- Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?
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- FOR AT LEAST HALF A CENTURY, THE US HAS
BEEN INTERCEPTING AND DECRYPTING THE TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS OF MOST OF THE
WORLD'S GOVERNMENTS
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- "...allows the US to play high-stakes
diplomatic poker with a mirror behind everyone else's back."
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- It may be the greatest intelligence scam
of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered
top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought
the world's most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption
technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and
the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality.
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- The purchasing nations, confident that
their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals
to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around
the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted
sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into
criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb
commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling.
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- All the while, because of a secret agreement
between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as
well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto
AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random
encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with
the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as
easily as they could the morning newspaper.
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- The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG
relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence
service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in
Teheran. The Iranian government charged the tall, 50ish businessman with
spying for the "intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany
and the United States of America." "I was questioned for five
hours a day for nine months," Buehler says. "I was never beaten,
but I was strapped to wooden benches and told I would be beaten. I was
told Crypto was a spy center" that worked with foreign intelligence
services.
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- Despite prolonged interrogation, Buehler
- who had worked for Crypto AG for 13 years and was on his 25th trip to
Iran - apparently maintained his ignorance. "I didn't know that the
equipment was bugged, otherwise the Iranians ould have gotten it out of
me by their many _methods._ "
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- With millions of dollars in contracts
and a major international spy operation at stake, the company was eager
to make the incident and Buehler go away, even though the salesman had
brought in 40 percent of Crypto's 100 million Swiss franc sales revenue.
Crypto bought Buehler's freedom with a $1 million payment to the Iranians,
returned him to Switzerland, and then, astonishingly, fired him and ordered
the bewildered salesman to repay the bond.
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- The cover-up backfired, however, when
current and former Crypto employees came to Buehler's defense and shared
their first-hand knowledge of manipulated cipher equipment.
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- "I hold proofs [sic] of the rigging
of code machines," said an unidentified former Crypto AG engineer.
"Fifteen years ago, I saw American and German engineers doctoring
our machines. It took me some time until I was certain about the manipulations.
The proofs: technical documents. ... I put them in a bank safety deposit
box. Then I informed the federal prosecutors_ office in Berne. There were
many conversations. Suddenly, these contacts were broken off and the affair
petered out."
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- The engineer told another reporter: the
schemes and the cipher keys were created by them [NSA and BND (Bundesnacrichtendienst-the
German intelligence service)]. I immediately, discreetly, notified the
Swiss prosecutors. There was an investigation. I was never able to find
out the result. Today, the Buehler affair brings everything out in the
open again. And, I'm afraid. What happened to Hans Buehler could happen
to any other salesperson of Crypto AG. It's not a question of attacking
this company; it's a question of saving lives....
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- When the Swiss media began to reveal
the background of Buehler's story, Crypto AG responded with a lawsuit in
an attempt to quash the story and muzzle Buehler. The suit was settled
days before former Crypto engineers were to testify that they thought the
machines had been altered. The parties agreed not to disclose the settlement
and Crypto sought to reassure its clients. Informed sources in Switzerland
and the Middle East confirmed that Crypto AG settled because it, and the
NSA and BND, didn_t want to reveal anything in court.
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- Nevertheless, the damage to Crypto AG's
credibility was already done. Customers from Saddam Hussein to the Pope
grew nervous. Informed of the details around the Hans Buehler incident,
the Vatican Ñ which uses Swiss cipher machines to secure diplomatic
communications transmitted from the Holy See to the many papal nuncios
around the world-showed a marked lack of charity. An official branded the
perpetrators "bandits!"
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- SWISS CHEESE NEUTRALITY
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- Although the Iranians may have been technically
wrong about Buehler's complicity in the massive deception, they were right
that something was rotten at Crypto AG. And even before the firing of Hans
Buehler, some of Cypto's engineers were ambivalent about secret deals with
the NSA.
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- "At first, I was idealistic,"
said Juerg Spoerndli, who left Crypto in 1994. "But I adapted quickly.
... The new aim was to help Big Brother USA look over these countries_
shoulders. We_d say, _It's better to let the USA see what these dictators
are doing._ " Soon, however, Spoerndli grew apprehensive over the
manipulation. "It's still an imperialistic approach to the world.
I don_t think it's the way business should be done." Ruedi Hug, another
former Crypto AG engineer, was also critical. "I feel betrayed,"
he declared. "They always told us, _We are the best. Our equipment
is not breakable, blah, blah, blah. ... Switzerland is a neutral country._
"
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- Apparently not. A document released in
1995 by Britain's Public Records Office indicates that Switzerland and
NATO concluded a secret deal in 1956.
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- The "Top Secret" document,
dated February 10, 1956, with the reference "prem 11/1224," was
written by the famous British World War II figure, Field Marshal Bernard
L. Montgomery. While "Monty" was a vice-commander of NATO, he
discussed a secret alliance with Swiss Defense Minister Paul Chaudet. In
peacetime, Switzerland would be officially neutral, but in wartime, it
would side with NATO.
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- A US document released in 1995 shows
Switzerland's importance to US national security. A Presidential directive
on national security prepared for President Truman states that "Switzerland
... delivers precision instruments and other materials necessary for the
armament of the USA and NATO countries [emphasis added]." Germany's
BND, too, has apparently cooperated with the US encryption rigging scheme
through Siemens Defense Electronics Group of Munich.
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- A previous director of Siemens called
Crypto AG a "secret Siemens daughter," while a former Crypto
AG financial director said, "the owner of the firm [Crypto] is the
Federal Republic [of Germany]."
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- The Siemens connection to Crypto was
remarkably incestuous. Siemens provided technical assistance for the machine
manipulation process. Suspicion about the German electronics giant's role
in Crypto's operations was heightened when it was reported that Siemens
helped raise the $1 million to spring Buehler from his Teheran prison cell.
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- In fact, after revelations of the Crypto-Siemens
association hit the Swiss press, Crypto's managing director Michael Grupe
informed the employees that the advisory board to Crypto's board of directors
was being dissolved. The two advisers-Alfred Nowosad and Helmut Wiesner-were
both full-time Siemens employees. With the world media describing the company
as a silent partner of German and American signals intelligence (sigint)
agencies around the world, Grube announced that "Crypto is changing
its profile."
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- The German government's contribution
to the encryption rigging scheme also included its pressuring another Swiss
firm, Gretag Data Systems AG, to allow a "red thread" program
to be installed in the encryption software. "Red threading" is
the software equivalent of sending in a Greek Trojan horse. Once owned
by AT&T, this encryption manufacturer was acquired in 1995 by Information
Resources Engineering (IRE), Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland.19 Interestingly,
IRE is staffed by a number of ex-NSA cryptographic engineers. A third Swiss
encryption company, Info Guard AG, was fully acquired by Crypto AG on June
16, 1994. Info Guard, which had been 50 percent owned by Crypto AG, primarily
sells encryption units to banks in Switzerland and abroad.
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- Although German and American sigint agencies
were involved in manipulating Crypto's cipher machines, Motorola, one of
the NSA's major US contractors, performed the actual technical lteration,
according to a former Crypto AG chief engineer who was personally involved
in the manipulation process.
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- CRYPTO HUDDLE
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- Once the cipher machines were rigged
to include the secret decryption key, the BND and NSA codebreakers could
use the transmitted key to read any message sent by Crypto AG's 120 country
customers. One previous Crypto AG employee contends that all developmental
Crypto AG equipment had to be sent for approval to the NSA and to the German
Central Cipher Bureau (Zentralstelle für Chiffrierung [ZfCH]), now
the Federal Information Security Agency (Bundesamt für Sicherheit
in der Informationstechnik [BSI] which is also Department 62 of the BND)
in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn.
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- In other cases, Crypto AG was apparently
forced to market encryption equipment manufactured in the US, sent to Crypto,
and passed off as Swiss equipment. In the 1970s, as Crypto was moving from
electro-mechanical to computerized crypto units, a former Crypto AG engineer
in Switzerland inspected one of the first prototype computerized machines
sent from the US. He remarked that since the code could be easily broken,
he found the machine useless. But when he told his superiors that he could
improve the encryption process if he was given access to the mathematical
functions, two US cryptographic "experts" refused to disclose
the information.
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- According to a confidential Crypto AG
memorandum, one of the NSA "experts" may have been Nora L. Mackabee,
an NSA cryptographer who is now retired on a horse farm in Maryland along
with her husband Lester, another retired NSA employee. Between August 19
and 20, 1975, three Crypto AG engineers huddled with Mackabee (identified
as representing "IA" Ñ most likely "intelligence
agency") along with three Motorola engineers and one other American,
Herb Frank. One Motorola engineer recalled that Frank was probably from
another US intelligence agency based in northern Virginia but described
him as a non-technical person who seemed to be making the administrative
arrangements for Mackabee.
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- Crypto engineer Juerg Spoerndli, who
was responsible for designing the firm's encryption equipment, had heard
from older engineers about the visits in earlier years by mysterious Americans.
He concluded that NSA was ordering the design changes through German intermediaries.
He confirmed the manipulation and admitted that in the late 1970s, he was
"ordered to change algorithms under mysterious circumstances"25
to weaken his cipher units.
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- PRIVACY? HA!
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- Although the Buehler incident lent credence
to the NSA Trojan Horse theory, it was not the first time that suspicions
were raised. Teheran had become concerned in 1987 when US official claimed
"conclusive evidence that Iran ordered the kidnapping" of ABC
News Beirut correspondent Charles Glass. Washington's alleged proof was
coded Iranian diplomatic cables Ñ intercepted by the NSA Ñ
between Teheran and the Hezbollah (Party of God) terrorist group in Lebanon
via Iran's embassies in Beirut and Damascus.
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- The next year, when a terrorist bomb
brought down PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, it seems the NSA
gained information by intercepting the communications of Iranian Interior
Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. It was apparently these messages that implicated
Iran, not Libya.
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- One intelligence summary, prepared by
the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, cites Iran's Mohtashemi as the mastermind.
Released in redacted form pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines, it states: Mohtashemi
is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He
is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid 10 million
dollars in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist
activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb PanAm Flight
103 in retaliation for the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus. Mohtashemi
has also spent time in Lebanon.
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- An Israeli intercept of Iranian diplomatic
coded communications between Mohtashemi's Interior Ministry in Teheran
and the Iranian embassy in Beirut (where Mohtashemi once served as ambassador)
revealed more than two years before Buehler was arrested by Iran that the
Shi_ite cleric transferred $1.2 to $2 million used for the bombing of PanAm
103 to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command
headed by Ahmed Jibril. Such revelations must have made the Iranians extremely
suspect of the security of their diplomatic traffic.
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- The role of Israel may be explained by
a little-reported intelligence alliance. NSA maintains a link with the
Israeli sigint entity, "Department 8200," located in northern
Tel Aviv at Herzliya. The sigint link is said to involve the British Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) base on Cyprus. Israel's ability to
crack the Iranian Crypto AG codes indicates that Israel had access to the
key decoding programs. The ease with which the West was reading Iranian
coded transactions obviously meant that someone in Israel's sigint services
possessed the decryption keys.
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- Then in 1992, Buehler was arrested. As
the Swiss authorities struggled to put the pieces together, they at first
believed that the Iranian secret services were retaliating for the arrest
in Switzerland of Zeynold Abedine Sarhadi, an employee of the Iranian embassy
in Berne and a nephew of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Swiss
police had arrested Sarhadi in early 1992 and were planning to extradite
him to France to face trial for the 1991 assassination in Paris of former
Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar.
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- On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar
was found dead with his throat slit, the Teheran headquarters of the Iranian
Intelligence Service, vevak, transmitted a coded message to Iranian diplomatic
missions in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar
dead?"
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- The Iranians concluded from Western press
reports that Briish and American sigint operators had intercepted and decoded
the message (as reported by L_Express of Paris) and knew that Teheran was
behind the assassination. They realized that their code had been broken,
looked to their Crypto AG cipher machines, and picked up Buehler.
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- According to one European source, they
may also have been tipped off by Stasi files of the ex-East German regime
that found their way to Iran and revealed the Crypto AG ruse. In any case,
the Iranians immediately began grilling prisoner 01228-1 about the role
he and his company played in giving Iranian and Libyan codes to the US.
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- Iran knew that Bakhtiar's assassination
had compromised the intelligence functions of the Iranian UN mission and
embassy in Geneva. The NSA had already identified one of the assassins,
Mohammed Azadi, from intercepts of his phone calls from a pay phone in
the town of Annecy in Savoy and an Istanbul apartment to the Iranian diplomatic
mission in Geneva.
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- On December 6, 1994, a special French
terrorism court convicted two Iranians of murdering Bakhtiar, but strangely,
it acquitted Sarhadi. "Justice has not been entirely served [for]
reasons of state," complained Bakhtiar's widow bitterly. Those "reasons"
may have included a tacit agreement among France, Switzerland, the German
BND, and the NSA to spare Sarhadi in order to avoid producing captured
transmissions and preserve the questionable secrecy surrounding the Crypto
AG cipher manipulation program. It was not only the "rogue states"
that were targeted.
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- During the sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations
of 1985, the NSA's British counterpart, the GCHQ, was able to decipher
the coded diplomatic traffic being sent between the Irish embassy in London
and the Irish Foreign Ministry in Dublin. It was reported in the Irish
press that Dublin had purchased a cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth
more than a million Irish pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely
monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. Later, during the
Falklands War, British GCHQ operators were able to decrypt classified Argentine
message traffic because the Argentineans were using rigged Crypto AG cipher
machines. Former British Foreign Office minister Ted Rowlands publicly
stated that GCHQ had penetrated Argentine diplomatic codes.
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- US: CRYPTO BULLY
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- If it turns out that the extent of communications
interception is as broad as suspected, the international implications are
profound. Every country in the world that used secure communications is
potentially affected. Some have sought to abandon Crypto AG, but found
their options limited.
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- The US had at times required purchase
of specific machines as a condition for favors. Pakistan was allegedly
granted American military credits with only one provision, that it buy
its encryption equipment from Crypto AG. Additionally, "It is not
unheard of for NSA to offer preferential export treatment to a company
if it builds a back door into its equipment," says one person with
long experience in the field. "I_ve seen it. I_ve been in the room."
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- Several countries abandoned Crypto AG
but failed to ensure secrecy. The Libyans switched to Gretag units after
the NSA cited secret communications to allege Libyan involvement in the
1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin. One senior US official said
the fact that the Libyans were making their codes more difficult to crack
would "make our job tougher." But the NSA seemed to have the
Gretag base covered as well. According to one knowledgeable cryptographic
industry expert, NSA's program to co-opt the services of encryption manufacturrs
probably extends to all those within reach of NSA operatives. US cryptographic
companies would be definite candidates for such participation.
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- The NSA program also likely extends to
companies in NATO and pro-US countries which have close relationships with
GCHQ, NSA, and the BND. Even neutral countries_ firms are not off-limits
to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto AG employee confirmed that high-level
US officials approached neutral European countries and argued that their
cooperation was essential to the Cold War struggle against the Soviets.
The NSA allegedly received support from cryptographic companies Crypto
AG and Gretag AG in Switzerland, Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in Finland,
and even newly-privatized firms in post-Communist Hungary.
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- In 1970, according to a secret German
BND intelligence paper, supplied to the author, the Germans planned to
"fuse" the operations of three cryptographic firms-Crypto AG,
Grattner AG (another Swiss cipher firm), and Ericsson of Sweden. Securocrats
often turn to the boogeyman of "rogue" nations in order to justify
the expense and ethical necessity of eavesdropping on all forms of international
communication, but in reality many intercepts involve messages by neutral
or allied nations.
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- NSA's 1993 release of the World War II
era "magic" intercepts under FOIA pressure revealed that US military
intelligence read not only messages by Axis nations, but also intercepted
and decrypted the top secret communications of Allied and neutral nations.
Switzerland was among the more than 30 countries whose messages were being
read. Since Swiss-made cipher machines were used by many governments at
the time, it is likely that the US has been reading such messages for over
half a century. An early example is the use of top secret intercepts by
the US delegation to the 1945 founding convention of the United Nations
in San Francisco.
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- Fifty years of intercepted communication
have given the US and its co-conspirators trade, diplomatic, economic and
strategic advantages. By intercepting the "bottom line" negotiating
positions of foreign governments, they have been able to shape international
treaties and negotiations in their own favor: They will know, for example,
the exact health status of the king of Saudi Arabia, the secret financial
transactions of the president of Peru, the negotiating position of South
Africa's trade delegation to the World Trade Organization, or the anti-abortion
strategy of the Pope in the United Nations. Such information, presented
daily to the president and the secretary of state in their intelligence
briefings, is extremely useful and allows the US to play high-stakes diplomatic
poker with a mirror behind everyone else's back.
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- http://caq.com:80/CAQ/caq63/caq63madsen.html
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