-Caveat Lector-
Area Businesses Thrive in a City Driven by Secrets
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 10, 1999; Page A01
Too late for Oliver L. North and G. Gordon Liddy, but serving a new
generation of Washington secret-keepers, behold the door-to-door
document shredder.
Six white trucks (motto: "Our business is to ensure nobody knows
yours") prowl suburban office parks and pause at downtown law firms
and government offices. Men in blue uniforms go into the offices and
haul out big blue nylon bags.
The bags are bulging with paper -- memos and marketing plans, doodles
and schemes, credit card numbers and lists of people with debts and
diseases. These must not fall into the wrong hands.
Inside each truck is a hopper big enough to ingest a stack of
telephone books. It has two interlocking hydraulic-powered cylinders,
with 16 to 20 blades each, spinning slowly in opposite directions.
With a low growl and occasional metallic belches, like a ruminant
cyborg, the machine masticates a half-ton of paper an hour, spitting
out quarter-sized scraps that are jumbled and compacted in back. For
the most secret jobs, the paper is reduced to dust. A truck won't
leave a client's parking lot until all has been shredded.
The edgier clients stand guard, frowning, and make sure no remnants go
astray.
Washington, of course, is shredder heaven. Here some of the nation's
leading shredding merchants got their start. Here shredding culture
flowered, beginning with that seminal, desperate moment the morning of
June 17, 1972.
It was hours after the Watergate burglars had been busted, and Liddy
found himself with more dirty little secrets than he quickly could
destroy.
He recorded his frustration in his autobiography: "The small shredder
was too slow. . . . I knew that there was a huge, high capacity
shredder somewhere."
It was the anguished cry of a secret-keeper whose needs had outpaced
the available technology.
Liddy never dreamed of a truck-sized shredder on wheels. In the
evolution of document destruction, the roof-top incinerator reigned
for a while, but it polluted. The petite office shredder was nice, but
nobody who was paid enough to be trusted had time to feed the paper
in, with the notable exception of Fawn Hall, North's shredding
secretary in 1986 during the Iran-contra scandal.
Enter Shred-it, the Rockville mobile shredding service, capitalizing
on two powerful late-millennium human emotions -- the yearning for
convenience and the rising panic about strangers (reporters, lawyers,
Congress, competitors, thieves) knowing your business. In two years,
Shred-it has rocketed from one truck to six serving Washington.
Clients include lawyers, accountants, banks, computer firms,
government agencies.
"I feel like I'm doing something good," says David Yount, a former
delivery driver who is operations manager of Shred-it. "I'm doing
what's right."
Yount, a young-looking 44-year-old with a red pen tucked behind his
ear, has a missionary zeal for his work that is characteristic of many
in the shredding industry. They are refugees from other careers, and
their friends called them crazy when they devoted their lives to
shredding. But they saw the value in making things vanish.
The other top executives of Shred-it are Richard Falck, 61, who sold a
large snack-vending business before getting into shredding, and Steve
Sweeney, 39, a former marketer for Frito-Lay.
Although they are steeped in tales of shredding infamy -- papers that
suddenly disappeared before a trial or a congressional inquiry -- they
dwell on the sunny side of document destruction.
Shredding protects privacy, they say. If Henry Kissinger had shredded
his paperwork before putting out his garbage in Georgetown in 1975,
the National Enquirer wouldn't have had anything juicy to pick
through. The paper reported it found details of Kissinger's Secret
Service protection. In 1988, in a fantastic boost to shredder sales,
the Supreme Court ruled that your garbage is public property. Now
"dumpster diving" is a favorite technique of snoops.
It's like an insurance policy, Yount says. "You pay me a little bit of
money now, and you don't have to worry about lawsuits or bad press or
a lost customer to a competitor in the future."
One day a Shred-it truck is parked outside the Reston division of
Oracle Corp., the huge California-based software company. George
Bjorson, a former Marine Corps anti-terrorist specialist now working
for Shred-it, is collecting the big nylon sacks of secrets.
The bags are stowed inside bland gray consoles scattered throughout
the building. Employees just drop the paper in.
"Those of us in the industry are very aware of how easily information
can slip into a competitor's hands," says Judith Ross, Oracle's
facility manager.
Bjorson hauls, hoists and shreds about four tons a day on his route.
Ushering millions of words into oblivion is a physical workout. "I
call it the Shred-it weight-loss program," he says.
Shred-it stands on the shoulders of giants. It's actually a franchise
dreamed up by Canadians, who have exported it to more than 100 cities
on the continent.
In the Washington area, long before Shred-it, there was Whitaker
Bros., also in Rockville. Started at the end of World War II, the
company became known as the "dean" of shredder suppliers, selling to
federal installations worldwide as well as to private business. For
all Shred-it's gee-whiz appeal, Whitaker remains a major player,
because many companies, embassies and spy agencies simply will not
trust their shredding to anyone else. They'll buy a top-of-the-line
office machine from Whitaker.
Over the years, Whitaker has sold some celebrity shredders.
"I'll show you the Ollie North," Vince Del Vecchio says. He's a former
Xerox executive who bought into Whitaker 15 years ago. He went from
reproducing secrets to shredding them.
Sitting there in a Whitaker storeroom is a gray, waist-high Intimus
007-S, identical to the high-security model from Whitaker that North
and Hall used to shred Iran-contra secrets.
Stowed in another Whitaker warehouse is a shredder legend: the
Shredmaster 400, one of the very devices that belonged to Richard M.
Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President, Liddy's old
employer. Whitaker bought it back after the scandal.
This cream-colored machine with the big tray in front for high-volume
feeding is likely the one Liddy used after the break-in. It sat on the
third floor of CREEP's 1701 Pennsylvania Ave. offices, which is where
Liddy went to shred. The bill of sale is made out to two scribbled
names that look like "Mr. McCord" and "Mr. Odle." James McCord was
CREEP's security coordinator, and Robert Odle was the director of
administration.
Del Vecchio studies the big machine with its dozens of teeth and
concludes CREEP must have had to shred "a fair amount of stuff."
While Whitaker Bros. was selling shredders to the stars, a Lorton
company called Document Destructors was becoming a national leader of
an alternative shredding concept: hauling secrets to industrial-sized
shredders at the company's facility. The business was founded by three
executives of a waste removal firm who noticed they were getting many
calls for shredding. They mortgaged their homes to get into shredding.
"Some people thought we were crazy," says Ben Keough, one of the
principals, but it paid off, and now their machines munch well over a
million pounds a year.
You can't be too careful. After the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun
in 1979, the Iranian radicals glued together the strips of paper that
had been shredded by the embassy staff.
Television FBI Agent Fox Mulder pulled the same trick to uncover "a
classic case of demon harvest" on the "X-Files" last Sunday.
That's why the best shredders today no longer cut paper in strips.
They cross-cut, chew or pulverize. There's no putting those secrets
back together.
But are we getting too paranoid? Have we gone shred-mad?
Kees Oversier has pondered this question. He is the director of
support services at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville.
Shred-it visits once a week and destroys nearly a ton of hospital
documents.
Sadly, he has concluded that these times require shredding. But he
says he believes you must maintain a balanced view. "If you get
paranoid, you can't live anymore," he says. On the other hand, "there
are weirdos out there who go through this stuff."
After a long day of shredding, the six white trucks motor to a
recycler in Rockville. The shreds will be baled and shipped to a
pulping mill.
Then a lot of Washington's dark secrets will be transformed into
environmentally friendly toilet paper.
And some will become computer paper, ready to be inscribed with more
secrets -- and to be shredded again.
� Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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