‘India, others unwittingly used intel coding devices’
WASHINGTON:US intelligence body CIA and Germany’s BND reportedly owned and ran for decades a company that secretly built and sold code-writing machines for secret communications to many countries, including India. They also unencrypted intercepted messages and shared the information within a close-knit group of partners.
The Washington Post, which uncovered the secret operation from classified CIA documents in a joint project with German broadcaster ZDF, said the company called Crypto AG was based in Switzerland and was dismembered and sold off in 2018 to separate companies, who weren’t aware of its antecedents.
The Post reported that India was among the company’s more than 120 clients, along with Pakistan. The report did not specify any Indian intelligence operation or communication that may have been intercepted.
This is not the first time that US intelligence has been found snooping on India.
In 2013, secret documents released by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden had shown that the Us-based National Security Agency had accessed computers of the Indian embassy in Washington, DC and its permanent mission to the United Nations in New York.
The joint CIA-BND operation was initially code-named “Thesaurus” and later dubbed “Rubicon”. It ran from the 1970s till 2018. “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report said, according to The Washington
Post.
“Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and (former) West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two foreign countries.”
Crypto AG was founded by Boris Hagelin, a Russian man who fled to Sweden and later moved to the US. The US and BND took complete control of the company in the early 1970s. The report also said the CIA monitored Iran for years, especially during the 1979-81 hostage crisis.