Domestic Intelligence in Nondemocratic Regimes

This Special Issue follows from a panel, “A ‘Domestic War on Terror?’: Learning from Others and Lessons for the United States,” at the 2022 International Studies Association Annual Convention. The panel used historical case studies to examine how nondemocratic regimes leveraged domestic intelligence to exert and maintain control. Even after these regimes fell or collapsed, domestic intelligence shaped states, societies, and individuals. This special issue offers several original case studies of domestic intelligence in nondemocratic regimes, incorporating new research and insights as intelligence increasingly impacts the lives of citizens of both democratic and nondemocratic states across the world.

INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES IN NONDEMOCRATIC REGIMES: PURPOSE AND ROLE

Nondemocratic regimes establish and employ intelligence services primarily to ensure the “survival” of the regime.¹ Indeed, as Greitens argues, “[A]utocrats who want to stay in power must simultaneously defend themselves from two different internal threats: threats from the population and threats from elites, especially elites in the coercive apparatus itself.”² These regimes use political or security services to control, intimidate, manipulate, abuse, and oppress real and/or imaginary “ideological enemies,” both domestically and abroad, with no respect for human rights and liberties. In general, these organizations are not democratically accountable but are usually under the control of the regime’s top leaders. Thus, these types of intelligence services have relatively high autonomy and high penetration of society.³ Notable examples of political police include Romania’s Securitate, Germany’s Stasi, Czechoslovakia’s StB, Russia’s KGB, Chile’s DINA, and Brazil’s SNI.⁴

With time, as nondemocracies tend to increasingly rely on the intelligence agencies, the power and size of these types of intelligence services grow considerably, which allows the security services to morph into independent security states. Independent security states gain incremental autonomy from the regime and insulation from any scrutiny while maintaining a high penetration of society. These intelligence agencies exhibit extreme secrecy, deep penetration of society, no accountability, frequent violation of fundamental rights and liberties, and abuses against real and imaginary opponents of the regimes.⁵ Such intelligence apparatuses existed at some point in time in Brazil (SNI), Iran (SAVAK), South Africa (BOSS), and even less-studied examples like Portugal, as Andrés de Castro explains in this Special Issue.

Whether functioning as security organizations or independent security states, intelligence services in nondemocracies are “effectively” collecting information, relentlessly monitoring, and frequently abusing—and killing—citizens.⁶ For example, with U.S. support, Latin American military dictatorships in the second half of the twentieth century implemented the so-called national security doctrines that granted their armed forces and military intelligence services carte blanche to counter subversion violently.⁷ U.S. support to nondemocratic regimes even extended to anti-Soviet communist states; for example, Tito’s Yugoslavia, as Florina Cristiana Matei explains in this issue. Intelligence apparatuses in these nations practiced state terrorism, using the rule of force and fear against their citizens.⁸ Unsurprisingly, the intelligence services’ repressive practices led to dire, en masse, human rights violations, illegal detentions, and torture of their fellow citizens that resulted in the deaths and disappearances of countless people throughout the region.⁹

Moreover, the reach of these intelligence services extended beyond their borders to expats and exiles in other countries, as Ardavan Khoshnood and Arvin Khoshnood discuss in this Special Issue with reference to Iranian operations against dissidents. Émigrés are always high-priority targets for intelligence services in nondemocratic regimes, especially if they become acerbic critics of the regime at home.¹⁰

Since the advent of the internet and the cyber realm, the rapid advancement in new technologies, including biometrics, spyware, and social network analysis, has boosted the ability of nondemocratic intelligence agencies to carry out their abusive and repressive tasks more effectively, rapidly, and even less costly. Some states are exporting surveillance models to others, as Luis da Vinha explains regarding Africa’s smart cities and digital authoritarianism.

Intelligence agencies in nondemocratic regimes help the ruling elite create either a surveillance state or police state, or both. The latter “combine … psychological fear … with … physical abuses,” as Matei et al. note.¹¹ Dumitru argues that Romania’s Securitate was the aspiration of all intelligence services in nondemocratic regimes: “The service seemed to be an omniscient and omnipresent force which exerted, on behalf of the totalitarian regime, a total control over the population.”¹² If not true in terms of total physical control, then certainly there was an element of psychological control that gripped the citizens of these states. In this Special Issue, for instance, Yaacov Falkov recounts the Soviet practice of profilaktika (“prophylaxis”) operations aimed at “sterilizing” and stamping out dissent.

The democratization process revealed entrenched patterns and practices that were the product of deeply rooted intelligence systems. In this connection, in this Special Issue, Eleni Braat, Antonio Díaz, and Dries Putter explore the areas of continuity and change in Greece, Spain, and South Africa, respectively, as an outgrowth of their old nondemocratic regimes. All in all, as the articles in this Special Issue reveal, intelligence effectiveness against the enemies of the regime is pivotal in helping dictatorships—and their legacies—endure.¹³

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florina Cristiana Matei

Florina Cristiana (Cris) Matei is a Senior Lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where she teaches M.A. courses for the Center for Homeland Security and Department of National Security Affairs. She is the coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations, published in 2021; The Conduct of Intelligence in Democracies: Processes, Practices, Cultures, published in 2019; and the Handbook of Latin American and Caribbean Intelligence Cultures, published in 2022. She is the Chair of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association. The author can be contacted at [email protected].

Jeff Rogg

Jeff Rogg is an Assistant Professor at Joint Special Operations University. He is currently revising his book manuscript, The Spy and the State: The Story of American Intelligence, under contract with Oxford University Press. He also currently serves as the Communications Director/Newsletter Editor for the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association and the Virtual Speaker Series Coordinator for the North American Society for Intelligence History. The author can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1 Linz and Stepan introduce four different types of nondemocratic regimes: authoritarian, totalitarian, post-totalitarian, and sultanistic. In their typology, authoritarian is a category of nondemocracies. Nonetheless, most academics use the term authoritarian to describe a nondemocratic regime in general, not necessarily to depict Linz and Stepan’s specific regime. Unless the authors specify that they are referring to Linz and Stepan’s typology when they use the term authoritarian, this introduction will use authoritarian as a generic term for nondemocratic regimes. J. J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

2 Thus, if autocrats fear the elites more, they fragment the security agencies to prevent elite challengers from ganging up to stage coups; if they fear the population more, they create efficient security service agglomerates (as was the case of East Germany’s Stasi or Romania’s Securitate) that seek to permeate and control the entire population. S. C. Greitens, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics). (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

3 Peter Gill, Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1994); T. C. Bruneau and S. C. Boraz, Reforming Intelligence: Obstacles to Democratic Control and Effectiveness (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); T. C. Bruneau and K. R. Dombroski, “Reforming Intelligence: The Challenge of Control in New Democracies,” in Who Guards the Guardians and How: Democratic Civil-Military Relations, edited by T. C. Bruneau and S. D. Tollefson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 145–177.

4 KGB stands for Committee for State Security; StB stands for State Security; SNI stands for National Information Service.

5 Gill, Policing Politics; Bruneau and Boraz, Reforming Intelligence; Bruneau and Dombroski, “Reforming Intelligence.”

6 Florina Cristiana Matei and A. Castro García, “Transitional Justice and Intelligence Democratization,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2019), pp. 717–736. https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2019.1621106. Florina Cristiana Matei, C. Halladay, and E. Estevez, Handbook of Intelligence Cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

7 For more information, see Florina Cristiana Matei, C. Halladay, and E. Estevez, Handbook of Intelligence Cultures in Latin America and the Carribean (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

8 Ibid.

9 In fact, it was because of these egregious human rights abuses that the verb “disappear” became a transitive verb in the region. Ibid.

10 More often than not when targeting émigrés, intelligence services in nondemocratic regimes collaborate with organized criminal groups or individual terrorists to achieve their goals. Romania’s Securitate, for example, used Carl the Jackal, the notorious terrorist, to eliminate émigrés—including Radio Free Europe journalists—who criticized the Ceaușescu regime. Florina Cristiana Matei, “Balancing Democratic Civilian Control with Effectiveness of Intelligence in Romania: Lessons Learned and Best/Worst Practices Before and After NATO and EU Integration,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2014), pp. 619–637; Florina Cristiana Matei, “The Challenges of Intelligence Sharing in Romania,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009), pp. 574–585; Florina Cristiana Matei, “The Legal Framework for Intelligence in Post-Communist Romania,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2009), pp. 667–698; Florina Cristiana Matei, “The Media’s Role in Intelligence Democratization,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2014), pp. 73–108. Florina Cristiana Matei, “Romania’s Anti-Terrorism Capabilities: Transformation, Cooperation, Effectiveness,” BIlten Slovenske Vojske (March 2010), pp. 98–103; Florina Cristiana Matei, “Romania’s Intelligence Community: From an Instrument of Dictatorship to Serving Democracy,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2007), pp. 629–660; Florina Cristiana Matei, “Reconciling Intelligence Effectiveness and Transparency: The Case of Romania,” Strategic Insights, Vol. VI, No. 3 (2007); Florina Cristiana Matei and T. C. Bruneau, “Intelligence Reform in New Democracies: Factors Supporting or Arresting Progress,” Democratization, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2011), pp. 602–630; Florina Cristiana Matei and T. C. Bruneau, “Policymakers and Intelligence Reform in the New Democracies,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2011), pp. 656–691; T. C. Bruneau and Florina Cristiana Matei, “Intelligence in the Developing Democracies: The Quest for Transparency and Effectiveness,” in The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, edited by Loch K. Johnson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012); Florina Cristiana Matei and C. Halladay, The Conduct of Intelligence in Democracies: Processes, Practices, Cultures (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2019).

11 Florina Cristiana Matei, A. de Castro García, and C. C. Halladay, “On Balance: Intelligence Democratization in Post-Franco Spain,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2018), pp. 769–804, at p. 772. http://hdl.handle.net/10945/62481

12 I. Dumitru, “Building an Intelligence Culture From Within: The SRI and Romanian Society,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2014), pp. 569–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2014.900298

13 Matei and Bruneau, “Intelligence Reform in New Democracies”; Matei and Bruneau, “Policymakers and Intelligence Reform in the New Democracies”; Bruneau and Matei, “Intelligence in the Developing Democracies”; Matei and Halladay, The Conduct of Intelligence in Democracies.