Attitudes in the West are changing. No longer is it deemed acceptable to bribe your way into a contract as long as you and your company are not caught.
Such publicity and the increasing weight of legalisation is having a perceptible impact on the private sector. Major western companies increasingly conscious of their public images want to be seen on the right side of the debate and more companies are implementing anti bribery and corruption mission statements in to their company codes. A dramatic change of culture is unlikely until anti bribery legalisation is backed up by proactive investigation and prosecution.
The role of international intelligence services in monitoring bribery and corruption in international contracts is dimension of their work that has emerged publicly in the last eighteen months. There is wide ranging evidence indicating that major governments are routinely utilising communications intelligence to provide commercial advantage to companies and trade.Such intelligence is gathered mainly by North American and Western European governments and companies based in these regions are the main target of such surveillance.
It is now clear that since the beginning of the Clinton administration US Intelligence agencies has devoted a great deal of its signals intelligence (SIGINT) capability to economic espionage. To that end the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdrops international telecommunications to identify which foreign companies are using bribery and corruption to obtain contracts. For America spies the vital tool has been the global eavesdropping system known by the code name Echelon, This is one role of a British and American run world wide spy system that can suck up phone calls, faxes and e mails sent by satellite. America intelligence agencies have been able to intercept these vital private communications, often between foreign governments and European businesses, to help the US win major contracts.
Intelligence obtained in this way is used to level the playing field for American companies constrained legally by the FCPA. On the face of it this use of intelligence resources is beneficial for reducing bribery. In a March 2000 article for the Wall Street Journal, entitled Why we spy on our allies, former CIA director James Woolsey claimed there was only one reason why the CIA tracked European companies. Most European technology just is not worth our stealing. he wrote. We have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies products are often more costly, less technically advanced, or both, than your American competitors. It has also provided some of the few figures available to make judgements about the extent of corruption in obtaining international contracts.
A report by the CIA, only recently released, indicated that the United States had found 51 contracts with a value of $28 billion that had been influenced by bribery or some other inappropriate activity by an overseas company. Using this information U.S. intelligence community had helped American firms win $16.5 billion in overseas contracts alone by alerting the governments in third world countries that ministers and others were on the take.
According to one reliable press report: From a commercial communications satellite, NSA (National Security Agency) lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus, the Saudi national airline and Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to US officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co and McDonnell Douglas Corp which triumphed last year in the $6bn competition.
Among the U.S. companies that have benefited are Raytheon, Boeing and Hughes Network Systems. Intelligence officials have clamped down on the release of such data since then although officials at the CIA, NSA, and State Department have said such activities continue.
Many Western European countries are among other users of eavesdropping technology though not on the same scale as the US. They are among the 30 other nations who now run their own top secret eavesdropping agencies capable of listening into other governments communications, private and business calls. Duncan Campbell estimates that about 15 20m Euros is expanded annually on communications intelligence and related activities. While the U.S. maintains that it only uses such information to intervene at govern level to stop bribery and level the playing field. The suspicion remains that the U.S. uses SIGINT information to give its companies advantage.
There has never been a prosecution of an American company under FCPA as a result of SIGINT which does make critics suspicious.
A staff member of the US intelligence reform commission set up , officials at the departments of Commerce, Treasury and State pass information to US companies without revealing the intelligence source. At Commerce, there is no code or book to consult to say when and what information can be passed to a US company. If, for instance, a government official learned that a foreign competitor was about to win a contract sought by a US company, someone in Commerce might call a US executive and say:Look, you might have a better shot at that contract if you sweetened your bid a little. They pass on the information. But they usually do it in a very veiled fashion.
The analogy I use is where we were 250 years ago with pirates on the high seas. Governments never admitted they sponsored piracy, yet they all did behind the scenes. If we now look at cyberspace we have state sponsored information piracy. We can not have a global e commerce until governments like the US stop state sponsored theft of commercial information. However, others remain sceptical that US intelligence really do feed information to US Companies.
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