Your comment illuminates things somewhat - at the top end of the international business food-chain there is no real free-market. We can talk about free-markets when discussing small, medium and even large domestic sized businesses. But when we think about integrated circuits, aircraft, shipping, consulting engineering, infrastructure etc, it's about discretion when lobbying to get the winning the bid, discretion in stealing key technologies, and discretion in manipulating the market.
My first instinct was to suggest that encryption is the magic bullet for having a real free market at the top end - but that doesn't stop bribery. In the one hand, we need to protect innovative businesses from having their intellectual property stolen and handed to the incumbent, in the other we need to shine a light on the corruption that pervades everything from soccer to software contracts.
I'm not sure what can be done beyond what you suggest at the end of your post: if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.
Time for the spies to become Wikileaks? The reason they won't do this is because every side has nasty secrets to hide.
Bribery is generally not sophisticated. Especially at the levels the CIA could give a shit about, bribery is an open secret and part of what the ruling classes expect, or at least condone.
Embezzlement- yeah that's hidden. Which is why congress pays whistleblowers. I mean the U.S. Is ridiculously out in front for these sort of things (well officially, I am sure bribery and corruption is still common)
Look, use your spy satellites to publically shame bribery - that's fine by me. Claim the UK is bribing every government it can find - sure, Cameron and Blair were hardly discreet. But claim that after you have done this service to the world, you then "quietly have a word". Come on. If you are doing this for the greater good, make it public.
I swear, if the CIA spent the next year uploading to their web site phone taps of public officials taking bribes, international corruption would end by 2017.