For decades, the US Central Intelligence Agency, together with the Federal Intelligence Service of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), intercepted secret messages from officials of more than 120 countries. This is stated in a joint investigation by The Washington Post and the German TV channel ZDF.
The interception was possible thanks to the jointly owned Swiss company Crypto AG, which supplied encryption equipment for communications to governments in more than a hundred countries.
According to The Washington Post, which analyzed the internal documents of the special services that came into its possession, the CIA and BND manipulated technology to break encryption and gain access to classified information. The departments monitored the correspondence from 1970 to 2018. This special operation was originally called "Thesaurus", but then it was renamed "Rubicon".
From the 1950s to the 2000s, Crypto AG encryption technology was used by more than 120 countries, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Latin America and the Vatican (excluding the USSR and China).
Former government secretary of state Bernd Schmidbauer, who coordinated the work of the German intelligence services, confirmed that such an operation did take place. It was discontinued in 1993, he said.
Meanwhile, the Swiss government has already ordered an investigation and verification of the released information.
The company Crypto AG itself, whose technology is still used in dozens of countries, was liquidated in 2018. The companies that bought most of its assets say they are not in contact with any intelligence agency.
