Widget API privilege level running as User - can it be run as Admin?

Widget API privilege level running as User - can it be run as Admin?

Okay, bear with me here....

Our data-sharing level mandates that all Leads are visible only to their owners. 

However, in the event that someone calls asking who their Sales Rep is, sometimes we need our team to be able to look up a Lead by name to find out who the owner is. That is not possible with our data-sharing set to Private, and we do not want leads visible across our teams. 

We decided to create a "customer search" webtab widget to address this (as there doesn't seem to be another easy way).

It's just a simple widget with a search field that displays all leads that match the search query. This is using the JS SDK embedded in the widget.

The actual search api call looks like this:
ZOHO.CRM.API.searchRecord({Entity:"Leads",Type:"word",Query:query})

This works great! We just show the name and lead owner in the results. 

There is ONE problem here though.... the widget runs with the record-access of the user accessing the webtab - so the same problem still persists where people can search and no results are returned. 

Is there a way to run the above API.searchRecord as if it were the admin so that all results are displayed?

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