Stasi

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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The Miami Herald reports on East Germany’s notorious Stasi security agency and its influence over the tropical version, Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT). Jorge Luís Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in 1987 in a Stasi cell, has found hundreds of East German government documents on Stasi relations with MININT, and is nearly finished writing what may well be the most thorough report to date on the links between the two security agencies.

The Stasi reconstructed MININT’s telephone and communications system in 1988 to better facilitate eavesdropping. Before that, in 1981, it modernized MININT’s printing press to enable better, faster production of party propaganda — and false passports used for espionage and subversion, Vázquez says.

The Stasi also overhauled the security system at José Martí International Airport in Havana, installing cameras, migration control booths and state-of-the-art X-ray equipment that mirrored identically the security methods in East Germany.

Coordinated espionage efforts between the Stasi and MININT also helped widen the Cuban secret service’s intelligence gathering. Vázquez’s study reveals that in 1985, Operation Palma Real, a cooperative action of ”electronic espionage” by German and Cuban agents, resulted in valuable interceptions of U.S. telephone and telegraph communications from the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo, Cuba.

Furthermore, the Stasi trained Cuban guerrillas who were being sent abroad to subvert other governments, teaching observation, espionage and interrogation techniques that considerably expanded Cuba’s impact on conflicts ranging from Central America to Africa, according to the documents Vázquez has gathered.

”What we see is a copy of the Stasi system that spread across the developing world — from Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique to Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador,” as Cubans passed on the methodology and technology to others, he said.

And then there was that intriguing mention of LSD, in a letter from the MININT’s supply department formally requesting from the Stasi some 360 doses of the hallucinogenic. The document does not explain its use.

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From today’s Inside the Ring (Washington Times):

Cuba’s intelligence service is stepping up activities in the United States because of the impending demise of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, according to intelligence officials.

The Cuban activities are aimed at finding out what the United States plans to do against Cuba in the aftermath of Mr. Castro’s death, such as backing regime opponents in a putsch.

Cuban intelligence collection is being stepped up against key U.S. targets, including the White House National Security Council, the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community with the goal of finding out U.S. policies and plans toward Cuba.

Cuban intelligence is “very good at this business” of spying, Joel F. Brenner, the national counterintelligence executive, told a breakfast meeting last week. Mr. Brenner said that the Cuban spy case of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes “compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human.”

Scott Carmichael, a Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence official and author of a new book on Montes called “True Believer,” said recently that Cuba’s intelligence service currently has penetrated the U.S. government to a similar extent as the former East German Stasi planted agents inside the West German government.

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