Maximator, the intelligence alliance formed by five European countries that ended up being spied on by their own machines

Military alliances are interstate political agreements signed to achieve common defense. They have existed since Antiquity (remember, for instance, the leagues formed by the Greek city-states), and although their most important aspect traditionally pertains to weaponry and warfare, since the 20th century they have increasingly incorporated specialties related to espionage and intelligence services.

Perhaps the most famous is the ECHELON network, composed of five Anglo-Saxon countries that also participate in another alliance called FVEY (short for Five Eyes). But there is a third one, also formed by the same number of countries, though in this case entirely European: Maximator.

German readers may find the name familiar. It is also the name of a doppelbock beer (a dark, malty, very strong lager) brewed by Augustiner-Bräw, a company in Munich founded by Augustinian monks back in 1328 to be consumed during Lent.

Augustiner Maximator was used to name the network after the founding states’ delegates toasted with it during one of their initial meetings. The world of espionage can be cold, sinister, even sordid, but it sometimes surprises with these quirky elements somewhere between amusing and outlandish.

spy espionage maximator europe — Member countries of the Maximator alliance. Credit: Bourenane Chahine / Wikimedia Commons

That beer-fueled meeting took place in 1976, the year Maximator was formally established. It was signed by the intelligence services of Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and, naturally, Germany (the Federal Republic; let’s recall that back then there was also an East German Democratic Republic under Soviet influence).

It was the Danes who presented the idea to the Swedes and Germans; the following year, they invited the Dutch, who joined in 1978, and in 1983 the French applied for membership, gaining entry two years later thanks to strong German support. There were two main reasons behind the initiative.

First, an obvious one: to organize an alternative network to the aforementioned Anglo-Saxon ones, made up exclusively of English-speaking UKUSA states (USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand); and second, to cooperate in the intelligence sector to exchange encrypted messages intercepted via satellite and radio.

Although The Baltimore Sun and Der Spiegel had already hinted at it in the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2020 that several international media outlets (specifically the American newspaper The Washington Post, the German TV network ZDF, and the radio program Argos from Dutch broadcasters HUMAN and VPRO) revealed a third, scandalous, and related matter.

It was Operation Rubikon, called Operation Thesaurus until the late 1980s. Developed by the BND (Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service) in collaboration with the CIA, it was based on gathering government-encrypted communications using the CX-52, a pin-and-lug cipher machine invented by Swedish engineer Boris Caesar Wilhelm Hagelin and manufactured by the Swiss company Crypto AG. Both agencies bought the company for nearly six and a half million dollars to market CX-52 units among their allies and thus facilitate the decryption of messages from countries considered hostile or unreliable.

About 130 countries were affected. Thanks to what was described as “the intelligence coup of the century”, the Americans obtained highly useful information to intervene in Allende’s Chile, learn Sadat’s negotiation stance during the Egypt-Israel talks that led to the Camp David Accords, assist the UK in the Falklands War by providing the cryptographic keys used by the Argentine armed forces (thanks to Dutch collaboration), uncover Gaddafi’s involvement in the La Belle Berlin nightclub bombing which justified the bombing of Tripoli, and discover General Noriega’s hiding place in the Vatican embassy during the US invasion of Panama.

The allies to whom the machines were sold included Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, the Netherlands, and Sweden. However, Germany and the US took care to hide the fact that they had acquired Crypto AG (whose code name within the CIA was Minerva), since its Swiss nationality gave it a convenient aura of neutrality.

What’s most serious is that they also failed to disclose that their own encrypted diplomatic and military communications could be decoded and read by the BND, CIA, and NSA (National Security Agency) thanks to the prior installation of backdoors (special sequences that allow bypassing security codes to access a system).

A total betrayal of allied states in the name of a “slightly safer and more peaceful world”, in the words of former German State Minister Bernd Schmidbauer in 2020. In reality, the BND had a serious disagreement with the CIA, seeing spying on one’s own allies as disloyal and politically risky. In fact, it withdrew from Operation Rubikon in 1994, after selling its shares in Crypto AG to the Americans for seventeen million dollars. In 2018, the Americans also pulled out, and the company was split into two privatized entities: CyOne and Crypto International AG.

In any case, for the CX-52 to work in practice, the buyers had to develop their own algorithms, mostly individually, and some, as we’ve seen, by working together through the creation of Maximator.

Apparently, other countries applied to join the alliance but were not admitted; specifically Spain, Norway, and Italy are mentioned. And so, the Danes, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and French continued onward, focusing on the decryption of diplomatic messages.

The decryption of military communications fell to another specific alliance called the Club of Five. Although Sweden didn’t take part in it, the number—and therefore the name—remained the same, with Belgium taking its place. Some well-known companies were also involved in that complex network, such as Motorola, which built several devices. Siemens, for example, made the machine casings, while Philips sold several of its Aroflex models (a version of the CX-52, like the German Hell 54) to Turkey that had been previously tampered with by the CIA.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on April 14, 2025: Maximator, la alianza de inteligencia formada por cinco países europeos que acabaron espiados por sus propias máquinas