In the past I have purposely avoided making any personal observations and/or comments about these events and the stories surrounding them.  The time is now right to make those observations and comments.

The enormous damage caused to my family and me cannot be forgiven.   These events are an insult to all my friends and associates...  an insult to the United States of America...  and an insult to the world community.  Read on...

Marty

Placing the cursor on most photographs reveals a description or my thoughts.

As I look at this story today, 20 January 2005, it struck me that trying to put 70 years of my life into one chapter is too unwieldy.   Seven chapters should do and they are...

Chapter One     The Beginning...
Chapter Two     The U S Recording Scandal...
Chapter Three   Bugging the FBI...
Chapter Four    The Criminal Case...
Chapter Five     The Civil Case...
Chapter Six       Repercussions...
Chapter Seven My personal observations...

Deciding where to start was the most difficult part of this story.  I decided to start at the beginning.

Born in 1935, the second son of a plumber, my family and I lived in the the hard coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania.  We were surrounded by families from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and many other coal miner producing countries.  Having the Kaiser name didn't help me much while these countries were being torn to shreds before and during World War II.  The hatred expressed towards me by neighborhood children was enormous.  As a child I had no idea that their animosity was anything other than the norm.   You will read more about this later.

My childhood was a time of roller skate keys, Radio Flyer wagons, smashing tin cans flat for the war effort, hanging in trees, digging tunnels, Zeppelins, kite flying, watching the big steam locomotives as they passed over my street, smashing a penny or two flat with their huge wheels, building rubber band powered airplanes and spending summers on a lake in the Pocono mountains.

During my pre-teen and early teen years I was fascinated by U control model airplanes and eventually had a large collection of them.  The engines I started with were spark powered complete with points, coil and condenser.  As radio controlled airplanes began to appear I found electronics more interesting.  Shortly after the end of WW2 I received my amateur radio license W3VCG and still hold those call letters today.

I can't say my school years were a shining beacon but at least I got through them.  In prep school XX became my co-dependent good buddy.  He was born without eyes but in spite of this I was able to get him involved in amateur radio too.  I took the glass out of the meters of an old transmitter/receiver and he was able to tune the transmitter by the pressure the pointer exerted on his fingertips.  He showed me how the loss of one sense is compensated for by the others.  We had lots of fun together with this incident being the most humorous.  I had my Mom's hand-me-down 51 Caddy and would drive it to a long riverside park on the other side of the river from Wilkes-Barre.  I would then allow my blind friend to take the wheel and speed up and down the park... usually with his left arm out of the window banging wildly on the side of the car while grinning from ear to ear. We were never caught but you can imagine a police man's expression as he approached the car.

I graduated from prep school in 1954 and made two attempts at college... both of which were not very successful.

While attending Rider College in Lawrenceville, N.J. I married a girl I had met at my summer home in the Pocono's and felt I'd better get a job quick. 60 years later we are still married.

Dr. Klensch, did basic engineering on a variety of projects...  and many other truly brilliant minds.  My job was to be their "hands."  I designed and built much of the circuitry that permitted all of these men to continue with serious development. 

We had unlimited use of vacuum chambers, glass working equipment and machine shops. After evaporating virtually every combination of chemicals I settled on Cesium Iodide doped with a bit Thallium as the most efficient evaporated phosphor. While working with these chemicals I conceived a totally new way to do image conversion. I wrote it up (see below), handed it to Dr. Morton who passed it up the line. It came back with a note that it had no commercial value but to be on the safe side they would issue a public technical note to destroy its patent value. I receive a "thanks" of $75.00.

RCA TN N0.:   
476          
September 1961

VIDEO PICKUP ARRANGEMENT
Martin L. Kaiser III

It is my understanding that when the Russians sent their first satellite around the back side of the moon they used this system because of its extreme simplicity.

In our group I remember four other technicians,  each with their own expertise.  We worked well together as a team and although I was always sticking my nose (comments) into many,  many projects other than mine it gave me the opportunity to be part of some incredibly interesting projects...  the end results of which became technology and products we take for granted today.

Obviously,  I turned my amateur radio interests towards amateur television.  I wrote extensively for technical journals, RCA in-house technical publications and radio amateur magazines and had my own ham TV station on the air.  Another amateur television enthusiast,  William Haldane (Bill),  and I became close friends.  He was part of RCA Service Company,  a group that put our ideas into the field for further trials.  At that time, Dr. Klensch and others, including me, were developing several schemes involving VVLF technology...  below 100HZ...  we used to call them "cycles" back then. I spent an enormous amount of time in the library scouring over Russian and German scientific papers and although I do not read or speak either language... show me a schematic and I'll tell you what the words most likely said. One interesting item I uncovered was the Germans use of strobe lights to down our aircraft. They would point the strobe spotlight at our aircraft and adjust the speed of the flash so it appeared to the pilot the bombers engines had stopped. The pilot would then jam the throttle forward not realizing he was already near full power and put the plane into a flat spin causing it to crash. On the ground, the German equipment operators were either losing consciousness or barfing all over the place. They soon realized that the frequency they had chosen, close to 6.8HZ, was the resonant frequency of the human body and it was the infrared component of the light causing the problem. They solved the problem by wearing filter glasses that blocked the infrared component.

At the lab, we stumbled across that problem too and although we were generating tens of kilowatts of audio at the 6.8HZ frequency lab personnel were walking into walls, tripping over chairs and barfing. We decided to stay well away from the critical frequency and conduct our research elsewhere.

Since we were all pretty much playing it "by ear" we had more fun than anyone should have in one lifetime.  Here is a good example.  Several hundred yards behind the main building was a small pond.  A bridge crossed the pond and in the middle of the bridge was a small house for test equipment.  A hydrophone was lowered from the house into the pond.  Two hundred yards away a 10 foot long by four inch diameter rod was driven flush with the ground.  Next to it lay a small loudspeaker connected to a microphone in the pond house.   My job was to drop a 10 pound cannon ball onto the stake when Klensch yelled "go" and he,  in turn,  would measure the shock wave.  So there I was in the middle of a field repeatedly dropping a cannon ball on the ground.   Someone inside the main building noticed me and called authorities. Soon an ambulance was fast approaching across the field.  My explanation caused all concerned side splitting laughter.  After the ambulance left Klensch and I continued with the cannon ball dropping experiment.

One day Bill Haldane approached me and asked if I'd like to go to Trinidad. Neither he nor I knew where that was but it sounded interesting. When I got home I grabbed the Encyclopedia and found out.  After discussing it with with my wife I returned with a firm "YES."  A month or two later Bill again approached me and advised that Trinidad would not accept our presence and wondered if I would like to go to Antiqua.  I didn't know where that was either but again said yes.  A month or two later he told me that Antigua wouldn't accept our presence.  He mentioned RCA had decided to set up the project on Barbados where there was a small U.S. Navy base and they simply would not tell the Barbadian government about the project.  He asked if I would go there and I responded in the affirmative even thought I had no idea what the "Project" was all about.  Finally I was given a briefing about a new high frequency (1 to 30 MHz)  "Over the Horizon Radar" (OHR)  an RCA technician/ham had conceived.  Essentially it was to study the "flutter effect" caused by objects moving through the ionosphere. In those days, thanks to the early design of limiter stages in the receiver, one could readily hear the effect when an airplane flew between an FM transmitter and FM receiver or see the effect when an airplane flew between a TV transmitter and TV receiver.  My job was to see if any useful information could be extracted from the flutter (due to the early design of limiter stages in the receiver).  I later learned that the two islands had turned us down because it was during the Cuban missile crisis and they did not want to antagonize their friend, Cuba.

I was transferred to RCA Service Company and sent to Burlington,  Massachusetts to check out the hardware.  When I got there, to my astonishment,  NOTHING relating to the project was there!  Within three months I appropriated or stole (allocated but not yet delivered...  midnight raids, you know) and assembled all of the equipment needed in two 40 foot trailers.  Finally the two trailers were ready to be put on ships headed towards Barbados and Jamaica.  My wife and I closed up the house and along with our 3 and 5 year old children flew, on probably one of the first 707's to take to the air, to Barbados.

As soon as we got settled I went to the Navy base to announce my presence.  The Captain of the base responded with total surprise.  NO ONE had informed him of our intention to set up on "his" base (north coast)!  It turned out that the four RCA advance men never left Bridgetown (south coast), the capital city of Barbados,  but instead spent their time enjoying the wonderful Barbadian rum and the strikingly beautiful Barbadian women!  I was truly on my own.  After some serious negotiating, the Captain gave me a few hundred square feet of space on which
to set up my project.

In a few weeks the antennas arrived aboard the same 707 I had arrived on. These consisted of four 50+ foot tower pieces and hundreds of pounds of rope, cable and hardware. It took the pilot, copilot, flight engineer, all the stewardesses, all the ground crew people I could gather and myself to get the pieces out of the airplane. Naturally, rum and beer flowed freely.  They were then loaded on flatbed trucks and taken to my little piece of "land."  My antenna site was to be on the beach 120 feet below but there was a major problem awaiting.  The beach was covered by hundreds of Manchineel trees, a highly poisonous tropical tree that bears a very poisoness apple. One drop of the sap from either the tree or apple raises a blister on the skin within seconds. My son picked up one of the apples and threw it. He then rubbed his eye and wound up with a totally swollen and closed eye that oozed green glop for a month.

The trailer finally arrived by an interisland steamer (shades of the African Queen) and, you guessed it, there was no tractor on the Island with which to pull it. I must have looked like Buster Keaton getting the container off. When they raised the container a few feet it began to swing from side to side and one of those sides was the ocean! Finally on one long swing the Captain on the ship ordered the crane brakes released and with a load BANG! the container was now solidly on Barbadian soil. Several trips to the junk yard solved the tractor problem.  The one I found also had no brake release compressor so I constructed a small gasoline powered compressor to do just that.  The trailer was then towed,  without brakes,  over mountainous terrain to my site at the Navy base.  My caravan consisted of myself in a 1958 VW waving a very large red flag out of the window followed by the tractor/trailer.  As I passed through several small villages many Barbadians ran out to the street clapping their hands and jumping wildly in joy thinking the island had been or was going to be taken over by Communist!

After the trailer was in place I began installing four (two sets of two) HUGE log periodic antennas.  Two were 150 foot long 1 to 30 MHz vertical log periodic curtains and two were huge,  and very heavy,  3 to 30 MHz horizontal log periodic beams mounted on the 100 foot towers that supported the curtain.  They were to be supported by 1/2 inch nylon rope.  Nearly every night Barbadian fishermen would "liberate" some of my beautiful rope.  To solve that problem I made several meaningless medallions that my workmen had to hang around their necks while working at the antenna site otherwise they would become impotent.  When word got out about that, the thefts stopped IMMEDIATELY!  To see more about the antennas and trailers go to my NOSTALGIA  page.

My family and I settled into the wonderful Barbadian life but the peace didn't last long.  One day while working on the antennas I heard the drone of a four engine airplane and looked up to see a Russian bomber at about 1,000 feet with its bomb bay doors wide open and a very large camera sticking out. Others obviously saw the plane too because it wasn't long before the American Ambassador was banging on my door.  Since my wife is the politician of the two of us I let her handle the incident.  Sure enough,  after a few of her special cherry-cheesecake pies we were back on track.  Those pies seemed to be the magical answer to the many other situations that would arrive.  In record breaking time I had the equipment up and running.  All of the equipment worked fine and we were ready for the next step. That phase was up to someone else. Also, we had to wait for the advent of computers.

The Russians tried the system for awhile and theirs became affectionally known as the "woodpecker" to us radio amateurs because of the sound it made as it swept across the radio bands. A couple of years ago my copy of MICROWAVE magazine arrived and lo and behold my system is STILL in operation.  Again see the NOSTALGIA  page for that article. Another version of the system was revealed in a 2002 issue of POPULAR SCIENCE that used the cell telephone and GPS systems for detection of stealth and other aircraft.

On my return to the U.S. I approached RCA Laboratories to change my title from Senior Technician to Associate Engineer in view of the fact that I had, under very difficult conditions and circumstances, acted as international diplomat and single handedly managed, designed, built, refined and operated a major project.  They essentially said that since I did not have an engineering degree I was a "certifiable dummy" and my title could not be changed.  That was the end of my career with RCA.

For a brief period I worked at Telerad Manufacturing in Flemmington, New Jersey, a division of the Lionel Corporation (toy trains), where I developed and oversaw the manufacturing of, among other products, the command receiver for the Atlas missile.

Petrovend Corporation asked Telerad (me) to develop possibly the worlds first dollar bill changer. They wanted to put the changer into all of their gas pumps. The unit I designed worked great but by the time it was finished... credit cards made the scene. Petrovend dropped the project in favor of credit cards.

I returned to college to receive my degree in Business Administration.   Most likely with RCA's comment in mind along with being more mature, I totally surprised my wife and myself by spending all remaining semesters on the Deans List.  While at college I took up flying and on graduation looked for a job in the field of avionics. Narco Aviation Products hired me to work at their marine facility in Cockeysville, Maryland. The company, Enac Triton, was essentially a one man show. I eventually thought, if he can do it, so can I! That job lasted about three months.

One day, in 1964, I announced to my wife that I was starting my own company. Naturally, she went into a panic. Not knowing exactly how to start a company, I picked up the telephone book and called the maintenance department of the first industry listed... Armco Steel. They agreed to give me a try and handed me an inoperative Curtis Immerscope.  An Immerscope is a device that ultrasonically looks through a red hot steel ingot to find flaws or air bubbles. I took it home in the trunk of my 57 Chevy, cleaned it up and replaced all the high voltage wiring that had become brittle from extreme heat. The maintenance manager, Fred Vogelgesang, was ecstatic and told me to "sit" while he called his equivalent in other companies to tell them he had finally found the man they had been looking for. Within weeks I had over fifty industrial customers within easy driving distance. Initially, I was uncertain about how much to charge my customers. One day at 2:00 AM I received an emergency call from Armco Steel. Their vacuum degassing furnace had been damaged by some molten steel in the wrong place. This furnace was thirty feet in diameter and forty feet deep. Its load cell system (scale) was accurate to within less than one pound at 100,000 pounds! I climbed down inside the furnace and found the burned wiring. A few quick repairs had it up and running in no time. I billed them $200.00. A few days later the maintenance manager called and asked me to stop by... I did. He told me that Armco would have lost roughly $200,000.00 (1965 $s) if the steel awaiting the degassing furnace had hardened were it not for my timely and prompt repairs. He handed the invoice back to me and told me to add another zero! I WAS ON MY WAY!!! Obviously, I was wrong in charging only an hourly rate for my time when I should be charging for the value of the service from the customers prospective.

My customers included steel mills, copper refineries, bottling companies, plastic companies, ice cream cone manufacturers, plastic and paper cup manufacturers, canning companies, veneer manufacturers, breweries and nearly 100 more. My 57 Chevy was a blue streak Earl Scheib Special (that was a "paint your whole car including the tires for $19.95" company... just kidding about the tires)! When called by my first brewery I learned very quickly that when the "new" beer comes down the pipes very early in the morning it is was mandatory for all employees, including me, to drink as much beer as possible while the machinery cooled down. I was on a first name basis with many famous cockroaches. In a brewery it impossible to get rid of those little critters even with soapy superheated steam. It was after one of those brewery trips that I got lost in downtown Baltimore (I can't imagine why!). I passed a gate that said "U S Army Intelligence, Fort Holabird." Hey, perhaps they too had something to fix. I drove around the property until I found a door that said "Supplies." A simple knock on that door put me into the "intelligence business." After repairing shelf upon shelf of equipment and noticing the allocation tag on each showing the value (price), I approached the powers to be and asked if they would consider my manufacturing for them exactly what they wanted... and at a greatly reduced price. My offer was immediately accepted and I was now in the intelligence equipment manufacturing business starting with the UAA-1 and 1059 miniature audio amplifiers.

Miniature transmitters (eavesdropping/bugging devices) intrigued me and I manufactured a wide variety of them. It didn't take long after I got into the bug building business for me to see the potential danger of those little devices so I decided I'd better get busy and start manufacturing bug detectors or countermeasure equipment to find them. Marketing my products was a snap since I could walk into virtually every intelligence agency in the Baltimore/Washington/Virginia area. I also began teaching courses on bugging and bug detection at Fort Holabird and that gave me access to other good marketplaces.

At this point in time I also began manufacturing bomb detection and disposal equipment.  I have decided to add this story as a side bar so it does not detract from the FBI story. You may view it by clicking on the title Side Bar A - Bomb Story in the chapter indexes.

By the mid-70's I had close to 200 customers (I know this because I put a list of them together for my criminal trial). They included corporations large and small and foreign, federal, state and local governments. I did many high level sweeps that got lots of good press.

My fame spread internationally and in 1974 the Government sent me to Egypt to train various services there. Egypt is a very beautiful country albeit poor. My training was extensive and graciously accepted.

Once firmly established in the intelligence equipment manufacturing business several magazine, news magazine and newspaper articles appeared about my company. It was a VERY satisfying time but it invited many people who were mildly crazy and some who were totally insane. For those I contacted their spouses or relatives suggesting they be hospitalized... and many were. One character turned out to be a professional litigant who was seeking affidavits to incriminate the Baltimore City Police Department. He left by air route. I later learned that the City of Baltimore settled out of court with him for $33,000.00.

One sad fellow was convinced the Martians were following him. I built a Martian Ray Detector for him hoping that might ease his pain and paranoia. He returned to my shop several times... each in a more depressed state. On one occasion he even parked in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel to try to escape them. Finally, in desperation, he used a pair of ordinary gas pliers to pull out one of his molars thinking that was the homing device the Martians were using. He wrapped it in aluminum foil so the Martians couldn't track it and brought it to my shop. Out of curiosity I had my dentist X-ray the tooth and that revealed only a pin (antenna?). His wife joined him on his next visit and she and I decided on the obvious next step... the hospital.

In the early 70s a disheveled man wearing mismatched jacket and pant and tennis shoes showed up at my door. Thinking he was just another unbalanced person I told him I had some sensitive material on my desk and asked if he would return in an hour. I used that time trying to figure out what to do with him. It was Edwin Duncan (now deceased) owner and President/Chairman of Northwestern Bank head quartered in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He told me he was having security problems at his bank and was afraid the IRS was bugging him. I agreed to train his security office, Jerry Starr (also now deceased), who in turn purchased a quantity of countermeasure equipment. Jerry eventually called me from the bank's home base in North Wilkesboro and asked if I would come to the bank and go through a sweep with him. He instructed me to go to the Baltimore/Washington International (BWI) airport and a company plane would pick me up and take me to North Carolina. I was impressed. Sure enough a twin engine turboprop showed up and ferried me to North Carolina.

On landing at their home airport in North Wilkesboro I noticed the pilot push a button on the instrument panel and the doors of the very LARGE hanger ahead slid open. Inside the hanger were at least six, and probably more, beautiful white airplanes each with the Northwestern Bank logo on the tail. They ranged in size from a four engine Fairchild turboprop down to a classic Twin Beech. I was very, very impressed but wondered... what is a small North Carolina country bank doing with all these airplanes? Jerry later revealed that one of them had been set aside for North Carolina Senator Sam Irvin of Watergate fame. We performed an extensive sweep of all buildings and did indeed locate a device in the locked office of the Comptroller. I left finding the actual device to Jerry and returned to Baltimore in the same airplane.

As years went by I learned a great deal about Duncan. He turned out to be a super patriot and used the banks enormous resources to fund various special operations conducted in foreign country's (most likely that is why he kept the IRS at bay). For example, in 1972, while visiting a friend with the Dade County (Miami) Bomb Squad I passed through the airport concourse and noticed a banner saying "Fly to the Cayman Islands... $62.00 round trip." Noting that I could get there and back in one day, I grabbed a flight. On landing in Cayman I knew that this is where I wanted to be. On my return trip I began scuba diving with Bob Soto. In time, I switched to a new company run by one of his dive masters. Several years later I again switched to a new dive operation that had a dive boat more to my liking. The dive master and I became very close friends. One day we got into a conversation about my work and he revealed that when he was a youngster he and several of his friends were snorkeling in a small lake located on the inland side of the main road across from where Laguna del Mar Condominiums now stands and they stumbled upon a huge underwater cache of weapons. He and friends, put a machine gun on each shoulder and marched into town. Word of the incident swiftly reached Jim Bodden, the father of the Cayman Islands, and he knew exactly who to contact to solve the problem, Duncan. Duncan grabbed plans for one of his existing banks, filled in the lake with marle (crushed limestone) and stuck one of his banks on it. SOME CORK! The bank was put up with such speed there was no time to change the design and it wound up with the drive-in-window on the wrong side (they drive on the left in Cayman).

Feeling particularly spry one day I called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and told him I manufactured products that might be of interest to him. He promptly invited me to visit him at headquarters. Walking into his office I immediately noticed that his desk was on a four inch pedestal and the legs on the sofa in front of the desk had been sawed off. I sat on the arm of the sofa and looked at him eye to eye. I think he liked that. He passed me on to their intelligence support office where I met XX. XX took me to the U.S. Recording Company and explained how to do business with the FBI through that company. Business went along fine until the Omnibus Crime Bill (Title III) was passed in 1968. Upon reading it, I immediately saw that I could not deal with apparent commercial concerns such as U.S. Recording. The FBI gave me a rubber stamp that essentially said "This order complies with the provisions of the Omnibus Crime Bill." Seeing real problems with that arrangement, any equipment ordered through U.S. Recording was delivered DIRECTLY to the FBI with the invoice going to U.S. Recording. During one of my many visits to the FBI technical section I noticed one of my invoices sitting on XX's desk and it was marked up a substantial percentage. I thought that was strange but paid no further attention to it.

In 1972 a company called Audio Intelligence Deices (AID) made its appearance. Their catalog claimed they could make "off the shelf" delivery... an apparent violation of Title III (Omnibus Crime Bill... it is illegal to manufacture, assemble, possess or offer for sale any device primarily designed for surreptitious interception of oral communications UNLESS you are under contract with a federal, state or local government). Having been warned on numerous occasions that I could not manufacture any device unless I had the contract in hand first, I immediately brought this apparent conflict to the attention of one of the very U.S. Attorney Generals' who had warned me.

Built into the Omnibus Crime Bill (Title III) was an automatic five year review period. In early 1975 I was contacted by investigators XX and XX of the U.S. House Select Committee on Intelligence. They asked that I prepare a statement detailing my observations of the effectiveness of the Omnibus Crime Bill. During our conversation I mentioned how I was dealing with the FBI through U.S. Recording, the rubber stamp and the incident about the marked up invoice. I prepared a statement primarily asking why AID was permitted to inventory and market "off the shelf" equipment while I could not. After my statement was prepared I contacted the CIA and FBI to see if there were any problems with my appearing before the Committee. The CIA asked for a days delay (a huge snowstorm saw to that) and then gave me the O.K. The statement was turned over to the investigators and a day was set for my appearance before the Committee.

Upon taking a seat to read my prepared statement, to my astonishment, it had been completely rewritten! The new statement attacked the FBI and made no mention whatsoever of AID. I immediately told XX that I was NOT going to read that statement. He instructed me to go to an ante room and repair it wherever I felt it was needed. Not anticipating this level of deception I had not brought a copy of my original statement. If I had, I most certainly would have read that instead. Given little time to repair a non-repairable statement, I did the best I could. When I read the revised statement all of the Congressmen looked at each other, me and the paper in front of them, wondering what was happening. To this day I do not know which of the three statements was read into the Congressional Record and... quite frankly, I don't give a damn.

On returning to my office I telephoned FBI Director Kelly (he replaced Hoover who had died) and requested a meeting with him. Two other high level FBI officials were present. I later read the internal FBI communications about that meeting. One of the men wanted to seriously deal with the U.S. Recording problem while the other wanted to execute me on the spot!

Shortly afterwards, two FBI agents showed up at my plant and tried to get me to withdraw my testimony. Every half hour one agent would leave the room to go to the "bathroom" i.e. change the tape in his recorder. He didn't even have the common sense to flush the toilet that was on the other side of the wall from my office to cover his activities. They tried to force me to sign their statement. I initially refused but later agreed to sign it with the statement "I have partially prepared the above statement." That got them out the door.

Shortly after that incident a "private detective" called and asked if I would show him how to three wire a telephone. We met in a conference room at a local motel in Towson. He handed me a screwdriver and I handed it right back to him and told him if he wanted to learn the process HE would have to do the work. About that time I noticed the toes of a pair of wing-tipped shoes at the bottom of the curtain that separated the room. Finally that person entered the room and, along with the other, tried to force me to make the modifications. I declined and departed. What a bunch of nonsense.

In a few weeks just about every common criminal in the Baltimore area began showing up at my plant. None got in the door. The FBI must have covertly informed these scum bags they were being wiretapped by the FBI and Kaiser could fix their problems. This type of nonsense went on for years.

In the midst of all the various intelligence agencies efforts to do me in, I received a warning from a credible agency friend that the Government was going to charge me with an unspecified crime.  That warning resulted in this letter to Attorney General Levi. 

March 23, 1976

Hon. Edward Levi
Attorney General of the United States
Department of Justice
Washington, D. C.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

It is with great hesitation that I write to you, however, I believe that I am in serious trouble and that you are the only person who will be able to assist me.

For over ten years, Martin L. Kaiser, Inc. has been a major supplier of electronic countermeasure, surveillance and clandestine bomb detection equipment to law enforcement agencies from the federal level downward. Among my customers, and these but a few, were the CIA, Department of Defense, FBI, State Department, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, Coast Guard, etc. In June, 1975, the National Wiretap Commission, operating under a Congressional mandate, received my business records under threat of subpoena. These records were subsequently brought to the attention of the House Select Committee on Intelligence by the National Wiretap Commission. As a result, it became publicly known that the FBI purchased its electronic countermeasure and surveillance equipment through a front known as the U. S. Recording Company. This disclosure has been of extreme embarrassment to the FBI, but I can assure you it is not an embarrassment of my making. I am sure you are well aware of the media's treatment of subsequent events.

Since this fact became known, my business has fallen to virtually zero. No federal agency or, for that matter, local agency will even discuss purchases of equipment with me. I can only assume, but cannot conclusively prove, that the FBI has "passed the word."It is not however, this event and the subsequent economic loss which are of primary concern, for I do engage in other business activities which will carry me through this trying time. Recently, a person of known reliability has pointedly warned me that I am to be made a test case under the criminal wiretap provisions of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Act. Being thoroughly familiar with the complicated and often conflicting provisions of that Act, I am fully aware of the danger existing to anyone who has committed themselves to the manufacture of electronic surveillance equipment.

I have never knowingly violated and have always strictly insisted on compliance with the provisions of the Omnibus Bill. I am firmly convinced that I am not presently violating the Bill, either. However, because of its complexity, my vulnerability, the FBI's pique, the new media's pressure, and the warning relayed to me, quite frankly, I am indeed worried. Although I know full well, based on previous attempts to receive clarification of the Bill, it is not the normal business of the Justice Department to give a "clean bill of health" to a citizen, I indeed wonder if there would be some way for you to advise me whether, under the wildest stretch of imagination, I am contravening any provision of the Omnibus Bill. Although I am reconciled to being driven out of this business, I desperately hope that I will not have to go through a trial in the process.

As mentioned previously, I also manufacture clandestine bomb detection equipment, again, having done this for federal and local agencies. Through a rather lengthy chain of events, the FBI now heads the National Bomb Program. Attempts to contact the FBI immediately after the LaGuardia explosion (which occurred well after my Congressional testimony) resulted in the most callous response I have ever received to one of my offers of assistance. The implications are hideous and further support my desire to resolve the issues as promptly as possible.

As a citizen who has consistently demonstrated his support of the law enforcement community and, therefore, his country, I need your help. Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.

Respectfully,

Martin L. Kaiser
President

MLK:nre

Basically, Levi responded by saying... You do what you think is correct... and if you're wrong, we'll arrest you. Not very comforting.

Within months of my testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence my business of manufacturing eavesdropping and countermeasure equipment fell to ZERO! Fortunately, I had the ability to shift into the manufacture of bomb detection and disposal equipment, a marketplace the intelligence community couldn't and wouldn't dare try to control. Heh, heh... was I wrong... again!