Operation RUBICON: The Company That Spied on the World

For over fifty years, the CIA and West German intelligence secretly owned the world's most trusted encryption company. More than 120 governments bought its machines believing they were buying neutral Swiss security. Every message was readable — to the people who built the back door.

This is the case file — a primary-source reconstruction: the purchase, the codenames, the intercepts that shaped the Iranian hostage crisis, the Falklands War, and the 1986 Berlin bombing response, and the investigation that finally forced it into the open in 2020.

For the full visual reconstruction — the documents shown side by side — the case file is open at https://youtu.be/lNseVbl8yy0

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THE DEAD DROP ARCHIVES Forensic documentary. Primary sources only. New case files open regularly.

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PRIMARY SOURCES — THIS EPISODE — CIA History Staff — The Intelligence Community's Source (MINERVA post-mortem, declassified 2020) — Washington Post / ZDF / SRF joint investigation, February 11, 2020 — Ronald Reagan — Address to the Nation, April 14, 1986 (American Presidency Project / Reagan Presidential Library) — Res Strehle, Verschlüsselt: Der Fall Hans Bühler (Werd Verlag, 1994) — John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ (Bloomsbury, 2020) — Crypto Museum documentation (cryptomuseum.com) — Swiss Federal Assembly GPDel final report, November 2020

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THE ARCHIVE Full visual reconstructions: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDeadDropArchives Unredacted source documents + annotated research logs: https://patreon.com/c/DeadDropArchives Case Files Dispatch newsletter: https://deaddroparchives.substack.com Join the investigation (Discord): https://discord.gg/deaddroparchives Reddit: r/DeadDropArchives

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The archive is open. deaddroparchives.com