In 1998, German prosecutors dropped criminal charges of industrial espionage against Lopez, who resigned from VW in 1996 and was injured in a car accident in Spain two years later. Fialka recounts a 1991 incident in which spies posing as garbage collectors scoured the trash cans outside the Houston home of a U.S. defense contractor executive. One of the ostensible garbage men turned out to be France's consul general, who said he was collecting fill for a hole in his yard. Not so, said the FBI, which suspected he was searching for secrets in part of a 30-year effort by the French government to reap U.S. scientific or military secrets. The book also recounts a vast Japanese corporate spy ring.
Experts pinpoint several reasons for heightened spy activity.
The end of the Cold War, which began when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and culminated when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, ended much of the storied espionage between the USSR, China and the West. But experts say that after a brief respite from spy activity, espionage resurfaced. Instead of international political and military espionage, it became corporate. By 1997, the FBI reported that 23 foreign governments were systematically scouring American companies of intellectual assets. The rise of email as the de facto means of sending messages across companies and the world has heightened the danger.