ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

CT Scannersnames most often have littler or no relationship to theclassified item, person, or event that they represent. Sometimes,such cryptonym are intentionally misleading. DuringWorld War II, the American military used the codename “Husky” to refer to a planned 1943 invasion ofNorth Africa.Intelligence and military agents working in the fieldoften use cryptonym to disguise their identity. As meansof protecting both volunteer operatives and the organizations,members of partisan groups in the French Resistancereferred to each other by code names. Names ofFrench villages, historical persons, and professional titleswere commonly used cryptonym. Resistance volunteersadhered to the codename system to minimize the chanceof Gestapo infiltrators, or with captured partisans underduress, easily identifying organization members.Other types of cryptonym include number series,now commonly used in reference to military and computertechnology, and symbols. Though used extensivelythroughout history as a means of maintaining a secretidentity, the practice of substituting secret symbols forproper names has fallen out of favor. In medieval Franceand England, knights and nobles wishing to send secretcommunications often signed their messages with secretivewax seals different in color and design from theirfamily crests or signature seals.Although assigning intelligence matters of great importancea cryptonym is one of the oldest espionage andenciphering technologies, the practice remains commonplacetoday. Code names are no longer the exclusivedomain of governments, military, or intelligence agencies.With the advent of the Internet, the ever-present username, or handle, has become the most popularly usedfrom of cryptonym.SEE ALSOCode WordCT Scanners.SEE Scanning Technologies.Cuba, Intelligenceand SecurityCuba has a security and intelligence apparatus that, whenconsidered in light of the nation’s size and its weak economy,is on a scale many times larger than that of theUnited States. Whereas its poverty, lack of exports, anddepressed economic conditions would normally makeCuba an irrelevant player on the international scene, itsclandestine operations extend its influence throughoutthe globe.Chief among Cuban intelligence agencies is theDirección General de Inteligencia (DGI), or General IntelligenceDirectorate. Established within the Ministry of theInterior in 1961, DGI initially took an aggressive role infomenting third-world Communist revolutions. By the late1960s, however, Cuba’s Soviet sponsors had grown waryof this adventurism, and pressured Castro to purge DGIleadership. Thereafter the agency focused on intelligencecollection.Operations against the United States. Today DGI collects awide variety of data through its operatives in Europe, theThird World, and North America—especially the last ofthese, because the United States is Cuba’s self-declarednumber-one foe. The Cuban delegation to the UnitedNations in New York City is the third-largest in the world,and it has been estimated that nearly half of its personnelare DGI officers. In 1982, United States authorities convictedfour Castro aides of smuggling drugs into theUnited States, and subsequently uncovered a vast drugsmugglingring that operated in cooperation with GeneralManuel Noriega’s Panama, as well as with Colombiandrug lords.Over a period of five years beginning in 1998, theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uncovered a Floridaspy ring consisting of at least 16 Cuban operatives. Theyfunctioned on a shoestring budget, and had to account toHavana for money spent, but in the realm of spying atleast, Castro’s regime often manifests what analysts contendis a certain economic genius. In some cases, Havanareceives intelligence free of cost. Ana B. Montes, a seniorintelligence analyst at the Pentagon arrested in September2002, received no money for activities on behalf ofCuba. Referring to the United States economic embargoagainst Cuba, in force since 1961, Montes claimed heractions reflected her concern over allegations of Washington’salleged unfair treatment of the Castro regime.After the DGI reorganization, responsibility for “nationalliberation movements” shifted to the National LiberationDirectorate (DLN), that in 1974 became the AmericaDepartment (DA) of the Communist Party of CubaCentral Committee. DA, which supported the Communistmovements that gained control of Nicaragua and Grenadain the 1970s and 1980s, is reported to have trained andsupported guerrillas and terrorists. Many of its operativesfunction in supposedly innocuous positions, including thediplomatic corps and Cuban-front corporations.In addition to DGI and DA, there is the Military CounterintelligenceDepartment of the Ministry of RevolutionaryArmed Forces, which conducts counterintelligence,signals intelligence, and electronic warfare activities againstthe United States.292 Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security