HP's Hunsaker Papers

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"Is it all above board?" Hunsaker asked Gentilucci on Jan. 30, after taking flak from Nye and others. "I think it is on the edge, but above board," Gentilucci replied. Hunsaker's response: "I shouldn't have asked…."

By Feb. 6, DeLia's investigators had made a break in the case, uncovering a call from CNET's Dawn Kawamoto to Keyworth's home phone. "Is Keyworth's [phone number] in the phone book? If not, how the hell did Kawamoto know the number?" Hunsaker wrote. He called the discovery "great news." Hunsaker told his team: "I'm starting to get excited."

Nye was not in a celebratory mood. "I have serious reservations about what we are doing," he shot back in an e-mail. "It is very unethical at the least and probably illegal. If [it] is not totally illegal, then it is leaving HP in a position [that] could damage our reputation or worse," Nye wrote."I am requesting that we cease this phone-number-gathering method immediately and discount any of its information."

"WILD IDEA."

In a later e-mail to Adler, Nye questioned whether Baskins, HP's general counsel, was being kept in the loop on the team's methods. It was clear, Nye wrote, "that this is a 'Don't ask, Don't tell,'" situation, with regard to the use of pretexting.

But the practice continued, and Nye remained uneasy. In early March, he detailed his concerns in a memo. "If one has to hold his nose and then conduct a task, then [it] is logical to step back and consider if the task or activity is the right thing to do," he wrote in a draft memo he sent to an HP security colleague for review. "Speaking for myself, I won't use this particular tactic on those cases I have been assigned to lead." Documents released by House investigators don't indicate whether Nye ever sent his memo to Hunsaker.

By then, Hunsaker was making broad use of the tactic. In a Mar. 21 e-mail exchange with Gentilucci, he said he had "a wild idea" to get the goods on Keyworth. "It involves pretexting [Keyworth] or his wife at their house," he wrote. Gentilucci's response: "Just don't tell Fred [Adler] and Vince [Nye]." "No kidding," Hunsaker said.

NO DOUBT AT THE TOP.

Hunsaker had sought and received assurances from DeLia, the outside investigator, that pretexting was legal. And Gentilucci had commissioned his own research that seemed to put HP in the clear. According to research done for Gentilucci by an unidentified law clerk, an investigator obtaining "a wire, oral, or electronic communication" is not civilly or criminally liable unless the information is used to commit a criminal act.

But if Hunsaker had any doubts about the direction of the investigation, Patricia Dunn herself put them to rest. After a February briefing on the investigation, including an overview of the methods being employed, Dunn gave Hunsaker's heroes two thumbs up. "She was impressed with what we put together for her and is confident we are on the right track," Hunsaker said in a Feb. 3 e-mail to his team.

On Apr. 24, after the investigation had wrapped up, concluding that Keyworth was, in fact, the source of the leaks to CNET, Hunsaker was promoted. His new title: director of HP's standards of business conduct team, the company's chief ethics officer. But by the end of September, after details of his investigation became public, his fortunes had turned and Hunsaker had left the company.

Woellert is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau.