In 1970, the American secret service CIA and the German BND signed a top secret agreement in Munich, which made them partners in what the CIA later called the "trick of the century." The BND named the operation "Rubikon" and the CIA "Minerva". The high-profile case was revealed by Germany's ZDF Second Program, the Washington Post and Switzerland's SRF Television.
By signing the agreement CIA and BND were jointly buying the Swiss encryption and coding company Crypto AG, the leading company of that time in the encryption market. The customers belonged to more than 120 countries, which supplied the Swiss company with equipment for embassies, services and government facilities in order to ensure the privacy of communications.
From what became known, not even the 120 employees of Crypto AG knew that the company belonged to secret services. Through contacts at Siemens and a law firm in Liechtenstein, the real owners of the Swiss company managed to remain in the dark.
Soviet and Chinese knew…
Crypto AG's clients included, among others, Iran, Saudi Arabia, as well as a number of African and South American countries. Only the then Soviet Union and China procured communications encryption equipment from other vendors. They knew what was going on with the Swiss company anyway.
Thanks to Operation "Minerva" or "Rubikon" the US knew in 1989 shortly before the military intervention in Panama that the then wanted dictator Manuel Noriega was hiding in the Vatican embassy in Panama City, which was equipped with Crypto AG machines . A few years earlier, in 1986, US President Ronald Reagan photographed, with a delay of only one day, Libya as responsible for the attack on a Berlin disco with three dead and 200 injured.
The fact that the Gaddafi regime had organized and executed the attack became known to the Americans thanks to the monitoring of the Libyan embassy in then East Berlin. In the estimation of former German intelligence coordinator in the chancellery, Bernd Schmittbauer, Operation Rubikon made the world safer.
What did Washington and Berlin know?
But there is also the other side of the coin. BND and CIA knew thanks to the dense surveillance network of dozens of countries when and whom the dictatorships in Latin America were torturing or murdering or when and where coups were being prepared. It remains unclear whether this information reached the White House or the chancellery.
The fact is, however, that CIA and BND information helped the British in the Falklands War against Argentina in 1981. From the revelations of the German, American and Swiss media it also appears that NATO member countries were also targeted in the operations. Among them Italy, Spain and Ireland.
After the end of the Cold War, the German secret service sold its stake to the Americans, who only dissolved Crypto AG in 2018. Already the American secret services had turned to partnerships with digital telecommunications providers for surveillance.
SOURCE:DW