👶 🙍🏼 🎋 As the CIA read for decades the encrypted correspondence of allies and opponents 😃 💅 🚶🏼

For more than half a century, governments of all countries have trusted the only company to conceal correspondence maintained by their spies, soldiers and diplomats.

This company, Crypto AG , achieved its first success by signing a contract during the Second World War to create coding machines for the US Army infantry. Having made good money on this, for decades it has become the dominant manufacturer of encryption equipment, and has been at the forefront of technology, moving from mechanical gears to electronic circuits, and finally, to silicon chips and software.

This Swiss company earned millions of dollars selling equipment in more than 120 countries, not only in the 20th, but also in the 21st century. Her clients included the Iranian government, Latin American military juntas, nuclear weapons and rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

However, all these clients did not suspect that the CIA secretly owned Crypto as part of a top secret partnership with West German intelligence. These intelligence agencies tweaked the company's devices so that they could easily crack codes used by countries to exchange encrypted messages.

And now this treaty, which lasted several decades, along with other carefully guarded Cold War secrets that belonged to the vast history of the CIA operations, has been disclosed thanks to materials received by The Washington Post and German media ZDF.

The documents list the CIA officials who managed the program and the company directors who were trusted with its implementation. It describes both the origin of the enterprise and the internal conflicts that nearly destroyed it. It shows how the United States and its allies have for years exploited the gullibility of other countries, appropriating their money and stealing secrets.

This operation, first called «Thesaurus» [Thesaurus], and then " Rubicon " [Rubicon], is among the most daring operations of the CIA.

As the CIA report says, “It was the intelligence triumph of the century. “Foreign governments paid good money to the USA and West Germany for the possibility that their secret communications would be heard by at least two (and possibly 5-6) foreign states.”

Since 1970, the CIA and its sister agency specializing in code cracking, the National Security Agency, have controlled almost every aspect of Crypto's work, giving instructions to their German partners on hiring, technology development, sabotage algorithms, and sales management.

And then spies from the USA and West Germany just sat down and listened.

They listened to mullah talks with the 1979 hostages during the Iranian crisis , fed data on the Argentinean military in Britain during the Falkland War , tracked campaigns to eliminate South American dictators and intercepted the mutual congratulations exchanged between Libyan officials onexplosions in the 1986 Berlin club .

A British military helicopter takes off after the landing of British marines in the village of Darwin in the Falkland Islands in 1982. During the Falkland War, American spies leaked information about the Argentine military in Britain.

Escort of an American hostage near the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, after students stormed the embassy and took its employees hostage. With Crypto, the United States monitored the mullahs of Iran during this crisis.

The program had its limitations. The main opponents of the United States, the USSR and China, have never used the services of Crypto. Their well-founded suspicions about the company's ties with the West protected them from its detrimental influence, although the CIA history suggests that US spies learned a lot by monitoring the communication of other countries with Moscow and Beijing.

There have also been information leaks that put Crypto under suspicion. In 1970, documents were published describing the active and revealing company communication between one of the founders of the NSA and the founder of Crypto. Foreign targets received signals of possible danger from carelessly made statements by officials of the country, including US President Ronald Reagan. The arrest of a Crypto seller in Iran in 1992, who did not realize that he was selling equipment “in secret,” caused a devastating “storm of publications,” as the CIA writes.

However, the true extent of the company's interaction with the CIA and its German partner has still remained unknown.

German intelligence, BND, in the 1990s, decided that the risk of disclosure is too great, and withdrew from this operation. However, the CIA simply bought out the Germans' share and continued to work, squeezing everything possible out of the company for further espionage, until 2018, when the agency sold the company’s assets, according to current and former officials.

By that time, the company's importance for the international security market had fallen dramatically, declining due to the proliferation of online encryption. Strong encryption, once the prerogative of governments and large corporations, is now no less common than smartphone apps.

Still, Crypto’s work is connected with modern espionage. Its duration and prevalence explain how the United States developed such an insatiable attitude towards global surveillance, which was discovered by Edward Snowden in 2013. The history of Crypto echoes in suspicious cases around modern companies supposedly connected with foreign governments, including the Russian company Kaspersky, which produces antiviruses, a messaging application related to the UAE, and Chinese telecommunications Huawei.

This story is based on the history of the CIA and BND, which also became the property of The Post and ZDF, as well as interviews with current and former intelligence officials and Crypto employees. Many of them agreed to communicate on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of this topic.

It is difficult to overestimate the exclusivity of the stories of the CIA and BND. Sensitive information is periodically declassified and published. However, it is extremely rarely possible (if at all possible) to find out their official history associated with a completely secret operation. WP managed to read all the documents, but their source insisted on publishing only parts of them.

The CIA and BND declined to comment on this story, although US and German officials do not deny the authenticity of the documents. The first of these is a 96-page description of the operation, completed in 2004 by the CIA’s historical unit, the Intelligence Research Center. The second is an oral story recorded by German intelligence agents in 2008.

Cross-cutting stories reveal the disputes of two partners regarding money, management and ethical boundaries, and show how often West German intelligence agents were horrified by the enthusiasm of American spies with whom they aimed at their “partners”.

However, both sides describe the success of this operation as going beyond their wildest dreams. Sometimes, for example, in the 1980s, up to 40% of the decrypted and studied by cryptanalysts from the NSA communications through diplomatic channels and other messages transmitted by foreign powers passed to Crypto.

And all this time, Crypto earned millions of dollars, which the CIA and BND shared among themselves, and invested in other operations.

The Crypto sign is still visible on the wall of the company's long-standing headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, although the company was liquidated in 2018.

Crypto products are still in use in more than ten countries around the world, and its orange-white logo still hangs on the wall of the company's long-standing headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. But the company was liquidated in 2018 by shareholders whose identities were forever hidden by the confusing laws of Liechtenstein, a tiny European country, thanks to its secrecy, having a reputation similar to that of the Cayman Islands.

Most of the shares in Crypto were bought by two companies. The first, CyOne Security, was created as part of the acquisition of a controlling stake, and now sells security systems exclusively to the Swiss government. The second, Crypto International, took over the brand and international business of the former company.

Each of them insists on the absence of ties with any kind of intelligence, but only one said that they did not know about the CIA. These statements were made in response to requests sent by WP, ZDF and the Swiss broadcaster SRF.

CyOne had a rather substantial connection with the disappeared Crypto, for example, the new CEO of the company held the same position in Crypto for almost two decades at a time when the company was owned by the CIA.

A CyOne spokesman declined to comment on aspects of Crypto’s history, but said the new firm “has no ties to any foreign intelligence.”

Andreas Linde, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Crypto, the company with rights to international products and business, said he had no idea about the relationship between the company and the CIA and the BND before they were introduced to it.

“We at Crypto International have never had anything to do with the CIA and BND - please quote this answer from me,” he said in an interview. “If what you say is true, then I feel betrayed, and my family feels betrayed, and I think many of the employees will feel betrayed, like so many clients.”

This week, the Swiss government announced the launch of an investigation into Crypto's relationship with the CIA and BND. Earlier in February, Swiss officials revoked an export license from Crypto International.

The moment for these movements of the Swiss is chosen strange. CIA and BND documents indicate that Swiss officials have known Crypto for decades with spies from the United States and Germany, but intervened only when news agencies were about to reveal this agreement.

The agency’s work histories do not specifically indicate when the CIA washed their hands, but they bear the inevitable imprint of documents written from the point of view of the architects of this operation. They describe Operation Rubicon as a triumph of espionage that contributed to US dominance in the Cold War, tracking dozens of authoritarian regimes and protecting the interests of the United States and its allies.

The papers contain virtually no answers to unpleasant questions, including what exactly the United States knew, and what they did, or did not do, with countries that used Crypto machines in the process of conducting operations to eliminate objectionable persons, ethnic cleansing, or human rights violations.

The revelations in these documents may lead to a review of those cases where the United States could intervene, or at least make public, international atrocities, and find out if the government decided not to do this so as not to lose access to valuable information flows.

Also, the documents do not say anything about the obvious ethical issues that underlie the entire operation: the deception and exploitation of opponents, allies, and hundreds of uninformed Crypto employees. Many of them traveled around the world selling or maintaining systems with “secrets”, unaware that they were doing this at the risk of their own safety.

Jürg Spoerndli is an electrical engineer who has worked at Crypto for 16 years. The deceived employees say that the revelations regarding the company's actions have deepened the sense of betrayal, both of themselves and of the customers.

In recent interviews, defrauded employees - even those who, while working at Crypto, began to suspect that their company is collaborating with Western intelligence - say that the revelations regarding the company's actions have deepened the sense of betrayal, both of themselves and their customers.

“You think you are doing a good job and ensuring data security,” said Jürg Spoerndli, an electrical engineer who has been with Crypto for 16 years. “And then you realize that you lied to all these customers.”

The managers of this secret program do not admit their guilt.

“Do I have any doubts about this? None, ”said Bobby Ray Inman, who served as director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA in the 1970s and early 1980s. “It was a valuable source of communication between large parts of the world, important to US politicians.”

Boris Hagelin, founder of Crypto, arrived with his wife in New York in 1949. Hagelin fled to the United States after the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940.

Failure operation

This large-scale and complex operation has grown out of the US military's need for a coarse but compact encryption device.

Boris Hagelin, founder of Crypto, was an entrepreneur and inventor born in Russia, but then fled to Sweden when the Bolsheviks came to power. Then he fled again, already in the USA, after the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940.

He brought with him a cryptographic machine that looked like a tricked out music box, with a sturdy grip on the side and a set of metal gears and gears enclosed in a rigid metal case.

She could not compete in complexity or in safety with Enigma machines."used by the Nazis. However, Hagelin's M-209, as she was later called, was portable, powered by muscular energy and ideal for infantry on the march. In the photographs you can see soldiers with boxes weighing 4 kg and the size of a thick book Many of Hagelin’s devices are kept in a private museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Mark Simons and Paul Revers, founders of the Eindhoven Cryptography Museum, Netherlands.

M-209, Hagelin’s encryption machine. Due to its portability and muscular strength, it was mainly used for transmit tactical messages about the movement of troops.

Sending an encrypted message was time consuming. The user needed to compose a message using a dial, letter by letter, pulling the handle. Hidden gears turned and produced an encrypted message on a strip of paper. The liaison officer then needed to transmit this encrypted message to Morse code to the recipient, who did the opposite.

Its security was so low that almost any adversary could crack the code, spending enough time on it. But it could take hours to break. And since the machine was used mainly for transmitting tactical messages about the movement of infantry, by the time the Nazis decrypted the signal, it most likely already had no value.

During the war, about 140,000 M-209 were manufactured at Smith Corona's typewriter factory in the city of Syracuse, New York, under a contract that brought Crypto $ 8.6 million. After the war, Hagelin returned to Sweden to open his own factory, bringing with him his condition and loyalty to the United States, kept by him until the end of his life.

Still, American spies looked in disbelief at his operations after the war. In the early 1950s, he developed a more advanced version of his machine with a new, “irregular” mechanical sequence that briefly baffled American decryptors.

Mark Simons, co-founder of the Museum of Cryptography, a virtual museum of encryption machines, explains how encrypted messages were composed using the Hagelin CX-52 machine.

US officials, worried about the capabilities of the new CX-52 machine and other devices that Crypto planned to release, began discussing what they called the "Hagelin problem."

As they say in the history of the CIA, these were "the dark centuries of American cryptography." The USSR, China and North Korea used coding systems that were almost impossible to crack. US intelligence was worried that the rest of the world would also go into the shadows if governments could buy safe cars from Hagelin.

The Americans had several points of pressure on Hagelin: his ideological commitment to the country, his hope that the United States would remain the main client, and the veiled threat that the United States would interfere with his plans, flooding the market with the extra M-209 left over from the war.

The US Signal Intelligence Service , led by William Friedman (center), in the mid-1930s. Other staff members, from left to right: Gerrick Beers, Solomon Coolback, Captain Harold Miller, Louise Newkirk Nelson (sitting), Abraham Sinkov, Coast Guard Lieutenant Jones and Frank Rowlett.

The United States also had a more important asset: William Friedman . Friedman, whom many consider the father of American cryptologyHagelin has known since the 1930s. They have been friends all their lives thanks to a common past and common interests - Russian roots and a passion for encryption.

Operation Rubicon could not have taken place if the two had not agreed with each other during the first secret meeting of Hagelin with US intelligence officers at a dinner at the Cosmos club in Washington in 1951.

Under the terms of the deal, Hagelin, who had moved to Switzerland at that time , was supposed to limit sales of the most complex models to countries approved by the United States. Non-listed countries could only buy older and weaker systems. Hagelin was promised to pay compensation for failed sales - as much as $ 700,000 in advance.

The United States fulfilled its part of the duties only many years later, since the top officials of the CIA and NSA predecessors constantly argued over the viability and value of this deal. However, Hagelin fulfilled his part of the agreements from the very beginning, and over the next two decades his secret collaboration with American intelligence only deepened.

In 1960, the CIA and Hagelin entered into a "license agreement", under which he was paid $ 855,000 to continue to fulfill the agreed conditions. The agency paid him $ 70,000 a year, and also began to periodically inject $ 10,000 “on marketing” to ensure that it was Crypto, and not other young companies in the encryption business, that entered into contracts with most of the world's governments.

This, in the terms of scouts, was a classic “operation of failure”, a scheme designed to prevent the enemy from acquiring weapons or technologies that give them an advantage. However, this was only the beginning of a collaboration between Crypto and U.S. intelligence. Ten years later, the entire enterprise was already owned by the CIA and BND.

In 1967, Crypto released the H-460, a fully electronic machine, the stuffing of which was developed at the NSA.

Brave New World

US officials from the very beginning wanted to ask Hagelin to allow US cryptologists to tweak his machines. However, Friedman did not let them do this, being convinced that Hagelin would decide that it was too much.

The CIA and the NSA discovered a new opportunity for this in the mid-1960s, when the spread of electronic circuits forced Hagelin to accept outside assistance to adapt to new technologies so as not to sink into oblivion, clinging to the production of mechanical machines.

NSA cryptologists were equally worried about the potential consequences of the advent of integrated circuits, which seemed to portend a new era of unbreakable encryption. However, one of the agency’s chief analysts, Peter Jenks, saw a potential vulnerability.

He said that the electronic system, "being developed by a cunning mathematician-cryptologist", can pretend to produce infinite streams of random characters, but at the same time actually repeat the output data at sufficiently short intervals so that the NSA experts - and their powerful computers - could hack them.

Two years later, in 1967, Crypto released a new, fully electronic model, the H-460, whose device was fully developed at the NSA.

The CIA’s history almost boasts how the agency crossed that line. “Imagine the idea that the US government persuaded a foreign manufacturer to tweak its equipment to their advantage,” the story says. “Here you have a brave new world.”

The NSA did not embed coarse backdoors into the machine, or secretly program devices to issue encryption keys. The agency also had the difficult task of intercepting communications from other governments, snatching these signals from the air, and later connecting to fiber optic cables.

However, changing the algorithms of Crypto's operation put the process of cracking codes on the stream, sometimes in seconds solving tasks that would otherwise take months. The company always produced at least two versions of each product - a safe one, which was sold to friendly governments, and amended for everyone else.

Thus, the partnership between the United States and Hagelin went from denial to "active measures." Crypto not only limited the sale of the best equipment, but actively sold devices designed to betray customers.

The result was not only penetration into devices. Switching Crypto to electronics cost the company so profitably that the business became dependent on the NSA. Foreign governments vied to seize systems that seemed to outperform old clumsy mechanical devices, but in fact made it easier for American spies to read messages.

German and American partners

By the end of the 1960s, Hagelin's age was approaching 80, and he tried very hard to ensure a good future for his company, which had grown to 180 employees. CIA officials were equally worried about what would happen to their operation if Hagelin suddenly sold it or died.

Hagelin once hoped to hand over the management of affairs to his son, Bo. However, representatives of American intelligence considered him a "dark horse", and tried to hide this partnership from him. Bo Hagelin died in a car accident on the Washington Ring Road in 1970. No signs of a dirty game were found.

Representatives of American intelligence have been discussing the idea of buying Crypto for years, but the conflict between the CIA and the NSA prevented them from doing this until two other intelligence intervened.

The French, West German and other European intelligence agencies either somehow found out about the US deal with Crypto, or guessed about it. Some, for obvious reasons, were very jealous and tried to find ways to conclude similar deals.

In 1967, Hagelin received an offer from the French intelligence to buy the company together with German intelligence. Hagelin categorically refused and announced the offer to his CIA operators. However, two years later, the Germans returned, with the permission of the United States, preparing a new proposal.

At the beginning of 1969, a meeting was held at the embassy of West Germany in Washington, where the leader of the cryptographic service of this country, Wilhelm Göing, described the proposal and asked if the Americans would not be interested in the opportunity to "become partners."

A month later, CIA director Richard Helms approved the idea of buying Crypto and sent his employee to Bonn, the capital of western Germany, to discuss the conditions, given one main caveat: the CIA told Going that the French would need to be “removed” from the deal.

West Germany silently agreed to this condition of the Americans, and the deal of the two espionage agencies was described in a June 1970 memorandum bearing the unbridled signature of the CIA representative in Munich, who was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease, and the indiscriminate scribbles of his BND colleague.

The two agencies agreed to invest on an equal footing and buy back Hagelin’s stake for about $ 5.75 million, but the CIA entrusted Germany with the task of preventing any details of the deal from ever being made public.

Liechtenstein law firm Marxer and Goop helped hide information about the new owners of Crypto through a series of shell companies and bearer shares that did not require names on registration documents. The company was paid annually “not so much for hard work as for silence and acceptance”, as it is written in the history of the BND. The firm, now called Marxer and Partner, did not respond to a request for comment.

A new board of directors was put over the company. And only one of its members, Stuhr Nyberg, to whom Hagelin delegated all the tasks of daily management, knew about his participation in the CIA. “Thanks to this mechanism,” they write in the history of the CIA, “the BND and the CIA controlled the work,” Crypto. Nyberg left the company in 1976. WP and ZDF could not find him or even find out if he was still alive.

The two intelligence groups held regular meetings to discuss how to deal with their new acquisition. As the headquarters of the operation, the CIA used a secret base in Munich, which initially worked at a former military base, and then moved to the attic in a building adjacent to the American consulate.

The CIA and BND have agreed to use several code names for the program and its various components. Crypto was called the Minerva, also called the CIA story. The operation was first called Thesaurus, and then in the 1980s it was renamed the Rubicon.

In German history it is written that the CIA and the BND shared the annual profit received by Crypto, while the BND was engaged in accounting, and the money due to the CIA was transferred to agents in the underground garage.

From the very beginning, small disagreements and tense moments prevented the partnership. From the point of view of CIA operatives, BND officers often seemed too busy making a profit, and the Americans "constantly reminded the Germans that this was an intelligence operation, not a business enterprise." The Germans were always shocked by the desire of Americans to spy on all but the closest allies, including such NATO members as Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy.

Recognizing the limitations of their ability to manage a high-tech company, the two agencies attracted third parties from other corporations. The Germans pulled Siemens, a conglomerate headquartered in Munich, into the business to give Crypto business and technical advice in exchange for 5% of sales. The United States later involved Motorola in the correction of particularly complex products, explicitly explaining to the director of the company that all this is done in the interests of intelligence. Siemens refused to comment, and Motorola representatives simply did not respond to the request.

To the displeasure of Germany, it was never included in the glorious Five Eyes company, a long-standing pact between the intelligence agencies of the USA, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. However, with a partnership at Crypto, Germany got so close to an American intelligence group that it might have seemed impossible after WWII. With the secret support of two of the largest intelligence agencies in the world and with the explicit support of two of the largest corporations, Crypto's business has flourished.

The table from the CIA’s history shows figures by which sales from the amount of 15 million Swiss francs in 1970 rose to over 51 million (about $ 19 million) in 1975. The list of employees expanded to 250 people.

“The acquisition of Minerva turned out to be a bonanza,” they say in the history of the CIA over this period. The operation entered a twenty-year period of unprecedented access to messages exchanged between foreign governments.

The meeting between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and US President Jimmy Carter during the peace talks between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in September 1978. During these negotiations, the NSA secretly listened to all of Sadat’s communication with Cairo.

Iranian suspicions

For many years, the NSA's listening empire has focused on three geographical targets, each of which had its own alphabetical code: A — USSR, B — Asia, G — everything else.

By the early 1980s, more than half of the information collected by Group G passed through Crypto machines, and the United States relied on these opportunities from one crisis to another.

In 1978, when the leaders of Egypt, Israel, and the United States gathered at Camp David for peace talks, the NSA secretly listened to all Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s conversations with Cairo.

A year later, when the Iranian armed militia stormed the US Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, the Carter administration tried to negotiate their release by exchanging unofficial messages through Algeria. Inman, who served as director of the NSA at the time, said he was constantly phoned by US President Jimmy Carter, asking about how Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime responded to recent reports.

“And in 85% of cases, we could answer this question,” Inman said. That's because the Iranians and Algerians used devices from Crypto.

Inman said that this operation put him in one of the most uncomfortable positions in the history of his service to the state. At some point, the NSA intercepted Libyan messages, from which it followed that the brother of the US president, Billy Carter, was promoting Libyan interests in Washington and was receiving money from Muammar Gaddafi for this .

Inman transmitted the information to the Ministry of Justice. The FBI launched an investigation against Carter, who denied receiving the money. As a result, they did not begin to judge him, and in return he agreed to register as a foreign agent .

In the 1980s, Crypto's list of the most active customers looked like a catalog of global hotspots. In 1981, Saudi Arabia was Crypto's largest customer, followed by Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, and South Korea.

Judging by the documents, in order to protect the situation on the market, Crypto and their secret owners turned dirty tricks against competitors and bombarded officials with bribes. In the history of the BND, a case is described of how Crypto sent a representative to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, with 10 hours of Rolex in a suitcase, and then organized a training program for the Saudis in Switzerland, whose “favorite pastime was visiting brothels with company money.”

Sometimes such a promotion led to the fact that devices acquired countries poorly adapted for the use of sophisticated equipment. Nigeria acquired a large batch of Crypto machines, but two years later, when the company did not receive any gain from this in the form of valuable information, it sent its representative to study the problem. “He found that the equipment was still in stock, not even taken out of the original packaging,” as written in a German document.

In 1982, the Reagan administration took advantage of Argentina's reliance on equipment from Crypto and relayed intercepted information to Britain during a brief military conflict between the two countries over the Falkland Islands. This is indicated in the history of the CIA, where, however, it does not specify what information was transmitted to London. The document in general terms describes the information obtained during the operation, and gives a few hints on how it was used.

US military officers in civilian clothes go around the scene of the explosion of La Belle disco in West Berlin, where in 1986 two US soldiers and a Turkish citizen died. In his speech on this subject, Reagan strongly framed Operation Crypto, accusing Libya of complicity on the basis of some evidence received by the United States.

Reagan heavily framed Operation Crypto, accusing Libya of complicity in the 1986 bombing of the La Belle disco in West Berlin, popular with American soldiers at the military base there. The explosion killed two US soldiers and a Turkish citizen.

Ten days later, Reagan ordered a retaliatory attack on Libya. Among the victims of the attack, they say, was one of the daughters of Gaddafi. Addressing the nation in anticipation of the attack, Reagan said the US has “direct, accurate and irrefutable” evidence of complicity in the Libyan bombing.

Reagan said that these evidence indicate that the Libyan embassy in East Berlin received orders to conduct the attack a week before the event. . And then, the day after the explosion, "they reported in Tripoli about the unprecedented success of their mission."

From the words of Reagan, it became clear that the exchange of messages between Tripoli and her post in East Berlin was intercepted and decrypted. However, not one Libya drew the appropriate conclusions from allusions in Reagan's speech.

Iran, knowing that Libya also uses Crypto machines, was increasingly worried about the safety of its equipment. However, Tehran did not take any action on this subject for another six years.

From the documents it follows that from the 1950s to the 2000s, more than 120 countries used encryption equipment from Crypto. The files do not have a complete list, but at least 62 clients are listed there.

North and South America : Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela.

Europe: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Vatican, Yugoslavia.

Africa : Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Libya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zaire, Zimbabwe.

Middle East : Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE.

Asia : Bangladesh, Burma, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam.

World Organizations : UN.

From the records it follows that at least four countries - Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom - knew about this operation, or received information about it from the United States or West Germany.

Irreplaceable person

After the purchase of the US company and BND, one of the most unpleasant worries of the secret partners was the need to keep Crypto employees ready to obey orders and ignorance of its real activities.

Even remaining in the shadows, the agencies struggled to maintain Hagelin's benevolent attitude towards their company. The employees were well paid, they had many bonuses, including access to a small sailing yacht on Lake Zug near the company headquarters.

And still, it seemed that the people who were closest to the development of encryption were constantly getting closer and closer to revealing the key secret of the operation. Engineers and developers responsible for prototyping often questioned the algorithms sent to them by someone unknown from above.

Crypto managers often reassured employees that all schemes come in consultation with Siemens. But even so, why were the flaws in the encryption system so easy to recognize, and why were Crypto engineers constantly prevented from fixing them?

In 1977, Heinz Wagner, director of Crypto, who knew the true role of the CIA and BND, suddenly fired an intractable engineer after the NSA complained that diplomatic traffic from Syria suddenly became impossible to decrypt. This engineer, Peter Frutiger, had long suspected that Crypto was collaborating with German intelligence. He traveled to Damascus many times in connection with complaints about the company's products, and, apparently, corrected the shortcomings without consulting his management.

Frutiger “revealed Minerva’s secret that was in jeopardy,” as recorded in the history of the CIA. Still, the agency got angry at Wagner for simply firing Frutiger, instead of finding a way to shut his mouth, leaving him in the company. Frutiger declined to comment on the story.

Mengia Caflish, approx. 1990. After being hired by Crypto, she, as a gifted electronic engineer, began to probe the vulnerabilities of the company's products.

U.S. officials were even more worried when Wagner hired the gifted electronics engineer Mengia Coughlish in 1978. She worked for several years in the USA as a radio astronomer researcher at the University of Maryland, and then returned to her native Switzerland and sent a job application to Crypto. Wagner hastened to take this chance and hired her. However, representatives of the NSA were immediately concerned about this fact, saying that she was "too smart to remain in ignorance."

The statement turned out to be prophetic - Caflish soon began to probe the company's products for vulnerabilities. Together with her research colleague, Spoerndley, who told about this in an interview, they conducted various tests and “open-text attacks” of all devices, including the teletype model HC-570, based on technology from Motorola.

“We looked at the features of the devices. and dependencies at every next step, ”said Spoerndley, and made sure they could crack the code by comparing only 100 characters of the ciphertext with an unencrypted message. It was a frankly low level of security, Spoerndley said in an interview he gave last month, but not so rare.

“The algorithms looked suspicious,” he said.

In the years that followed, Caflish continued to cause problems. Once, she developed such a strong encryption algorithm that the NSA was worried that it would be impossible to read. And he got into 50 HC-740 cars, which they managed to release before the company management found out what was happening and stopped production.

“It just seemed to me that something might be wrong,” Caflish said in an interview last month about the sources of her suspicions. However, it became clear that her activity was not appreciated, she said. “Not all questions were admissible.”

The company restored the corrected algorithm by registering it in the rest of the products from the party, and sold these 50 cars to banks so that they did not fall into the hands of foreign governments. Since there were so many such cases, Wagner once informed the elected members of the Research and Development Department that Crypto was "not always free in her desires."

The recognition reassured some engineers who understood it so that the company's technology was subject to the restrictions imposed by the German government. However, the CIA and BND became increasingly convinced that their company could not operate in this mode.

Crypto turned into something like the Palace of the Wizard of the Emerald City, where workers looked behind the scenes in an attempt to understand what was happening. By the end of the 1970s, secret partners decided to find a wizard who could develop more cunning and less obvious vulnerabilities in algorithms, someone authoritative enough in the encryption world to manage to tame the research department.

Agencies in search of candidates turned to other intelligence services for help, and eventually settled on a man proposed by Swedish intelligence. Since Hagelin was associated with Sweden, the intelligence of this country was informed of this operation from the very beginning.

Schel Ove WidmanA Stockholm professor of mathematics, made a name for himself in European academia through research in cryptology. He was also a military reserve, and collaborated with representatives of Swedish intelligence.

From the point of view of the CIA, Widman had an even more important property: a connection with the United States, which he formed after a year in the state of Washington as an exchange student.

The family that sheltered him at that time could hardly pronounce his real name, so they called him “Henry” - under this nickname he later worked with his contacts at the CIA.

Responsible for hiring Widman described the process as extremely easy. After being processed by Swedish intelligence agents, he was brought to Munich in 1979 for several interviews with the leaders of Crypto and Siemens.

At first, Widman answered questions from half a dozen men at a table in the hotel’s conference room. When everyone went out for lunch, two of them asked Widman to stay in private conversation.

“Do you know what ZfCh is?” - asked Jelto Burmeister, the head of the BND operation, using the acronym for the German encryption service. When Widman answered in the affirmative, the Bürmeister said: “Now you understand who really owns Crypto?”

At the same time, Widmann was introduced to Richard Schroeder, a CIA officer who worked in Munich and was responsible for the agency’s participation in Crypto. Widman later told agency historians that at that moment “his world was completely destroyed.”

But if so, then he, without a doubt, agreed to participate in the operation. Without leaving the room, Widman agreed to hire, shaking hands with everyone. The three men, joining the others at dinner, gave the thumbs up signal, turning the meeting into a celebration.

At Crypto, Widman was accepted as a “scientific adviser” who responded directly to Wagner. He became a secret intelligence agent, and every six weeks left Zug for secret meetings with representatives of the NSA and ZfCh. Schroeder, an agent of the CIA, was also present at the meetings, though not particularly versed in the technical details of the conversations.

There, they agreed on hardware changes and developed new encryption schemes. Widman then delivered the blueprints to the company's engineers. In CIA history, he is called the “indispensable person” and “the most important recruiter in the history of the Minerva program.”

His authority prevailed over his subordinates, putting him in a "technical position that none of Crypto could challenge." It also helped with the suspicions of foreign governments. After hiring Widman, the secret partners adopted a set of principles for compiling tweaked algorithms, as written in the history of the BND. They should be “impossible to detect using conventional statistical tests”, and when detected, they should be “easily attributed to human error or problems of use”.

In other words, having received uncomfortable questions, Crypto executives could blame everything on negligent employees or stupid users.

In 1982, when Argentina became convinced that its equipment, purchased from Crypto, betrayed the secrecy of communications and helped the British in the Falkland War, Widman was sent to Buenos Aires. Widman convinced them that the NSA most likely hacked an outdated speech encryption device used by Argentinean intelligence agencies, but the main product they bought from Crypto, the CAG 500, "remained secure."

“The bluff worked,” the CIA story writes. “The Argentines hardly agreed, but continued to buy equipment from Crypto further.”

Today Widman has long been retired, and lives in Stockholm. He declined to comment. Many years after the hiring, he told US officials that he considered himself “a participant in the critical battle for the benefit of Western intelligence,” as the CIA document says. “He said that at that moment he felt in place. It was the mission of his life. ”

In the same year, Hagelin, who was already 90 years old, fell ill during a trip to Sweden and was hospitalized. He recovered enough to return to Switzerland, but the CIA was worried about the vast collection of notes and papers related to Hagelin's business and personal life stored in his office in Zug.

With the permission of Hagelin, Schroeder arrived there with a suitcase and sifted through the files for several days. He was introduced to the staff as a historian interested in describing the life of Hagelin. Schroeder took all the “revealing” documents, as it is written in history, and sent them to the CIA headquarters, “where they are stored to this day.”

Hagelin remained disabled until his death in 1983. WP could not find Wagner and even determine whether he was still alive. Schroeder retired from the CIA more than ten years ago and teaches part-time at Georgetown University. He declined to comment.

The Hydra Crisis

Crypto survived several unprofitable years in the 1980s, but intelligence flowed there. U.S. spies intercepted more than 19,000 Iranian messages sent through Crypto machines during the ten-year war with Iraq, and looked there for information about Tehran’s terrorists and attempts to eliminate dissidents.

As stated in a CIA document, Iranian communications "were 80-90% readable" for American spies. If Tehran hadn’t used the corrected machines from Crypto, these numbers would have been an order of magnitude smaller.

In 1989, the use of Crypto machines by the Vatican played a key role in the U.S. hunt for Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega Morena . When this dictator took refuge in the apostolic nunciature- equivalent to the papal embassy - its whereabouts were disclosed thanks to messages sent to the Vatican.

However, in 1992, the operation of Crypto faced its first serious crisis: Iran, taking belated measures in connection with long-standing suspicions, detained the company's sales manager.

Hans Buchler, who was then 51 years old, was considered one of the best sellers of the company.
Iran was one of the largest customers, and Buchler traveled back and forth for years. He had difficult moments, for example, in 1986, Iranian officials thoroughly interrogated him after an explosion at a disco and US missile attacks on Libya.

Six years later, he boarded a Swissair company bound for Tehran, but did not return on time. Then Crypto turned to the Swiss authorities for help, and found out that the seller was arrested by Iranians. Members of the Swiss consulate, who were allowed to meet with him, reported that he was “in poor psychological shape,” as stated in the CIA's history.

Buchler was released only nine months after Crypto agreed to pay Iran $ 1 million - according to documents, the BND secretly took over this payment. The CIA refused to participate in this, citing US policy prohibiting the payment of ransom for hostages.

Buchler knew nothing about Crypto's relationship with the CIA and BND, or about device vulnerabilities. He returned with psychological trauma and suspicions that Iran knew more about the company in which he worked than himself. Buchler began to talk with Swiss journalists about his adventures and accumulated suspicions.

William Friedman in Switzerland in 1957, with his wife and colleague Elizabeth Friedman (left), and Annie Hagelin, wife of Boris Hagelin.

Boris Hagelin in 1972.

Publicity again drew attention to already forgotten evidence, including references to the “Boris project” in Fridman’s vast collection of papers, which after his death in 1969 were transferred to the Virginia Military Institute. Among the 72 boxes brought to Legingston were copies of his correspondence with Hagelin.

In 1994, the crisis deepened after Buchler was shown on Swiss television in a report in which Frutiger also participated, whose identity was hidden from the audience. Buchler died in 2018. Frutiger, an engineer who was fired for fixing Syrian encryption systems, did not respond to requests for comment.

Michael Group, who took over as director after Wagner, agreed to speak out on Swiss television with objections to the allegations that he actually knew were true. “The Group’s performance was believable, and perhaps saved this program,” the CIA writes. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

And even so, it took several years for the debate to subside. In 1995, the Baltimore Sun newspaper published a series of several stories investigating the NSA's work, including an article entitled "Game rigging," which revealed aspects of the agency’s relationship with Crypto.

The article wrote how NSA officers flew to Zug in the mid-1970s in secret meetings with Crypto managers. The employees pretended to be consultants to the shell company Intercomm Associates, but the names were given their real names - and this is reflected in the records that one of the company's employees kept.

In the process of this public flogging, some employees began to look for other jobs. Several countries, including Argentina, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Indonesia, either canceled their contracts with Crypto or temporarily suspended their operation.

It is amazing that Iran was not among them - the CIA file states that this country “almost immediately resumed the purchase of Crypto equipment”.

And the main victims of the Hydra crisis (this code name was given to the Buchler case) was the partnership of the CIA and the BND.

For years, BND representatives have been horrified that their American counterparts do not divide other countries into opponents and allies. Partners often quarreled over which countries deserved to receive safe versions of Crypto products, and American officials often insisted that the corrected equipment should be delivered to almost all countries - whether they were allies or not allies - who would succumb to persuasion to buy.

German history records the complaints of Walbert Schmidt, the former director of the BND, that the US "wanted to treat the Allies the same way they treat Third World countries." Another BND representative echoed him, saying that for Americans "there were no friends in the world of intelligence."

The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the united Germany had different priorities and tasks. The country decided that it is more seriously at risk due to operations with Crypto. Hydra greatly influenced the Germans, and they were afraid that revealing their participation in this project would cause fury in Europe and lead to enormous political and economic consequences.

In 1993, Konrad Porzner, the head of the BND, made clear to the CIA director James Woolsey that support for this project among German government leaders was gradually disappearing, and that the Germans might want to get out of this project. On September 9, the head of the German department of the CIA, Milton Bearden, reached an agreement with BND representatives under which the CIA would redeem Germany’s stake in the company for $ 17 million, as stated in the history of the CIA.

The leaders of German intelligence regretted the way out of the operation, which they, in fact, conceived. In German history, intelligence leaders accuse political leaders of completing one of the most successful spy programs in which the BND has ever participated.

In this regard, the Germans were soon expelled from the flow of intelligence collected by the United States. In German history, the words of Burmeister are quoted, who are interested in whether Germany still belongs "to a small number of countries that Americans do not listen to."

Documents published by Snowden gave unpleasant answers to this question, showing that US intelligence not only considered Germany their target, but also tapped the cell phone of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Alive and well

The CIA’s history ends when Germany leaves the program, although the last date is 2004, and the text contains clear hints that this operation still worked at that time.

For example, it notes that Buchler’s case was “the most serious security breach in the history of the program,” but it did not become fatal for her. “It did not lead to her death,” they write in history, “and at the turn of the new century, Minerva was alive and well.”

In fact, everything looked like the operation went into a long period of decline. By the mid-1990s, “the days of profit were long gone,” and Crypto “would have ceased to exist if not for the influence of the American government.”

As a result, it seems that the CIA has supported the operation for years, the value of which was intelligence, not business. The company's product line has declined, as well as revenue and customer base.

However, according to current and former intelligence officials, information continued to flow, in part due to bureaucratic energy. Many governments have not bothered to switch to newer encryption systems that have been circulating in the world since the 1990s and disconnect their devices from Crypto. As follows from the documents, this was mainly the case for less developed countries.

Most of the CIA and BND employees mentioned in agency stories are now over 70 or 80, and some have already died. In an interview in Switzerland last month, several former Crypto employees mentioned in the documents described their uneasy feelings about working for the company.

They were not told at all about the company's true relationship with intelligence. But they had well-founded suspicions, and they are still worried about the ethical side of their decision to stay in the company, which they suspected of fraud.

“You had to either quit or accept what was happening,” said Caflish (who is now 75), who left the company in 1995 but continues to live in the backyard of Zug in the building of a former clothing factory, where she and her family have been engaged in staging semi-professional opera performances for many years. . “There were reasons for my departure,” she said, including both her discomfort due to company suspicions and the desire to spend more time with the children. After all these recent revelations, she said: “It makes me wonder if I should have left earlier.”

Spoerndley said that he regrets the rationalizations he gave himself. “Sometimes I told myself that it might be better if the good guys from the USA know what is happening in these third world countries with their dictators,” he said. “But it was cheap self-deception.” As a result, you understand that you can’t do this. ”

Most of the top managers directly involved in the operation acted on ideological motivation and rejected offers to pay for their services in excess of salaries in the company, as written in the documents. Widman was one of the few exceptions. “With the approach of his pension, his compensation for covert operations began to increase dramatically,” the CIA says. He was also awarded the CIA Seal Medal.

According to former Western intelligence agents, after the BND left the partnership, the CIA expanded its secret collection of encryption companies. Using the proceeds from the Crypto operation, the agents secretly acquired a second firm and supported a third with money. The documents do not contain any details about these firms. However, in the history of the BND, it is noted that one of Crypto's long-standing rivals - Gretag AG, also located in Switzerland - “fell under the control of the 'American' and was liquidated in 2004 after the name change.”

Crypto itself was slowly working. She survived the transition from metal boxes to electronic circuits, and from teletypes to voice encryption systems. However, she ran into problems when the encryption market moved from hardware to software. Members of US intelligence agencies apparently continued to believe in Crypto operations, although the NSA's attention shifted to finding ways to take advantage of the global influence of Google, Microsoft, Verizon and other US tech giants.

In 2017, the long-standing headquarters of Crypto, built near Zug, was sold to a commercial real estate company. In 2018, the remaining assets of the company - the key parts of the encryption business, launched almost a century ago - were divided and sold.

All these operations, apparently, were supposed to cover the CIA's exit from the project.

The purchase of the Swiss share of the business by CyOne was arranged as a buyback of the controlling part of the shares by the managers, which allowed the best Crypto employees to switch to work in a new company, free from espionage risks and with a reliable source of income. The Swiss government, which has always been sold only with strong encryption systems from Crypto, is now the only CyOne customer.

Giuliano Ott, who served as director of Crypto AG from 2001 until its closure, took a similar position at CyOne after the purchase. Given his previous position, he probably knew that the CIA owned the past company, just like all his predecessors.

In a statement, the company said that “neither CyOne Security AG nor Mr. Ott have any comments on the history of Crypto AG.”

Crypto's international accounts and business assets were sold to Swedish entrepreneur Linda, who comes from a wealthy family that owns commercial real estate holdings.

At a meeting in Zurich last month, Linda said the company attracted him in particular with its legacy and connection with Hagelin - in Sweden this still matters. Having taken control of the company's operations, Linde even moved some copies of Hagelin’s historic equipment from the warehouse, placing them on display windows at the entrance to the factory.

After receiving evidence that Crypto was in the possession of the CIA and BND, Linda looked clearly shocked, and said that during the negotiations he did not recognize the identities of the company's shareholders. He asked when this story was planned for publication, explaining that he had employees working abroad and that he was worried about their safety.

In the next interview, Linde said his company is investigating all the products it sells for hidden vulnerabilities. “We should get rid of everything that was connected with Crypto as soon as possible,” he said.

When asked why he did not ask Ott and other persons involved in the transfer of the company about the veracity of the charges, Linde said that he treated this information as “simple rumors”.

He said that he was reassured by the fact that Crypto still had significant contracts with other governments, since he assumed that the company's products should have been carefully checked, and would have refused it if it turned out to be compromised.

“I even bought the brand, 'Crypto',” he said, emphasizing his confidence in the viability of the company. But, given the information that became known, he said, “it may have been one of the stupidest decisions in my entire career.”

The liquidation of the company was managed by the very Liechtenstein law firm that provided cover for the sale of the company to Hagelin the CIA and BND 48 years ago. The terms of the transactions in 2018 were not disclosed, but current and former officials suggest that their total amount ranges from $ 50 to $ 70 million.

And for the CIA, this money was the last profit from Minerva.

As the CIA read for decades the encrypted correspondence of allies and opponents