MIAMI — A House Republican chairman accused US intelligence agencies on Tuesday of “definitely” being implicated in a “cover up” concerning “Havana Syndrome,” the strange illness that has afflicted hundreds of US officials — both at home and abroad.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Monday, March 9, 2026
The East German State Security as mentor of the Cuban political police
By Jorge L. García Vázquez
The MININT Archive (statistics 1980)
Jorge Luis Garcia Vázquez author of the blog STASI-MININT, is a Cuban exile living in Berlin. In his blog he provides lots of information about the relationship between the STASI & the MININT. In his paper “El Archivo del MININT y el asesoramiento de la STASI.” (The MININT Archive and the advice of the STASI), he provides the followings statistics :
Until 1980 the MININT had prepared a total of:
2,088,571 records or documents of the State Security6,056,847 records
pertaining to Internal Order
"This total quantity of documents: 8,145,418, was the main
problem of the MININT, their classification, organization and conservation,
especially of 160,000 pre-1959 records...
. The Stasi report describes the exact location of the Archive, the status
of the personal Card Index, which contains “all the Counterintelligence
materials, for example the data on informants, operations carried out or
documents of operational importance.”
In this card index alone were registered 4 million people with the following
personal data: surname, first name, date of birth, gender, skin color, codified
fingerprints and registration number....
Foto J.L.García Vazquez
"This total quantity of documents: 8,145,418, was the main problem of the MININT, their classification, organization and conservation, especially of 160,000 pre-1959 records...
.
The Stasi report describes the exact location of the Archive, the status of the personal Card Index, which contains “all the Counterintelligence materials, for example the data on informants, operations carried out or documents of operational importance.”
The Stasi report describes the exact location of the Archive, the status of the personal Card Index, which contains “all the Counterintelligence materials, for example the data on informants, operations carried out or documents of operational importance.”
In this card index alone were registered 4 million people with the following personal data: surname, first name, date of birth, gender, skin color, codified fingerprints and registration number.
Monday, March 2, 2026
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.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Infiltration, seduction among Cuban spy tactics in U.S. BY TIM JOHNSON/ Jun 16 2002 Miami Herald
The Miami Herald
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.''
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
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
Thursday, February 19, 2026
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
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
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.
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.
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 ..."
From Berlin to Havana: The Secret Stasi–DGI Axis
Saturday, February 7, 2026
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
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