Spy “Rubicon”: the main operation of the CIA in the XX century is disclosed

The disclosure of the secret of the Enigma encryption machine, which allowed the Allies to decipher the secret communications of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, is no longer the main cryptographic spy plot of the 20th century. The Washington Post and the German ZDF television channel found that the American intelligence services for at least 20 years freely read the classified correspondence of diplomats and special services of most of the world countries. And the former leader of the commercial cryptography market Swiss Crypto AG was the company of American and German special services in the literal sense of the word.

Spy history of the century

The American newspaper and the German television channel received a report on the Rubicon operation, written in 2004 at the Center for the History of the CIA intelligence, and an interview with participants, compiled by German intelligence. The CIA report (the newspaper publishes only excerpts) in style is more likely to panegirik of ingenuity and cooperation of the special services, but the sensational content is fully justified. Special services do not comment on the report, but their authenticity does not deny.

Crypto founded Boris Hagelin born in the Russian Empire in 1948. His father, Sweden citizen Karl Hagelin, was the chief manager of the oil industry of Nobel in Baku. The son was supposed to be a successor to the case, but the plans did not come true because of the revolution. Boris Hagelin took up electrical engineering, and then cryptography.

The foundation of the success of the future Crypto was laid down during the Second World War, when Khagelin received giant at that time (more than $ 8 million) US military order for M-209 mechanical encryption machines. The order gave Khagelin not only money, but also loyalty to the United States.

After the war, the resistance of machine crypto protection increased sharply in all countries. In the Korean war, the American intelligence services fell into the "Dark Age of Cryptography" - when they could no longer decipher someone else's secret exchange on a reasonable time. The US National Security Agency (NSA) decided to control at least commercial cryptography, prohibiting the supply of advanced systems to unwanted countries, and came out with this proposal to Crypto and Hagelin.

It was difficult to refuse the proposal: in the event of a refusal, the special services threatened to flood the M-209 market at catchy prices. Hagelin managed to persuade Hagelin to voluntary cooperation with the assistance of his friend, a cryptologist of Russian descent William Friedman. He is considered the “father of American cryptography” and worked a lot for the American special services, including Enigm.

In 1950-1960, Crypto blocks the deliveries of a persistent crypto protection of the countries outside NATO, Sweden and Switzerland and at the same time gaining “weight” in the market, suppressing competitors using financial injections from special services and bribing (“representative” budgets). It gradually falls into financial dependence on the NSA.

Until the mid-1960s, Crypto algorithms were “honest”. The fracture occurred in 1967, with the transition to electronic encryption. The US intelligence services through a third-party supplier managed to introduce an H-460 electronic cipher-460 ciphermine into a breakthrough product-the vulnerability of the random number generation algorithm. The generated keys were not random, but repeating, so that the specialists who knew about this could easily open the cipher, and he did not seem persistent.

After that, Crypto began selling products to everyone and earn tens of millions of dollars a year for “devices created specifically to betray the owners” for special services.

In 1970, Crypto, according to a complex scheme, was bought by the ANB-Central and West German intelligence BND, which independently learned about the true essence of the company. Crypto receives the closed name "Minerva", the operation itself - "Rubicon".

The scale of the operation

CIA directly (and gloatingly) calls her "intelligence victory of the century." “The authorities of many countries paid a lot of money to the United States and West Germany for the right to surrender their largest secrets to two (and possibly five or six) foreign states,” the report said.

In some periods of 1970-1980, up to 40% of the global diplomatic and other closed correspondence passed through Crypto systems. The equipment was supplied to the vast majority (120 countries) of the world and even fell into the countries of the Warsaw bloc, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The cars of the "Swiss" company used Iran, Libya, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The USSR and China have never used imported cryptography - and, as it turned out, right.

The main events with a large role of cryptolasee for special services:

• Camp-David agreements of 1978 (Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty). Egypt ceased to claim the role of the leader of the Arab world and turned towards the United States.
• Crisis with hostages at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979-1981. US President Jimmy Carter knew exactly about the position of Ayatollah Khomeini through the communications of Algerian intermediaries. The crisis sharply worsened the relations of the United States with Iran and provoked Saddam Hussein to the Iran-Iraq conflict.
• Iran-Iraq conflict, during which the United States read 80–90% of the Iranian closed exchange.
• Falkland conflict of 1982. The United States transferred Britain intelligence on Argentina, which was widely used by Crypto equipment. No details are disclosed about this - this is the most “gray” place of the report.
• The Libyan La Belle disco attack in West Berlin in 1986 with the death of the American military. Immediately after him, US President Ronald Reagan announced the undoubted involvement of the Gaddafi regime and instructed to respond. Such evidence could only be obtained through an interception of encrypted communication, and countries with qualified special services began to abandon Crypto.
• The overthrow of the head of Panama Manuel Noriegi in 1989. It was possible to find out his whereabouts through the communications of the Vatican (Noriaga was hiding in the Catholic mission).

The popularity of Crypto falls with the beginning of the 1990s and the partial disclosure of Iran operation, and then with the wide implementation of persistent cryptography due to the distribution of computers. In the early 1990s, BND comes out of the project, the company becomes subsidized and gets intelligence from previously delivered cars.

In 2018, the CIA completely sells assets to two companies - Cyone Security and Crypto International - through the same company that organized the purchase of Crypto in 1970. Both stated that they had no relations with the special services, although Cyone Security was led by the former director of Crypto.

Most Crypto employees did not know about the true essence of the company, and one member of the board of directors conducted all the connections with the special services.

Two developers of the company independently revealed the inherent vulnerability, and in one case changes were made to the design that made cryptography truly persistent. Randomed 50 "real" cars sold banks, only in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of other countries.

Why is it important

The history of Rubikon shows how exactly the United States acquired an insatiable appetite for global information intelligence, the scope of which Edward Snowden opened in 2013, WP notes. The US attitude towards companies with alleged ties with foreign states, such as the Russian “Kaspersky Laboratory” and Chinese Huawei, also becomes more understandable.

The report also raises the issues of morality - for example, how often the United States did not prevent attempts, terrorist attacks or mass killings in order to maintain a source of information, or how many times specialists were sent to hostile countries to configure spy equipment, which people themselves considered cryptographic.

Finally, it is worth thinking about whether now some company is playing the role of Crypto. In any case, the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, confidently indicates ICloud and WhatsApp.