The CIA secret that saved the Falklands

US spied on enemies for 70 years after posing as code experts... and selling tech to 120 countries

THE CIA plundered the secrets of allies and enemies for decades through the sale of code machines its operatives could crack.

The sensational operation even allowed Washington to feed information to London about Argentine forces in the Falklands War.

The CIA secretly controlled a Swissbased maker of encryption devices, using the company as a front from the 1940s until 2018.

Codenamed Thesaurus and later Rubicon, the operation is being hailed as one of the most audacious in intelligence history.

Crypto AG of Zug sold code-making equipment to more than 120 countries but none of its customers knew it was run by the CIA and spymasters in West Germany.

Clients included military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican, according to documents leaked to the Washington Post.

Intercepted messages could be translated within seconds.

Swiss authorities yesterday said they had opened an investigation into the extraordinary revelations that have not been disputed by the CIA or the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. The ruse reportedly allowed the CIA to monitor Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 US embassy siege and catch Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by American servicemen.

It also led to the capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

He was wanted by the US and was discovered because of a message sent to the Vatican seeking refuge.

‘It was the intelligence coup of the century,’ concludes an official CIA history that exposes the operation’s existence. ‘Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.’ Britain did not buy Crypto machines, pictured, according to the report, but joined the trusted few nations benefiting from it.

In 1982, the Reagan administration exploited Argentina’s reliance on Crypto by leaking its military secrets to the UK.

However, it is not known what information was shared but Argentine officials eventually has suspicions that their messages were being read.

The Soviet Union and China were never Crypto customers because they always suspected it had links to Western intelligence.

However, clients included Nato members such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey, whom the US considered less reliable. Boris Hagelin, Crypto’s founder, was a Russian-born inventor who fled to the US in 1940 with his greatest creation, a portable encryption machine – similar to Nazi Germany’s Enigma.

Although the firm was liquidated in 2018 its products are still used in more than a dozen countries.

A Swiss defence ministry spokesman said a judge would investigate the allegations and report by the end of June.

‘The events under discussion date back to 1945 and are difficult to reconstruct and interpret in the present-day context,’ he added.