Corporate secret agents

The US Chamber of Commerce has estimated that espionage has caused losses of around $25 billion a year in intellectual property. Information is a hot commodity in the information economy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989 was the making of modern industrial espionage. The US intelligence community was a sudden victim of downsizing. "Spooks" needed to earn a crust and soon found themselves plying their trade in the corporate world.

Motorola led the pack and recruited former marine Jan Herring from the CIA, where he had gathered data for GATT talks and negotiations with China and Japan, and supplied information on the oil market.

Penenberg and Barry emphasise in Spooked that US corporations were asleep while foreign agencies - of friends and foes - were awake and stealing their secrets. Herring left Motorola in 1987 and was replaced by his old subordinate in the CIA. One of hundreds of ex-agents in the private sector, his consultancy advises top companies on intelligence strategy.

The first trial in the US under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 ended in 1999 with Taiwanese firm Four Pillars being fined $5 million. The victim, adhesive label manufacturer Avery Dennison, was awarded $40 million in the civil case that followed.

The Avery saga would do justice to a Hollywood movie script and serves to reveal much of what happens in the shadows of corporate life.

But Spooked relies too much on this case to deliver its punch. By definition it is very difficult to be authoritative about clandestine, or at the very least publicity-shy, business.

For once, a trend was not invented in America. Penenberg and Barry claim the French are the most aggressive in industrial espionage, while the Japanese have turned it into an art form.

The book is gung-ho on poor old Uncle Sam and is populated with naive Americans and wily foreigners. Its tone is as subtle as those movies where Sylvester Stallone takes on the enemy - self-righteous, confident, simplistic and well-meaning.

But despite its shortcomings Spooked shines a light on a "billion-dollar industry" that is surely coming to an executive suite near you.

Hell, these guys are even organised in their own trade association, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.

jmulqueen@irish-times.ie