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To: IceShark who wrote (2838)	7/10/2000 10:59:48 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

Interesting report on Echelon in today's NY Post. Seems our "eye in the sky" is used to give US businesses an advantage in global competition. >>Last week, State Department spokesman Rich Boucher said it is neither the "policy nor practice" of U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct economic espionage or give sensitive intelligence information to American companies. But officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations have gone on record about an aggressive program in which the United States has used signals-intelligence information to help "level the playing field" for American companies that compete against European and Japanese firms that use bribery and other anti-competitive pressure to win contracts. The program apparently is being coordinated through an "advocacy center" in a little-known office at the Commerce Department that recently changed its name from the Office of Intelligence Liaison to the Office of Executive Support. Former CIA Director James Woolsey told Congress that in 1993 alone, U.S. firms obtained contracts worth $6.5 billion with the help of timely intelligence information. "We collect intelligence on those efforts to bribe foreign companies and foreign governments into awarding an airport contract to a European firm rather than an American firm," Woolsey said in a 1994 speech. "And we find out about those and ... we go not to the American corporation that's competing, but the secretary of State, and he sends an American ambassador to see a president or a king, and the ambassador says, ‘Mr. President' or ‘Your Majesty, your minister in charge of construction is on the take and you have a lot going with the U.S., and we don't really take kindly to your operating that way.'" The Clinton administration has confirmed that it helped the Boeing Corp. win a $6 billion contract to sell jets to Saudi Arabia in 1994 by quietly approaching King Fahd with intercepted e-mails and faxes indicating that Airbus, the competing European consortium, was trying to bribe Saudi officials. The same year, the Raytheon Corp. won a $1.4 billion contract over France's Thompson CSF to sell a sophisticated surveillance system to Brazil under similar circumstances. Raytheon officials were quoted in several newspapers at the time as saying the administration's intervention had been "very helpful." Was the United States using Echelon to conduct economic espionage or to legally further the cause of free and fair trade? These two deals in particular are now under investigation by the French prosecutor's office and the European Parliament. "If this was all aboveboard, like the U.S. says, why has no one in these cases been brought to court and evidence presented that company officials were engaged in bribery?" asks Campbell.<< nypostonline.com