THE KONA FILES.

Leaks are inevitable in business and politics, but as acts of defiance they are maddening to those who prize order and control. At Hewlett-Packard, under the tumultuous stewardship of Carly Fiorina, the country's most visible female chairman and C.E.O., unauthorized disclosures to the press became a particular problem. In February, 2005, Fiorina was fired. A series of damaging leaks preceded her firing, and the selection of her replacement as C.E.O., Mark Hurd, was almost derailed by disclosures to Business Week. Patricia Dunn was appointed chairman of the board, with a mandate to insure that this kind of thing was stopped. So when Dunn opened an e-mail from the company's head of public relations, in January of 2006, that included an article from CNET's technology-news Web site entitled "HP Outlines Long-Term Strategy," she read it with dismay.

The story, by Dawn Kawamoto and Tom Krazit, was an inside account of the company's retreat, held two weeks earlier, at the Esmerelda Resort & Spa, in Indian Wells, California. The reporters quoted an unnamed source within the company as saying, "By the time the lectures were done at 10 P.M., we were pooped and went to bed." The article went on to discuss the managers' thinking about AMD vs. Intel chips, new sales strategies, and possible acquisitions. Clearly, someone at the retreat, which was attended only by board members and top executives, had leaked proprietary information. Dunn had overseen an earlier, unsuccessful effort to identify the source of the articles about Fiorina; this time she was determined to get to the bottom of the problem. She e-mailed the CNET article to the board, including its most powerful member, the seventy-four-year-old venture capitalist Tom Perkins:

Tom, this will disturb you as much as it disturbs me. For our discussion. , Break out the lie detectors., Regards, Pattie

Tom Perkins's role in the rise of Silicon Valley cannot be overstated. David Packard, who, with Bill Hewlett, founded Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, hired Perkins in 1957, at a time when the company was entering a period of rapid expansion, and Perkins was put in charge of the research labs. Packard also allowed Perkins to develop his own laser business on the side; he made his first millions when he sold it to SpectraPhysics, in 1970.

Hewlett-Packard's initial push into the nascent world of computers did not come until 1966, and began inauspiciously--the first model was not a success. The partners decided to put Perkins in charge of the computer division. He created a specialized sales force, and computers eventually became the largest segment of the company's business. When Packard left to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration, Perkins became Bill Hewlett's special assistant. By 1971, when Packard returned from Washington, Hewlett-Packard's revenues were around $500 million. (Today, they exceed $90 billion.) Per-kins then left to launch his own venture-capital firm. One of his first spectacular successes was Genentech, the biotechnology concern.

Since then, Perkins and his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, have provided the seed capital for numer-ous technology startups that have gone on to sell shares to the public--including Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and AOL--culminating in the public offer-ing of Google, in 2004. Perkins acted as a mentor to many of Silicon Valley's most prominent entrepreneurs and chief executives, among them Eric Schmidt, Jim Clark, and Jeff Bezos. He has become enormously wealthy. He owns a Norman-style mansion in Belvedere, in San Francisco Bay; a medieval manor house, with a moat, in East Sussex; and the world's largest private yacht, the two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-foot Maltese Falcon.

Tall, tan, fit, graying at the temples, Perkins looks the part of a billionaire captain of technology and industry. He is an avid sailor, a fast-car enthusiast--he owns a Porsche Carrera GT, a McLaren F-1, and a Bugatti EB 110--and a wine connoisseur with a widely admired collection of Napa Valley reds. After divorcing his second wife, the romance writer Danielle Steel, in 1999, he began writing himself, and embarked on a novel about the amorous exploits of a rich financier much like him.