Sources: CIA secretly owned Crypto AG, the leading supplier of encryption systems globally, and could read allies' and adversaries' communications for decades
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.
Washington PostGreg Miller
Context & Ripple Effects
For half a century, Crypto AG sat at the center of a trust-based encryption market: governments bought machines from a neutral Swiss vendor and assumed the vendor had no master. The Post's sourcing says that assumption was the product — the CIA secretly owned the company and read its customers' traffic. The revelation lands on a CIA already pivoting toward digital espionage and a major reorganization, making clear that the agency's technical ambitions long predate its cloud-era posture.
The story also reframes the trust fights that followed it. When the CIA briefed allies that Huawei received funding from Chinese security services and the PLA, it was arguing that vendor-state entanglement disqualifies infrastructure — an argument the Crypto AG history now cuts both ways on. And the WikiLeaks cache coverage showing that [[a:917231|Signal's and WhatsApp's encryption held up because the CIA targeted devices rather than the math]] points to where buyers go when they can no longer trust the vendor: open, auditable implementations.
First-order effects
Governments that bought Crypto AG machines — the spies, soldiers, and diplomats in the Post's framing — must now treat decades of their communications as compromised and audit or replace the equipment still in service.
The CIA's source-protection and liaison relationships take a direct hit: allies who shared intelligence with Washington learn their secure channels were readable by their partner.
Second-order effects
US arguments against Chinese-supplied encryption hardware lose their clean edge — allied buyers weighing the Huawei warnings can now point to a US-owned vendor doing exactly what Washington warned about, complicating the Entity List pressure on Hualan that NASA, NATO, and the DEA have sidestepped.
Demand shifts toward verifiable alternatives: open-source crypto whose implementations can be publicly audited, and national procurement that treats vendor ownership as an attack surface to be proven rather than assumed.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the encryption market structurally splits between trusted-vendor models and sovereign, self-auditable infrastructure, with governments insisting on inspectable supply chains for anything carrying state secrets.
Espionage doctrine shifts from owning the vendor to compromising the endpoints — the lesson the WikiLeaks cache coverage already illustrated — because the vendor channel is now understood to be a known, guarded vector.
The trend: State espionage is moving from secretly owning trusted infrastructure suppliers toward endpoint and supply-chain compromise, and the exposure of that playbook is pushing governments toward open, sovereign, auditable encryption they control themselves.
EXCLUSIVE: The CIA secretly owned the world's leading supplier of encryption systems to other countries. Crypto AG sold rigged machines to more than 100 nations, including Iran, India, Egypt, Italy... “It was the intelligence coup of the century.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ …
@baltimoresun @TBowmanNPR @gregpmiller I recall vividly how at the end of my trip to Switzerland in 1995 to find former employees of Crypto AG, one of them managed to find a smoking-gun memo from 1975 that showed an NSA crypto mathematician named Nora Mackebee had attended a Cryp…
The other interesting lesson was that the scheme seemed to have been successful not so much because their customers seriously analyzed the products and trusted them, but more because they spent a huge amount of effort on sales and marketing.
The fact that Crypto AG sold rigged encryption hardware to western adversaries has been reported before, but it was far more pervasive than I ever imagined. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@baltimoresun @TBowmanNPR @gregpmiller My guess: NSA old-timers will roll their eyes at the presentation of this spectacular intelligence sting as the work of the CIA. NSA (with its predecessor) was of course the brains behind the operation, starting with the legendary codebreake…
Back in 1995 at the @baltimoresun, with @TBowmanNPR, I wrote a long story on the NSA's covert relationship with Crypto AG, allowing the US to read the secrets of many countries: https://www.baltimoresun.com/ .... Now @gregpmiller got the official CIA history of this decades-long …
For more than half a century, countries all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The Swiss company, Crypto AG, was secretly owned by the CIA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican... what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence.” https:…
Amazing story. Helps explain the US mistrust of Huawei—it's grounded in the assumption that the Chinese government is as duplicitous as the US government has long been. https://twitter.com/...
“what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. [They] rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.” https…
Wild. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.” https://twitter.com/...
“what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence.” Holy cow. WHAT a story. It's loooong—but a real thriller. Must read by @gregpmiller https://twitter.com/...
EXCLUSIVE: “It was the intelligence coup of the century.” The CIA secretly owned a Swiss company that sold rigged encryption systems to other governments for half a century. The Post obtained classified files tracing the entire operation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
The CIA monitored Iran's mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco. http…
“The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.” https://twitter.com/...