Maximator (after a type of beer from the Augustiner-Bräu) is the internal name of a secret service network between the secret services of Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, comparable to the Five Eyes. It was founded in 1976 on the initiative of the Danish secret service and has operated largely undetected since then.[1] The most important tool for the reconnaissance and decryption was the sale of encryption devices with weak encryption methods. This was done via Crypto AG, which secretly belonged to the BND and the CIA.
Activities
So far, only activities of the Dutch arm, Technisch Informatie Verwerkingscentrum (TIVC), are known, whereby mainly administrative assistance for the GCHQ in the Falklands War was provided in the decoding of the Argentine radio traffic.
At the urging of the CIA, the sale of compromised encryption devices from the Dutch company Philips to Turkey was enforced against the will of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, and the TIVC.[2]
The service maintained a ground station in the Caribbean on Curaçao, which monitored and decoded the radio traffic from Cuba and Venezuela.[3]
References
- ^ [1] A European spy pact to rival the Five Eyes comes to light
- ^ [2] Bart Jacobs (2020) Maximator: European signals intelligence cooperation, from a Dutch perspective, Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2020.1743538
- ^ [3] Geheimdienst-Kooperation "Maximator": Die Five Eyes Europas?