"American planes come to the edge of our country and they don't say 'excuse me,'" President Jiang Zemin exclaimed, even as he expressed hope that the two sides could reach a "common understanding" about the incident that led to the death of Chinese pilot Wang Wei. "This sort of conduct is not acceptable in any country."

In fact, American intelligence has conducted reconnaissance flights for some 50 years, and so have dozens of other countries -- including China, which conducts extensive surveillance all over the Pacific. But the Chinese were miffed that the Clinton administration had ramped up these operations last year in response to mounting tensions over the potential sale of U.S. weapons to Taiwan. (President Bush approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan this week, but he excluded the most contentious weapon from that deal -- an Aegis radar system that had China rattling its sabers.) Chinese officials also complained last May that the flights were coming too close to the coast; the American military responded bluntly that the flights were in international airspace and would continue.

Even in a world where spying is a common reality, it still has the potential to rile neighbors, allies and competitors alike.

As talk heats up that the Bush administration is creating a new Cold War environment in its tough talk with China, Russia and North Korea, even alienating our allies in Europe who are distressed by plans for a national missile defense, some in the field of security are floating ideas that could ease the tensions between the U.S. and the rest of the world while still maintaining our national security interests. The most idealistic of these are proposals for a pact of mutual restraint: Don't spy on us, and we won't spy on you.

Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy recently raised the idea for such an espionage treaty. "Is it possible that espionage could be restricted by international agreement? Remarkably, the answer is yes," Aftergood writes in a recent issue of the organization's newsletter. Aftergood points out that the U.S. already has an agreement with Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom not to engage in espionage against one another.

"There's no need to be utopian about this," Aftergood says in a phone interview. "This is not the solution to all problems. And it does not mean that we can dispense altogether with espionage. But we can do more to build a civilized world and we can eliminate some of the friction that has arisen as a result of espionage, especially among our Western allies."

Such a plan would not be realistic in dealing with sometimes hostile and often secretive countries like Iraq or China. But Aftergood proposes that an agreement could be extended to our other allies in the West -- France and Israel in particular. He even sees it as a possible solution to our tensions with Russia. "It's a particularly interesting case, because Russia has a highly accomplished espionage capability and if they could be made to restrain themselves, it might well be to the U.S. advantage," Aftergood says. Like the arms race, he argues, the spy race can exhaust precious resources.

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