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Guest Post
By Ante Horvat
Foreign Intelligence Agencies, Capabilities, and Croatia
The revelations last year by Edward Snowden – and the brave reporting by Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues at The Intercept, as well as in quality independent blogs such as Washingtonsblog.com – shine a bright light on just how massive, invasive, many times in most countries, blatantly unconstitutional, and illegal surveillance has become in the world today with borderline psychotic government obsessions to control internet discourse on politics and geopolitics.
Information management is power, as management equates to control.
While the internet was not what it is today in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, signals intelligence was a key component of intelligence for all states – the pervasiveness of Internet usage has only exponentially increased its usefulness to further these goals.
Yugoslavia, which broke with Stalin earning it a false reputation as some moderate Communist regime and not a police state, due to Cold War realities managed to receive many perks.
One of those is UDBa crimes not being touched with a ten foot pole by Western governments unless the murderers were too sloppy.
Or, as was the case with the Croatian Six, a Western intelligence agency and national police would collude with UDBa to frame law-abiding citizens of Croatian descent for trumped up, UDBa planned and planted “terrorism” charges. In the case of Chicago’s Bozic family, UDBa’s attempted murder of Mrs. Bozic after she told her husband’s would be UDBa assassins that came knocking on her home door that he had left early for work that day, the Cold War perks for Yugoslavia led to a total gag on the investigation after 24 hours with no valid explanation, no further investigation, nor justice, to date.
Yet, even with the repressive domestic police state apparatus, and an aggressive foreign intelligence apparatus targeting dissenters in the West for murder, Yugoslavia was of many nations to be sold the intelligence and law enforcement Google before Google – PROMIS software.
The controversial software – which tracked cases in legal systems, but also intelligence operatives, assets, intelligence targets, and built matrices of relationships between everything in the system if there was any connection – was sold by the US to over 80 nations in the 1980s after being stolen from Inslaw Inc..
It is known that the sold pirated versions – which made it to over 80 countries – had exploits to allow for information extraction.
Which means that the U.S. – and its Five Eyes allies – potentially almost certainly had back door access to all of the not just judicial files, but also intelligence agencies’ files which in the case of Yugoslavia and other nations in the Eastern Bloc, including repressive secret police agent lists, informants and snitches, and the names and dossiers of all civilians under surveillance, which in Croatia’s case, was one third of its population.
This opens several questions.
The first is that with the fall of Tito’s Yugoslavia, why haven’t Western governments, other than Germany, aggressively called for UDBa operatives who engaged in state sponsored terrorism, to be held accountable, as well as for insisting that European states that were under Communism, to push through vigorous lustration laws such as in Germany upon reunification and Poland after it regained true independence?
The second is why, after 1990, this information which the U.S. and more than likely other Five Eyes have on the inner-workings, employee lists, informant and snitch lists, and innocent victims’ dossier lists, have not been shared with Croatia’s (or other Central, Eastern and South Eastern) European post-Communist states?
Could it be that all of those former regime elements, who were loyal to Yugoslavia and their own power within it and who were also trained operatives, were recruited by foreign governments for subversive activities?
All signs point to yes.
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About the author: Ante Horvat was born in the USA in 1970′s. He has recently moved to live permanently in Croatia and although spending most of his life in the USA he had made several temporary residence visits to Croatia during that time. His education and professional development in history and international relations also spans across the two continents. He is an active observer of and participant in the development of democracy in Croatia since the early 1990’s and its correlation with the developed Western democracies.
Related Posts:
http://inavukic.com/2014/04/05/psychological-operations-and-information-warfare-against-croatia-and-croats-part-iii/
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There will never be a balance between a “safe State” and privacy. One thing you will never hear any country say is that our nation is safe and we steer clear of any invasive measures to our citizens. Never. Enjoyed your post.
Cheers Mocha – yes that is quite so, privacy is cheap, but when breaching it threatens personal safety and national integrity then it’s a whole new ballgame we should not tolerate.
Ina, I’m curious to know your opinion of Putin. In the US, there is a constant propaganda campaign against him–which makes me believe that he may be doing a few things right.
Two things I know about him is that he does what is in Russia’s best interests and has an 80% approval rating. The US congress has a 7% approval rating and does *not* do what is in the best interest of its own (or the world’s) population.
I’m actually a bit surprised that despite the uniform propaganda many Americans, like me, have a fairly high opinion of him. In other words, we wish we had “leaders” interested in our best interests–and we don’t. I have no idea why the US should be tinkering around with the internal affairs of Russia. Yet, they are.
I think, Donald, the difference between Putin and US is that Putin only looks at Russia and its position while the US seems to have a wider impact of its actions than just the US – I have not been convinced that Putin uses the language of “world” peace, however hollow and impossible that may be. A separatist flavour to Putin’s politics can be seen in its latest actions in Ukraine… now, is Putin “better” than US congress/Obama in acting in interests of own country? When I look at that I look at the life of ordinary people in each country and one cannot but see that Russians are no better off than the US people – there’s a great deal of misery on the streets of Russia and poverty, probably more than in the US… as a leader Putin is probably as strong as Obama but that in itself does not mean that they are good leaders of their people…What Putin seems to be fighting is the notion of US being the world’s leading and strongest country – he’d like a piece of that “glory” I think
Thanks for the feedback and for your perspective on that question, professor. I appreciate it.
😀
I found this quite well written and intriguing yet we all know it is true… In fact the KGB has nothing on the western democracies as far as surveillance of its citizens, with today’s technology it is even more important as you noted to draw a line and not tolerate such practices. 🙂
Thank you Joe Bradshaw, indeed we should not tolerate such practices and they need to be exposed and dealt with, otherwise fear digs into the bones and we lose the most precious quality of life: freedom from fear.
My dear friend, there is an award waiting for you on my blog. Congratulations. Hugs, Barbara
You’re so great, Barbara – thank you!
Reblogged this on idealisticrebel.
Thank you for the reblog, Barbara. Hugs, Ina
Reblogged this on Brittius.com.
Thank you for the reblog, Brittius. Much appreciated
You are most welcome.
😀
questo è davvero molto, troppo triste, come tu dici in risposta ad un commento toccare la privacy del singolo una ingiustizia, ma quella di una nazione è un vero reato, purtroppo viviamo in un mondo in cui ci fanno diventare troppo difficile riconoscere la verità dalla menzogna, ma non bisogna mai di stancarsi a cercare
grazie per tutto quello che ci fai conoscere
This is really very sad, too, as you say in response to a comment, tap the privacy of the individual an injustice, but that of a nation is a real crime, unfortunately we live in a world where we make it too difficult to recognise the truth from falsehood, but don’t ever get tired of trying
Thank you for all that you know
Cheers, ventisqueras – in good condition to pursue truth 😀
With all the internal problems the US has I find it stunning that my government is *always* looking for a fight somewhere with someone. It really makes me angry. They meddle in everyone else’s affairs when they can’t even take care of their own. 1/4 of all the prisoners in the world are in the US, the land of the “free.”
We recently found out that our leaders were (yet again) lying to us to get into (yet another) war. They knew that Assad didn’t use that saren gas, but they made every effort to convince people that he did.
The US citizens are (with the possible exception of North Korea) the most brainwashed population on earth. And right now, I know that the National “Security” Agency may be reading this. It isn’t just the Croats that they are using psy-ops, and I don’t really understand why. We do have a heavily financed military industrial complex that makes a good deal of money off of using weapons. Eisenhower, a former general, and at the time, the president in his farewell address warned about that threat. He was right.
I suppose, Donald, US rates as the “leader country” of the Western world if not the most powerful in the world and, hence, its actions to “lead” ? While the spy system in US of US or others spying on US does exist it does not have the same intent as it does for Croatia – psychological operations and information warfare focused on Croatia have had and still do the intent to destroy the integrity of the Croatian state…
This was an interesting series. Some thoughts I agreed with, some I disagreed with. However, I do think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and in practicality, I don’t think it’s going to get better unless we can, as suggested by John Lennon, do away with religion and countries. As long as those two exist, though, there will always be “psychotic government obsessions” about whose god is bigger and badder, whose military might be planning an invasion. The United States wrongly invading Iran and Afghanistan provided the “right” of Russia to invade Crimea/Ukraine. The U.S. set a dangerous precedent with pre-emptive invasions, and, I believe, the impetus for World War III.
Ah Russel Ray, Lennon imagined well just as many did before and after him…but the world seems to be lost to power seekers who will do anything to keep it and build on it, until I imagine their own power gets so huge and out of hand that it will lead to WWIII
And the U.S. Supreme Court is doing everything it can to make the rich power seekers here much more comfortable in their power seeking.
and so the US Supreme Court is in on Economic Liberalism that’s just beginning to show its ugly face to the needy, to those without opportunities for a fair chance …