The press conference to announce Dunn’s resignation was scheduled to be held at 1 P.M. on Friday, September 22nd. Dunn’s request to participate in the press conference was rejected, but she felt that she was parting on good terms. Hurd embraced her, and every board member followed suit, hugging her and murmuring, “This is so unfair. We’re sorry. Thank you.”

At the press conference, Hurd acknowledged that the processes “broke down, and no one in the management chain, including me, caught them.” He thanked Dunn for her eight years of service. At the same time, he said he had received information that is “very disturbing to me,” and a Hewlett-Packard lawyer offered a narrative of the events that placed the blame squarely on Dunn. Dunn was especially upset that the lawyer said she contacted private investigators, without mentioning that it was a Hewlett-Packard security manager who had sent her to them.

After the press conference, CNBC turned to a panel of experts, among them Viet Dinh, who praised Dunn for “a courageous and graceful thing” and for “taking responsibility for the investigation that she initiated, conducted, and supervised.”

That same day, Hewlett-Packard announced that Mark Hurd would become chairman as well as C.E.O. Those who supervised the leak investigation—Ann Baskins, Kevin Hunsaker, and Anthony Gentilucci—have resigned from the company. Bob Wayman, the interim C.E.O. when Kona I began, retired.

On Wednesday, October 4th, Dunn was charged by the California Attorney General with four felony counts: fraudulent wire communications, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy. She pleaded not guilty. Also charged in the criminal case were Hunsaker and DeLia and two private investigators, Matthew DePante and Bryan Wagner (a.k.a. “mike@yahoo.com”). They, too, pleaded not guilty. Baskins’s lawyer said last week, “A general counsel has to be able to rely on her senior counsels’ research and advice, particularly when she has hundreds of lawyers working for her worldwide.” Hunsaker’s lawyer said, “There cannot be a violation of law without an intent to violate the law, and Kevin absolutely believed that the investigation was being done in a legal and proper way.”

The S.E.C. is continuing to investigate Hewlett-Packard’s compliance with disclosure obligations and other issues, as is the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney in California’s Northern District. On January 12th, one of the private investigators, Bryan Wagner, pleaded guilty to federal charges of identification theft and conspiracy and has been coöperating with federal investigators, a potentially ominous turn for others under investigation.

I had dinner with Dunn in San Francisco the first week in January. The previous June, she had learned that she had a recurrence of ovarian cancer, and, after surgery, had resumed her chemotherapy treatment. She was eager to recount her story, and to rebut the many myths that she maintains have arisen about her. In the contest between her and Perkins—one representing the post-Sarbanes-Oxley world of accountability and governance, the other the action-oriented culture of Silicon Valley—Dunn believes that she has been thoroughly vanquished. “I bow to Tom,” Dunn told me. “He is a powerful man. He’s far more powerful than I am.”

Still, all but one of the Hewlett-Packard directors with close ties to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, including Perkins and Keyworth, are now gone. The directors who have taken their place—the Nokia and ExxonMobil executives, a banker from Wachovia—are not the Silicon Valley heroes Perkins championed but managers from large public companies, exactly the kind of director sought by Dunn. Across the Valley, technology companies have been adding seasoned governance experts to their boards.

Keyworth told me that the allegations that he was a “leaker” have caused him irreversible harm. “I’ve had some tough criticism in my life,” he said, “but I’ve never been dragged in the mud like this before. I kept the nation’s atomic secrets! I’m on the board of General Atomics, which makes the Predator aircraft. I’m close to top people in the U.S. military. Now I’ve been branded a ‘leaker.’ ” Though readily acknowledging that he was a source for Kawamoto’s January 23rd article (a “puff piece,” as he calls it), he resents insinuations that he leaked any confidential Hewlett-Packard information.

Perkins feels vindicated by the outcome, and, from all appearances, remains close to Hurd. In an e-mail to Hurd on September 12th, Perkins wrote, “When I resigned I did it in anger, but I still believe it was the right thing to do. . . . You should know that I always wanted you to be chairman, but this was an awful way to get there.” A week later, in a second e-mail, Perkins informed Hurd that a friend, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, had spoken with Bill Lockyer, the Attorney General:

I am continuing to try to take the steam out of the boiler as it pertains to you. John Doerr had a very good conversation with Bill Lockyer about the situation based upon my assessment (i.e., you are one of the victims). It can’t hurt.

Perkins told me that he never thought the affair would reach this juncture. “In the beginning, all I wanted was to get the facts and get the minutes right. I never wanted a scorched-earth campaign. I didn’t expect them to stonewall.” Nor did he expect Dunn to be indicted. “This wasn’t grand larceny,” he told me. “I don’t think she should go to jail. She’s very ill.”

What started out on Dunn’s part as a quest for higher ethical standards led to a lawless, out-of-control investigation and possibly a prison term. She began the investigation at the behest of the board; even Perkins agreed that the leaks had to be stopped. She was urged to keep the investigation in-house. She insisted repeatedly that it be strictly legal and was assured that it met Hewlett-Packard’s high ethical standards. She received legal advice from Baskins and Hunsaker on the legality of pretexting that proved disastrous. She never heard the objections raised by the lower-level investigators and maintains that she doesn’t even remember hearing the word “pretexting.” She emphasized Sonsini’s assertion that, among chairmen of major corporations, not one in ten would have acted any differently.

At the first mention of getting access to directors’ and reporters’ personal phone records, she should have tried to stop the investigation. But the same could be said, even more emphatically, of others connected to the investigation: Hunsaker and Baskins, certainly—both of them lawyers—but also Mark Hurd, who as chief executive was privy to both Kona I and Kona II, attended an early meeting at which phone records were discussed, and was briefed on their progress.

“Mark got the same legal advice I did,” Dunn said. “He got the same memos. We were both victims.” But Hurd remains chairman of Hewlett-Packard, and Dunn faces four felony counts. Dunn worries that she won’t live long enough to defend herself in court. “I care deeply about what people who know me think,” she said. “But, in order to be exonerated, it takes so long. My legacy may be written before that can happen.”

Despite the ongoing investigations, Hewlett-Packard is now thriving financially. Earlier this year, the stock rose above $43, the highest level in six years, and in late January the board disclosed that Hurd had been given an $8.6 million cash bonus and options on five hundred thousand shares of stock. ♦