13 Facts About Crypto AG

Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952.

The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to the managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares.

On 11 February 2020, The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF revealed that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence, and the spy agencies could easily break the codes used to send encrypted messages.

Crypto AG was established in Switzerland by the Russian-born Swede, Boris Hagelin.

Crypto AG sent over new machines to the NSA and they had an ongoing discussion concerning which countries they would or would not sell the encryption systems to, and which countries to sell older, weaker systems.

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In 1994, Crypto AG bought InfoGuard AG a company providing encryption solutions to banks.

In 2018, Crypto AG was liquidated, and its assets and intellectual property sold to two new companies.

The secret relationship initiated by the agreement involved Crypto AG not selling machines such as the CX-52, a more advanced version of the C-52, to certain countries; and the NSA writing the operations manuals for some of the CX-52 machines on behalf of the company, to ensure the full strength of the machines would not be used, thus again reducing the necessary cracking effort.

Crypto AG had already earlier been accused of rigging its machines in collusion with intelligence agencies such as NSA, GCHQ, and the German Federal Intelligence Service, enabling the agencies to read the encrypted traffic produced by the machines.

Le Temps has argued that Crypto AG had been actively working with the British, US and West German secret services since 1956, going as far as to rig instruction manuals for the machines on the orders of the NSA.

In 2020, an investigation carried out by The Washington Post, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen revealed that Crypto AG was, in fact, entirely controlled by the CIA and the BND.

Swiss government's decision to impose export controls on Crypto International AG in the wake of the Crypto AG disclosures caused diplomatic tensions with Sweden, reportedly leading to the latter cancelling plans to celebrate 100 years of diplomatic relations with Switzerland.

The export controls preventing Swedish authorities from obtaining equipment from Crypto AG International was reportedly a reason behind Sweden's decision.