Hal lipset biography

THE INSTITUTEPrivate detective Harold “Hal” Lipset [above] took on thousands of cases and earned a reputation for inventing ingenious listening devices. He was also an advocate for public regulation of eavesdropping.

Lipset’s career was complicated. He took on controversial clients and testified as an expert witness in U.S. court cases. He also served many of his clients in unconventional ways, like breaking into hotel rooms to catch cheating spouses and pursuing suspected jewel thieves across Europe.

He died 20 years ago, but his private detective agency is still in business 70 years later.

SECRET RECORDINGS

After serving as a U.S. military police officer during World War II, Lipset moved in 1947 to San Francisco and opened a private detective agency.

He began collaborating with the city’s leading law firms on pretrial investigations. He initially used a wire recorder to tape conversations, but the introduction of transistors in the 1950s inspired him to seek help with building much smaller listening devices, which eventually made him famous. He worked with electronics expert Ralph Bertsche, who showed him how to design devices using transistors.

According to an obituary in TheNew York Times, Lipset once won over a skeptical prospective client by playing a recording of a previous conversation he had with the client while sitting naked in a steam room. The bug had been hidden in a bar of soap.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Whether strapped to his chest or embedded in soap, miniature listening devices were crucial to Lipset’s work. He often used them to obtain information that could discredit his client’s opponents in court. He was wary of wiretapping’s impact on privacy rights, however. He criticized its misuse in a section he contributed to the 1959 book The Eavesdroppers, written by Philadelphia prosecutor Samuel Dash. In 1960 Lipset wrote an article, “The Wiretapping-Eav

Biography

From philandering spouses to United States presidents, Hal Lipset took thousands of cases as a private detective and earned a national reputation as a pioneer of electronic surveillance. Ironically, he was both an inventor of eavesdropping gadgets and an advocate for public regulation of these devices.

Lipset was born in Newark in 1919 and attended the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the U.S. Army in 1941, serving in the military police and earning a Bronze Star in combat. He learned the investigator’s trade during his enlistment.

After the war, Lipset and his wife, Lynn, moved to San Francisco and opened a private detective office, Lipset Service, in 1947. They attempted to bring professionalism and order to a disreputable industry. Lipset began collaborating with the city’s leading law firms on pre-trial investigations. He also developed a relationship with an electronics expert, Ralph Bersche, who showed him how to apply the emerging transistor technology of the 1950s to eavesdropping on behalf of his clients.

Whether he was wired up with a tape recorder or listening in to a microphone imbedded in a bar of soap, Lipset depended on miniature listening devices to obtain information and discredit his client’s opponents in court. Lipset, who had encountered many examples of wiretapping by police as a private investigator, was wary of its impact on privacy rights and contributed to a book by a former Philadelphia prosecutor, Sam Dash, in 1959 to criticize the practice.

As both an expert wiretapper and a leading critic of its abuse, Lipset was called before a Senate committee to testify in 1968. In his most famous act of gumshoe virtuosity, he shocked the panel and public opinion by demonstrating how to create a bug in a martini olive. Although the techn

Hal Lipset, a San Francisco sleuth who helped elevate, or rather reduce, electronic surveillance to a miniature art, has died in a San Francisco hospital. He was 78.

Friends said he died Monday of heart failure during treatment for an aneurysm.

Mr. Lipset, best known as the man who put a bug in a martini olive, was widely credited with transforming the once-seedy gumshoe calling into a respected profession.

He trained many detectives who eventually set up their own agencies, and was known for recruiting intellectual operatives, among them Patricia Holt, now the San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor, who wrote his 1995 biography, “The Bug in the Martini Olive.”

Mr. Lipset was trained as an Army investigator in Europe in World War II, then settled in San Francisco, where he and his wife, Lynn, opened an agency in 1947.

He later worked closely with Sam Dash, a former Philadelphia prosecutor, on his 1959 book, “The Eavesdroppers.” Dash said it was Mr. Lipset’s riveting demonstration of a bugged martini glass before a Senate subcommittee in 1968 that focused public opinion on the issue. The tiny transmitter inside a fake olive became the symbol of how easy transmitters were to conceal.

As the Senate Watergate Committee’s counsel, Dash hired Mr. Lipset as chief investigator in 1973, but, when the Nixon White House leaked the fact that Mr. Lipset had been convicted of a minor eavesdropping offense, Dash, who had been aware of the incident, let him resign.

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