That's an interesting spin on what the article said. To quote:
According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994. The NSA found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official to secure a lion's share for Airbus in modernising Saudi Arabian Airlines' fleet. The planes were in a $6 billion deal that Edouard Balladur, France's then prime minister, had hoped to clinch on a visit to see King Fahd in January 1994. He went home empty-handed.
James Woolsey, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounted in a newspaper article in 2000 how the American government typically reacted to intelligence of this sort. “When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,” he wrote. Apparently this (and a direct sales pitch from Bill Clinton to King Fahd) swung the aircraft part of the deal Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's way.
“When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,”
That's very altruistic, and only a pure coincidence that an American defence contractor, who is purer than the driven snow, should get the work instead.
I guess McDonnell Douglas was still smarting from that deal in '79 when they were indicted for... bribing the officials of 5 foreign countries (including nl).
