The CIA's best kept secret

Information has never been able to avoid being instrumentalised. The world's major powers have always fought to achieve world supremacy and have used data as a weapon to accomplish this.  One of the states with the most experience in this area is the United States, an example of this was the revelations made by Edward Snowden. The latest case of espionage - considered to be "the intelligence coup of the century" - involves the CIA and the espionage services of the then West Germany (BND), which for more than five decades have secretly controlled more than 120 countries.

The Cold War marked a turning point in international diplomacy. It was around this time when US and German intelligence joined forces to spy on 120 countries through the world's leading supplier of encryption equipment: Crypto AG. The Swiss company Crypto AG supplied more than 120 governments with encryption devices. What these states didn't know was that these devices were allegedly manipulated to break the codes and messages, according to a joint investigation by the American newspaper "The Washington Post", the German television station "ZDF" and the Swiss media "SRF" on Tuesday. 

During the 1980s, approximately 40 percent of foreign data by U.S. intelligence officials were obtained through Crypto devices. However, the story of Crypto AG began much earlier. The Swiss company scored its first victory in building coding machines for US troops during World War II. As a result, the company became the leading manufacturer of encryption devices, which were purchased by more than 120 countries, including Iran, India and Pakistan. 

The agreement between the CIA and the BND was one of the "best kept" secrets of the Cold War, according to the Washington Post; a secret that has come to light through a classified and exhaustive CIA history of the operation.  This document identifies the CIA officers who headed up the program and all those who were responsible for implementing it. The operation, called " Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon", stands out as one of the most audacious in the history of the CIA. "It was the intelligence coup of the century", concludes the CIA report. “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”, the newspaper reported. 

During this period, the United States and Germany had access to confidential information about Iran and its hostage crisis. In 1979, hundreds of Iranian students entered the U.S. embassy and took 52 people hostages.  Crypton's devices also provided intelligence about Argentina's army to Britain during the Falklands War and were aware of developments in countries such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, among others. The document to which 'The Washinton Post' has had access also relates the relationship that these machines may have with historical episodes such as the killing of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976 or the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

But this encryption system had its limits. Neither the former Soviet Union nor Russia trusted this company, because they were suspicious of its relationship with the West.  The history of one of the greatest espionage coups in history began to crumble when, in the early 1990s, the BND decided to leave the operation. The CIA decided not to give up and to continue using this data in its favor, so it bought the participation of the Germans and continued to take advantage of these devices until 2018, when the agency sold all the company's actives.  

Even so, Crypto products are still used in several countries, even though the company disappeared in 2018 after being bought by CyOne Security and Crypto International, which took over the brand and the international business of the former company. Both companies have insisted that they have no relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In the meantime, the Swiss government has announced that it will launch an investigation to investigate the links that existed between the company and the CIA and the BND.
 

Crypto's history began during World War II when the US Army decided to hire the company to develop an encryption device. The person responsible for doing so was Boris Hagelin, a Russian businessman who ran away to Sweden when the Bolsheviks took power and later moved to the United States. During the war, more than 140,000 devices were built. However, this conflict was only the end of the beginning. Hagelin returned to Sweden and became a point of reference for both the United States and hundreds of other countries that decided to buy his encryption devices.  The Post notes that since 1970 the CIA has controlled almost all aspects of Crypto AG, in cooperation with BND.

The Cold War symbolized the transition to a new stage in international diplomacy, a period in which intelligence and espionage took on a special role. For more than fifty years, the CIA has been witnessed to the fall of the main Latin American regimes, the war in the Maldives or the Iranian crisis in 1979. During this period, they’ve had access to confidential information from more than 120 countries, information that has sometimes been powerful enough to change the future of these regions. Fifty years later, the CIA's best-kept secret has come to light to show us, once again, the great power that information has.