Help Yourself! ... a Story of FBI Corruption

Copyright 2024 Martin L. Kaiser III.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1761-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1763-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1762-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024918477

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I will be as harsh as the truth

and uncompromising as justice.

¹

William Lloyd Garrison (1805—1879)

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten: Bugging the FBI ...

Chapter Eleven: The Civil Case ...

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Bibliography

FOREWORD

Marty Kaiser grew up in a blue-collar working family in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He was the typical patriotic American with a love for his country and a dream to someday make a difference. He was to become the United States government’s top technical eavesdropping spymaster. He could craft a bug, or listening device, no one could find, or build a system that would detect devices planted by foreign governments.

Marty’s US government clients for surveillance and countersurveillance equipment included the who’s who of the three-letter covert US intelligence agencies. He was the equivalent of Agent Q in the British James Bond movies.

Marty Kaiser is also a man of ethics and integrity. When called to testify before the House Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the FBI’s purchasing procedures, he simply told the truth in an effort to assist the Committee with its investigation. That testimony would place him on a collision course with internal FBI corruption at the highest levels and make him the target of shocking retribution.

Because of his mastery of technical eavesdropping, Marty was recruited by Walt Disney Productions/Touchstone Pictures to provide technical support for the surveillance devices portrayed in the movie Enemy of the State. The film is an excellent portrayal of the power of government secrecy and surveillance, and the consequences of its abuse. How ironic it is that the theme of the film would be played out in real life with the advent of the NSA domestic spy program, which secretly arose out of the unbridled US Patriot Act. NSA surveillance of innocent US citizens would indeed become a reality. The FBI would begin secret, warrantless searches of American homes and businesses. The CIA would operate secret prisons worldwide under horrific conditions. All this would be done without constitutional validation.

Help Yourself!…A Story of FBI Corruption is a fascinating, uncensored, and refreshingly candid story of a man who rose to be considered the US government’s top expert on eavesdropping. It is the story of a man who went up against the Goliath of government corruption alone, and paid the price for refusing to back down from the truth. Help Yourself!…A Story of FBI Corruption is the story of how a government can become alarmingly corrupted by the abuse of secrecy and the addiction to the power of its agents. These agents attempted to destroy the business, reputation, and family of a true American patriot who wanted to serve his country. In Marty Kaiser’s case, they messed with the wrong man.

Kevin M. Shipp,

Former CIA Officer

Author of From the Company of Shadow: CIA Secrecy and Operations and Twilight of the Shadow Government.

PROLOGUE

Now that my autobiography, Odyssey of an Eavesdropper is published and available worldwide in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, it is time to move on to my memoirs. Come join me in a journey through my life.

Born 1935 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I lived with my two brothers, Al and Ron, and parents in one-half of a duplex house on Horton Street. It was a basic house consisting of a living/dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms, and one bathroom. The kitchen stove and furnace were both coal-fired. Dad was a plumber who worked for his father, owner of Martin L. Kaiser Company, Plumbing and Heating. My grandfather worked for his father, my great-grandfather, who emigrated from Prussia in 1858. He served in the Civil War, rising to a rank of sergeant. The Kaiser copper and tinsmith business began in Prussia and can be traced to the late 1700s.

My very early years consisted primarily of playing in the backyard sandbox or swinging on the swing. On rainy days, I played on the dirt portion of the cellar floor. Eventually, my boundary was extended to my best friend Charlie Siegel’s yard two houses away, where Charlie and I spent hours hanging out in his cherry tree thinking up games to play. One memory, in particular, remains frozen in my head, literally. At age four, I was sitting at the kitchen table when we heard the drone of a multiengine aircraft. We all ran outside and there was a huge zeppelin about one thousand feet overhead. Each of the six engines had a gondola from which the passengers could view the activity below and wave their handkerchiefs. Not watching, I lost my footing, fell off the fourth step, and cracked my skull on the sidewalk below. I still remember my father holding me on the doctor’s table while the doctor stitched me up. During the war, I would use my Radio Flyer wagon to collect tin cans for the war effort. A stamp was given for each wagonload. That stamp was then stuck on a card that represented the weapon I was buying. Mine was a tank.

The railroad tracks were roughly one hundred yards from our house. Whenever Mom would hear a locomotive passing nearby, she would rush outside to gather up the laundry before the clinkers (ash) fell on the clothes. Eventually, I was permitted to go as far as the railroad trestle. I was always awestruck by the size of the steam locomotives, their sound, and the one hundred plus cars full of sparkling diamonds of coal they were hauling. Once in a while, a hobo would jump from one of the cars; sometimes, hobos would show up at our kitchen door, with hats in hand, asking for something to eat. Mom always had a sandwich and drink for them. I admired Mom for her caring.

The uneven flagstone sidewalk made roller-skating a real challenge. Around age six, I began building airplane models, usually hiding in the closet at night to finish a project. I’m lucky I did not asphyxiate myself from the glue I was using. A few years later, Dad gave me a gasoline powered U-control model airplane. The OK29 engine used a spark plug along with its associated coil, points, and spark advance lever. That’s me in the picture second from the left at the local airplane club. After a few crashes and a lot of broken propellers, I was finally able to keep the plane aloft until the gas ran out. Kites were the rage at that time. The object was to get the kite as high as possible using as much string as possible. When the string broke, the race was on to recover the kite, which usually wound up several blocks away.

At the beginning of summer break, we headed to our house at Lake Nuangola fifteen miles south of Wilkes-Barre. The house there was built in 1935, the same year I was born. We had electricity, indoor plumbing, a central heating system, and a well with an electric pump. Granddad’s cabin was one hundred yards away and had no electricity, no central heat other than a fireplace, no running water (a hand pump outside supplied the water), and an outhouse. I never thought about it that much back then, but the outhouse was only forty feet away from the well. I will never forget the smell of the outhouse. Most of the time, I just peed in the bushes. I was always fascinated by the icebox in the kitchen. It had a peculiar odor. A local farmer, Mr. Daubert, using his horse-drawn wagon, supplied ice on Monday, meat on Tuesday, vegetables on Wednesday, and fruit on Thursday. On Friday, he would use the same wagon to pick up the garbage. I never gave much thought about that, but nobody got sick or died. On Saturday, he built stone walls, most of which survive to this day. I had fun swimming, fishing, sailing, sailboat racing (I took first place six years in a row), hiking, and building tree houses. One-half mile away was a candy store at Rule’s Garage that kept me stocked with candy. The other side of the lake could be reached by way of a narrow boardwalk and bridge that crossed the swamp. Perry Storm’s grocery store and an ice cream parlor were over there. It was a great hangout. One Sunday, I was sitting on the steps of the ice cream parlor when a meteorite zipped down at a low angle and hit the road not ten feet in front of me. It appeared to be about the size of a quarter and threw off sparks like a fireworks pinwheel. It made a buzzing sound and was going so fast it must have gone back into outer space.

There was also a pavilion on that side where all social gatherings were held

In 1945, Granddad gave the business to Dad and we moved to West River Street in an upscale part of the city. The house was built in 1846 and had twenty-four rooms. It still had gas lamps throughout. A front and back staircase gave my brothers and me the opportunity to chase each other throughout the house, wrecking my mother’s nerves in the process. A big yard gave me plenty of space to fly smaller model airplanes. There were some neat features to the house. You could lie with your ear against the cellar floor and hear the blasting in the mines below. Our house and the house next door were on a huge rock that rolled slightly with the settling of the mines below. One year, you could put a marble at the back door and it would roll out the front door; the following year, you could put a marble at the front door and it would roll out the back door. There was never any apparent structural damage as the rolling was very slight.

I met a local boy, Dick Banta (W3TBT), who was a radio amateur. As a result, I, too, became a radio amateur (W3VCG), which led me to what I am today. I still hold those call letters. It is interesting to note that the radio amateurs who taught me Morse code and radio theory were using spark transmitters. My travels took me from the era of spark transmitters to vacuum tubes and, eventually, transistors.

Naturally, I was attending school all of my early years. Admittedly, I did not do well in school because of what I now know to be attention-deficit disorder (ADD). It tended to make me somewhat of a loner, living in my own world of model airplanes and amateur radio. I did, however, have several neighborhood friends. Pete McCormick, down the street, and Jimmy Karambelas, across the street, became the closest. Pete went on to become a biggie in the Jesuit Church and Jimmy became a multilingual simultaneous interpreter for the United Nations. One of our many projects included unwinding a transformer and running the wire through cracks in the street to each other’s houses so we could then keep in touch by Morse code.

At one point, we tried overhead wires but the bus kept knocking them down. My first transmitter was a single 6L6 amplifier tube powered by a 5U4 rectifier tube, straight out of the ARRL 1945 radio amateur’s handbook. The receiver was a National Radio SW-35. The next transmitter was a Harvey Wells Bandmaster and the receiver a used Hammarlund Super Pro, both shown in the picture above. I damn near electrocuted myself one day when I reached behind it and hit a high voltage terminal. That setup, along with a better antenna, plus a general class license, allowed me to reach stations in foreign countries. I’ll never forget my first foreign contact with a VE5 Canadian station.

Eventually, I began work on a 500-watt transmitter that later became a 1,000-watt unit all housed in a six-foot tall relay rack. Dad found a used National NC183D receiver that helped greatly in making hundreds of local and foreign contacts. I’ve kept it for memories and it still works.

CHAPTER ONE

My middle school days were spent at Meyer’s High School in Wilkes-Barre. I then moved on to Wyoming Seminary prep school in Kingston, Pennsylvania. The spring following my junior year, my church put together a youth caravan (unknowingly all paid for by my father) to travel throughout Europe. There were thirteen of us. We left the port of New York aboard the steamship Anna Salen heading for Southampton, England. After spending a couple of days