Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Briber : Why is Paris burning? CIA has been snooping around for economic secrets

France’s Prime Minister Edouard Balladur had it right. Speaking of the new Paris-Washington flap over five Americans--some with diplomatic status--caught allegedly committing economic espionage in France, he noted almost dismissively that “events like that occur regularly on both sides of the Atlantic.” In other words, we do it to you, you do it to us, everyone does it to everyone else, so this is no big deal.

True enough, so far as it goes. What distinguishes this latest revelation is that it has become a public matter. Among friends, the usual way to handle such embarrassments is to quietly send home those caught spying without anything being put on the record. In the latest case, details of the reported U.S. effort to obtain economic intelligence by suborning several French officials were leaked to a newspaper. The State Department denounced the story in Le Monde as “unwarranted.” That characterization amounts to something less than a ringing denial of guilt.

Economic espionage is an ancient practice, dating at least from the time Moses sent Joshua to spy out the promised land to make sure the Israelites leaving Egypt wouldn’t just be swapping one patch of useless desert for another. Economic intelligence gathering since then has grown considerably in sophistication. The State Department is involved in it. So is the Commerce Department and, of course, the CIA, which gained a degree of post facto notoriety for repeatedly overestimating the strength of a Soviet economy that was rapidly spiraling toward collapse.

Is economic spying necessary? Certainly timely and accurate assessments of foreign economic strengths and weaknesses can be of great value to policy-makers and should be maintained. Whether the CIA should have that task is a more difficult question. If reports from France are accurate, the CIA tried to get hold of French economic secrets the good old-fashioned way, by bribing officials to hand them over. Unfortunately, French counterintelligence appears to have been running a sting operation that led to the whole effort being exposed. If such spying is needed--and it is--a bit more subtlety surely is in order.