Where a clerk was breaking open the sealed packages and counting out the wafers on his desk to make damned sure Intel was getting its money worth....
I find this hard to believe. At some point a person in a space suit was introducing them into a clean room; she should have noticed that the packages were not sealed.
Maybe the clerk was carefully sealing them back up again? In retrospect they probably should have had tamper-proof seals given the value attached to the wafers being delivered unopened, but then most problems are easily avoidable in retrospect.
Exactly; this happened early enough in the history of ICs that I'm sure they weren't taking such precautions, just like tamper revealing seals for over the counter drugs didn't become big until after the Chicago Tylenol murders.
There's a good chance a tamper revealing seal would have stopped the clerk from opening the containers, and of course it they'd been broken before reaching the people at the fab lines who were supposed to open them that would have clued Intel into the problem before any went into production and would have allowed them to quickly trace the problem back upstream.
I find this hard to believe. At some point a person in a space suit was introducing them into a clean room; she should have noticed that the packages were not sealed.