The National Security Agency (NSA) carries out industrial espionage on governmental organisations and private-sector firms mainly in Europe, the Mainichi Shimbun reported, saying the information came from European Union (EU) documents.

The agency supplies information to US companies to help them win international business contracts, the paper said in a story illustrated by photographs of the documents. The documents are part of a 100-page interim report drawn up in January and its updated 10-page summary presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday.

Victims of the bugging included electric machinery company Thomson CSF of France, European consortium Airbus Industrie and electronics firm NEC Corp. of Japan, the report said.

Thomson lost a radar sale deal with Brazil to a US company after bugging found theFrench firm was in secret negotiations, while Airbus lost a one-billion-dollar contract, it said.

NEC was secretly talking with Indonesia on a contract to provide telecommunications facilities in 1990, but the US government found the move and put pressure on the Indonesian government, it said.

The espionage thus led AT&T Corp of the United States to win half the contract, it said.

The wiretapping network, called Echelon, is part of the huge UKUSA electronic system run by the United States and Britain, the paper said.