Maximator-Alliance

Maximator-Alliance   (Mass Surveillance, SIGINT)
Interests	Falklands War, Turkey, Cuba, Venezuela.
Exposed by	Hans van de Ven
Membership	•  Denmark •  Germany •  France •  Netherlands •  Sweden
Intelligence Alliance, similar to Five Eyes.

Maximator (named after a type of beer from the German brewery Augustiner-Bräu) is an alliance 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, has operated largely undetected since then, and is still in existence.

Nieuwsuur

Journalist Huub Modderkolk reported a similar network in his book "It's war, but nobody sees it", and was followed on Dutch soil for his work, resulting in getting sued by the AIVD and MiVD. His book with revelations was mostly used in Cold War 2.0 efforts to highlight Russophobia in Dutch current affairs program Nieuwsuur.

Members

Within the participating countries specific intelligence organisations played relevant roles. In Germany the BND is responsible for (foreign) signals intelligence, whereas what was then called the ZfCh did the cryptanalytical work. In Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands these activities were combined in respectively the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS), the National Defence Radio Establishment, and the Technical Information Processing Centre. French Maximator activities were part of the DGSE. American services played a role in the background.

Activities

The most important tool for reconnaissance and decryption was the sale of encryption devices with weak encryption methods. This was done via Crypto AG, a supposedly private Swiss company secretly owned by the BND and the CIA.

So far, only the activities of the Dutch arm TIVC (formerly Technisch Informatie Verwerkingscentrum today Joint Signet Cyber Unit) are known. During the Falklands War, Dutch gave the British GCHQ access to Crypto AG algorithms, enabling them to decode Argentine radio traffic, vital for winning the war. The Dutch had again received access to this information from the BND through the Maximator alliance.

At the insistence of the CIA, the sale of compromised encryption devices from the Dutch company Philips to Turkey was pushed through against the will of the BND and the TIVC.

The service maintained a ground station in the Caribbean on Curaçao that monitored and decoded radio traffic from Cuba and Venezuela.

 

Known members

All 5 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Denmark	Member of the EU, NATO.
France	A European nation, former colonial power, permanent seat on the UNSC
Germany	"The economic powerhouse of Europe" - Germany dominates the European Union.
Netherlands	Politicly fragmented and very densely populated country. Had very lenient drug and (underage) sex laws. Named a "narco-state" by neighbouring countries. Home of the first Bilderberg meeting.
Sweden	A nation state which is heavy on social control, but which defied the SDS COVID lockdown policy.

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