By Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune
PARIS - A French investigating magistrate said Tuesday that he was starting a preliminary inquiry into possible damage to France's economic interests by U.S. electronic espionage. His investigation - which will not necessarily result in legal proceedings - was the latest twist in sporadic but long-running concern in France about the workings of a U.S. network of satellites and ground stations, known as Echelon, that reportedly can intercept a million communications around the world every 30 minutes.
Disclosures about the U.S. system, which is rumored to be powerful enough to eavesdrop on most phone traffic in France and other countries in Europe, have fueled allegations in France that Washington has turned its Cold War weapons against U.S. allies for economic advantage.
The French government has avoided a confrontation with Washington about Echelon, partly because France itself operates a similar but much smaller system of electronic eavesdropping to capture phone conversations, fax messages and e-mail in the United States, according to published accounts in Paris.
French government wiretapping and other espionage against French citizens and companies is another factor explaining the reluctance in Paris to fuel a public quarrel with Washington over the issue, according to Olivier Debouzy, a Paris attorney and former government official who represents several leading multinational corporations.
Speaking last month on French television about Echelon, Mr. Debouzy said that the most effective response to governments' surveillance of private messages lay in encryption programs that are commercially available for corporate and personal communications. Early this year Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government made the first moves to authorize encryption in private messages for the first time in France's history.
But the French authorities have only limited powers in trying to curb an investigation of the sort announced Tuesday by Jean-Pierre Dintilhac, an examining magistrate, who said that he was seeking the assistance of France's counterintelligence agency, known by its initials as the DST, in trying to determine whether France had lost contracts or suffered other damage because of Echelon's operations.
Mr. Jospin's government has pledged not to interfere with magistrates' inquiries, but the case seemed unlikely to come into court even if Mr. Dintilhac uncovered evidence that France's interests had been harmed.
Diplomatic damage could result, however, at a time when the European Parliament has been hearing complaints from German, French and British representatives about the capabilities of Echelon. Former U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that Washington spies on European economic activities, but insisted that these efforts were confined to uncovering bribery and never included disclosure of commercial secrets to U.S. companies.
Echelon, which was initially brought to public attention in the 1980s by a British investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell, has become more of an issue in Europe in recent months because Britain plays a key role in running and using the eavesdropping network. This U.S.-British tradition of intelligence-sharing, a core feature of the special relationship between Washington and London, is often seen in France as incompatible with the European Union's current bid to develop its own defense and security policy.
This debate was brought into the open a few weeks ago in a research paper on trans-Atlantic intelligence-sharing that has attracted an influential readership in European capitals. In the paper, Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a respected research organization in London, said that France and Germany needed to develop better intelligence cooperation among their own services in order to be able to operate efficiently with U.S. forces in future conflicts.
On the issue highlighted by Echelon, Mr. Grant, echoing the views of influential officials in London, Paris and Washington, recommended that ''NATO countries should agree on a code of conduct about economic espionage.''
The Americans and the French will continue to spy on each other, he wrote, but such activities would be much less damaging ''if both sides agreed on a set of rules about what is allowed and what is not allowed in industrial espionage against each other.'' Such an accord, he said, should be applied to all the NATO countries.
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