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Coming at a time of rising trade tensions between Japan and the U.S., the charges created a furor in the Japanese press. Complained the country's second biggest daily, Asahi Shimbun (circ. 12.2 million), in a front-page story: "Even among some Americans there can be heard voices saying that this was a highly political action against Japan." Commentators denounced the FBI's undercover methods as entrapment. Several newspapers reported that Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki had tentatively decided that the defendants should not be extradited.
Ethical or not, the investigation produced a devastating mass of evidence against the suspects. The sting began last fall when the FBI formed Glenmar Associates and billed it as a consulting firm with information to sell about computers. Glenmar's headquarters were in the heart of Northern California's so-called Silicon Valley, a center of American electronics manufacturing and a hotbed of industrial intelligence gathering. FBI Agent Alan Garretson, using the name Al Harrison, posed as Glenmar's president.
By January, representatives of both Hitachi and Mitsubishi had approached the fake firm, seeking data on IBM's newest computers. IBM, concerned about its vulnerability to industrial spies, agreed to cooperate with the FBI by providing its Glenmar front with some confidential documents as bait. Among the items offered: design information for IBM's top-of-the-line Model 3081 computer.
According to the FBI, the Japanese firms took the bait. Agent Garretson soon began an odyssey that took him, among other places, to San Jose, Calif., Las Vegas and Honolulu for secret meetings with various Hitachi and Mitsubishi employees. Perhaps most bizarre of all was a 5 a.m. rendezvous between Garretson and Hitachi Engineer Jun Naruse at a hotel in Hartford, Conn. Garretson had arranged for Naruse to see a new IBM 3380 data-storage device on a computer at the nearby Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Group. Flashing false identification badges that had been supplied by P & W officials, who were in on the ruse, Garretson escorted Naruse past security guards into the deserted computer room; there Naruse quickly began photographing the IBM unit. That night, in the first of several payments from Hitachi, Naruse handed Garretson $3,000 in $100 bills.
The FBI insists that the Japanese knew what they were doing was illegal. In an affidavit filed in federal court, the bureau says that it taped a telephone conversation in which Naruse admitted that if anything went wrong with the deal, there could be "real trouble for Hitachi." There could also be real trouble for Naruse and the other defendants. If convicted on the charges, they face fines of $10,000 and U.S. prison sentences of up to five years on each count.
—By Charles Alexander. Reported by Bob Buderi/San Francisco