Industrial espionage does not necessarily improves engineering culture.
When I visited NITsEVT, a big-big-big organization dedicated to adapting of the stolen IBM 360/370 software to Russian language and Russian computer variants - I was amazed at how low the software culture was there. It looked like the only way to implement something was to look at how some American (but not necessarily bright) person has implemented some similar thing.
The whole “adaptation” project led to overall degradation of software culture as compared to 60s, when a lot of Russian system software was an original one. Or so a lot of people were saying.
Is there any evidence that's what happened? As far as I can tell, the NSA was doing it's routine thing of spying on foreign governments and and discovered that Airbus was trying to bribe a gov official.
Maybe you agree with Henry L. Stimson that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", but I haven't seen anything indicating that the NSA was spying on behalf of Boeing, or even directly targeting Airbus. Maybe I missed something, would be happy to learn if you have any sources to share :)
I don't think secret tech or cloak and dagger business moves are what makes an aircraft company win. it's a far more complex amalgamation of government intervention, regulations, institutional knowledge, and company culture. Things you could never steal with spies.
European countries have had aviation industries stretching back to the 1910s. They always had the engineering. But making a good product is not enough. You have to SELL it.
No what made Airbus start winning in the 1980s was hiring a former Boeing salesman. That's when they took off. Convincing air liners to take a chance and order Airbus planes.
>> According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994. The NSA found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official to secure a lion's share for Airbus in modernising Saudi Arabian Airlines' fleet. The planes were in a $6 billion deal that Edouard Balladur, France's then prime minister, had hoped to clinch on a visit to see King Fahd in January 1994. He went home empty-handed.
>> James Woolsey, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounted in a newspaper article in 2000 how the American government typically reacted to intelligence of this sort. “When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,” he wrote. Apparently this (and a direct sales pitch from Bill Clinton to King Fahd) swung the aircraft part of the deal Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's way.
Wow, I knew national industry deals were murky, but damn.
Another way of presenting the same facts is that Airbus has done business with a country where corruption and bribes are the norm. The U.S. intercepted communications and used them to blackmail buyers so that they chose Boeing instead of the best airplanes.
Exactly. It's fair to say that at the level of national champion industries and state-to-state deals, countries' intelligence organizations are always involved.
Maybe they're doing defense (discovering bribes swaying the bid to another country, or monitoring their own country's bribes) or offense (stealing competitor bid data and specifications), but they're not idle.
I don't mind being asked for a source on a difficult to research topic but this was covered in the mainstream press and you clearly didn't even attempt a google search.
The article referencing this and Airbus is rather sensationalized and cuts off half the quote. This was said in reference to Airbus bribing foreign officials to buy from them. The full quote reads:
"When we have caught you at it, we haven’t said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you’re bribing and tell its officials that we don’t take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and your bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal…"[5]
[5] R. James Woolsey, "Why We Spy on our Allies," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2000.
The source unfortunately is locked behind a paywall so admittedly I don’t have the full context either.
