r/Intelligence

Hi everyone, I hope this isn’t a silly question.

I’m currently trying to break into the federal / intelligence / security field and would really appreciate any guidance on potential entry points or roles to target.

I’m 26, speak six languages (including Russian), and hold a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, Economics, and Politics from a German university. I’m currently pursuing a Master’s in Global Security at King’s College London. While I don’t yet have direct experience in intelligence, I also don’t have any political party affiliations or public political exposure.

I’m a dual U.S. and Italian citizen, having grown up in the United States and obtained Italian citizenship about nine years ago. My long-term goal is to work in areas such as international security analysis, international crime, or counterterrorism: ideally in service of the U.S., where I feel both my background and expertise are most aligned.

My main question is: how realistic is this path given my current profile? Are there specific internships, entry-level roles, or stepping-stone positions you would recommend? And is a military route necessary, or are there viable civilian pathways to break into the field?

I’d really appreciate any advice or insights. thank you in advance!

Operation Rubicon is probably the most successful intelligence operation in modern history, and most people have never heard of it. The CIA's own classified internal history, leaked in 2020, called it "the intelligence coup of the century." That's not a journalist's description. That's the agency's assessment of its own program.

The setup: Boris Hagelin, a Swedish inventor, founded Crypto AG in Switzerland in 1952 after building the M-209 cipher machine used extensively by the U.S. military during WWII. He relocated to Switzerland and built a business selling encryption equipment to governments worldwide, leveraging Swiss neutrality as a brand asset. A company based in a neutral country manufacturing security products seemed inherently trustworthy.

By the early 1950s, Hagelin had entered an informal arrangement with William Friedman, the NSA cryptologist widely considered the father of American codebreaking. The deal was straightforward: Hagelin would sell his most capable machines to U.S.-approved countries and weaker, breakable versions to everyone else. Correspondence between Friedman and Hagelin, declassified in 2015, documented the relationship in detail.

By the late 1960s, Hagelin was aging and the informal arrangement was becoming untenable. When French and West German intelligence approached Hagelin in 1967 to propose their own partnership, Hagelin reported the approach to his CIA handlers. The agency decided it was time to buy the company outright. In June 1970, the CIA and BND purchased Crypto AG for $5.75 million. The company was given the codename "Minerva." The operation was initially called "Thesaurus," later renamed "Rubicon."

The manipulation was elegant. The CIA and NSA didn't install obvious backdoors. They weakened the algorithms — rigging the keystream generators so that output, while appearing random to the user, contained mathematical structures the NSA could exploit to recover plaintext. To anyone without knowledge of the specific weakness, the encryption looked secure. To the NSA, it was transparent. As the technology evolved from mechanical cipher machines to electronic systems to software, the rigging evolved with it.

The customer list included Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Argentina, India, the Vatican, and dozens of others. More than 120 governments paid money for equipment they believed was protecting their most sensitive communications. It was doing the opposite. Siemens manufactured teleprinters for Crypto AG, provided management personnel for 20 years, and held a five percent share of the profits. The Maximator alliance — Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands — was also read into the vulnerabilities and exploited them.

The intelligence yield was staggering. During the 1978 Camp David negotiations, the NSA read every communication between President Sadat and his advisors in Cairo — because Egypt used Crypto AG equipment. During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, Iranian communications were intercepted in real time. In 1982, Britain received intelligence during the Falklands War because Argentina encrypted its military communications on Crypto AG equipment. By 1988, the CIA and BND were decrypting approximately 19,000 Iranian messages annually — 80 to 90 percent of Iran's total encrypted traffic. At its peak, according to leaked CIA documents, 40 percent of the NSA's total machine decryption traced back to Operation Rubicon.

The operation also provided intelligence on South America's Operation Condor dictatorships — Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil — as they coordinated cross-border campaigns of imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial killing using Crypto AG equipment. American and German intelligence read the traffic. They knew what was happening.

The closest the operation came to exposure was in 1986. President Reagan publicly cited intercepted Libyan diplomatic traffic as justification for bombing Tripoli and Benghazi after the Berlin discotheque bombing. Every Crypto AG customer worldwide suddenly had a reason to wonder how the Americans were reading their communications. The operation survived. It survived again in 1992 when Hans Bühler, a Swiss Crypto AG salesman who had no idea he was selling rigged equipment, was arrested in Iran on espionage charges and detained for nine and a half months. Crypto AG paid roughly $1 million bail for his release. He came back to Switzerland and started talking to journalists. The media coverage was extensive. The operation survived.

The BND, rattled by the exposure risk, sold its stake to the CIA in 1993 or 1994 for $17 million. The CIA kept going alone. For another 24 years. An academic study in Intelligence and National Security identified three factors explaining why: geopolitical pressures on target countries limiting their alternatives, the targets' limited technical resources for independently verifying encryption security, and operational brilliance by CIA-BND agents inside Crypto AG who managed each crisis. The simplest factor was the most powerful — there weren't many alternatives. If you were a mid-sized government in the 1980s and needed encryption equipment, your options were American, Soviet, or Swiss. The Swiss option looked neutral.

The CIA sold Crypto AG's remaining assets in 2018. The company was split into CyOne (domestic Swiss sales) and Crypto International AG (international sales under new ownership). The operation formally ended after 48 years of continuous signals intelligence collection. The BND reportedly continued exploiting the algorithm weaknesses even after its formal exit — Italian traffic was reportedly still being deciphered around 2001.

The structural lesson is the one that connects Crypto AG to modern debates about encryption backdoors and tech company cooperation with intelligence agencies. As Warwick University researchers noted after the 2020 revelations: long before Snowden, intelligence agencies were compromising commercial encryption products, and the question isn't whether they're doing it now — it's how many current products carry weaknesses that will take another 48 years to discover.

Longer analysis covering the technical mechanics of the algorithm rigging, the full intelligence yield across five decades, and how this connects to modern encryption policy debates:

https://unteachablecourses.com/crypto-ag-cia-spy-operation/

The part that gets me is the longevity. Most covert operations last months or years. This one ran for nearly half a century across multiple technological eras, survived repeated near-exposures, and only ended when the CIA decided to sell the company — not because anyone caught them. What other historical intelligence operations come close to that operational lifespan?

most notable ukraine, palestine, israel kurdistan, and several other places i cant look up right now.

do something. i solved the 6 eyes quiz.

I know visiting places like China is a red flag. How about places like Hong Kong or Vietnam?