Department of State Security

Wired Magazine has published an article that addresses the painstakingly process of reconstructing torn surveillance files by hand of the Stasi (East Germany’s State Security Service), which had an influence over its tropical version–Cuba’s Ministry of Interior (MININT).

Will the MININT follow suit in tearing up files once the Castro regime is no longer in power?

A snippet of the article is as follows:

Because before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

[…]

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally “paper-wolves” and “rip-wolves,” German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

[…]

The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years — even taking into account the varying textures and durability of paper, the different sizes and shapes of the fragments, the assortment of printing (from handwriting to dot matrix) and the range of edges (from razor sharp to ragged and handmade.) “The numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle at home, you have maybe 1,000 pieces and a picture of what it should look like at the end,” project manager Jan Schneider says. “We have many millions of pieces and no idea what they should look like when we’re done.”

[Photo: Wired]

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Chris Simmons, a career counterintelligence officer and an expert on Cuban intelligence has written the following article on the Iran-Cuba nexus published in the Miami Herald:

Scott Carmichael, a senior counterintelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently confirmed continued intelligence sharing between Iran and Cuba. Additionally, Israeli sources report that during last year’s meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana, Iranian and Cuban intelligence officers discussed increased collaboration in targeting the United States.

Close ties between Tehran and Havana have reportedly existed since Iran’s revolutionary leadership came to power in 1979. Given both nations’ sponsorship of terrorism, their continued collaboration imperils U.S. national security. In the past, Havana provided training and material to selected terrorist groups, some of which are Iranian allies. Today, Cuba remains a safe haven for some international terrorist groups and it allows safe transit to others. Furthermore, Iran’s Interests Section and its Mission to the United Nations appear inadequately staffed for significant intelligence collection. This shortfall likely makes Tehran even more dependent on Havana’s continued intelligence trafficking.

In 2006, Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz — a career officer in Cuba’s premier foreign intelligence service, the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) — visited with senior Iranian government officials. This meeting followed his October 2003 meeting with President Mohammad Khatami on expanded ties between Havana and Tehran.

At the time, Cabrisas served under cover as a minister without portfolio. During their discussions, Khatami said reciprocal visits by officials of the two countries would lead to further expansion and consolidation of mutual ties. Khatami described his nation’s ties with Havana as exemplary and claimed that closer Cuba-Iran cooperation would benefit the entire world. Cabrisas publicly focused on Havana’s willingness to broaden ties with Tehran and underlined the need to bolster economic cooperation. The meeting called for the recurring visits by officials, scientists and others to develop these enhanced ties.

Since at least 1996, the DI has targeted U.S. technologies beneficial to the Cuban economy. With one of the most advanced biotechnology industries in the emerging world, Castro successfully made biotechnology a building block of the Cuban economy. Cuba now holds more than 400 biotechnology patents and earns considerable foreign currency through its sales of biotechnology products to more than 50 nations. Tehran and Havana first began collaborative work on dual-use biotechnologies in the early 1990s.

Acting on behalf of Tehran, in July 2003, Cuban intelligence jammed the transmissions of the National Iranian Television (NITV), the Voice of America and three other Iran-bound broadcasts. The extended jamming coincided with Tehran’s crackdown on the dissident commemoration of the historic 1999 student uprising.

Loral Skynet, owners of the targeted satellite, quickly traced the source of the jamming to a spot several miles outside of Havana. The location identified was the Cuban military intelligence’s Bejucal Signals Intelligence site, which intercepts and jams radio and television signals with equal ease. NITV first broadcast from its Los Angeles-based station in March 2000. However, Iran promptly jammed the Hot Bird 5 satellite in its static orbit over France.

NITV and other broadcasters then moved to Telstar 12, because its stationary orbit over the mid-Atlantic placed it outside the range of Iran’s jamming stations. However, the move placed NITV within range of Cuba, the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that jams foreign broadcasts. Worldwide, only seven nations engage in such illegal jamming.

Havana had demonstrated Tehran’s importance in May 2001 when Fidel Castro visited Iran. Cuba’s ambassador to Tehran, career DI officer Darío Urra Torriente, coordinated and oversaw all aspects of Castro’s meetings with Iran’s leaders. If history is any example, the focus of the conference was economic and political issues, as well as intelligence collaboration. Urra’s experience in the Arab world dates back to the early 1960s, when he served in Algiers. During that tour, he assisted in Algeria’s covert shipments of weaponry to Venezuelan revolutionaries.

(H/T: La Nueva Cuba)

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A new Latell Report follows:

President George W. Bush’s address on Cuba policy at the State Department on October 24 was his first since Raul Castro’s accession to power fifteen months ago. The president used powerful, and at times evocative, language in reaffirming his administration’s commitment to maintaining the economic embargo until a genuine democratic transition begins on the island. He welcomed several supportive members of congress–conservative Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats– and introduced family members of imprisoned Cuban journalists and democracy activists. Bush was adamant that the United States not acquiesce in a dynastic succession, insisting that life will not improve for Cubans by exchanging one dictator for another.

He seemed, moreover, to move policy into a more activist mode than had been the case since Fidel Castro yielded power in July 2006. By many accounts, actions in support of Cuban dissidents have been more cautious since then. The administration has also generally eschewed confrontational language, perhaps in the belief that the new regime’s grip on power was tenuous and out of concern that instability on the island would provoke another mass seaborne migration to Florida.

But to whatever extent such considerations may have inhibited policy, they now appear to have been superseded. The president said, the operative word in our dealing with Cuba is not stability. . . (it) is freedom. . . Now is the time to support the democratic movements growing on the island. Now is the time to stand with the Cuban people as they stand up for their liberty. If he meant that new or more assertive policies are in the works to support the democratic opposition, he provided no details.

But in other, potentially more significant ways, the president ventured beyond the standard rhetoric and policy prescriptions of recent years. For the first time, perhaps in the entire history of American relations with the Castro brothers regime, a president made public overtures to Cuban military and security personnel. Seeking to enlist at least some of them as agents of democratic change, Bush said that Cuba must find a way to reconcile and forgive those who have been part of the system, but who do not have blood on their hands. They are victims too.

Remarkably, substantial segments of the speech were excerpted in Granma, Cuba’s communist party daily. The preceding conciliatory commentary was deleted, but another, equally potent one was printed on page two of the Cuban newspaper. It was a both a plea and a promise to the Castro brothers nomenclatura.

You may have once believed in the revolution. Now you can see its failure. When Cubans rise up to demand their liberty . . . you’ve got to make a choice. Will you defend a disgraced and dying order by using force against your own people? . . . There is a place for you in the free Cuba.

It is difficult to understand why Cuban authorities took the unprecedented step of quoting a sitting American president. I cannot recall another comparable example since relations were severed in 1961. And much of the verbiage that was aired by the Cuban media was highly critical, even incantatory, directed at different Cuban audiences, including schoolchildren and the country’s discontented youth.

Perhaps the new regime is so confident of its strength and popularity that it does not fear how the president’s remarks will be received. Alternatively, reformers who appear to be ascendant in the current leadership may have wanted to add the president’s words to the increasingly dynamic mix of issues the regime has encouraged the populace to debate and discuss. Many pragmatists no doubt agree with President Bush that life will not improve for Cubans under their present system of government. By allowing that conclusion to be aired in Cuba’s controlled media, they may have signaled their concurrence.

The president also cited many items from the long list of pre-conditions for normalizing relations that are specified in the 1996 Cuba Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (Helms-Burton). But one of the most prominent of them was not mentioned in any form. Section 205 (a) (3) of Helms-Burton demands the dissolution of Cuba’s most powerful organs of internal repression: the Department of State Security in the Ministry of Interior, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and the Rapid Response Brigades that often inflict violence on dissidents. The omission of this previously crucial requirement for a transition government may have been no more than a drafters or editors oversight. But its absence is consistent with the speech’s central theme of willingness to reconcile with members of Cuba’s uniformed services.

Other straws in the wind suggest that a certain new level of bilateral security cooperation has already been instituted. The State Department’s two most recent annual reports on international terrorism, issued by the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, reveal that Cuba has assured the United States that it will no longer provide safe haven to new U.S. fugitives who may enter Cuba.

Last year, the Cuban government made good on that commitment by repatriating an American who landed a stolen plane in Cuba. The 2006 State Department report, issued in April 2007, indicates that after several meetings between U.S. diplomats in Havana and Cuban officials, the man was returned last October for prosecution. The report concludes that this was the first instance in which the Cuban government permitted the return of a fugitive from U.S. justice.

It is not clear whether this new Cuban policy results from a unilateral decision to seek greater bilateral security cooperation or from a process of mutual concessions. So far, the administration has not commented beyond the cursory wording included in the two annual counter terrorism reports.

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