Posted on 11/04/2007 6:29:02 AM PST by nuconvert
E. Germans drew blueprint for Cuban spying
A once-jailed Cuban exile's research reveals how East Germany exported its repressive Stasi security system to Cuba, where it lives on today.
MICHAEL LEVITIN
BERLIN -- In the cavernous underground jail once run by East Germany's notorious Stasi security agency, Jorge Luís Vázquez leads a visitor into a dank, tiny, pitch-black cell, then slams the iron door shut.
The world vanishes into darkness. Moments later, the door swings open and light returns.
''Well, how was it?'' asks Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in one of these very Stasi cells in 1987, when East Germany was under communist rule, and now leads tours through the prison-turned-museum.
More importantly, he has found hundreds of East German government documents on Stasi relations with Cuba's own feared Ministry of the Interior, known as MININT, and is nearly finished writing what may well be the most thorough report to date on the links between the two security agencies.
Vázquez says he found the MININT is ''almost a copy'' of the repressive Stasi security system, exported by East Germany to Cuba in the 1970s and '80s, and that the ties between the two organizations run far deeper than previously known.
From how to bug tourist hotel rooms to an intriguing mention of the hallucinogenic LSD, the degree to which the Stasi trained and provided material and technical support to the security arm of Fidel Castro's regime had a sweeping and harsh impact on Cuba.
Germans taught the Cubans how to mount effective camera and wiretap systems for eavesdropping -- for example, at what height on the wall to install microphones, which color wallpaper provides the best concealment, and which shade of lighting for the best video recordings.
The Stasi provided computers and introduced new archiving methods that better organized, protected and sped up the Cubans' processing of security information. It delivered one-way mirrors used for interrogations and provided equipment to fabricate masks, mustaches and other forms of makeup so that when the Cubans sent out covert agents, ''they went in dressed with wigs, false noses -- the works -- credit of the Stasi,'' Vázquez says.
`MAJOR ROLE'
U.S. experts on Cuban security agencies agree with Vázquez's findings.
''East Germany had a major role in building up Cuban counterintelligence as well as its foreign intelligence services, providing training for decades . . . right up to the final days of East Germany,'' said Chris Simmon, a career U.S. counterintelligence officer and expert on Cuban intelligence.
And Cubans are still using what they learned from the Stasi, added Vázquez, 48.
''The repressive system that existed in East Germany . . . is the same one that exists today in Cuba,'' he says. ``What MININT learned from the Stasi has not been forgotten. On the contrary, [the strategies and techniques] are alive today despite the fall of the Berlin Wall.''
The Stasi's menacing control over almost every aspect of private and public life in East Germany can be seen in this year's Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, the tale of a Stasi officer's inner conflict as he protects a dissident playwright whose apartment has been thoroughly bugged by the Stasi.
A FEARED AGENCY
Headquartered amid the grim Soviet-styled apartment blocks of the former East Berlin, the Stasi -- short for Staatssicherheit, or State Security -- succeeded through surveillance, intimidation and torture in becoming one of the most feared intelligence agencies in the world.
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, the Stasi had 91,000 employees and 350,000 collaborators in a country of 17 million.
When the Stasi archives were opened to the public in the early 1990s, East Germans learned that there had been 986 documented deaths at the prison and discovered 112 miles worth of files on their fellow citizens.
About the same distance as Havana to Key West, Vázquez joked during a tour of the museum, known as the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen memorial.
Vázquez, who has brown mop-like hair and an excitable manner when he speaks, learned German while a teenage student in one of Cuba's language institutes.
He was later sent to East Germany as a translator for Cubans studying there, and from 1982 to 1987 lived in Karl-Marxstadt, now Chemnitz.
He also traveled widely throughout Eastern Europe, where his conversations with people about the daily hardships in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia darkened his views of communism. It was Moscow, he says, that ``traumatized me the most, seeing the political and economic disaster of communism.''
But in 1987 Vázquez helped a visiting Cuban musician escape to Canada. He was arrested, interrogated for one week at the Stasi prison and then deported under armed guard to Cuba.
After several days at a Havana jail he describes as a ''medieval'' experience, spent in 'filthy, tiny cells with nothing to cover oneself with, listening to prisoners' screams,'' he was freed but blacklisted from most jobs.
He later married a German citizen, returned to Berlin in 1992 and in 1996 got to see his file in the Stasi archives. He began his research in 2002 and has dug up hundreds of files, read through thousands of pages of official documents and published dozens of articles in Miscellanea, a Swiss-based Cuban exile magazine.
And now he's putting the finishing touches on his report, ''The Havana-Berlin Connection: State Secrets and Notes on the Collaboration between the Stasi and MININT.'' He is now looking to publish the Spanish-language report in book form.
''I want to provoke a change,'' he says. ``When a security system has its own prisons, judges, lawyers and interrogators and no one controls them, as in Cuba, then the state security is what's sustaining the Communist Party, and repression is what's sustaining the Cuban regime.
``I want to hold the Cuban government responsible; I want to denounce it for its collaboration with the Stasi.''
COOPERATION
But the materials on Stasi-Cuban cooperation that he has uncovered speak for themselves.
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.
But Stasi-MININT relations were not always warm.
Vázquez said the Stasi frequently criticized its Caribbean counterparts for being disorganized, carelessly leaking information to American spies and failing to master the use of secret codes.
''It was a cultural confrontation: the Cubans were one way -- not punctual, for example -- and the Germans were the opposite,'' Vázquez said.
And some Stasi methods simply didn't work in Cuba.
Storing the scents of dissidents so they could be tracked down by dogs if needed, a technique used in East Germany, did not work in the hot and humid tropics, according to the documents that Vázquez located.
In the 18 years since the Berlin Wall fell, the former East Germany has made perhaps more effort than any other Soviet Bloc country to open up the security files kept on its citizens, and face the dark questions that still haunt its past.
Now, Vázquez hopes, his study's publication can serve as ''a base for others, from Poland to Bulgaria, to do similar investigations'' across Eastern Europe.
pong
And you can be sure that Hugo Chavez is learning from the Cubans and is implementing this stuff in Venezuela.
Yes, undoubtedly the Cubans are helping Chavez in Venezuela, and will help their minions in Bolivia and Ecuador.
The East Germans had strong ties with certain African regimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they assisted Mugabe.
The East Germans were especially friendly with the North Koreans. When the DDR ceased to exist, Kim Il Sung offered to give refuge to Honecker. (Honecker eventually went into exile in Chile, sheltered by local leftists there.)
The North Korean system also, like the Stasi, owes much to Soviet models. The North Koreans to this day maintain Siberian labor camps, with Russian cooperation.
Drive by Bump
Cuba did the same sending their athletes, trainers, coaches all over South America to develop athletes and promote communism. They did the same in the field of medicine sending their medical people all over the Global South.
These programs were unbelievably successful in third world countries. And, that is where much of the anti-Americanism is still found.
been there - know that
Yeah, but at least they never forced prisoners to wear panties on their heads. /s
The real question is what did Cuba’s DGI, also set up and probably run by the East Germans for the KGB, have to do with the Kennedy Assassination?
BuHuHaHa! BTW - have you watched this?
It is worth watching. Some Americans even want to publish a Remake*.
Usually US-remakes of European films are the worst BS anyone can think of. To us it is extremely funny if the plot suddenly happens in the US. ;)
There is a tendency for these regimes to collaborate. For example, it’s known the N. Korea has it’s hands in Iran. Iran has close ties with Venezuela (Believe it or not).
An Iran will see no competition (They are not competing for power nationally or regionally) and no threat in Venezuela, but a mutual partner when it comes to their threat picture. So the answer is most definitely yes. Without even much investigation it can be assumed that Cuba and Venezuela are working hand in glove. More later.
I’ve heard of that movie. BTW “Goodbye, Lenin!” is one of my all-time favorite movies.
Interesting read indeed.
What the liberal today as in the past attempts to do is to “compartmentalize” all the events. Your article makes the point of the links in these battles. Coincidence that some of the componenets on SA2 and 3 missiles used in Vietnam came from the DDR? The goal is to look at the war in Korea, Vietnam, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War stand off with the spy and terrorist actions in Europe, Grenada....... all as separate incidents with their own cause by those who oppose intervention. In reality they were all connected and part of a global struggle between the Communist block and the Western free world.
Here’s another interesting factoid. Some of the engineers in Grenada were East German, most of the construction workers were Cuban, and much of the project was financed through backdoors from the Soviet Union funneled through Nicaragua which was lead by a Soviet backed Sandinista regime. Yet when we invaded Grenada, freed hostages, and stopped the plan to build a gargantuan runway (large enough for Soviet strategic bombers) many were up in arms, and boy did the conspiracy theories fly.
Today you have the same thing happening. Those who oppose the war in Iraq and growingly even Afghanistan, who think we should not take action on Iran, are de facto required to separate or compartmentalize all these issues. They have to disconnect Hezbollah from Iran, $20,000 rewards for suicide bombers and Saddam, the Taliban and 911. Suddenly the problems in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan etc. are all separate issues with no connection to one another at the macro level. You have to disconnect these things in order to live in the happy go lucky world of no radical Islamic threat. People who oppose the intervention in Iraq are more or less forced to take this absurd position since they realize that otherwise their basic anti-war or intervention premise is logically flawed.
Inherently, large ideological struggles like this are trans-national and long terms (often multi-generational). The conflict usually takes on many faces, in different places, and even morphs over the years. It is often fought through proxies, and third party fringe groups. The battle is inherently more non-conventional and is fought on many planes simultaneously (Information Operations, intelligence battles, subversive political ploys etc). Think about the battle against Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines in the last years. Is this part of the much greater struggle between the free West and a radical Islamic world view? You bet; as much as it was when the Soviets and especially the former Tito Yugoslavia subversively attempted to throw Greece onto the side of the East block in the late 40s. Was the Greek civil war in the late 40s part of the Cold War? You bet! It was going on concurrently as we were airlifting supplies into a blockaded Berlin, and those fueling the communists in Greece sat on the other side of the wall. Is it the way the anti-war pundit then explained it? Of course not. Even then there were voices against our intervention in Greece although all supported the Berlin Airlift. Some will talk for days and days in circular arguments and plea to emotions, but it all boils down to that they can not accept the greater picture of the global conflict for whatever reason. May it be the Cold War or today the war against radical Islam; they are very similar in that both are inherently battles between two opposing world views and ways to organize society.
What you end up with are ridiculous arguments. In Vietnam some tried to argue that our intervention was for the vast tin found there and warm water ports. As soon as we landed on the beaches of Somalia it was said that large untapped oil reserves lie buried there. When we invaded Panama they said it was to hold onto the Canal….. Any different when we went into Grenada? The real motive for intervention has to be attacked if your one of those who thinks we should not be interventionist. Do we see this today? Those who find themselves against the war, may they be pacifists, some German that wants to uphold his self image because his state is a near do nothing, or a plethora of other reasons, they are in reality attacking the intervention because they are self rationalizing, and a key component of this argument is near always the separation of events and between cause and effect. However, any rational person with an objective mind, who has any knowledge of events quickly sees the connections, and just like the links between the Stazi and Cuba, there are links between what happened in the 2002 Bali bombing and 911. There are links between London and Madrid. There are links between Hezbollah and Iran. There are links between Pan Am 103 and Libya, just like the La Belle Disko and Libya………. In the Cold War there were many that were denying the ideological struggle. Many said that if we just lay down our arms we’d be left alone. Some sympathized with their enemy (You saw this more in Europe). All the same attempts at denial, attacking the motives, the pretending that these events all occur in a vacuum are made today. Today’s struggle being less well defined and harder to put ones arm around; less overt (No Khrushchev screaming “We will burry you” referring to the West and beating his shoe on the table); more asymmetric, and less consistent, is much more difficult to explain. In the Cold War we faced an ideological threat, and its face was very much the same from Castro (declared Communist), to Honneker (declared Communist) to Khrushchev (Head Communist) to Moa (Asian Communist), Poll Pot (Freak- Asian Communist), Ho chi min (Confuciust Communist)…… Today you’re looking at a common thread and ideology but no Warsaw Pact, no formal organizations (other than AQ) and those who want to see the picture as fuzzy have a much easier time.
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