The Soviets obtain a pair of his B-series cipher machines and copy them. The resulting machines, for which he never earns a dime, become a critical resource for the Russians in WWII.
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His French contracts eventually run aground on the inconvenient fact of the Nazis invading France. This would throw a wrench into most operations. But Hagelin isn’t daunted. In Fall 1940 he boards the last ship from Genoa to the U.S. before Italy enters WWII.
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In his luggage he has two of his latest cipher machines, the C-38. He doesn’t return home in 1940. Or 1941, 1942, 1943. By the time it’s safe to return to his home in Sweden it’s 1944. The US government has produced 50,000 copies of his machine under license.
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The machines are manufactured in the Corona typewriter factory in NYC. The US Army calls them the M-209. The Navy calls it the CSP-1500. By the end of the war, there are more than 140,000 machines in service.
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If this was the end of things, it would just be a remarkable story. But it gets so much weirder.
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After the war, Hagelin moves his company from Sweden to Switzerland. The Swiss have no pesky restrictions on the sale of cryptographic machinery, so he can sell his machines commercially.
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Hagelin has established a reputation by this point. It would be remiss of me to forget that at the end of the war, even Germany got in on the action — after obtaining a C-38 machine, they made their own version called the SG-41. They nearly replaced the Enigma with it.
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(The German SG-41 was never broken. Had it been developed earlier in the war, and deployed at larger scale, it might have shut the Allies out of the invaluable traffic they’d been getting from ULTRA.)
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Hagelin’s new company is called Crypto AG. It sells cipher machines to industry, and many smaller governments who can’t afford their own technology. Because it’s Swiss, the company is trusted in a way that NATO-based firms could never be.
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This naturally attracts the attention of the NSA. The agency calls the famous cryptographer William Friedman out of retirement and sends him to Switzerland to recruit Hagelin to the US cause. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Friedman …
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I like how this one ends.
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