The spy agency is known for its sometimesquestionable tactics and violations of other nations’ sovereignty in order to carry out its duties.
And sometimes those actions, while alarming and despicable, may even be justified for national security.
But now the CIA just got exposed for the most massive conspiracy of the century, and national security was not a factor.
In 1944, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt the need for a “Central Intelligence Service,” which would “procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods.”
And thus, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was born a few years later when President Harry S. Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947.
From its inception the CIA has been known as protectors of America. But to think thatthe CIA and its programs were always altruistic is at the least naïve. But at least they were on our side and it’s widely accepted they were instrumental in winning the Cold War.
Most CIA operations are top secret,requiring the highest levels of security clearance in order to access that information.
But the CIA has also been accused of things as far-fetched as being behind the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and other leading American political figures.
Of course we know they have been behind the assassinations or attempted assassinations of foreign leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
The point is, due to the top-secret nature of the intelligence agency, we don’t know what the truth actually is.
But a new bombshell article in The Washington Post, written by Greg Miller, and entitled “The Intelligence coup of the century,” exposed the CIA for code-breakinghighly classified communications and documents of our allies and adversaries.
Miller writes, “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. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.”
The Swiss firm has made millions off of specializing in selling the equipment to countries to help them to keep their secrets highly confidential, and out of the hands of other nations.
But what none of the countries, and even the Vatican, knew about this niche Swisssecurity firm is that it was secretly owned by the CIA in a bizarre partnership with West German intelligence forces.
Not only that, but both the CIA and the West Germans secretly “rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.”
And this operation has been going on for decades.
A comprehensive CIA history of the operation was obtained by both The Washington Post and a German public broadcaster company called ZDF released in a joint report that actually identifies the CIA officials who ran the program. The document explores the years the CIA was secretly taking other countries’ money while simultaneously stealing their secrets.
The report concluded, “It was the intelligence coup of the century. 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.”
Now, we already know Edward Snowden, the National Security Advisor employee who exposed the United States government forkeeping comprehensive data on everybody, but this is on a whole other level – using a fake company to spy on foreign allies and adversaries that entrusted them with their biggest secrets.
Miller wrote, “They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1970 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military 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.”
But now Crypto AG is “under new ownership” and the company now-called “CyOne” claims it has “no ties to any foreign intelligence services” any longer.
The Swiss government announced last Tuesday that it would be launching an investigation into Crypto AG’s ties to the CIA and the company’s export license was immediately revoked.
Andreas Linde, the chairman of the company that now holds the rights to Crypto’s international products and business, said he had no knowledge of the company’s relationship to the CIA before being confronted with the facts in this article.
Linde said, “We at Crypto International have never had any relationship with the CIA or BND — and please quote me. If what you are saying is true, then absolutely I feel betrayed, and my family feels betrayed, and I feel there will be a lot of employees who will feel betrayed as well as customers.”
To many here in the U.S., this is sadly just another example of an agency gone rogue.