According Brad Williams' book Japanese Foreign Intelligence, which also has a chapter (#2) on CIA's activities in spying on Japan, the CIA tried their hand at economic & tech spying on Japan in the mid-1980s, by setting up a ring of agents under non-diplomatic cover, as business people. However the PSIA is said to quickly have uncovered this in part due to poor spycraft by the Americans (including unsecured comms), and so the CIA agents were apparently withdrawn.
Williams doesn't say anything about whether the Japanese made public any of this at the time. (He does cover a lot more the 1982 IBM case, in which the FBI set up a sting operation on two Japanese corporations trying to acquire some IBM trade secrets, and which was widely covered in the US and Japanese press at the time.) Williams source for the info on CIA's attempts at economic spying in Japan is a book in Japanese (alas) Sato Masaru and Koh Young Choul, Kokka Joho Senryaku, Tokyo: Kodanash, 2007--which even if I'd manage to get my hands on, I'd not be able to read myself. So, did the Japanese press mention any of this at the time, i.e. that PSIA uncovered CIA's attempts to do some economic spying on Japan? Or was it essentially kept under wraps, for the sake of good relations (despite the publicity in the IBM case)?
