A Thin Case

...All nations’ intelligence services use so-called “open sources,” publicly available data, to gather information, and there the United States is a treasure trove...

...At least we can hope that he wrote his book in such alarming, even apocalyptic terms, because it would be provocative and boost sales, but that deep down he knows that things are not so bad...

...But, of course, that is exactly the solution sought by many of his sources in the intelligence community, who want more money for such purposes...

...Despite the elimination of the military threat to the United States and the disappearance of the Third World hot spots that pitted the United States against the USSK, the persistent CIA and its sister agencies have held their own...

...Fialka ignores this debate...

...Cabot Lowell's theft of the design plans for England’s Cartwright loom, and the resultant effects on U.S...

...But, in general, the author does not help us get a handle on how serious the threat of economic espionage is...

...Members of Congress openly called on the CIA to help US...

...Drug traffickers...

...Unfortunately, Fialka’s publisher had no such scruples...

...Similarly, Fialka presents us with this supposedly alarming statistic: “In 1981, the People’s Republic of China had no doctoral candidates in the United States...

...But it is a question of degree...

...Yet in his headlong rush to warn America about economic spies, Fialka frequently inveighs against legitimate and proper intelligence collection through open sources...

...With an apparent lack of skepticism, Fialka accepts the FBI’s claim that it is handhg more than 800 cases of economic espionage at present, though FBI Director Louis Freeh refuses to document a single one...

...Of course, to many students of the long Cold War era, American foreign policy has always been guided primarily by the imperative to defend the commercial interests of corporate America abroad, from the CIA's subservience to the United Fruit Co...

...industry abroad...

...spy stories go, it wasn’t much,” he writes, blaming it all on “the alleged machinations of a fiftylsh Dallas public relations woman...

...Fialka probably knows better...

...Was it terrorists...

...At the very least, the list of the CIA3 customers expanded from the Pentagon and the State Department to include the Commerce Department and the Federal Reserve...

...Last year, Congress gave them a raise, increasing spending on intelligence-and promising more in ’9% Reaching for a metaphor, fcmier CIA Director James Woolsey gave this oft-quoted reason why America’s intelligence problem had gotten worse, not better, with the demise of the USSR: The dragon may be dead, but the forest is filled with many “poisonous snakes.’’ And only the CIA could help America spot them .and stamp them out...

...corporation willing to kowtow to the Chinese in order to win export contracts, America’s national interest be damned...

...A Thin case Economic espionage may be rampant, but this book doesn't quite prove it by Robert Dreyfuss Perhaps we aren't surprised that with the end of the Cold War, people in high places did not take look at the $30-billion-a-year U.S...

...For instance, China’s insistence on obtaining military-related technology from McDonnell-Douglas, which Beijing then quietly shifted from its nominally civilian use to an apparently military purpose, was hardly an example of economic espionage...

...competitiveness, but his call to scale back visas for foreign students is strident...

...Policy makers here and abroad could, theoretically at least, make rational calculations of their own nation’s economic self-interest and act on them...

...industry...

...He endorses the idea that the United States must spend more money on counterintelligence, beefing up the FBI and trackq suspected money laundermg...

...As the Cold War fizzled, a renewed debate occurred in the United States about whether or not the CIA and the rest of the US...

...intelligence community ought to be unleashed to give America a competitive advantage in trade and technology by stealing economic secrets...

...In fiact, Fialka’s most compelling anecdote may be in the book‘s introduction, which details nineteenth-century entrepreneur Francis ROBERT DREYFUSS is a freelance journalist in Alexandria, Virginia...

...And, far too often his anecdotes involve conflict in areas that have little to do with spying per se...

...government institutions to foreign prying...

...But his publisher insisted on changing the title...

...But it is a long march from the fact that China sends 15,000 students a year to the United States to the unsupported claim that Beijing has “a minimum of several hundred long-term agents operating here.’’ Perhaps we need to start looking under our beds again...

...intelligence agencies are engaged in precisely the kind of conduct that he so denounces among other countries...

...Arms proliferators...

...He tells the story of a French author who wrote a book and wanted to call it La Guerre Economique (Economic War...

...intellectual property, it would be China...

...And if those calculations were to include the apparent need to plunder other nations’ economic secrets using spies, eavesdropping technology and other Cold War tools, the theory goes, they would do so...

...His arguments and examples throughout seem &-as if F&a is trying to weave a tapestry of international espionage out of a few colorful, but not particularly substantive, threads...

...If any country has anything like a coordinated, long-term plan to grab U.S...

...For many critics of the national security state, however, it was difficult precisely to identify the threat...

...And the more scandalous and heavy-handed 199495 CIA effort in France, where undercover CIA operatives bungled an attempt to pry into French industrial and trade secrets (and were caught) is dismissed by Fialka...

...Indeed, one of China’s most notorious militaryindustrial bigwigs managed to infiltrate himself into a White House coffee with President Clinton, thanks to the overeager Democratic party fundraisers who booked his unauthorized tour...

...it was an example of a subservient U.S...

...ten years later, it had 1,596...

...The widely reported news that the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) spied on and bugged the Swiss hotel rooms of Japanese trade negotiators in 1995 fails to interest Fialka...

...Yet in the 1990s that imperative is no longer distorted by the prism of the U.S.-Soviet conflict...

...Certainly there is 3 contingnt of economic spies out there, and has been for as long 3s there have been technological developments to steal...

...As the basis of his argument, Fialka relies (rather uncritically) on the assertions of the CIA, the FBI, and private security consultants-many of them, of course, former spooks-who assert that America is engaged in a new kind of Cold War...

...When it comes to remedies, Fialka’s are a mishmash of the platitudinous and the outrageous...

...Most outlandish is his call to limit or “even [close] down altogether” the Freedom of Information Act, because it opens U.S...

...But cases of actual spying are a different kettle of snakes from efforts by China-or any other nationto make use of America’s thankfully open society...

...And another Chinaconnected money man, the Lippo Group’s John Huang, deposited himself at the Commerce Department, where he secured top -secret clearance...

...It can certainly be argued that with the end of the Cold War, economics-not ideology -began to govern the foreign-policy apparatus of most of the world’s leading nations...

...Now comes John Fialka, a highly respected veteran reporter for The Wall Street Journal, to tell us that a rapidly propagating species of snake is the economic espionage agent...

...Many in the CIA were opposed to the idea, while others saw it as a way to make use of otherwise superfluous spies and spy satellites...

...With it, he ignores or poohpoohs reports that the U.S...

...Unhke Cold War I, Cold War I1 pits the United States against virtually the entire rest of the world...

...Like a corporate Paul Revere, Fialka sounds the alarm about industrial spies from countries friendly and not-so-friendly s~varmingto steal the Fortune SOO’s trade and technology secrets, and thereby reduce America to second-class status...

...To criticize Fialka’s book is not to dismiss entirely the idea that other nations are mounting spying operations against the United States...

...intelligence community, scratch their collective heads, and ask, ‘ m a t do we need them for anymore, anyway...

...And he concludes that Russian, French,Japanese, and other spies are a key reason why the United States is no longer the undisputed world economic leader...

...China has much to gain, and boasts an authoritarian, military-dominated regime that mixes the civil economy with industry run by the People’s Liberation Army...

...Fialka reports that since 1950 “three successive wvaves of economic espionage have rolled over the country...

...Since around 1993, CIA directors have repeatedly assured Congress and the American public that the agency will aggressively pursue the growing foreign threat to American companies...

...War’ was felt to be too strong a word,” he says...

...And though most of the spying is aimed at military secrets, defense technologies, and our own intelligence agencies, at least some of it may be directed at civilian technology, from software to electronics to biotech...

...In fact, the affair involved at least seven CIA officials from stations in France and Belgium and caused heads to roll at the CIA3 headquarters in Langley, Virginia...

...in Guatemala and Big Oil in Iran in the 1950s to the eager defense of the copper industry and ITT in Chile in the 1970s...

...Few would quarrel with his recommendation that “the public school system must be fured” in order to boost U.S...

...Certainly they are...

...In the vast arena of economic espionage, Americans have been looted by the Russians, outplayed by the Japanese, and overwhelmed by the Chinese,” Fialka says, along with the French, the Germans, the Koreans, the Indians, the Israelis-the list goes on...