Security News > 2020 > May > Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War
Dutch spies operating as a part of a European equivalent of the Five Eyes espionage alliance helped GCHQ break Argentinian codes during the Falklands War, it has been revealed.
Flowing from revelations made in German-language news reports earlier this year that Swiss cipher machine company Crypto AG was owned by the CIA and German counterpart the BND during most of the Cold War, an academic paper has described the Maximator alliance which grew from the Crypto AG compromise.
Dutch eavesdropping agency TIVC was one of the key parts of the Maximator alliance, playing a very important role in helping Britain during the 1982 Falklands War.
At the time, those were supplied by Crypto AG. Unfortunately for the South Americans, the models they had - HC550s and HC570s - included "Rigged" algorithms, deliberately undermined "By the BND and the CIA, via their ownership of Crypto AG". "A directly involved Dutch source states that at that stage a specialist from TIVC travelled to GCHQ and explained how the HC500 Crypto AG devices for Argentinian naval and diplomatic communications worked; subsequent solution of the ciphers was left to GCHQ itself," said Prof Jacobs, who spoke to multiple former Maximator personnel while writing his paper.
Historian Hugh Bicheno, in his 2006 book Razor's Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War, excoriated Rowlands, writing that "This was the precise equivalent of publicly announcing, during World War II, that the Allies had broken the Enigma system used by the Nazis."