Its reach and duration help to explain how the United States developed an insatiable appetite for global surveillance that was exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Once the province of governments and major corporations, strong encryption is now as ubiquitous as apps on cellphones.Įven so, the Crypto operation is relevant to modern espionage. The company’s importance to the global security market had fallen by then, squeezed by the spread of online encryption technology.
But the CIA bought the Germans’ stake and simply kept going, wringing Crypto for all its espionage worth until 2018, when the agency sold off the company’s assets, according to current and former officials. The German spy agency, the BND, came to believe the risk of exposure was too great and left the operation in the early 1990s. And the 1992 arrest of a Crypto salesman in Iran, who did not realize he was selling rigged equipment, triggered a devastating “storm of publicity,” according to the CIA history.īut the true extent of the company’s relationship with the CIA and its German counterpart was until now never revealed. Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan. Documents released in the 1970s showed extensive - and incriminating - correspondence between an NSA pioneer and Crypto’s founder. There were also security breaches that put Crypto under clouds of suspicion. spies learned a great deal by monitoring other countries’ interactions with Moscow and Beijing. Their well-founded suspicions of the company’s ties to the West shielded them from exposure, although the CIA history suggests that U.S. America’s main adversaries, including the Soviet Union and China, were never Crypto customers. Using Crypto, the United States monitored Iran’s mullahs during the crisis. Embassy compound in Tehran in 1979, after students stormed the embassy and took its diplomatic staff hostage. (Paul Haley/Imperial War Museums/Getty Images) An American hostage is guided outside the U.S. spies fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)Ī Royal Navy helicopter takes off after transporting Royal Marines to Darwin, Falkland Islands, in 1982. They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.Īn American hostage is guided outside the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened. 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.”įrom 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency, controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto’s operations - presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes.
#Spy spies code
The operation, known first by the code name “Thesaurus” and later “Rubicon,” ranks among the most audacious in CIA history. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.
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