Howard C. Barlow (1918–2003) was an American cryptographer , telecommunications expert, and high-ranking civilian employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States .
31-583: Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased for US $ 5.75 million and jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018. The mission of breaking encrypted communication using
62-606: A coded message to Iranian embassies, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?" Western governments deciphered this transmission, causing the Iranians to suspect their Crypto AG equipment. The Iranian government then arrested Crypto AG's top salesman, Hans Buehler, in March 1992 in Tehran . It accused Buehler of leaking their encryption codes to Western intelligence. Buehler was interrogated for nine months but, being completely unaware of any flaw in
93-626: A high-ranking NSA employee, and Lawrence E. Shinn, NSA's signal intelligence directory in Asia, took over the correspondence. In June 1970, the company was bought in secret by the CIA and the West-German intelligence service, BND , for $ 5.75 million. This was effectively the start of Operation Rubikon. Hagelin had first been approached to sell to a partnership between the French and West-German intelligence services in 1967, but Hagelin contacted CIA and
124-596: A press release that "in March 1994, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office initiated a wide-ranging preliminary investigation against Crypto AG, which was completed in 1997. The accusations regarding influence by third parties or manipulations, which had been repeatedly raised in the media, proved to be without foundation." Subsequent commentators were unmoved by this denial, stating that it was likely that Crypto AG products were indeed rigged. Le Temps has argued that Crypto AG had been actively working with
155-563: A secretly owned company was known as " Operation Rubikon ". With headquarters in Steinhausen , the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices. The company had about 230 employees, had offices in Abidjan , Abu Dhabi , Buenos Aires , Kuala Lumpur , Muscat , Selsdon and Steinhausen, and did business throughout the world. The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to
186-684: A world-class analytic and engineering organization that was able to meet the communications needs of the Vietnam War and the Cold War . His political skills enabled NSA to forge significant COMSEC relationships with U.S. Allies and become the leader for COMSEC in NATO . Over a long and illustrious career, Howard Barlow received many awards, including the NSA Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1967 and, in 1973,
217-484: The Soviet Union nor People's Republic of China were customers of Crypto AG, several of their friendly countries had the company's equipment. 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. The operation
248-546: The invasion of Normandy in 1944. While he was overseas, he designed various types of specialized communications equipment. After the war, Barlow stayed in the cryptologic profession and joined, as a civilian, the Armed Forces Security Agency, which later became the NSA. He worked in the research and development division as one its first communications security ( COMSEC ) engineers. By 1954, he had risen to
279-624: The 1930s. The same year, Hagelin's lawyer, Stuart Hedden, became deputy commander in CIA , Inspector General. In 1948 Hagelin moved to Steinhausen in Switzerland to avoid taxes. In 1952 the company, which until then had been incorporated in Stockholm, also moved to Switzerland. The official reason was that it was transferred as a result of a planned Swedish government nationalization of militarily important technology contractors. A holding company
310-491: The Americans did not cooperate with the French. At this point, the company had 400 employees and the revenue increased from 100,000 Swiss franc in the 1950s to 14 million Swiss franc in the 1970s. In 1994, Crypto AG bought InfoGuard AG a company providing encryption solutions to banks. In 2010, Crypto AG sold G.V. LLC, a Wyoming company providing encryption and interception solutions for communications. In 2018, Crypto AG
341-486: 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. These claims were vindicated by US government documents declassified in 2015. In 2020, an investigation carried out by The Washington Post , Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF) revealed that Crypto AG was, in fact, entirely controlled by
SECTION 10
#1732802060790372-714: The CIA and the BND. The project, initially known by codename "Thesaurus" and later as "Rubicon" operated from the end of the Second World War until 2018. The 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 International
403-518: 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
434-632: The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), enabling the agencies to read the encrypted traffic produced by the machines. Suspicions of this collusion were aroused in 1986 following US president Ronald Reagan 's announcement on national television that, through interception of diplomatic communications between Tripoli and the Libyan embassy in East Berlin , he had irrefutable evidence that Muammar Gaddafi of Libya
465-658: The Swiss government and its intelligence services were aware of the spying activities of Swiss-based Crypto for many years and had "benefited from the US-led spying". The company and its history were the subject of BBC Radio 4 's Archive on 4 programme in May 2021. The company had radio, Ethernet, STM, GSM, phone and fax encryption systems in its portfolio. Machines: According to declassified (but partly redacted) US government documents released in 2015, in 1955 (just after encryption
496-713: The United States. His father Karl Wilhelm Hagelin worked for Nobel in Baku (part of the Russian Empire at the time), but the family returned to Sweden after the Russian Revolution . Karl Wilhelm was an investor in Arvid Gerhard Damm 's company Aktiebolaget Cryptograph , established to sell rotor machines built using Damm's 1919 patent. Boris Hagelin was placed in the firm to represent
527-688: The device to the Signal Intelligence Service , and the code-breakers in Arlington Hall . In the end he was awarded a licensing agreement. 140,000 units were made during the war for American troops. During his time in United States , Hagelin became close friends with William F. Friedman , who in 1952 became chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) and whom Hagelin had known since
558-455: The family investment. In 1925, Hagelin took over the firm, later reorganising it as Aktiebolaget Cryptoteknik in 1932. His machines competed with Scherbius ' Enigma machines , but sold rather better. At the beginning of World War II , Hagelin moved from Sweden to Switzerland , all the way across Germany and through Berlin to Geneva, carrying the design documents for the company's latest machine, and re-established his company there. That design
589-647: The firm manufactured the C-36 mechanical cryptograph machine that Damm had patented. After Damm's death, and just before the Second World War , Cryptoteknik came under the control of Hagelin, an early investor. Hagelin's hope was to sell the device to the United States Army . When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, he moved from Sweden to the US and presented the device to the military, which in turn brought
620-576: The level of division chief. From 1955-1956, Barlow attended the Harvard University Middle Management Program, graduating with a master's degree in business administration . Returning to NSA, he took a tour in operations before being named the deputy director for research and development in 1958. He held this position until 1962, when he was made assistant director for COMSEC (ADC), a position that he held until 1973. His insights and management skills created
651-564: The machines, was released in January 1993 after Crypto AG posted bail of $ 1m to Iran. Soon after Buehler's release Crypto AG dismissed him and sought to recover the $ 1m bail money from him personally. Swiss media and the German magazine Der Spiegel took up his case in 1994, interviewing former employees and concluding that Crypto's machines had in fact repeatedly been rigged. Crypto AG rejected these accusations as "pure invention", asserting in
SECTION 20
#1732802060790682-649: The managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares . The company has been criticised for selling backdoored products to benefit the American, British and German national signals intelligence agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and the BND, respectively. Crypto AG sold equipment to more than 120 countries, including India , Pakistan , Iran , and multiple Latin American nations. Although neither
713-405: The technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which machines. Providing such information would have allowed the intelligence agencies to reduce the time needed to crack the encryption of messages produced by such machines from impossibly long to a feasible length. The secret relationship initiated by the agreement also involved Crypto AG not selling machines such as
744-602: Was added to the US Munitions List on November 17, 1954) Crypto AG's founder Boris Hagelin and William Friedman entered into an unwritten agreement concerning the C-52 encryption machines that compromised the security of some of the purchasers. Friedman was a notable US government cryptographer who was then working for the National Security Agency (NSA), the main United States signals intelligence agency. Hagelin kept both NSA and its United Kingdom counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), informed about
775-568: Was behind the West Berlin discotheque bombing in 1986. President Reagan then ordered the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation. Further evidence suggesting that the Crypto AG machines were compromised was revealed after the assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991. On 7 August 1991, one day before Bakhtiar's body was discovered, the Iranian Intelligence Service transmitted
806-683: Was known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later the BND called it "Rubicon" ( German : Rubikon ) and the CIA called it "Minerva". According to a Swiss parliamentary investigation, " Swiss intelligence service were aware of and benefited from the Zug-based firm Crypto AG’s involvement in the US-led spying". Crypto AG was established in Switzerland by the Russian-born Swede , Boris Hagelin . Originally called AB Cryptoteknik and founded by Arvid Gerhard Damm in Stockholm in 1920,
837-404: Was liquidated, and its assets and intellectual property sold to two new companies. CyOne was created for Swiss domestic sales, while Crypto International AG was founded in 2018 by Swedish entrepreneur Andreas Linde, who acquired the brand name, international distribution network, and product rights from the original Crypto AG. In 2020, it was established following a parliamentary investigation that
868-759: Was reportedly a reason behind Sweden's decision. Boris Hagelin Boris Caesar Wilhelm Hagelin (2 July 1892 – 7 September 1983) was a Swedish businessman and inventor of encryption machines. Born of Swedish parents in Adshikent , Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan ), Hagelin attended Lundsberg boarding school and later studied mechanical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, graduating in 1914. He gained experience in engineering through work in Sweden and
899-464: Was set up in Liechtenstein. During the 1950s, Hagelin and Friedman had frequent mail correspondence, both personal and business alike. 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. In 1958 when Friedman retired, Howard C. Barlow ,
930-508: Was small, cheap and moderately secure, and he convinced the US military to adopt it. Many tens of thousands of them were made, and Hagelin became quite wealthy as a result. After his company, Crypto AG , was secretly sold to foreign intelligence agencies (the American CIA and German BND ) in 1970, it fraudulently sold compromised machines to a variety of customers, including governments. Historian David Kahn has suggested that Hagelin
961-713: Was the only cypher-machine maker who ever became a millionaire. Boris is the great-grandfather of Carl Hagelin , former NHL player for the Washington Capitals . Howard Barlow Barlow, a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering , served in the European Theatre of World War II . One of his major assignments was the Communications Planning Officer for