My Take | Why Washington is paranoid about Huawei
- New expose shows how American intelligence secretly owned and operated encryption company whose devices were used by the governments of more than 100 countries over decades, so the US now fears a repeat by the Chinese with the services of the 5G giant
The past illuminates the present. This bombshell of a story dropped by The Washington Post certainly explains a lot about America’s current war against Chinese 5G supplier Huawei.
For more than half a century after the second world war, the Swiss company Crypto, whose products the governments of more than 100 countries have relied on to send secure encrypted messages, was secretly owned and operated by the CIA and its West German intelligence counterpart, the BND.
This has enabled American intelligence to read the top secrets of friends and foes alike, and to share them with other members of the so-called Five Eyes, the intelligence services of four other English-speaking countries.
But given the close working relationship with West German intelligence, maybe it should have been called the Six Eyes, despite the language differences.
Washington has kept insinuating that Huawei poses a security risk to all companies and governments that use its 5G infrastructures. Yet, it has never provided actual evidence despite having searched high and low for it, including illegally hacking into Huawei’s mainframes at its Shenzhen headquarters.