[Example] The largest sting operation you’ve never heard of

IN JUNE 1970 the CIA did something audacious. In partnership with the BND, Germany’s spy agency, it secretly bought Crypto AG, a Swiss firm that was then the world’s leading purveyor of cipher machines. The devices were used by over 120 countries to encrypt sensitive diplomatic and military communications. For almost 50 years America, having subtly rigged the machines, could read many of those messages. “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” boasted a CIA report.

In 2018 the FBI went one better with Operation Trojan Shield. “Dark Wire” by Joseph Cox, a technology journalist and the co-founder of 404 Media, a website, tells the story of how American and Australian officials quietly established Anom, an encrypted messaging service, to attract criminals seeking to evade surveillance on traditional platforms.

The app promised whizzy features, such as messages that would auto-delete and the ability to send voice notes that scramble a user’s voice. In reality, all the data was funnelled to a server in Lithuania, which was an open book to the FBI. The result was an intelligence bonanza, with the FBI processing as many as 1m messages a day in 45 languages. That led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people and the seizure of hundreds of firearms by the time the operation was wound up, and the subterfuge revealed, in 2021. It was the largest law-enforcement sting operation ever.

Mr Cox, who spent years doggedly tracking the story and getting to know its players, many of them unsavoury international gangsters, has written a vivid account of the saga. The pages pop with dramatic irony: criminals trade cocaine and confess to lurid murders in the belief that their incriminating texts and messages are safe from prying eyes. One agent confesses “chuckling to myself, as these guys in whatever foreign country are going back and forth, talking about the FBI”.

Drug smugglers and hitmen speak for themselves, their personalities memorably captured by their own messages. Maximilian Rivkin, known as “Microsoft”, a sociopathic Swedish polyglot, plots crimes in Croatian, English, Spanish and Swedish. “He punctuated his assassination plans with heart and thumbs-up emojis,” writes Mr Cox. At one stage, Mr Rivkin requests a bulk discount for ordering multiple murders at once.

“Dark Wire” conveys the moral ambiguities and grubby trade-offs inherent in this sort of intelligence work. “The FBI was happy to allow some crimes to play out…if it meant collecting intelligence on other ones,” writes Mr Cox. “Some crimes ultimately weren’t worth burning the entirety of Anom over.” On around 150 occasions the FBI had to intervene to stop a threat to life, passing on details of murder plots to local authorities around the world, often disguising the source of the intelligence.

The book also raises deeper questions about the nature of secrecy, privacy and the law. If you want to communicate securely with someone without others eavesdropping, it makes intuitive sense to choose a device optimised for that purpose, such as Anom. The problem is that the people who go to such lengths to communicate privately often tend to be those who have something to hide, such as spies or criminals. Those devices, like Crypto AG machines before them, thus become particularly attractive targets for intelligence agencies and police forces. That, at least, is how it used to work.

Nowadays “end-to-end” encryption—the method of enciphering your messages so that they look garbled to anyone who should intercept them en route—is widely available on apps such as Meta’s WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage and Signal. The result is that criminals and law-abiding citizens mingle on the same platforms.

Mr Cox says that security agencies see “large-scale, bulk interception missions” like Operation Trojan Shield as the future of the fight against organised crime. But can they pull off such a big coup again? Criminals will no doubt be warier of digital Trojan horses. ■