The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s file on telephone security measures appears to show the Bureau overlooking an obvious line of inquiry while investigating a leak to the mafia and possible tapped phone lines. While the file indicates that the Bureau checked both the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service’s phones for taps, it indicates they may have overlooked the most obvious possibility: that the culprit was the phone company employee who’d been giving the mafia access to the phone lines.

According to Federal Bureau of Investigation files, a few months before it was abolished, a bug was discovered in the Honolulu offices of the Atomic Energy Commission. The device would not only let someone listen in on phone calls, but any conversations held around the phone - even when it wasn’t in use.

A FOIA release of Federal Bureau of Investigation’s file on counter-surveillance includes an entry describing the White House’s 1954 report that their phones had been tapped. According to the file, the FBI and the phone companies shared more information with each other than with the White House - and they wanted to keep it that way in order to protect the phone company’s reputation and the FBI’s methods.