WOW... Excellent newspaper article. I never knew that.
Thank you for sharing.
As I remember how the incident was reported....MD governor was having a meeting in his office. Some security guy on his staff was playing with the receiver of the red phone. He unscrewed the mouthpiece, looked inside and said “This is live.” AT&T originally said it was a “mistake in wiring” and soon after bowed out saying it was an FBI matter. Front page of NY Times next day had a picture of a phoneman’s butt protruding from the kneewell of the governor’s desk as he “fixed it.”
I had just started working for Ma Bell at the time and remember saying that there was NO WAY you could look inside the mouthpiece, tell it was “live” and have it be just a mistake in wiring. There were ONLY TWO wires in a mouthpiece, so AT&T’s initial reaction was bogus as hell.
That story hung around for about a day and went down the memory hole. But it taught me that when it came to AT&T and the Gov’t., neither could be trusted.
A couple of years later, AT&T signed a letter of agreement with the DoJ to get out of some anti-trust action and Affirmative Action became the law of the land enforced by the EEOC*
*EEOC - Eventual Ellimination Of Caucasians.