A vigilant internal security force fights industrial spying
If things keep going the way they have been lately, the next John Le Carré novel might feature not agents from the British Secret Service or the CIA but spies from the gray-flanneled ranks of International Business Machines Corp.
Consider what happened last week. First thing Monday morning. IBM officials confronted three high-ranking employees at their desks. They charged them with trying to sell secrets about IBM's new personal computer and fired them on the spot. Later that day the firm sued the three in a New York State court in an effort to block them from using confidential IBM information for personal profit.
Only three months earlier. IBM security men helped the FBI pull off another sting by nabbing five employees of Hitachi, Ltd., and Mitsubishi Electric Corp., two leading Japanese electronics firms. They were accused of conspiring to transport stolen IBM property out of the U.S. In the same investigation, a middle manager of National Advanced Systems, a subsidiary of California-based National Semiconductor Corp., was arrested for receiving stolen goods. Last week IBM filed suit against Hitachi and National Semiconductor, charging them with unfair competition through the use of confidential IBM materials.
Sting II came as a shock because the three employees dismissed last week were very highly placed in the company and had broad access to classified material. The accused: Lewis Eggebrecht, a senior engineer who was chief architect of the IBM personal computer, the company's fastest seller; Peter Stearns, another senior engineer, who headed an important product-development team; and William Erdman. an office-systems product-line manager.
The first hint that IBM had a serious new security problem came in an Aug. 12 phone call to the company from Martin Alpert, president of Tecmar, Inc., an electronics firm in Cleveland. Alpert said that his company had been approached by IBM's Erdman with an offer of what appeared to be confidential information. IBM officials persuaded Alpert to play along with Erdman and covertly tape their negotiations. IBM Security Director Richard Mainey planned the ruse and equipped Alpert with a recorder.
Tecmar is one of a fast-growing legion of companies that manufacture supplementary products for use with the IBM personal computer, including hardware to enhance its performance. According to court papers filed by IBM, Erdman told Tecmar that he and some senior IBM technical personnel were planning to leave the company. Without telling IBM, they had already set up their own computer-equipment company, Bridge Technology, Inc. Erdman proposed to sell Tecmar some 40 designs for add-on products for the IBM personal computer, including plans for a so-called combination board that, among other things, would improve the machine's memory capability. Erdman allegedly boasted that with his designs some of the products would be "out on the street before IBM comes out with them."