A police state needs it secret police to quietly maintain domestic ‘order’ and to hold onto power. Believe it or not, the police state was not invented by the U.S. *chuckle* Power has always been paranoid and obsessive about domestic revolution and disobedience. This obsessiveness is one of the reasons why secret police are so common around the globe and throughout history. Remember the Black Iron Prison? Men in black with iron-shod boots knocking on your door in the dark of morning.
- Oprichnina – Secret police of the Tsars, especially Ivan the Terrible. The oprichniki constituted a security police whose relentless aim was to purge the land of treacherous elements. Ivan’s victims suffered heartless torture. Many were drowned or strangled or flogged to death; some were impaled, others roasted on a spit, still others fried in large skillets. The entire city of Novgorod was put to torture on the charge that its archbishop was planning to hand over the city to the Lithuanians. Sixty thousand of its citizens were butchered in a week-long orgy. But churchmen, boyars, and merchants whom Ivan suspected of treason were not the only ones to suffer. His favorites, the oprichniki leaders, died in an agonizing torture more fiendish than anything they had devised for their victims.
- The Cheka – Secret police of the Bolsheviks. (VChK; Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) 1917-1922. From this point the Cheka initiated a period of mass executions of people not based only on their specific actions, such as sabotage, but also for their beliefs and class origins. In reprisal for the assassination of the German ambassador, the Cheka executed 350 Social Revolutionaries and 512 hostages were shot by the Secret Police after the assassination attempt on Lenin. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were executed by the Cheka during the Red Terror.
In addition to mass executions, the Cheka also initiated the infamous slave labor camps to imprison not only those considered undesirable but also people who happened to have the wrong class origins, most particularly the bourgeoisie. By the end of 1920 Soviet Russia had 84 of these concentration camps with about 50,000 prisoners. This prison system grew rapidly immediately following the Russian Civil War so that by 1923 the number grew to a total of 315 camps.
- The Gestapo – Secret police of Nazi Germany – The Geheime Staatspolizei (German for Secret State Police, abbreviated “Gestapo”) was formally organized after the Nazi’s seized power in 1933. Hermann G�ring, the Prussian minister of the interior, detached the espionage and political units of the Prussian police. And staffed them with thousands of Nazis. G�ring became the commander of this new force on April 26, 1933. At the same time that Goring was organzing the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler was directing the SS (Schutzstaffel, German for “Protective Echelon”), Hitler’s elite paramilitary corps. In April of 1936 he was given command of the Gestapo as well, integrating all of Germany’s police units under Himmler.
- Savak – The Shah’s brutal secret police force, Savak, formed under the guidance of CIA (the United States Central Intelligence Agency) in 1957 and personnel trained by Mossad (Israel’s secret service), to directly control all facets of political life in Iran. Its main task was to suppress opposition to the Shah’s government and keep the people’s political and social knowledge as minimal as possible. Savak was notorious throughout Iran for its brutal methods.
- Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) – later Committee for State Security (KGB) – Secret police of Stalinist Russia – The NKVD broke prisoners down by intense interrogation. This included the threat to arrest and execute members of the prisoner’s family if they did not confess. The interrogation went on for several days and nights and eventually they became so exhausted and disoriented that they signed confessions agreeing that they had been attempting to overthrow the government.
- The Stasi (Ministerium f�r Staatssicherheit) – Secret police of Communist East Germany – Our own CIA has classified files it stole from the Stasi – The Stasi used a huge network of informants to repress the citizens of East Germany. It was not uncommon for members of families to spy on each other for fear of blackmail, as a result of physical threats and even because of monetary rewards from the secret police force. In the late �80s, the Stasi had nearly 175,000 official informants on their books, roughly one informant for every 100 people. (Some estimate the size of the �unofficial� Stasi informant force as nearly 10 times this level.) The Stasi maintained a force of over 90,000 uniformed and plain-clothes agents.
- Shin Bet / Mossad – Israel’s secret police – In 1982, reports of torture became widespread following the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon, especially at the Ansar detention camp. An incident in 1984, however, became the turning point in precise documentation of torture in Israel. Majid and Subhi Abujumaa were beaten to death by the Israeli secret police (the Shin Bet) following a failed bus hijacking in Gaza. The truth that the cousins were murdered during interrogation, and not during the storming of the bus as the Israeli government had reported, only surfaced after an Israeli newspaper printed a photograph of one of the men being led away in handcuffs. This incident led to the Landau Commission investigation into the practices of the Shin Bet. The Israeli Government Commission documented the use of torture to obtain confessions from detained Palestinians, yet none of the convictions based upon such coerced confessions reversed.
- CIA(Central Intelligence Agency)/ FBI(Federal Bureau of Investigation)/ SS (Secret Service)/ NSA (National Security Administration) – America’s secret police – We have more than anyone else. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been operating as a secret police force. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a history of domestic political spying on famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, on civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and on a wide variety of legitimate organizations. These domestic counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) used infiltration, eavesdropping, and disinformation campaigns to harass and destroy such groups as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.