Crypto AG

The Swiss cipher company trusted by 120 governments — owned, it emerged, by the CIA the whole time.

Operation RUBICON, confirmed by 2020 Washington Post/ZDF reporting from CIA internal histories: the CIA and BND secretly owned Swiss cipher-machine maker Crypto AG from 1970, selling deliberately weakened encryption to over 100 governments and reading their traffic for decades. It is the archive's single best precedent: a real, decades-long, world-scale backdoor conspiracy, run exactly as the theories always describe, admitted only when historians got the files.