Crypto AG

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Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased in 1970 by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and jointly owned until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018. The mission of breaking encrypted communication using a secretly owned company was known as Operation Rubicon. With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices. The company had about 230 employees, had offices in Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Selsdon, and Steinhausen, and did business throughout the world. The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to the managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares. The company has been criticised for selling backdoored products to benefit the US, UK, and German national signals intelligence services, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and the BND, respectively. Crypto AG sold equipment to more than 120 countries, including India, Pakistan, Iran, and multiple Latin American and African nations. Although neither the Soviet Union nor People's Republic of China were customers of Crypto AG, several of their friendly countries had the company's equipment. A few "allied" NATO members also used Crypto AG equipment, particularly southern European countries and Belgium. On 11 February 2020, The Washington Post, ZDF, and SRF revealed that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with the BND, and the spy agencies could easily break the codes used to send encrypted messages. The operation was known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later the BND called it "Rubicon" (German: Rubikon), and the CIA called it...