In Latin America, customers included Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. In its heyday, Crypto AG sold thousands of sophisticated encryption machines to over 100 unwitting countries. In 1993, the CIA secretly bought out the BND’s stake for $17 million, and owned Crypto AG outright until only two years ago when its remaining assets were liquidated.Īccording to the internal histories cited by the Post and ZDF, the clandestine intelligence gathering operation was initially codenamed “Thesaurus,” and later changed to “Rubicon.” The code-name for Crypto AG was “Minerva.”
and Germany “rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages,” the Washington Post reported, generating a wealth of intelligence intercepts from countries around the world, among them Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Italy. But, through their secret CIA/BND ownership, the U.S. The company, founded in the 1930s by Swedish inventor, Boris Hagelin, already had a longstanding “gentlemen's understanding” with the National Security Agency dating back to the early 1950s, according to the Post report. The ZDF reports, and the Washington Post story titled “‘The Intelligence Coup of the Century’: for decades the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries,” base their accounts on classified internal histories from the CIA and the BND which detailed their partnership to secretly purchase Crypto AG, the leading manufacturer of encryption devices in 1970. Today's posting reveals that Operation Condor-the network of Southern Cone military regimes which targeted opponents around the world for liquidation in the mid and late 1970s-conducted their communications on those encryption devices made by the CIA-owned Swiss company, Crypto AG, without realizing the U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post.ĭeclassified records posted today by the National Security Archive show that among those secretly surveilled countries were military regimes of the Operation Condor nations-led by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay-as they conducted regional and international acts of repression and terrorism against leading opposition figures. FOIA Advisory Committee Oversight Reports.
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