AN INSIDE JOB?

By Steven Cherry & Harry Goldstein

No mystery novel is complete without the reader finding out “who done it,” but real life is usually messier than fiction. In the Athens affair, we can only speculate about who may have been behind the most spectacular cell-system penetration ever.

The hackers' facility with the esoteric art of programming the Ericsson AXE central-office switch convinced some that the criminals were either employees of Vodafone Greece or of Intracom Telecom.

Intracom has aroused suspicion because it provided key software to Ericsson and because the Greek company is a major telecommunications equipment supplier to Greece's dominant carrier, OTE Group. Given that the majority of OTE's shares are owned by the Greek state, a business having large dealings with OTE would have had a strong incentive to tap the phones of the ruling party in order to check on whether any of the deals it or OTE had set up under the previous government were in danger of being derailed. Under this theory, phone taps for Arabs and members of antiauthoritarian groups were installed to send investigators on a wild goose chase.

But what really raised eyebrows was the fact that one of the hacked Vodafone exchanges was located on the campus of the main Intracom facility. Anyone wishing to enter that particular Vodafone facility would have had to go through the Intracom gates, meaning that visitors to the Vodafone exchange would have been logged twice. Unfortunately, the visitor records for the exchange were destroyed by Vodafone in accord with routine procedures, despite the extraordinary circumstances. So investigators had only the Intracom visitor records, which would not record any visits to the Vodafone exchange by Intracom personnel.

The leading cause for suspecting the employees of Vodafone Greece is the suicide of its head of network planning, Costas Tsalikidis. Yet the deceased's family questions whether it was a suicide at all. The family's attorney, Themistokles Sofos, has stated, “I am certain that Costas Tsalikidis did not commit suicide, and that makes me believe he probably gained knowledge of the phone tapping through his diligence with all matters professional.” Thus, speculation is divided between theories that say Tsalikidis committed suicide because his involvement was about to be discovered and those that argue that Tsalikidis was murdered because he had discovered, or was about to discover, who the perpetrators were.

Another popular theory posits that the U.S. National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, or some other U.S. spy agency did it. The location of the monitored phones correlates nicely with apartments and other property under the control of the U.S. Embassy in Athens.

Under this theory, phone taps of Arabs and members of antiauthoritarian groups were installed because of fears of a terrorist attack on the Athens Olympics. It is widely believed that these U.S. agencies, particularly the NSA, have all the necessary tools and expertise for mounting such an attack.