Cryptography-Digest Digest #802, Volume #8 Sun, 27 Dec 98 05:13:04 EST
Contents:
U.S. Spying On Friend And Foe (Mark Adkins)
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Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1998 04:24:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Mark Adkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: U.S. Spying On Friend And Foe
You know, I wasn't going to post this, but I've just caught part of a
debate on C-SPAN regarding whether Jonathan Pollard should be released
early, and I was offended by the sanctimonious bleating of people like
David Klinghoffer of National Review, who have the audacity to compare
the revelation of technical intelligence to a foreign ally by Pollard
to the case of Aldrich Ames. The United States has some nerve! (For
those who may be interested, I am neither Jewish nor pro-Israel. I
simply find the hypocrisy of the United States Government appalling.)
It's also enlightening to bear in mind what follows when considering
U.S. Government proposals for cryptological systems and standards for
domestic and export use. There is also some information regarding
intelligence intercepts of Iranian (not Libyan) communications about
the bombing of PanAm Flight 103.
The article is particularly interesting since the United States spies
on every country in the world except for Great Britain, Australia, and
Canada -- see Ronald Kessler, _Inside The CIA_ (NY: Pocket Books,
1992) -- and quite frankly I'd be surprised if we abide even by those
agreements. The position of the U.S. intelligence community has always
been that since governments and leadership change, what is today a
cooperative ally may tommorrow become obstructionist if not hostile
("obstructionism" being judged by the compliance of foreign leaders with
the values and priorities of U.S. foreign policy) and that therefore it
is a good idea to spy on allies as well as enemies since one cannot set
up an espionage infrastructure in a foreign country overnight. We also
spy on economic competitors like Japan. (Kessler, pp. 9-12) Generally
speaking, these countries spy on us as well.
What follows is the full text, including a sidebar article (which I
have placed at the end of the main article) and footnotes, of an
article by Wayne Madsen, an Arlington, VA based journalist specializing
in computer security, privacy, and intelligence, who is also the author
of _Handbook of Personal Data Protection_ (NY: Stockton, 1992). The
article appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of CovertAction Quarterly,
pp. 36-42. CAQ can be reached at (202) 331-9763 (voice), (202) 331-9751
(fax), or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Their snail mail address is 1500 Massachusetts
Avenue, N.W., #732, Washington, D.C. 20005. By way of disclosure to
readers of this newsgroup, CAQ is an unabashedly left-wing periodical
which sometimes produces intelligence-related articles of some interest
and validity (and occasionally some embarrassing stinkers). As for this
article, read it and decide for yourself.
* * *
CRYPTO AG: THE NSA's TROJAN WHORE?
by Wayne Madsen
copyright 1998 by CovertAction Quarterly
It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century. For decades
the U.S. has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret messages
of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world's most sophisticated
and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG,
a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of
its clients on its neutrality. The purchasing nations, confident that
their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals
to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around
the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only
conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes
strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political
leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling.
All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security
Agency (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand-delivering
the messages to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so
that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be auto-
matically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. (1)
NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the
morning paper.
The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March, 1992
when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans
Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in Tehran. The Iranian
government charged the tall, 50ish businessman with spying for "the
intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United
States of America." (2) "I was questioned for five hours a day for nine
months," Buehler says. "I was never beaten, but I was strapped to wooden
benches and told I would be beaten. I was told Crypto was a spy center"
that worked with foreign intelligence services. (3) Despite prolonged
interrogation, Buehler -- who had worked for Crypto AG for 13 years and
was on his 25th trip to Iran -- apparently maintained his ignorance. "I
didn't know that the equipment was bugged, otherwise the Iranians would
have gotten it out of me by their many 'methods'." (4)
With millions of dollars in contracts and a major international spy
operation at stake, the company was eager to make the incident and Buehler
go away, even though the salesman had brought in 40 percent of Crypto's
100 million Swiss franc sales revenue. (5) Crypto bought Buehler's
freedom with a $1 million payment to the Iranians, returned him to
Switzerland, and then, astonishingly, fired him and ordered the
bewildered salesman to repay the bond. The cover-up backfired, however,
when current and former Crypto employees came to Buehler's defense and
shared their firsthand knowledge of manipulated cipher equipment. "I
hold proof of the rigging of code machines" said an unidentified former
Crypto AG engineer. "Fifteen years ago, I saw American and German
engineers doctoring our machines. (6) It took me some time until I was
certain about the manipulations. The proof: technical documents...I
put them in a bank safety deposit box. Then I informed the federal
prosecutor's office in Berne. There were many conversations. Suddenly,
these contacts were broken off and the affair petered out." (7)
The engineer told another reporter: "the schemes and the cipher keys were
created by them [NSA and BND (Bundesnacrichtendienst -- the German
intelligence service)]. I immediately, discretely notified the Swiss
prosecutors. There was an investigation. I was never able to find out
the result. Today, the Buehler affair brings everything out in the open
again. And, I'm afraid. What happened to Hans Buehler could happen to
any other salesperson of Crypto AG. It's not a question of attacking
this company; it's a question of saving lives..." (8)
When the Swiss media began to reveal the background of Buehler's story,
Crypto AG responded with a lawsuit in an attempt to quash the story and
muzzle Buehler. (9) The suit was settled days before former Crypto
engineers were to testify that they thought the machines had been altered.
The parties agreed not to disclose the settlement and Crypto sought to
reassure its clients. Informed sources in Switzerland and the Middle East
confirmed that Crypto AG settled because it, and the NSA and BND, didn't
want to reveal anything in court.
Nevertheless, the damage to Crypto AG's credibility was already done.
Customers from Saddam Hussein to the Pope grew nervous. Informed of the
details around the Hans Buehler incident, the Vatican -- which uses Swiss
cipher machines to secure diplomatic communications transmitted from the
Holy See to the many papal nuncios around the world -- showed a marked
lack of charity. An official branded the perpetrators "bandits!" (10)
Although the Iranians may have been technically wrong about Buehler's
complicity in the massive deception, they were right that something was
rotten at Crypto AG. And even before the firing of Hans Buehler, some of
Crypto's engineers were ambivalent about secret deals with the NSA. "At
first, I was idealistic" said Juerg Spoerndli, who left Crypto in 1994.
"But I adapted quickly. ...The new aim was to help Big Brother USA look
over these countries' shoulders. We'd say, 'It's better to let the USA
see what these dictators are doing.'" Soon, however, Spoerndli grew
apprehensive over the manipulation. "It's still an imperialistic
approach to the world. I don't think it's the way business should be
done." Ruedi Hug, another former Crypto AG engineer, was also critical.
"I feel betrayed," he declared. "They always told us, 'We are the best.
Our equipment is not breakable, blah, blah, blah. ...Switzerland is a
neutral country.'" (11)
Apparently not. A document released in 1995 by Britain's Public Records
Office indicates that Switzerland and NATO concluded a secret deal in
1956. The "Top Secret" document, dated February 10, 1956, with the
reference "prem 11/1224," was written by the famous British World War II
figure, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. While "Monty" was a vice-
commander of NATO, he discussed a secret alliance with Swiss Defense
Minister Paul Chaudet. In peacetime, Switzerland would be officially
neutral, but in wartime, it would side with NATO. (12) A U.S. document
released in 1995 shows Switzerland's importance to U.S. national security.
A Presidential directive on national security prepared for President
Truman states that "Switzerland...delivers precision instruments and other
materials necessary for the armament of the USA and NATO countries." (13)
Germany's BND, too, has apparently cooperated with the U.S. encryption
rigging scheme through Siemens Defense Electronics Group of Munich. A
previous director of Siemens called Crypto AG a "secret Siemens daughter"
(14) while a former Crypto AG financial director said, "the owner of the
firm [Crypto] is the Federal Republic [of Germany]." (15) The Siemens
connection to Crypto was remarkably incestuous. Siemens provided
technical assistance for the machine manipulation process. Suspicion
about the German electronics giant's role in Crypto's operations was
heightened when it was reported that Siemens helped raise the $1 million
to spring Buehler from his Tehran prison cell. (16) In fact, after
revelations of the Crypto-Siemens association hit the Swiss press,
Crypto's managing director Michael Grupe informed the employees that the
advisory board to Crypto's board of directors was being dissolved. The
two advisors -- Alfred Nowosad and Helmut Wiesner -- were both full-time
Siemens employees. With the world media describing the company as a
silent partner of German and American signals intelligence (SIGINT)
agencies around the world, Grube announced that "Crypto is changing its
profile." (17)
The German government's contribution to the encryption rigging scheme
also included its pressuring another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG,
to allow a "red thread" program to be installed in the encryption
software. "Red threading" is the software equivalent of sending in a
Trojan horse. (18) Once owned by AT&T, this encryption manufacturer was
acquired in 1995 by Information Resources Engineering, Inc. (IRE), of
Baltimore, Maryland. (19) Interestingly, IRE is staffed by a number of
ex-NSA cryptographic engineers. (20) A third Swiss encryption company,
Info Guard AG, was fully acquired by Crypto AG on June 16, 1994. Info
Guard, which had been 50 percent owned by Crypto AG, primarily sells
encryption units to banks in Switzerland and abroad. (21) Although
German and American SIGINT agencies were involved in manipulating
Crypto's cipher machines, Motorola, one of the NSA's major US
contractors, performed the actual alteration, according to a former
Crypto AG chief engineer who was personally involved in the manipulation
process. (22)
Once the cipher machines were rigged to include the secret decryption
key, the BND and NSA codebreakers could use the transmitted key to read
any message sent by Crypto AG's 120 country customers. One previous
Crypto AG employee contends that all developmental Crypto AG equipment
had to be sent for approval to the NSA and to the German Central Cipher
Bureau (Zentralstelle fur Chiffrierung [ZfCH]), now the Federal
Information Security Agency (Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der
Informationstechnik [BSI], which is also Department 62 of the BND)
in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn.
In other cases, Crypto AG was apparently forced to market encryption
equipment manufactured in the U.S., sent to Crypto and passed off as
Swiss equipment. In the 1970s, as Crypto was moving from electro-
mechanical to computerized crypto units, a former Crypto AG engineer in
Switzerland inspected one of the first prototype computerized machines
sent from the U.S. He remarked that since the code could be easily
broken, he found the machine useless. But when he told his superiors that
he could improve the encryption process if he was given access to the
mathematical functions, two U.S. cryptographic "experts" refused to
disclose the information. (23)
According to a confidential Crypto AG memorandum, one of the NSA "experts"
may have been Nora L. Mackabee, an NSA cryptographer who is now retired
on a horse farm in Maryland along with her husband Lester, another retired
NSA employee. Between August 19 and 20, 1975, three Crypto AG engineers
huddled with Mackabee (identified as representing "IA" -- most likely
"intelligence agency") along with three Motorola engineers and one other
American, Herb Frank. One Motorola engineer recalled that Frank was
probably from another U.S. intelligence agency based in northern Virginia
but described him as a non-technical person who seemed to be making the
administrative arrangements for Mackabee. (24)
Crypto AG engineer Juerg Spoerndli, who was responsible for designing the
firm's encryption equipment, had heard from older engineers about the
visits in earlier years by mysterious Americans. He concluded that NSA
was ordering the design changes through German intermediaries. He
confirmed the manipulation and admitted that in the late 1970s he was
"ordered to change algorithms under mysterious circumstances" to weaken
his cipher units. (25)
Although the Buehler incident lent credence to the NSA Trojan horse
theory, it was not the first time that suspicions were raised. Tehran
had become concerned in 1987 when U.S. officials claimed "conclusive
evidence that Iran ordered the kidnapping" of ABC News correspondent
Charles Glass. (26) Washington's alleged proof was coded Iranian
diplomatic cables -- intercepted by the NSA -- between Tehran and the
Hezbollah (Party of God) terrorist group in Lebanon via Iran's embassies
in Beirut and Damascus.
The next year, when a terrorist bomb brought down PanAm Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland, it seems the NSA gained information by intercepting
the communications of Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. It
was apparently these messages that implicated Iran, not Libya. One
intelligence summary, prepared by the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency,
cites Iran's Mohtashemi as the mastermind. Released in redacted form
pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by lawyers for
the bankrupt Pan American Airlines, it states:
Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal
terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal.
He has recently paid 10 million dollars in cash and gold to these
two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one
who paid the same amount to bomb PanAm Flight 103 in retaliation for
the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus. Mohtashemi has also spent
time in Lebanon. (27)
An Israeli intercept of Iranian diplomatic coded communications between
Mohtashemi's Interior Ministry in Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Beirut
(where Mohtashemi once served as embassador) revealed -- more than two
years before Buehler was arrested by Iran -- that the Shi'ite cleric
transferred $1.2 to $2 million used for the bombing of PanAm Flight 103
to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command
headed by Ahmed Jibril. (28) Such revelations must have made the
Iranians extremely suspect of the security of their diplomatic traffic.
The role of Israel may be explained by a little-reported intelligence
alliance. NSA maintains a link with the Israeli SIGINT entity "Department
8200" located in northern Tel Aviv at Herzliya. The SIGINT link is said
to involve the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) base
on Cyprus. Israel's ability to crack the Iranian Crypto AG codes
indicates that Israel had access to the key decoding programs. The ease
with which the West was reading Iranian coded transactions obviously meant
that someone in Israel's SIGINT services possessed the decryption
keys. (29)
Then in 1992, Buehler was arrested. As the Swiss authorities struggled
to put the pieces together, they at first believed that the Iranian secret
services were retaliating for the arrest in Switzerland of Zeynold Abedine
Sarhadi, an employee of the Iranian embassy in Berne and a nephew of
former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Swiss police had arrested
Sarhadi in early 1992 and were planning to extradite him to France to face
trial for the 1991 assassination in Paris of former Iranian Prime Minister
Shahpour Bakhtiar. On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar was found
with his throat slit, the Tehran headquarters of the Iranian Intelligence
Service, VEVAK, transmitted a coded message to Iranian diplomatic missions
in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?" The
Iranians concluded from Western press reports that British and American
SIGINT operators had intercepted and decoded the message (as reported by
L'Express of Paris) and knew that Tehran was behind the assassination.
They realized that their code had been broken (30), looked to their Crypto
AG cipher machines, and picked up Buehler. (31) According to one European
source, they may also have been tipped off by Stasi files of the ex-East
German regime that found their way to Iran and revealed the Crypto AG
ruse.
In any case, the Iranians immediately began grilling prisoner 01228-1
about the role he and his company played in giving Iranian and Libyan
codes to the U.S. (32) Iran knew that Bakhtiar's assassination had
compromised the intelligence functions of the Iranian UN mission and
embassy in Geneva. The NSA had already identified one of the assassins,
Mohammed Azadi, from intercepts of his phone calls from a pay phone in the
town of Annecy in Savoyand an Istanbul apartment, to the Iranian
diplomatic mission in Geneva. (33)
On December 6, 1994, a special French terrorism court convicted two
Iranians of murdering Bakhtiar, but strangely, it acquitted Sarhadi.
"Justice has not been entirely served [for] reasons of state," complained
Bakhtiar's widow bitterly. Those "reasons" may have included a tacit
agreement among France, Switzerland, the German BND, and the NSA to spare
Sarhadi in order to avoid producing captured transmissions and to preserve
the questionable secrecy surrounding the Crypto AG cipher manipulation
program. (34)
It was not only the "rogue states" that were targeted. During the
sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985, the NSA's British counterpart,
the GCHQ, was able to decipher the coded diplomatic traffic being sent
between the Irish embassy in London and the Irish Foreign Ministry in
Dublin. It was reported in the Irish press that Dublin had purchased a
cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth more than a million Irish
pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely monitored and
deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. Later, during the Falklands
War, British GCHQ operators were able to decrypt classified Argentine
message traffic because the Argentinians were using rigged Crypto AG
cipher machines. Former British Foreign Office minister Ted Rowlands
publicly stated that GCHQ had penetrated Argentine diplomatic codes. (35)
If it turns out that the extent of communications interception is as broad
as suspected, the international implications are profound. Every country
in the world that used secure communications is potentially affected.
Some have sought to abandon Crypto AG, but found their options limited.
The U.S. had at times required purchase of specific machines as a
condition for favors. Pakistan was allegedly granted American military
credits with only one provision, that it buy its encryption equipment from
Crypto AG. (36) Additionally, "It is not unheard of for the NSA to offer
preferential export treatment to a [U.S.] company if it builds a back door
into its equipment," says one person with long experience in the field.
"I've seen it. I've been in the room." (37)
Several countries abandoned Crypto AG but failed to ensure secrecy. The
Libyans switched to Gretag units after the NSA cited secret communications
to allege Libyan involvement in the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West
Berlin. One senior U.S. official said the fact that the Libyans were
making their codes more difficult to crack would "make our job tougher."
(38) But the NSA seemed to have the Gretag base covered as well.
According to one knowledgeable cryptographic industry expert, NSA's
program to co-opt the services of encryption manufacturers probably
extends to all those within reach of NSA operatives. U.S. cryptographic
companies would be definite candidates for such participation. The NSA
program also likely extends to companies in NATO and pro-U.S. countries
which have close relationships with GCHQ, NSA, and the BND. Even neutral
countries' firms are not off-limits to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto
AG employee confirmed that high-level U.S. officials approached neutral
European countries and argued that their cooperation was essential to the
Cold War struggle against the Soviets. The NSA allegedly received support
from cryptographic companies Crypto AG and Gretag AG in Switzerland,
Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in Finland, and even newly-privatized firms
in post-Communist Hungary. (39) In 1970, according to a secret German BND
intelligence paper, supplied to the author, the Germans planned to "fuse"
the operations of three cryptographic firms -- Crypto AG, Grattner AG
(another Swiss cipher firm) and Ericsson of Sweden. (40)_
Securocrats often return to the boogeyman of "rogue" nations in order to
justify the expense and ethical necessity of eavesdropping on all forms of
international communication, but in reality many intercepts involve
messages by neutral or allied nations. NSA's 1993 release of the World
War II era "MAGIC" intercepts under FOIA pressure revealed that U.S.
military intelligence read not only messages by Axis nations, but also
intercepted and decrypted the top secret communications of Allied and
neutral nations. (41) Switzerland was among the more than 30 countries
whose messages were being read. (42) Since Swiss-made cipher machines
were used by many governments at the time, it is likely that the U.S. has
been reading such messages for over half a century. An early example is
the use of top secret intercepts by the U.S. delegation to the 1945
founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco. (43)
Fifty years of intercepted communications have given the U.S. and its
co-conspirators trade, diplomatic, economic, and strategic advantages.
By intercepting the "bottom line" negotiating positions of foreign
governments, they have been able to shape international treaties and
negotiations in their own favor. They will know, for example, the exact
health status of the king of Saudi Arabia, the secret financial
transactions of the president of Peru, the negotiating position of
South Africa's trade delegation to the World Trade Organization, or the
anti-abortion strategy of the Pope in the United Nations. Such
information, presented daily to the president and secretary of state
in their intelligence briefings, is extremely useful and allows the U.S.
to play high-stakes diplomatic poker with a mirror behind everyone's
back.
END MAIN ARTICLE
[sidebar article]
CRYPTO'S CRYPTIC OWNERSHIP
by Wayne Madsen
copyright 1998 by CovertAction Quarterly
The ability of the NSA to decipher classified foreign diplomatic and
military intercepts would not have been possible without the assistance
of Boris Hagelin, one of the 20th century's greatest cryptographers.
Hagelin aided the U.S. during World War II when he sold 140,000 invaluable
cryptographic machines to the U.S. Army. In the early 1950s, the Russian-
born Swede founded the giant cryptographic firm, Crypto AG. By 1957,
Hagelin had sealed a secret agreement with William Friedman, a legendary
NSA cryptographer, to modify the crypto machines sold by Crypto AG to some
120 countries. (44)
Although the official line is that Crypto AG is an independent Swiss
company started and owned by Hagelin, there is strong circumstantial
evidence that from the beginning, Hagelin was merely a figurehead
controlled by the German intelligence service and "his" company was an
intelligence front.
According to the Zug canton Registry of Commerce, when his Steinhausen-
based firm was organized on September 28, 1950, 48 out of the total 50
shares were held by a secretive "brass plate" company with a mailbox in
Vaduz, Liechtenstein, called the Establishment European Trading Company
(German acronym, AEH). (45) The original shares were sold for 1,000 Swiss
francs each. They have been managed by the KPMG Trust Company (KPMG
Treuhandgesellschaft), a subsidiary of KPMG, the international accounting
firm.
Boris Hagelin owned only one share of Crypto's original 50 stock shares.
Another privately held share was owned by Albert Dormann, a Crypto vice-
director and attorney-of-record for AEH, who also worked for Credit Suisse
Bank in Zug, where the 50,000 Swiss francs were deposited. AEH of Vaduz
owned the remaining 48 shares (as a proxy for Germany). AEH is reportedly
owned by the Federal German Estates Administration (Bundesvermoegensver-
waltung). (46) In a 1993 interview with German television, Erich Schmidt-
Eenboom, the author of a book on the German BND, said that the German
Estates Administration is often used to "camouflage" the activities of the
BND, especially in electronic eavesdropping matters. U.S. intelligence
was involved at least since 1947 when the Dutch found that their Hagelin
ciphers were bugged by the U.S. Army Security Agency, then based at
Arlington Hall, Virginia.
END SIDEBAR ARTICLE
FOOTNOTES
(1) Interview with former Crypto AG employee, Sept. 20, 1994
(2) "The Case of Hans Buehler," Swiss Radio International, Sunday
Supplement, May 14, 1994.
(3) Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, "No Such Agency: Rigging the Game,"
Baltimore Sun, Dec. 10, 1995, p. 1A.
(4) Frank Garbely, Interview with Hans Buehler, Swiss German Television,
Polit Magazine, March 23, 1994.
(5) Yvan Stefanovitch, "Hans Buehler, Espion Sans le Savoir (The Spy Who
Didn't Know He Was A Spy), VSD April 14-20, 1994, p.50.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Frank Garbely, Interview with Hans Buehler, op. cit.
(8) Stefanovitch, op. cit., p. 50
(9) "Rendezvous: People and Places in Switzerland," interview with Hans
Buehler by James Nason, Swiss Radio International, July 18, 1994.
(10) Res Strehe, Verschlusselt (Enciphered), (Zurich: Werd Verlag, 1994,
p. 199).
(11) Shane and Bowman, op. cit., p. 9A.
(12) "Montgomery memorandum casts shadow over Swiss neutrality,"
Statewatch (London), Sept.-Oct. 1995, p. 12.
(13) ibid.
(14) "Geheimniskramer," Bilanz, March 1988, p. 147.
(15) "Trojan Ear", Focus, March 28, 1994, p.38
(16) Stefanovitch, op. cit., p. 83.
(17) Hauszeitung ([Crypto AG's] House Journal) (translation), n. 15,
Dec. 15, 1994.
(18) Interview with former Crypto AG employee, Sept. 1994.
(19) IRE Press Release, Nov. 6, 1995 <www.ire.com/nr/newrelea/g-tag.htm>
(20) Author's observations from a 1993 visit to IRE headquarters.
(21) Schweizerisches Handelsamtsblatt, n. 124, S.3634, June 29, 1994.
(22) Garbely, op. cit.
(23) Ibid.
(24) Shane and Bowman, op. cit., pp. 8A-9A.
(25) Ibid, p. 9A.
(26) UPI, "NBC Says U.S. intelligence shows Iran ordered Glass's
kidnapping," Boston Globe, July 2, 1987, p. 17.
(27) U.S. Air Force Intelligence Agency intelligence summary SECRET NOFORN
WINTEL message dated March 4, 1991, to various military commands involved
with Desert Storm (O 041900Z MAR 91). "O" means the message had a
precedence of Operational Immediate and "1900Z" means 1900 hours Greenwich
Mean Time. NOFORN stands for Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals, while
WINTEL is an acronym for Warning Notice - Intelligence Methods and Sources
Revealed.
(28) David Horovitz, "Israel Discovered: Iran Paid for Lockerbie,"
Jerusalem Post, Sept. 21, 1989.
(29) Interview with intelligence specialist in Tel Aviv, May 2, 1995.
(30) Stefanovitch, op. cit., p. 36.
(31) Ibid, p. 50.
(32) Richard Norton-Taylor and Alex Duval Smith, "For Sale: Secret
Codes with the Cracks Built In," The Observer (London), May 5, 1996,
p. 22.
(33) Louise Lief, "Murder, they wrote: Iran's web of terror," U.S. News
and World Report, Dec. 16, 1991, p. 67.
(34) "Indications but No Proof of Iranian State Terrorism," Neue Zuercher
Zeitung, Dec. 8, 1994.
(35) Conor O'Clery, "Irish coded messages broken by British," Irish Times
(Dublin), Jan. 24, 1987, p. 2; and "America's Falklands War: A
relationship sweet and sour," The Economist, March 3, 1984, p. 25.
(36) Martin Stoll, "Trieb die Crypto ein Doppelspiel," Tages Anzeiger,
July 5, 1994.
(37) Shane and Bowman, op. cit.
(38) William Beecher, Libya Reportedly Seeking to Thwart US Intelligence,"
Boston Globe, April 22, 1986, pp. 1,5. See also, "Libyans Buy Message-
Coding Equipment: Effort to Thwart US Intelligence Leaks Leads to Swiss
Firm," Washington Post, Apr. 22, 1986, p. A8.
(39) Interview with former Crypto AG employee, Sept. 20, 1994.
(40) Bundesnacrichtendienst Paper dated Oct. 13, 1970, paragraph c.
(41) Tim Weiner, "U.S. Spied on its WW II Allies," New York Times,
Aug. 11, 1993, p. A9.
(42) Among the countries included were Belgium, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile,
China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany,
Greece, Iran, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands,
Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland
, Syria, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.
(43) Beichohobunsho, ULTRA kokuren tanjo 50 nen me no shinjitsu (Secret US
Documents on ULTRA: The Reality Aboutthe Birth of the UN, 50 years later),
NHK Television program (Tokyo), Oct. 22, 1995; see also National Archives,
Record Group 457, "MAGIC Diplomatic Summaries".
(44) James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (New York: Penguin Books, 1983),
pp. 408-9. According to a confidential source in Europe familiar with
the cryptographic industry, Crypto AG's customers include or have included
the former Kingdom of Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Burkina
Faso (and the former Upper Volta), Central African Republic, Chad, Congo
(Brazzaville), Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq,
Ireland, Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Netherlands,
Pakistan, Phillipines, Qatar, Syria, the United Nations, Vatican City,
Venezuela, Yemen, the former Yugoslavia, and the former Zaire.
(45) Facsimile dated May 20, 1994, from a former Crypto AG employee.
(46) Ibid.
All text copyright 1998 by publisher CovertAction Quarterly and author
Wayne Madsen. All rights reserved.
Please preserve the full-text and footnotes with copyright notices
(and THIS notice) and CAQ contact information if you copy this to
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merely include this request as a courtesy to the author and publisher.
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--
Mark Adkins ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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