Shadow File #002
- Status
- DOCUMENTED
- Category
- SURVEILLANCE
- Date
- 1970 â 2018
The Company That Sold Broken Locks
Crypto AG sold secrecy. Its owners sold the ability to read it.
The Story
Crypto AG of Zug, Switzerland, supplied cipher machines to more than a hundred countries â foreign ministries, militaries, embassies. Swiss neutrality was part of the product.
In 1970 the CIA and West Germany's BND secretly acquired the company. Selected machines were rigged so that intercepted messages could be read by the owners. Customers had no reason to suspect their supplier.
The operation, known as Rubicon, was revealed in 2020 by a joint investigation drawing on a classified CIA history and BND records. Switzerland opened its own parliamentary inquiry.
What We Know
Verified, documented facts.
- Crypto AG was covertly owned by the CIA and the BND from 1970; the BND sold its stake in the 1990s and the CIA remained until the firm was liquidated in 2018.
- A classified internal CIA history of the operation, obtained by journalists, describes it as an intelligence coup of the century.
- The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF published the joint investigation in February 2020.
- The Swiss parliament's control delegation investigated and published findings in 2020.
What Remains Unknown
Open questions â not answered by the record.
- Precisely which machine models and which customers were compromised, and for how long.
- How much specific intelligence was obtained, and how it shaped particular events.
- What Swiss officials knew, and when â a point the parliamentary report treats with care.