Paula Lugones
02/11/2020 - 19:26
- Clarín.com
- Politics
It was a perfect plan and it worked for more than half a century. In a joint operation with the secret services of Germany, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spied for decades the coded communications of at least 120 countries, including Argentina, through a Swiss company that sold machines to decrypt encrypted messages , according to a journalistic investigation released Tuesday in the United States, Switzerland and Germany.
Among several spied world events, these "punctured" machines fed military intelligence to Britain during the Falklands War and closely followed the murderous campaigns of the dictators of South America. According to newly declassified documents accessed by Clarín , Argentina and the countries that made up the Condor Operation (the agreement between several dictatorships in the Southern Cone to coordinate repressive actions against opponents) they actually used these devices with which they were spied on .
The CIA documents.
"The espionage operations through Crypto AF (the machine supplier company) provided the US intelligence with much more detailed information about the operations, something that was not yet known," Carlos Osorio, who directs the Project, told Clarín. Documentation of the Southern Cone of the National Security Archive in Washington. " If all this is declassified, that treasure of intercepted communications could mean a significant advance in the history of Operation Condor and also in the history of the entire region," he added.
The plan was perfect and worked for decades, an investigation by The Washington Post , the German broadcaster ZDF and the Swiss radio station SRF revealed Tuesday. The Swiss company, called Crypto AG, was secretly controlled by German intelligence and provided half-world governments with machines to encrypt messages that eventually ended up being decoded by US and German agents , who had the tools to do so.
Crypto AG worked with about 120 countries since the end of World War II, including Iran, India, Pakistan and some dictatorships in South America, including Argentina. In 1970, the CIA, together with the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) secretly became the owners of the company, data that obviously ignored the states that hired the service.
Through the total control they exercised over the company, the CIA and the BND adulterated the equipment they sold to easily violate security codes and access the secret messages of those governments. The business was round because they not only obtained classified information from their customers, but also billed millions of dollars for their service . The Post investigation tells that Crypto paid the CIA with money bags delivered to underground parking lots.
According to the investigation , neither Russia nor China ever hired Crypto services .
The documents that reveal espionage.
The Washington Post newspaper titled the investigation as "the coup of the century" and said that in an internal and classified CIA document the history of this ultra-secret project is described and intelligence officials who supervised the operation and executives are identified of Crypto involved. The CIA did not comment on the report released Tuesday. Crypto was divided into two divisions in 2018, and one of those branches, Crypto International, said the report was "very disturbing," but that they had no connections with the CIA or the BND or "we have never had it."
Crypto products, the report says, are still being used in more than a dozen countries around the world, although after the Cold War the agency would have lost its spying targets.
In the 1970s, Crypto AG sold thousands of these sophisticated encryption machines . In the region they were installed in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. According to documents recently declassified by the US government - which began to be released in the Barack Obama administration and continued with that of Donald Trump - the use of these devices provided information on historical events such as the 1973 Chilean military coup, the coup in Argentina in 1976, the assassination of Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, the Sandinista revolution and the Contra war in Nicaragua, supported by the Argentine dictatorship, and also the Falklands war.
“As the nations that made up the Condor operative built their entire communication system around Crypto AG machines, the US intelligence community. He had the opportunity to monitor all the plans and missions of the Condor operative, including its multiple plots for murders in the region, ” said Osorio, who leads the declassification process of the thousands of documents from different agencies that involve our region. The documentation can be seen on the organization's website: nsarchive.gwu.edu
The Post reports that, in 1982, when Argentina doubted that the team provided by Crypto had revealed secret messages and thus helped the British forces in the Falklands War (according to the document), he was sent to Buenos Aires a Company representative, a spy named Henry Widman, to try to resolve the situation. Widman told the Argentine authorities that probably the National Security Agency of the United States had intervened a device that Argentina was using, but that the main product they had purchased from Crypto, called CAG 500, had remained "invulnerable." The document, revealed by the Post, says that "the deception worked . " "The Argentines swallowed with difficulty, but continued to buy the equipment," they said.
The CIA spied for more than half a century to Argentina.
During the Cold War, most Crypto executives involved in such operations were motivated by ideological issues and declined to receive salaries beyond those provided by the company, according to the documents. Widman was one of the exceptions. "When he was about to retire, his salary was substantially increased," the CIA reports say. And even the agency rewarded him with a merit medal.
Washington. Correspondent