U.S. and German secret services have been spying on more than a hundred countries for years through a Swiss company that specializes in encrypting conversations, media in the three countries revealed on Tuesday. Crypto AG became the market leader in encryption equipment after World War II, selling its hardware for more than 120 countries for "millions of dollars" until recently, the Washington Post said in a survey conducted with German television ZDF and Swiss radio and television SRF.
Among his clients are "Iran, the military juntas of Latin America, India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican," said the American daily. But Crypto AG was secretly purchased in 1970 by the CIA, as part of a "highly confidential partnership" with BND, German intelligence. The German service disengaged in the early 1990s and the CIA resold Crypto in 2018. The two counterintelligence agencies "rigged company equipment in order to easily break the codes that countries (customers) used to send encrypted messages ”.
"The coup of the century"
They thus monitored the hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, provided information on the Argentine army to Great Britain during the Falklands War, followed the assassination campaigns of South American dictators, and Surprised Libyan officials congratulate themselves on the bombing of a nightclub in West Berlin in 1986 that killed two American soldiers, says the Washington Post .
The operation, named "Thesaurus" then "Rubicon", was "the coup of the century" in terms of intelligence, welcomes the CIA in a 2004 report consulted by the authors of the investigation. They also had access to documents collected by the German intelligence services in 2008. Neither the CIA nor the BND wanted to comment on this investigation, without denying the authenticity of the documents, according to the Washington Post .
A "very alarming" investigation
The former German intelligence coordinator, Bernd Schmidbauer, for his part confirmed to the ZDF the existence of this operation, estimating that "Rubicon" had made it possible "to make the world a little safer". The Swedish company Crypto International, which bought Crypto AG, considered that the investigation was "very alarming", assuring that it had "no connection with the CIA or the BND". Swiss authorities told AFP on Tuesday that they had launched a "research" on the subject on January 15.
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