>> 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.

A big part of why Lockheed got out of the airliner business was that they got caught bribing the Japanese prime minister.

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.

What's fun is I get results by just copying a phrase from your comment and googling it:

"NSA conducting industrial espionage on Airbus"

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu-sn&q=...