The Olympics Spy Scandal

A joint intelligence operation during the 2004 Summer Olympics took a drastic turn.

In March 2005, a Greek software engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found dead in his home, shortly after the discovery of a massive digital surveillance operation hidden within his company’s network.

Costas Tsalikidis. GreekReporter.com.

Costas was the network planner for Greece’s largest mobile service provider, Vodafone-Panafon. In early 2005, unusual error messages on some of Vodafone’s telephone switches led Vodafone and Swedish telecommunications firm Ericsson to investigate. It turned out the error messages were caused by a flawed update that had been pushed to some malware hidden on the network. The investigators discovered a highly sophisticated bugging operation in which calls from more than 100 targeted cell phones were doubled and paralleled within the hardware switches, then routed separately to fourteen so-called “shadow phones”.

These parallel calls meant that when a targeted phone was active, someone else could listen in on the conversation in real time and receive text message updates regarding phone location and other data. The operation had been running for approximately five months since the first shadow phones were activated, and was targeting Greece’s prime minister, the ministers of national defense, foreign affairs, and justice, the mayor of Athens, and the Greek European Union commissioner, plus activists, journalists, and businessmen.