Cassidy: Pepto-Bismol is necessary to stomach HP

By Mike Cassidy

Mercury News

Three weeks into this Hewlett-Packard spying scandal and my head is spinning.

Enough shoes have dropped to outfit a centipede. With HP brass being hauled before Congress this week, I'm expecting even more stomach-turning revelations.

I hardly know where to start with the imbroglio that seems to have no end. I mean, who knew HP had its own plumbers unit to stop leaks?

Turns out the leaders of the once-revered Silicon Valley company were every bit as paranoid as Richard Nixon -- and every bit as bad at getting away with espionage.

Not to say that HP's skulduggery didn't pay off.

Get this about Dawn Kawamoto. She's the CNet reporter who got the scoop that HP was going to improve business by working on new products and by buying companies that could benefit HP. The company's secrets police infiltrated Kawamoto's e-mail and grabbed up her phone records. And you know what they found?

Laugh all way to court

Yes! That Kawamoto was planning a vacation. And not just any vacation.

``She has made numerous calls to a hotel in Disneyland,'' one of HP's hired guns wrote in an e-mail, according to news accounts.

Ha-ha! Disneyland! Case closed.

The HP CIA operation is part Keystone Cops, part Marx Brothers and part Monty Python's Flying Circus.

We've slipped into the absurd with HP goons tailing board members and reporters, and with the best minds at the company cooking up a fictitious Deep Throat while hatching plans to plant janitors and secretaries in newsrooms to gather intel on evildoers. The company has moved from the Bill (Hewlett) and Dave (Packard) days of management by walking around to the current days of management by skulking around.

Picture the scene where the HP covert ops guys sat around and conjured up ``Jacob,'' a disgruntled HP executive. The gumshoes needed a cover so they could send tantalizing e-mails to Kawamoto to try to smoke out her inside sources.

I'm figuring it went something like a Hollywood screen writers meeting.

``I think we have to figure out who Jacob is, weak, strong, vindictive, a Bill and Dave fan, possibly a lower-level employee,'' one spook wrote to the other.

Stranger than fiction

The e-mail excerpt appeared in a Washington Post story written by Ellen Nakashima and Yuki Noguchi. (Note to Nakashima and Noguchi: You get an e-mail from a guy named Jacob -- delete it.)

By the way, no truth to the rumor HP's sleuths originally wanted to send e-mails from a disgruntled HP executive named ``Carly.''

(I can't tell you who told me so. You know who you are. In fact, HP knows who you are.)

You want really absurd? In a 2005 spasm of spying, former chief executive Carly Fiorina ordered covert ops that apparently led to spies pawing through her own phone records.

Or how about this, according to the Post: At one point, HP's spooks decided to leak details of an upcoming handheld product to Kawamoto to gain her trust.

Yes, they were prepared to leak company secrets to find out who was leaking company secrets.

Even HP's departed chairwoman Patricia Dunn understands that this scandal is the stuff of late-night stand-up. She was inducted last week into the Bay Area Council's Business Hall of Fame. She gave a quick speech peppered with witty zingers.

Keep your name from being ``bandied about in the press with the word `gate' after it,'' she advised. She cracked wise about how the pope's tongue-tripping about Islam has kept the publicity heat off of her.

Good sport, that Dunn. I'm surprised she didn't don a Groucho mustache and glasses for added giggles.

Could be she left them at home -- in her spy kit.