A Swede was behind the encryption devices that allowed the US and Germany to get classified information from 120 different countries during the Cold War

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His brother-in-law found out through his own research and couldn’t believe his eyes.

He told me many times ’I am sorry I cannot tell you what I have done during my life.

If I could, you would think I was the biggest spy in the world’. And he was right,"
says Sixten Svensson, whose brother-in-law Boris Hagelin founded the company Crypto AG in the late 1950s.

In a long article published this week, the newspaper The Washington Post describes how Crypto AG’s encryption devices, that were sold to governments all over the world, were rigged in a way that allowed the US to easily break their codes.

According to the paper, Crypto AG was "secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence".

Hagelin died in 1982, but Sixten Svensson never suspected anything while he was alive.

All he knew was that Hagelin was a very wealthy man. 

At the beginning of 2010, Svensson was asked by a local history society to write an article about Hagelin, and that is when he started uncovering the secret about the man who was married to his sister.

Source: Sveriges Radio