Not Russia, nor North Korea, according to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. It’s France — one of America’s closest allies.

“There are probably a dozen or 15 countries that steal our technology in this way,” Gates said in an interview the Council on Foreign Relations posted online Thursday. “In terms of the most capable, next to the Chinese, are the French — and they’ve been doing it a long time.”

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Gates, who was also director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first Bush administration, said that when he talks to business audiences, he asks, “How many of you go to Paris on business?’ Hands go up. ‘How many of you take your laptops?’ Hands go up. ‘How many of you take your laptops to dinner?’ Not very many hands.”

“For years,” Gates said, “French intelligence services have been breaking into the hotel rooms of American businessmen and surreptitiously downloading their laptops, if they felt those laptops had technological information or competitive information that would be useful for French companies. France has been a mercantilist country — the government and business have operated hand in hand — since the time of Louis XIV.”

But the U.S. government doesn’t do that kind of thing, Gates said, although he acknowledged that “it’s hard for people to believe this. You’ll have to take my word for it. We are nearly alone in the world in not using our intelligence services for competitive advantage for our businesses.”

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The French Embassy in Washington had no immediate response to Gates’ comments.

Gates described spending many years within a CIA that he said generated “an enormous amount of information, either at low classification or unclassified,” about other nations. Details about their electrical grids, their water supply systems, even the weight their bridges could handle — “things like that — things that any company wanting to build a factory in a foreign country would love to have.”

But despite his attempt to work with, in his words, five or six commerce secretaries, “I never could get one of them interested in being the facilitator of getting that kind of CIA information to American companies. So this is something we don’t do. The Chinese probably have the most pervasive system of collecting against us of any country, but I think it’s important to remember they’re not alone.”

Interviewer Fareed Zakaria had asked Gates for his take on Monday’s Justice Department indictment of five Chinese military officers accused of stealing U.S. companies’ secrets to give Chinese companies a competitive edge.

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The former defense secretary — who irked the White House earlier this year with his new book that tweaked the Obama administration, especially Vice President Joe Biden — said the indictments put Washington and Beijing in uncharted waters.

“I don’t know of any precedent for indicting foreign intelligence officers while they’re still sitting in their home country, unlikely to visit,” he said. “I think partly it was a wake-up call for American companies that this is real and it’s big and it’s very well organized, coming from the Chinese. Second, I think it’s a shot across the bow of the Chinese, [to say] they may’ve gone too far and there’ll be broader ramifications for the relationship. And frankly, there’s probably a little PR value here at home, showing we’re aggressively trying to deal with this problem. Where it goes from here, I don’t know.”