Every U.S. businessman knows that espionage is as much a part of corporate competition as it is of international intriguebut few have ever been willing to admit it. Now the businessmen, soothed by a promise of anonymity, have confessed all. To nine Harvard Business School graduate students, who polled 200 key U.S. companies and personally grilled 100 top corporate executives, they gave enough eye-opening information on industrial spying to fill a 77-page report.
The vast majority of U.S. businessmen, says the report, feel that information gathering should cease "when it conflicts with legality or common morality," confined themselves to such...