 I hired a junkie to yank out the bug. He got caught by the landlady and swallowed it. I said, ‘Don’t give me any sad story, vomit it up.’ He did, wire and all.”

Debugging

Nantes explained that he would only occasionally sell hardware to private businesses in small quantities. He would also sometimes take on debugging work, looking for surveillance devices installed by others. “I never found anything,” he admitted. “I charge $500 a phone and $200 a room. I don’t really want to do this kind of work so I charge what the traffic will bear.”

Obsessed with sports cars, Nantes used the money he made in surveillance towards the purchase of an Alfa Romeo, a Spider and a Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3 with a “super engine.” Through building this collection, he came into contact with Ralph Fields, the owner of a luxury car import shop. Fields called him one day, relaying the request that a friend of his, with the improbable pseudonym Severina Dufy, wanted her apartment bugged. “I went over there and the doorman checked me out real good,” Nantes recalled. Eventually making his way upstairs, Nantes knocked on the door and it opened, and suddenly there was a naked woman standing in front of him.