The Counterintelligence Analyst, the Stasi, and the Moles. Excerpts from the Havana-Berlin Connection Investigation. By Jorge L. García Vázquez

By Jorge L. García Vázquez 

The Bay of Pigs fiasco exposed two fundamental problems. First, it revealed the CIA's operational ineptitude. Second, it highlighted a glaring lack of coordination between the Agency and the White House. These factors, along with the economic strategy of successive US administrations to isolate Cuba through the trade embargo, allowed Fidel Castro to cultivate a robust anti-American movement, gain allies, and secure economic and military support from the socialist bloc.

U.S. intelligence services long underestimated the training, scientific and technical preparation, ideological approach, and methodology of Cuban analysts and officers, including their knowledge of operational psychology. This was demonstrated in 1987 after Major Florentino Aspillaga defected. The CIA carried out multiple operations aimed at weakening the power of the Communist Party and its intelligence apparatus but was unable to erode its foundation. Ultimately, the Agency's analysts failed to grasp their enemy's modus operandi. However, Cuban counterintelligence and espionage do understand the American mindset and work strategy. This has allowed them to create an effective system of influence and operational disinformation.

A parallel can be drawn between the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence and the former East German intelligence services. The operational conditions were analogous, which elucidates the persistent influence of Stasi methodologies on Cuban intelligence analysis and gathering, double agent training, and infiltration plans within the United States.

 

Infiltration, seduction among Cuban spy tactics in U.S. BY TIM JOHNSON/ Jun 16 2002 Miami Herald

  The Miami Herald

Jun. 16, 2002

Infiltration, seduction among Cuban spy tactics in U.S.

  BY TIM JOHNSON

  WASHINGTON - Ana Belen Montes' confession in March brought the latest evidence of how Fidel Castro's regime seeks to spy on the United States,
  targeting the Cuban exile community, Capitol Hill, the military and CIA, and universities, experts say.

  Time after time, Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence has run double agents, letting them fall into U.S. hands, or wash up on U.S. shores, as presumed
  defectors.

  After insinuating themselves into exile groups, Radio Martí or federal agencies, they would sow discord, or bolt back to Havana to publicly discredit the
  U.S. government.

  Cuban spies based in the United States are ''very smooth, very acculturated and really very, very professional,'' one retired counterintelligence official
  said.

  They operate from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and the huge Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City, which has more than
  70 accredited diplomats.

  ''I'll just flatly tell you that almost every one of them are intelligence officers,'' the retired official said.

  At Cuba's mission in New York City, intelligence gathering is such a principal task, another U.S. official said, that many of the Cuban personnel ``frankly
  don't even know where the U.N. is.''

  By the mid-1970s, Cuban operatives were gathering information not only for Havana but also to pass on to the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.

  ''The Cubans were much more successful at bringing people aboard and gathering information,'' the official said. ``They were Latin and they were kind of
  glamorous. We're much more open to Latins than we are to people with steel teeth and a Slavic accent.''

  Cuban intelligence agents practice literal and figurative seduction, spending months and even years looking for weak points in their targets, experts say.

  ''They investigate everything,'' said Francisco Avila, a former Cuban double agent who came clean in 1992 and now lives in South Florida. ``Do you like to
  smoke? Do you like to fish, hunt? Go to the movies? Or maybe a man is a real womanizer, and they send a woman to seduce him.''

  Avila, who was tasked by Cuban intelligence with infiltrating Alpha 66, a Miami exile paramilitary group, voiced amazement at how many Cuban agents
  penetrated the group.

  ''One time, I was one of six people aboard a boat belonging to Alpha 66, and I looked around and realized that three of us were from [Cuban] state
  security,'' Avila said.

  Before his break with Havana, Avila said, he would receive instructions in Miami every three months or from a contact, who would give him a large
  hollowed-out bolt with a paper inside.

  The paper would instruct him on how to meet his Cuban intelligence handler in New York City.

  'It would say something like, `We'll see each other in Queens at such and such an hour in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken,' '' Avila said. When Avila
  would show up there, ''almost always it was the first secretary of the U.N. Interests Section'' waiting for him.

  The FBI counterintelligence unit has about 40 to 50 agents nationwide assigned to watch Cuban spies -- not nearly enough to keep tabs on every Cuban
  diplomat who wanders the streets of New York, Washington and Miami.

  ''It's not like the movies,'' the security official said.

  ``You put two people out on somebody and they'll lose him. It's very hard to surveil somebody.''

THE LESSONS OF THE STASI/ GIVE ME LIBERTY BY DAVID HOFFMANN

 

THE LESSONS OF THE STASI

Fidel Castro’s intelligence services had long used subversion, deception, informers, and psychological pressure tactics. But Castro wanted to find new ways to suffocate any opposition in Cuba. He turned to the Stasi, the feared Ministry of State Security in East Germany. They had refined methods to detect opposition and nip it in the bud, including a type of psychological warfare known as Zeresertzung, or “decomposition.” The Stasi tutored Cuba’s state security in these methods, including wiretapping, which were later used against Oswaldo.

GIVE ME LIBERTY

By David Hoffmann 

https://www.davidehoffman.com/oswaldos-quest/

From Berlin to Havana

 

ESPIONAGE
E. Germans drew blueprint for Cuban spying (2007)

A once-jailed Cuban exile's research reveals how East Germany exported its repressive Stasi security system to Cuba, where it lives on

BY MICHAEL LEVITIN
Special to The Miami Herald

BERLIN 

https://havana-berlin-connection.blogspot.com/2011/05/east-germans-drew-blueprint-for-cuban.html

Cuban spies received secret messages by old-time short-wave

By Juan O. Tamayo

Every week, one short wave radio station in Cuba broadcasts 97 messages coded in fax-like tones. A computer program easily available to the public changes the tones into numbers, and the Cuban spies then decode the numbers into words.
A second Cuban spy station transmits 16 messages per week in the dots and dashes of the 175-year-old Morse code – secret messages to Havana spies who may be older or less technologically savvy.

Cuba’s most famous numbers station, known as “Atención” because of the opening line of the deadpan female voice in Spanish that started its transmissions, went off the air just late last year, Smolinski.

The lack of any accent in the voice of the Atención station was explained in December by Jorge García Vázquez, a Cuban in Berlin who has been researching the links between Havana and the STASI, the former East Germany’ intelligence service. A Jan. 10 1977 letter in the STASI archives shows Cuban intelligence Maj. Eddy Herrera had requested the equipment for a numbers station, preloaded with the Spanish words for one through zero, Attention, Goodbye and Final, Garcia Vázquez reported.

https://havana-berlin-connection.blogspot.com/2014/02/cuban-spies-received-secret-messages-by.html

The training of Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence officers in the techniques of the East German “counterintelligence state” was evident in many ways. The demise of the German Democratic Republic in 1990 and consequent access to Stasi files confirmed and expanded the understanding of the relationship. Regarding guerrilla CI, this relationship is important because Cuban trainers played substantial roles in passing on their knowledge to Latin American and other insurgent groups. Cuban researcher Jorge Luís Vázquez, 33 ..." 

http://www.slideshare.net/CIARO/jsou-guerrilla-counterintelligence

From Berlin to Havana: The Secret Stasi–DGI Axis

https://youtu.be/VT7YciPY_vw

The Kremlin Files: Russian Double Agents and Operational Games

 

THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — There are similarities among intelligence agencies worldwide. All professional services rely on tradecraft to recruit and manage assets. They all operate within bureaucratic systems and ultimately answer to political leaders. At a basic level, espionage tradecraft is a common professional language. However, Russian intelligence services (RIS) differ significantly from their Western counterparts in several key aspects. First, their primary mission is not to serve the interests of the Russian people, nor to protect the country's constitution; instead, their loyalty is to the regime and Putin’s personal political survival. And secondly, in terms of tradecraft, they differ from the CIA and other Western services in their approach and tactics. One of the most important—and often misunderstood—aspects of Russian intelligence is their use of double agents, known in Russian intelligence doctrine as operational games (operativnye igry).

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-kremlin-files-russian-double-agents-and-operational-games

By Sean Wiswesser

Former CIA Senior Operations Officer

Sean Wiswesser is a former senior operations officer with the CIA. He served multiple overseas tours and held senior leadership positions such as Chief of Station and in joint-duty assignments across the intelligence community. Sean is the author of the forthcoming book Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War (Spring 2026), which examines the evolution of Russia's intelligence services, their fight against the West, and their role in modern hybrid warfare.

United States consistently underestimates Cuban intelligence, sources say

 

March 18, 2024 by Ian Allen 5 Comments

AGENTS OF THE CUBAN government have “penetrated virtually every segment of the United States national security structure,” enabling Havana to share actionable intelligence with Russia and China, according to a new report. Citing former United States and Cuban intelligence officers, The Wall Street Journal said on Saturday that Washington’s counter- intelligence efforts are no match for Cuba and its intelligence service, the Dirección de Inteligencia (DI). The DI is “the best damn intelligence service in the world” for cultivating agents, according to Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst who served as the U.S. Intelligence Community’s National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. Latell told The Wall Street Journal that the Dirección de Inteligencia bears the imprint of Fidel Castro himself, who took a personal interest in running the service during his reign.

INTELNEWS

Electronic Warfare . Excerpts from the research report, "Havana-Berlin Connection": By Jorge L. García Vázquez

                   Electronic Warfare

Excerpts from the research report, "Havana-Berlin Connection"

By Jorge L. García Vázquez

"Dear Comrade Prieto,

Allow me to inform you that, thanks to the support of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Cuba, the assembly and commissioning of a 10-meter parabolic antenna was successfully completed at the Special Radio Services of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR".

(Letter from General Manfred Männchen, head of the Stasi's Special Radio Services, to Colonel Abelardo Prieto Rodríguez, head of Directorate XI of the Ministry of the Interior, October 30, 1985).

The Radio Intelligence (RI) and Radio Counter-Intelligence (RCI) departments of the Ministry of the Interior and their East German counterparts in the Stasi engaged in intense and costly collaboration.

The development of "electronic warfare" in Cuba has a name: Ramiro Valdés. The Minister of the Interior of Cuba at the time dedicated special attention to this sector. During a meeting with high-ranking Stasi officers, Valdés proposed turning Cuba into an "Electronic Warfare laboratory" for the benefit of the socialist bloc.

An important collaboration agreement was signed on June 30, 1983, between the Special Radio Services of the Ministry of State Security (MfS) and the Cuban Directorate of Counterintelligence.

In 1975, a Stasi delegation visited Cuba. A report on the visit stated:

"The Ministry of the Interior (MININT) has requested the support of the MfS. Cuban counterintelligence has existed since 1961. Its main department is located in Santiago de las Vegas, 25 kilometers south of Havana and near the Rancho Boyeros Airport. Other centers are located in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Four radio direction-finding stations are located in other parts of the country".

What did this collaboration entail, and what were its technical and operational objectives?

(a) Intercept and decrypt enemy Special Services' and agents' transmissions.

(b) Monitor radio communications in East Germany and Cuba and in the diplomatic missions accredited in both countries.