(FORTUNE Magazine) – Is your fist fat? Is it listless, tired, feeling flaccid? Here's just the book to get it fit again. By page two, you'll be shaking your fist vigorously in the air. By chapter eight, you'll be slamming it down repeatedly on your desk, shouting, "No, by thunder; our enemies shall not prevail!" Pretty soon other people--when they see your fist coming--will hide or try to run away.

Healthy outrage is what Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialka seeks to provoke in readers, and with War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America he succeeds admirably. America, he argues, may have won the Cold War, but daily we are losing ground economically to enemies who pilfer our commercial secrets.

These thefts are perpetrated not just by America's adversaries (as one might expect), but by our purported pals and allies. Take the French. Take the French, please.

It's not just Jerry Lewis movies that they're copying. "On a bright morning in May 1991," writes Fialka, "a guard standing behind the sprawling [Houston] home of an executive of a large U.S. defense contractor happened to notice two well-tailored men tossing plastic bags of garbage into their van. It is a neighborhood of excess. But custom-collected garbage?"

One of the two turned out to be no less a personage than France's consul general in Houston. He claimed he was collecting fill for a hole in his backyard. The FBI suspected he was searching trash for secrets--one well-established tactic in a vast, 30-year effort by the French government to harvest any U.S. scientific or military secrets that might redound to France's economic gloire.

The tale is one of many calculated to set readers' blood boiling. Fialka begins each one with the same "It was a dark and stormy night" setup. Yet whatever the book's stylistic limitations, it boasts as many gadgets as a good Bond movie: the laser beam that eavesdrops on conversations by reading vibrations of speakers' voices off office windowpanes; the assassin's gun whose darts have been loaded with deadly poisons that mimic symptoms of a heart attack.

Preposterous? Not at all. The stakes in economic espionage are high. Chapter four ("A Yen to Know") recounts the effort by Japanese corporations to steal U.S. research into tilt-wing aircraft that represented four decades' worth of Bell Helicopter experimentation, $3.5 billion of U.S. government investment, and $17.8 billion in potential U.S. exports. The spy technique employed was "tunneling," wherein company A, seeking to avoid the cost of research, sets up an anonymous-looking subsidiary and hires away company B's disgruntled (but knowledgeable) employees. With tilt-wing aircraft, it's too early to know how far the Japanese succeeded. Still, as Fialka writes, "it's more than just possible that a family of new aircraft that spent 40 years germinating in the U.S. might take off first in Asia."

Most technology thefts go unreported--a lapse the author attributes to what he calls "rape-victim syndrome." No company likes to admit that it has been the object of a crime as outrageous and intimate as spying. Nor is the government eager to confront crimes that call its own competence into question. Companies that want increased protection from spies, says Fialka, had better look first to themselves, second to the CIA or FBI.

Confronting spies directly is not a good idea. The Japanese long ago figured out how to use Americans' reverence for fair play to their own advantage: When an American company accuses a Japanese rival of spying, the PR flunkies of the accused dismiss the charges as "Japan bashing." It's an effective dodge learned from the Israelis, who sometimes deflect charges of corporate chicanery by dismissing them as anti-Semitism.

The ultimate protection against spies, Fialka argues, is attitudinal: Americans need to drop the smug assumption that top technology always originates here. Like the French, Koreans, Russians, Japanese, Israelis, and others, we need to institutionalize curiosity, keeping tabs on the doings of our peers abroad, scouring the world for the latest and best technology. It's a case of the best defense being a good offense. And as anyone who's read this book can tell you, the offense we're facing is pretty darn offensive.