 Hello, welcome to our talk on CryptoLeaks. My name is Markus Komper. I'm an enthusiast in history of espionage. In February I learned of a secret collaboration between US and German intelligence to gather information from rigged crypto machines, for that they owned and controlled a Swiss firm, Swiss Corporation Crypto AG. The program was so important that they decided to hide this even from the parliamentarian control. And for complete other reasons I got in contact with a journalist who unearthed this secret. And what he told me about his way of research was so fascinating that I decided I have to share it with you. And here is Peter F. Müller is an old school Macraker. He mostly works for TV. He often covers stories related to organized crime and intelligence affairs. Two decades ago he shot a documentary on the German front intelligence service BND, Bundesnachrichtendienst. And he and his co-author Michael Müller used the material for a book which became the classic history book on the BND. And via stream I welcome two gentlemen from the Netherlands, Mark Simms and Paul Reuvers. They are from Eindhoven and in these times it's hard to cross the border so we decided this way. Paul and Mark are engineers and they formed the probably largest collection of cypher devices from the era when cryptography was accomplished by hardware. They also set up the cryptomuseum.org and they wrote a timeline on the operations we nickname CryptoLeaks. You can find this timeline in the link in the description of our talk and you will find there although two documentaries and two articles with multimedia stuff, one in English and one in German. The English one was written by Greg Miller together with Peter and was placed at the Washington Post and it was the first Washington Post article which got three pages as a front page article. Another partner was Swiss TV and the journalists in charge, Fajona, Nicole and Anjela were promoted to be the journalists of the year for that piece. And there was a third partner in the Netherlands, what's the name? From Netherlands, Danish Radio. Our talk will last an hour and we have 20 additional minutes for Q&A. I guess most of you are familiar with our topic so we can focus on additional aspects. So let's meet the man who unearthed the Minerva document, Peter F. Miller. How did you do it? Well good evening everybody. First of all let me say that I'm pleased to be on the stage of CCC tonight and that's a great honor to talk about the story. How do you do a story like that? It's a good question as I work normally as a freelance independent journalist and I'm not embedded in a big editing team like big magazines or newspapers. You can be as easy as it is. Tell it's a result of long-lasting investigative journalism. One of the principles I follow is when you did a story like 20 years ago, a history of the BND, you get in contact with people and over the years you stay in contact with people. And eventually that pays out one day and is as simple as it is. One day you have this brown manila envelope somewhere in front of your door or in your letterbox containing the information you never dreamt to get your hands on. So and this happened some time ago and the person who provided me with the material was somebody who was a long time involved with the German intelligence service and it was a matter of heart for him to give away those papers because he simply wanted the public one day to know what kind of operation those bad guys as they are always quoted in the press do as well. All in all it was about 250 pages we got our hands on and we had to start first, read this stuff, read it three times, four times, five times and always when you read it again you find new information because you're tipping in a new environment. When I got these papers first in my hand I had to decide where to go to and as I worked closely together with colleagues from ZTF I chose ZTF to go to to Elmer Teversen and he jumped on the story and so I had a team to work with the funding for the story and together with my partner Uli Stoil from ZTF we started to develop the story and took some international partners and advisers into our group Erich Schmid Ehmboom from Weilheim and Professor Richard Aldrich from England David Redd so we started. What do you do when you start a story like that? You start to check out what you can check out, you start to check names, you start to find people you might talk to as it was a very very sensitive story. This was the biggest hurdle at the beginning because you don't just go to the BND in Berlin and say can we discuss this topic I would like to talk to you about it so you just have to figure out who are the persons you can confront with and who to go to and after all for me that was an interesting experience we decided to go to some CIA veteran first. I had interviewed him sometime earlier on a BND story and suddenly I realized that his name pops up in that story so I decided to go there again he was at the time in the 90s a CIA station chief in Bonn so I called him again and said look I forgot to ask some questions can I come again and I took my cameraman we flew to Austin in Texas and I sat down with him in the cafeteria of the hotel and the conversation lasted five minutes he didn't tell me anything he looked at me and said and looked at me and said look this is such a secret story we I can't take it and talk about it I will take it to my grave and he said I'm sorry that you did all the way down here we stood up and went out and then he turned around and said to me you can see on the reaction of a guy like me that you're on a bloody good story good luck with it and that's it I had a confirmation that the story was a real one but I didn't get any interview and nothing out of it so but that was the beginning and then we we went on from there the next context were people of course in Switzerland crypto AG is a shareholders company in zooc in Switzerland and of course you find former employees you for you find engineers and some of them were ready to talk so that were our next persons and so you go on and on and on and you slowly fill gaps you get stories you get side stories out of it and that's what we did and at the end shortly before we went public I picked up the phone and called the former minister of the chance to rebound Schmidt power his nickname at the time was 008 because he was very keen on intelligence matters and I went to see him in a lovely village in the Austrian mountains and and he just said yes it's true I can't talk about it but that's it so that's that's the background of it what I would like to do now give you a short a short historical background on it the normally you see we talked a lot in the last couple of years it was snowden we talked about all the wrongdoings or so-called wrongdoings of the NSA and so on what we didn't see and what was completely underestimated in all those years which role smaller countries played in that field of encryption and of espionage and in this world both the Germans and the Swedish and later on you will hear as well as the Swiss played a very very important role and the German impact into that one began already right after World War II when all the guys who were active during the the the Nazi times working on encryption came back and started working on it for the for the new West German state guys like Hürtenheim and going they were right in the middle of it and as early as in 1951 General Gehlen the head of the Gehlen organization already contacted the Americans looking for joint operations together with the Americans in order to control that market and maybe if I may this is would be a good moment to get Paul and Mark into the game because they know much more about the historical background of the kind of machines they used and what they think so can we can we switch over to Mark and Paul in Eindhoven what would that be possible okay Paul and Mark can you hear us yes okay we cannot see you but I hear you hello great to have you here okay we have in our studio here the machine with which it all began and that's a machine from World War II or at least it's known from World War II it's an enigma machine now I hope you can all see our video stream so we can give you a loud I personally cannot see it can the people see it yes okay so we you're blind yeah it's marvelous this is the machine during World War II by the German army in enigma one as it is called by the real mark a machine with a keyboard 26 lamps a panel with plugs at the front and a set of wheels moving wheels or rotors that rotate when you start typing so for every letter you type in one of these rotors makes a movement as Mark will now demonstrate and a light will come on now I had a second camera here and perhaps I can show you a little bit more of this machine closer here you can see that Mark when Mark types and the rightmost rotor will make a single stack and at each time he presses a key and not another letter lights up now this may not sound very special but this was the first time that the machine was used in encryption that used the principle of complexity sorry security by complexity so not security by obscurity as it was previously known but security by complexity this machine had so many settings so many possible configurations that it would take at least 20 years to try them out so that's the machine that started all of it that machine was broken during World War II but there was another machine that we probably will be talking about today and it's a much smaller one that's called an M209 and that's a very very small machine it is not very secure but secure enough for tactical messages during the war and that machine was used by the American army during World War II that machine was made by a gentleman in Sweden by the name of Boris Hargelin and we will hear much more about him today from from Peter this machine was not safe as I said it could be broken by the Germans within four hours that's an estimate but it was good enough for technical messages that have lost their their value after after four hours now if we quickly open this machine and I will show it in close-up again there you can see that it's very small it has six moving rotors in place and it has a good cage with fast moves and whenever you set up a letter here with a wheel the whole thing moves and prints the output from two pieces of paper so a very clever machine small enough to fit in a large pocket I think the first version of these machines was designed for the French army and had to be small enough to fit in the pocket of a of a uniform trousers this machine is slightly bigger but Hargelin sold hundreds of thousands with these machines during World War II so it made him a very very very rich man I think this is a good moment Peter to go back to you yes thank you Paul just a few short words about the the the origin of all this operation Boris Hargelin was a genius developer of encrypting machines in the 1930s and 40s and he found his counterpart in America and William Freedman who quickly realized that if the United States wanted to be in that business they had to come together with Boris Hargelin so over the years in the 50s and 60s there were various contacts between the two and in the 50s Boris Hargelin moved from Sweden to Tex heaven and more secure Switzerland to build up his company so and they they went from there all the times the Germans were already involved in the background and there was various attempts by the Germans to get into bed with Boris Hargelin but it only came true in 1970 funny enough it was Horst Ehmke the secretary of state from Chancellor Willy Brandt the first social democrat chancellor we had who signed the contract it was the first time in the west german history that the social democrats controlled the foreign intelligence service BND and they did it with great worth and they they they went forward and they signed this contract they had a very secret operation in Lichtenstein covering up who is the true owner and they kept his secret for many many many years and it only really came out in now 2018-19 when we published this story how it really went all the time so let's let's ask the question what is important about that operation I mean we all know that spying operations did exist for centuries and the history is full of it what was special about this operation well we are talking about encrypting machines which are used by governments in order to communicate with their embassies overseas back and forth to communicate within the military so it's a highly it's not a personal espionage it's a highly political espionage operation and one of our guys in the group Professor Richard Aldrich once called it the intelligence coup of the century in terms from from an intelligence point of view to show you how important that operation is I give you a very small example there were two times in history in the in the late 40s and in the early 80s when the soviet union soviet union who was not part of the the system they they the eastern bloc countries did not get those machines but of course the americans were able to crack the codes of the soviet union using in the warshow pact and then those and those two occasions in 19 the late 40s and the early 80s from one day to another they changed the code system completely so overnight Russia or the soviet union at the time for the americans and the allies was a black box they couldn't they couldn't listen to anything anymore and in those periods especially in the 80s the operation rubicon was the sole source of information for the americans and the germans what was going on in russia very simple because every ambassador from every meeting from every meeting with military personnel on a cocktail party or whatever they sent home long reports about what is going on in the soviet union and at those days this was the sole information the western countries could get that was via operation rubicon so that is i think that's a good example to to to demonstrate how how important how important this operation was i mean they they sold machines to about 120 130 states a lot of third world countries of course but western allies as well i mean portugal spain italy some of the nato members were customers and what is not mentioned in our paper they don't talk about international organizations which is quite interesting because after we published crypto of the the operation rubicon we of course we continued our research and by now we know and we have to prove that all those international organizations from the united nations unesco the world bank or whatever they all used those machines so you can you can easily say that uh why that that this was really a rep of espionage system around all the important political players in the world um i would like to give you a few more examples what the value of the story in the political day-to-day business was let me start with argentina argentina was one of the biggest customers of crypto ag and the bnd had a an agent or an informant very close to general videla in the in the late 70s and they sold hundreds of machines and the same person aroberto pardasso was the sales representative of crypto ag in argentina so you all remember most of you will remember that we had the falkland war or the war of the malvina as how it is said in argentina um and the british sent their troops down there and they were close to losing this war because far distance from britain and so on so and then uh i don't know if you remember this big incident called the sinking of the belgrano which was a big battleship from the argentines the the brit's didn't have any clue where the ship is they had no idea where to look for and where to where to find it so um and it was the germans who got the information they had a listening post in husum at the at the uh at the north sea called object castanete and so they were picking up the the the traffic from the argentinas uh they decoded they passed it on to their dutch partners the dutch partners jumped into the plane went to gchq in london and gave them the information and a few days later the belgrano was sunk because they had the exact coordinates more than 320 people died in that ship disaster that that was one of the the the the germans and the americans were fully aware of all the human rights atrocities being committed in argentina uh it has mentioned on various uh parts in the in the in the paper that they knew from the beginning on how many thousand people uh were dumped from planes into the ria de la plata the the enemies of the of the um political junta of the the the military junta uh so they were all informed about it did nothing against it another example is operation condor the operation where a couple of south american states uh came together uh to jointly chase and kill uh enemies of their the the the military regimes and operation condor had a no own um uh communication system called condor tell and they used the cx 52 which which paul uh just demonstrated you before so everybody was informed what was going on there the next next thing is the panama invasion you probably might remember the panama invasion with uh pine apple phase what they called him general noriega uh who had been a cia asset for a decade who was one of the biggest drug dealers in the van and suddenly uh the united states said oh we have to get rid of him um now uh he fled of course and he got into hiding uh and then the americans found him because noriega had gone to the uh um um embassy or nuncia tour of the vatican how did the americans know that because the vatican was using crypto ag machines in rome and so they found out that noriega was in the embassy what did they do they transported huge boxes and played terrible loud music over a period of a couple of days till everybody came out of the embassy and said stop that shit so that's that's one little example of it and uh another example is a label bombing in berlin the libyans used crypto ag machines and uh the the allies the germans the americans uh most likely knew that there was something planned they had three uh three um possible scenarios where to where to plant a bomb and finally they bombed uh discotheque label with uh hundreds and hundreds of heavily injured people a few dead people and uh the then president ronald wagen used this even announcing that they had the information from intercepted traffic from the libyan embassy and they used this bombing uh there is this it is uh attack on this discotheque which was mostly seen by american soldiers uh as an excuse to start the bombing of ben gazi and triply in libya okay i mean um um i would like to bring back paul into into paul and mark into the game because there is one interesting story about the about the uh what's it's called the turkish the turkish uh affair the turkish story um turkey of course was a big customer of crypto ag and uh there's one side is the military the other side is the diplomatic service and the the americans the cia approached zeeman's who was involved in the construction of those those machines um to sell rigged machines to the uh to the american to the turkish um diplomatic service and zeeman's and the bnd said well listen this is a natal partner we can't do that we we don't want to they said well if you don't want to do it then leave it and they moved on to philips which was also partner in this system and philips uh happily agreed to rig the machines and to sell them to turkey and we are talking here about a very special machine um which is called uh an aeroflex which was one of the big sellers paul correct me if that is wrong uh of crypto ag at the time and of zeeman's a teletype writer and maybe you can explain this a little bit what is what is this machine about and how that works yes um the machine is right here on the table right now it is basically a zeeman's teletype writer a zeeman's t-1000 that's the model number but if you look closely at the machine you will see that at the bottom there is a crypto module on our wall switch cameras to show you that um in seconds you see that right at the bottom there is a little layer here with a few keys key locks and the button there now mark will try to open this device by tilting it sideways right it's a heavy machine so he may need a little help for me um basically this is this machine was made by zeeman's as a normal teletype writer and philips in eindhoven in the Netherlands made a little unit that is put onto the bottom of it and that unit contains the cryptographic equipment uh the cryptor module which is called here you see that so this part here is a normal teletype writer and here at the bottom is the crypto unit now that crypto unit consists of a lot of electronic components as you see all marked with little labels that say confidential but there's one little mysterious block here yellow one and with the worst confidential and NATO secret permit that's the cryptor module and philips made various variants of it said it had a NATO version it had a police version and they had a foreign version and as you can probably imagine the foreign version of us of course readable and breakable now this machine was used by all NATO countries including turkey and these machines were safe but turkey also wanted to use it for our embassies and of course the cAA would not allow that you can't use a NATO machine for embassy traffic of country so it had to make a special variant of this machine but the Turks knew that there was a machine that was breakable so they had to make a little module that fitted in the old one in the place of the old one that made the machine behave like a normal pyroflex machine but was in fact breakable and that's exactly what they did so in the end they sold these machines to to turkey and several thousands of them and western intelligence was able to read all the turkish messages now of course germany wasn't germany was excluded from the list because they had refused to cooperate with the cAA they tried to imagine this um the b&d is a partner of the cAA in operation rubicon but because they refused to make breakable machines for turkey they were excluded from the intelligence that was gathered from breaking this machine um philips didn't make make themselves the job very easy they designed a special chip that was needed to break this machine so it was not a simple back door that you could open with a master key it was something for which you had to break several binary equations and that was not a trivial task at the time so they they designed a special chip that was used to break this machine and that machine was sold to turkey now over time there have been other variants of this machine um too long to go into depth with that but there is also a chinese version and you're going to mention why that was made etc there are several versions of this machine and except for the nato version all other machines are breakable back to you peter right okay back to you peter yes thank you thank you paul and mark um uh the turkish the turkish uh case is a very special one because um you might ask yourself the question um where did all the communists at the time called communist countries were in that that whole thing were they witting did they know what was going on well we have spoken to some people uh of course and we have interviewed them um who worked for the former east german stasi and he told some very interesting stories um of course the eastern block countries uh were very closely monitoring the whole market of encrypting machines we have reports like 20 25 pages long listing every single company who somehow is involved in producing encryption material you see from semen's to phillips to to all kind of other machines and funny enough crypto ag does not appear in that list so we asked the the the very important informant how does this happen and he had a very simple um explanation for that he said uh crypto ag was shaskar day from the kgb so there was a clear rule in the the whole of the varsh our pact states that whatever uh concerned crypto ag was only and solely for the kgb to to um and to check out so whatever they did stealing machines finding buying machines uh getting um manuals working minutes of the machines it was all delivered to to russia and they worked with us and of course they managed to crack some of the codes of the machines so besides the fact that the americans and the germans and some other um uh what we call in german trip red fara um some other nations were uh participating in those information uh there was a a good chunk of machines the russians and uh the the other countries could read and as a kind of a present for the east germans because of course speaking german and switzerland it was easy for them to to to uh work around uh they were delivered the the the algorithms from the turkish machines so um they were able to follow up all the turkish traffic and that is important uh in one sense uh turkey is member of nato at whatever is communicated from brussels home to um to to ankara uh they were able to read the east germans were able to read so and if you have one nato partner uh read the communications you have most of the other ones as well because they share all the the information from there so um that that was a very interesting aspect of our research to find out that uh of course the enemy so called was um also in that game uh and some um some um american veteran of this whole story what once told us uh like it was like uh a big uh kindergarten big boys playing espionage everybody knew it everybody was doing it and nobody said a word um what we talked about the cases um you might ask yourself the question why did they write down this story that's another very interesting interesting uh story um in the late nineties after the uh cold war was over and uh all the old veterans from the espionage game uh the old man old white man came together every once in a while to chat about the old good times and there was one meeting at the teufelspark in berlin which was a former listening post of the americans during the the years of the cold war uh listening into east germany and the eastern countries and they they once had a meeting uh old cia veterans nsa veterans um bnd veterans and kgb veterans stasi veterans they all came together had champagne and were clapping themselves on the shoulders what kind of good guys they had been and at that occasion the americans and the germans kind of had the idea why don't we write our why don't we put down on paper this incredible stories incredible operation and that's how it started the americans got the official approval from the cia and the nsa uh to write down the story then they went a couple of years later to the germans and the guys involved on the german side wrote their part of the story most of it's uh it's it's it's a same story in some aspects they vary because they have other uh uh moments of talking about each other financial business and so on and uh that's how this was written down and the funny thing is the papers are written in plain language so they don't use the cover names of the people involved they use the plain names this is one of the reasons why we do not publish those papers because uh there is a an importance to to protect sources to protect people our our aim is not to destroy people so that's we were approached by the swiss especially uh that we would hinder all kind of investigation into that case by not publishing those papers i can truly say you that we would never do that uh because we would endanger people and that's what we don't want to do um so um where are we all right um as you may be aware the germans went out of that operation in 1993 so uh when you read the german parts of the papers the involved intelligence people were uh were flabbergasted you see it was a political decision made uh in the chancellery to get out there are various reasons for that first of all maybe technology had changed you see and the old machines were not that important anymore uh there were other means of gathering information electronic means maybe they were political means uh some uh person told us if at that time after the fall of the wall after the germans were trying with the french to get a new europe together after the the mass trick protocol and all that uh they said if at this moment the um operation would have become known that this good germany would have been part of such an operation even against their own friends and allies it could have been uh the political end for helm would call so that's why they decided to get out of it and um uh you might say they they were furious the the agents the they were furious about it because they said and that's what they're writing down how can you go from the champions league into the third or fourth league and don't play any role anymore that's only partly true that's only partly true because um first of all um those machines don't stop working in 1993 just because the germans get out of the operation of course many countries use those machines for many many years because not everybody can afford to buy new machines every year we're talking about hundreds and thousands of millions of dollars to spend um and um we know from talks in switzerland in 2019 that they then uh follow follow company of crypto ag had still contracts with old customers for service for old machines and so on so uh that means that even the germans being officially out they still had the opportunity for many many years to to read the traffic of a lot of countries um a second probably very important thing is uh for whatever reason in 1976 the germans together with the dutch the danish and the swedish intelligence service later joined by french intelligence formed a new kind of operation without the americans without the british and they met in a in a beer garden in bavaria and they said look we have to we have to find the name for our operation and they were holding their their max of beer and it was a beer called maxi mato so they said this is the name of our new operation operation maxi mato and from there on those five countries were sharing uh um signal intelligence uh um behind in the back of the of the americans we don't know if the americans knew about it or they accepted it that's possible this story still runs today and it was only uh really brought to light by a dutch scientist um and uh the dutch intelligence service was not very pleased when we published it story but that means as the swedish by contract from the early days of boris harglin on were always part of the information they were getting all the information from this operation rubicon from early on and even before 1970 the swedish got everything and being partner with the germans and the other countries in operation maxi mato the germans even um ending the operation rubicon in 1993 were still getting all the information um which which came on afterwards we know now that when the germans sold their shares to the americans um in 1993 the uh uh c a a became the the this sole owner of the company and this ended only in 2018 so um it's probably fair to say although the papers don't talk about it that's the research we did afterwards that uh all the machines after 1993 were as well rigged and sold all over the world uh we are still investigating what's happening now because the company was sold uh by management by out to two entities and uh frankly there is no reason not to believe or to believe that any any of these operations ended in 2018 let me talk in a few minutes about uh about money because this was a shareholders company and in in the early years they made a lot of lot of um money with those machines they had profits of millions of dollars so the germans um being um very strict and and law abiding um they were taking care of the administration uh the business side of the of the whole operation and what did they do with the with the with the profits they get well it's very simple they got it in cash from a bank somewhere in switzerland or in lichtenstein and then at one time they had like 15 million i think or 14 million dollars in profit to share they took their part and transported it to the chancery in bon and the germans used part of that money to finance the uh the the the political democratization in portugal at the time it gave it to the to the uh schtiftung of the parties ardenauer schtiftung ebert schtiftung and so on the only thing we don't know is what happened to zeidel schtiftung because it never was mentioned what to see see as you did with it and they gave the money to the social democrats the christian democrats in order to overthrow the uh the dictatorship of salazar what did the americans do with it they met in a they met in a in a parking garage and they handed over a suitcase with cash money so like in a in a b or c rated espionage movie and as we know from our talks the americans used part of that money to buy other crypto companies uh competitors to crypto ag because they had the aim we want to control the whole market so they used the money for that one um well there is two things which are not mentioned in the paper paperwork the one is i talked early about the uh the uh importance of international organizations which is by now proven we have the paperwork we have the uh the list from the united nations we have lists from swiss archives what kind of machinery they sold when uh to to to those organizations um and the second part is which is completely underestimated public possibly in the public as well is the importance of the economic espionage uh nowadays it's probably much more important to know what your partners in a negotiation about a trade agreement trade agreement think and do the japanese the germans the canadians uh because the political stuff is known anyway so this is probably the biggest the biggest part of it and the papers don't talk about that at all the banks use those machines we have swift the international finance directorate who use those machines so there is a big big area uh where information gathered uh is most important for for governments now let me let me give you a final a last example for now i'm sorry that i'm speaking so long um uh where you can see how important it is uh even years after you got out of the operation um we call this the so-called italian traffic uh in the at the end of 2000 or the end of beginning of 2001 the germans as i'm sure the americans did as well uh intercepted um a message from uh the italian traffic the italians being uh in the european union being a nato partner uh still used those machines and they had intercepted news from from the uh from the um from arab countries that um a few people were on its way to the united states in order to to learn flying to go to a flying school and expresses where is it said they don't have to start to lend and to start the only things they have to do to know how to fly straight forward and that was a few months before this terrible incident uh terror attack on 9 11 the sad thing about it is this was on the table of the analysts at b and d uh and somebody just disappeared in the weekend and didn't give it on so if there would have been a better control a better better reading of this stuff i'm not sure if something could have been prevented the same uh i could say about why didn't the italians do anything why didn't do the americans anything but uh i'm just telling that story to to to demonstrate to you um how valuable those machines are even after a long period of time and um i know that uh um probably uh those old machines are running out now but uh i think it's an it's a very very important operation and uh paul i would like to come one one more time back to you i didn't couldn't see you at the beginning um everybody in that business knows about enigma did you show your enigma machines already to the audience or they i couldn't see that on the on the on the uh on the yes i did you did it already okay then this has been done um well i'm sure that there might be some questions and i probably could go on talking and talking about that but uh i think it's nearly 55 minutes we talk now maybe it's uh time for or paul paul americ do you want to add anything to add no i don't think i have a lot to add um the only thing that i might want to add is about the history of um of of operation um rubicon the minerva paper it is very usual for the cia to write down the history of their operations they always do that after an operation has ended but since this operation lasted for more than 30 years they thought it was wise to do it some way halfway through the operation which is very unusual because she don't write normally about an operation that's still ongoing and yet they did this but what is important to notice i think is that it is not written by the official cia historian because they could not even inform him they appointed two people for more um officers for more security officers who wrote this paper so that in that respect it is very very unique thank you thank you very much then shall we pass to the questions then yeah um i have a few questions myself um if a journalist gets his hand on classified material he has to deal with some serious questions for instance uh the legal situation not everybody wants to live for years in a foreign embassy and uh giving out information government secrets uh is not necessarily a benefit for society it can be dangerous thing it can manipulate elections can even trigger a war um so how did you deal with this aspect well that that was of great concern at the beginning you see when i first contacted the colleagues at the tf we had a long talk about that of course and we involved the lawyers to find out if we are breaking any laws or where could we break laws um as uh everybody knows not all those guys in other countries are as smooth with those uh breaking uh legality on that one and uh our lawyers said us look um it's we we are safe on that one we had certain rules that we don't publish names of people who might still be alive or who are alive because we talked to them so we didn't do that uh and funny enough um of course we made an official request to b and d into c a a gregg from the washington post uh asked officially at the c a a um and uh we we didn't get any any proper answer man we we got a proper we got a proper answer like from the b and d from the chancellor we we got like 14 pages long paperwork uh explaining us on 14 pages why this was so secret that even in the geheimhaltungsauschers in the in the bundestark those people wouldn't wouldn't get access to the papers uh but that's it nobody said anything to any operation about that i do not know what happens when i travel the next time to the united states um i have no idea um i think uh the decision to to take in other partners international partners potent partners like the washington post to swiss um the swiss friends and the dutch makes it more difficult for intelligence agencies to go after a single journalist so um in this way we kind of felt safe at the end at the beginning it was a big concern to us we had a lot of talks about it how to deal with it yes the manoeuvre document was intended never to see the light um how did the agencies react when they learned that you have your hands on this well i i i don't know from the b and d i just had an informal talk with somebody who is close to them and i said uh would you like to talk to me about uh operation rubicon and he started laughing he said you know them know that i can't talk about it so that was it i know from the american colleagues that uh the cia apparently um was furious when it came out and they took them a week trying to find a leak in the history department where it came from and they i don't know if they found out i have no idea but uh they were not they were not happy about it um but such is life you see so okay when the story went out there appeared a strange conspiracy theory that the material was limited hang out by the b and d played by some dude called uve muller not peter f muller uve muller and it was given to zf just in a controlled way is this true well let's let's put it that way in very blunt words as bullshit i don't know this uve muller i know i heard about him that he was dealing with information whatever i don't know him um i know where the paper comes from and uh the fact is that there was in switzerland um it was uh uh reported that this was intentionally done now in order to harm the swiss the swiss government and all that and the the the head of the uh investigation group in the in the swiss parliament hen uh in his press conference called the journalist the bad guys and he called us traitors we should have never published those those papers this this we are we are terrible whatever no it's not true um i had those papers for quite some time uh that was not uh coming just uh shortly before now publish it now but i had it for quite some time and there was an agreement uh that i had to wait for a couple of years before i would be allowed to publish it and that happened so it was not a story which came out now to be planted now nobody knew that we were doing it now we had already for a couple of years i could listen to you for hours but now i think we have to switch to the q and a session um yes we do have um one question so far um sorry for the technical inconvenience and the delay um again for everybody if you have questions to us please post them on twitter or mastodon with a hashtag rc3rs that's together or visit us at hack and under the hashtag under the channel rc3 dash rs um our signalangers are happy to receive the questions so we have two um the first is is there any date when this paper when this paper or these papers will be officially declassified it's a little annoying that we still have to rely on secondary sources with no proof i think it's um frankly i doubt it that those papers will ever officially be of not not not the bill ever maybe in 20 years or whatever i have no idea but i don't see any any reason why they should now publish those papers for same reasons that i talked earlier about confidentiality of names people involved and so on so um we got many requests from journalists and we were really uh attacked heavily by by some people not giving out the paper to the public and i tried to explain the reasons earlier um first of all of course it's for journalists it's valuable stuff there's so many little stories still in that they would we would like to evaluate and maybe work on for an upcoming book uh but i do not see the intelligence services the bnd or the ca the nsa publishing those papers in the moment they have put nothing gain out of it maybe we should add uh the documents didn't have a secret stamp it was not classified in any way because everybody knew that this paper will see never light so there is though they they didn't follow the normal procedures of stamping secret cosmic top secret ultra gamma former and what they coat uh use um okay um well um please keep your questions coming um the channels again hashtag rc3 r3s on twitter and mastodon and of course our irc uh hash rc3 dash r3s um okay um i uh do have one uh question uh to you when you got uh uh when you got the papers in your hands and uh you you realize the implications about that uh what what were your first thoughts um i would i i don't know how i would react to that situation i cannot i cannot imagine me being in that situation it's it's a it's a it's a strange but it's a very good feeling i can tell you because suddenly you have something in your hands where you say oh this might be bigger than you thought before um and uh uh but then quickly you start thinking what does it mean how careful do we have to be whom do we involve and please allow me one thing it just came to my mind i forgot to mention something with all the the political impact of this whole operation i forgot to mention of course uh the you human victims i mean there have been people dying in this operation um one representative of crypto agai was bombed in his car in 2002 in Saudi Arabia um um Hans Bühler the representative in Iran was held hostage for nine months because Iranians um speculated or uh were suspicious about the the the rigged machines there were several people from the ca and the nsa who uh committed suicide um and last but not least what you have to see in that operation uh swiss neutrality was uh a victim as well because as we know now we didn't know it when we had those papers but in the research we did after we have published that we uh we found out how deeply switzerland was either the intelligence service or was the politicians were involved in it and even a player in it till today so um this is why this story caused a political uproar in switzerland much bigger than in germany because uh still being on swiss soil still operating from there um this is a big discussion and i think the aspect of neutrality for the swiss the big one but i think they lost their innocence in that story sorry to add that but i i think it's important that the you see the the intelligence services and the company uh knowing in what danger the employees were uh didn't do anything to protect them and uh don't forget 98 of the people involved in that company and in crypto ag working there as engineers or whatever or representatives sales representatives did not know that the machines were rigged so they were sent out into dangerous areas of the world to sell those machines not knowing what they were really selling and i think this is something we really have to approach the services that didn't take didn't take care of that i'm sorry too for this little excursion no it's it's perfectly fine and i do also think that this implication is a big one um there's also another question from lennox over on twitter um has there been any reaction uh on the side of the german government now as i said um the only reaction we got was uh we sent a long list of questions to uh the the chancellory as the chancellory is the the the supervising board for the bnd and uh we got a 15 i don't know 14 15 page answer uh frankly saying nothing i mean they just said it's so secret that they wouldn't even inform the uh parliamentary control group they the the guys from the parliament who control uh or us opposed to control the secret services they wouldn't even inform then in the geheimschutzstelle where you normally could go and read secret papers can't take notes don't photograph them they wouldn't even do that that was the only reaction we had from the from the government okay thank you very much for that um so i think that was that so far um thank you very much uh both uh both places for being here um and everybody that was involved and thank you very much for uh for doing your journalistic work and um i think we're looking forward to see your future releases from those documents um and with that um i would go back to the break thank you very much thank you thank you