CIA secretly owned global encryption giant
120 governments paid for security software unaware that US and Germany were using it to spy on them
A SWISS company that sold encryption equipment to more than 120 governments was secretly owned by the American CIA, it has been revealed.
Crypto AG made encryption devices for governments that were purchased by countries to keep the communications of spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. They were unaware, however, that it was owned by the CIA and, until the Nineties, Germany’s spy agency.
The decades-long enterprise, among the Cold War’s most closely guarded secrets, was laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German broadcaster.
The operation, known first by the codename “Thesaurus” and later “Rubicon”, ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.
“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concluded. “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.”
Clients included Iran, Latin American military juntas, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and the Vatican.
It meant the CIA and its German allies could monitor Iran’s mullahs in the 1979 hostage crisis, feed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands conflict, track the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and catch Libyan officials congratulating themselves on bombing a Berlin disco in 1986.
Crypto AG was never able to convince the USSR or China to use its equipment, to the CIA’S frustration.
Yet it was an astonishing resource for the intelligence agencies. In the Eighties, Crypto AG accounted for roughly 40 per cent of diplomatic cables and transmissions by foreign governments. US analysts decoded them and mined them for intelligence.
The revelations raise uncomfortable questions as to whether German and US authorities were in a position to intervene in, or at least expose, international atrocities, but opted against doing so at times to preserve its access to valuable streams of intelligence.
Former employees of Crypto AG had no idea they were selling rigged devices. “You think you do good work and make something secure,” said Juerg Spoerndli, an electrical engineer who spent 16 years there. “Then you realise that you cheated these clients.”
Crypto’s products are still in use in more than a dozen countries. But the firm was dismembered in 2018, liquidated by shareholders whose identities are permanently shielded by the Byzantine laws of Liechtenstein.
Germany sold its stake in the Nineties; the CIA in 2018.
Andreas Linde, the chairman of the company that now holds the rights to Crypto AG’S international products and business, said he had no knowledge of the company’s relationship with the CIA and Germany’s equivalent, the BND.
“We at Crypto International have never had any relationship with the CIA or BND – and please quote me,” he told the US and German publications.
“If what you are saying is true, then absolutely I feel betrayed, and my family feels betrayed, and I feel there will be a lot of employees who will feel betrayed as well as customers.”
The Swiss government announced yesterday that it was launching an investigation into Crypto AG’S ties to the CIA and BND. Neither intelligence agency has commented.