An employee most often accomplished the thefts. In 1994, the FBI reported that its economic counterintelligence unit had information that nearly 50% of research and development firms had a trade secret theft, and 57% reported repeat or multiple thefts. By 2015, research and development spending reached an all-time high of US$499 billion. “It’s a fact, if you snooze you lose.” “Competitive Intelligence is your best alarm clock.” īy 2010, research and development investment in the United States had more than doubled to nearly US$380 billion, or 2.62% of nominal GDP. The following information from a 2001 Business Week publication illustrates the point well: companies that engage in corporate spying see a payoff in increased revenue, costs avoided, and better decision-making. This ranges from analyzing publicity documents to schmoozing representatives to research securities filings and news reports. Competitive intelligence (which if not properly conducted can also be a form of industrial espionage) involves legal means of data collection. Still, the issue of what constitutes espionage can be gray. The spy’s tools may have transitioned to the computer and other sophisticated technology, but many of the people are previous Cold War participants, now working for private firms. However, the reality is somewhat different but in a world of increasing corporate competition and computer-based data storage, the problem of espionage is increasing. Government spies, typified by James Bond, working in glamorous settings, retrieve government secrets. ![]() Walters, in Introduction to Security (Tenth Edition), 2019 EspionageĮspionage usually brings about thoughts of spies sneaking into a company’s private vaults and copying or stealing formulas or products. Matthews served for 33 years as a clandestine operations officer in the CIA, and since retirement has written a series of novels about Dominika Egorova, the latest of which is The Kremlin’s Candidate ( Michael Joseph, £12.99).Robert J. I wondered how much the real-life “swallows” had inspired Red Sparrow, so I asked Jason Matthews, who wrote the novel on which the film is based. Lora, meanwhile, was rewarded with permission to live in Moscow, and eventually married one of her many lovers. Krotkov’s disillusionment with the USSR was principally due to the results of another sparrow’s operation which had resulted in the suicide of the target, a French diplomat called Louis Guibaud. “You forget, I am an actress,” she replied, to which he responded, “Yes, but a Soviet actress.”ĭejean was blackmailed into spilling secrets and sending misinformation back to Paris, and did so for several years until Krotkov defected and spilled the beans. The KGB chief General Gribanov came to congratulate her, but, with a puritanism that seems to have been surprisingly typical of the sexpionage masterminds, chided her for her immodesty. Once Dejean had gone, Lora sat celebrating with her colleagues, half-naked and proudly showing off her bruises. In 1963 the playwright and screenwriter Yuri Krotkov defected to the West and later revealed that he had been tasked by the KGB with seeking out attractive young women who could be used to seduce men. The true details of what the Soviet spymasters were up to during the Cold War are buried deeper than Davy Jones’s locker, but defectors have given us the occasional glimpse into the life of these women. With no other way to provide for her sick mother, she is forced into the world of espionage and sent to a secret academy where she and her fellow “sparrows” are drilled in seduction techniques by a boot-faced Charlotte Rampling, before heading off to ensnare a hunky CIA operative. ![]() Red Sparrow stars Jennifer Lawrence as a Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballerina whose career is ended by an injury. ![]() A Soviet sex school for training female spies in the art of seduction sounds like the stuff of fiction: something that Ian Fleming would have rejected as too implausible before going back to writing about exploding pens and lethal bowler hats.īut this is the subject of Francis Lawrence's new film, Red Sparrow, and is inspired by establishments that are said to have really existed during the Cold War, where young women known as “sparrows” or “swallows” were instructed with typical Soviet thoroughness on methods of manipulating a man’s ego and other more tangible areas to get to his secrets.
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