The Stasi- Old School Masters of PsyWar
East German (GDR) Secret Police methods targeted individuals and groups
From 1950 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, operated as the main security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR). In terms of modern US governmental structures and operations, the closest bureaucratic analog to the mandate of the Stasi is the US Department of Homeland Security, particularly CISA (The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency). However, aspects of modern CIA, FBI, and NSA data collection and PsyWar/Mockingbird operations also overlap with the general mandate of the Stasi within the GDR, as do some of the group or gangstalking activities sponsored by the CDC via the public-private partnership “CDC Foundation” and its contractor and subcontractor relationships (for example; “Public Good Projects” and “Shots Heard Round the World”).
Figure 1: Webpage images from the Public Goods Projects and Shots Heard Round The World non-profit organizations.
Additional details and evidence of coordination, illegal cyber/crowd/group stalking, financial and contractual relationships between the CDC Foundation and these organizations can be found in the Substack Essay titled “Fifth Gen Warfare, Part 3” and Epoch Times reporting titled “CDC Partners With ‘Social and Behavior Change’ Initiative to Silence Vaccine Hesitancy”
Modern Western/NATO PsyWar “hybrid warfare,” as practiced by the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand governments (Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance States - “FVEY”), targets both offshore and domestic citizens, dissident groups, and whole populations. In FVEY nations currently deployed PsyWar methods are often operationalized via mercenary “censorship-industrial complex” corporations and intelligence community cutouts. The strategies and tactics used strive to integrate well-developed psychological manipulation techniques with sophisticated modern information technologies including internet-specific tools, a variety of computational algorithms, sponsored bot and troll activities, infiltrators and chaos agents, group/crowdstalking, and advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, among others. These methods and activities are described and detailed in the soon-to-be-published book “PsyWar. Enforcing the New World Order” by Malone and Malone (Skyhorse publishing). The overall objective of this work is to inform the general public of the PsyWar methods and technologies that are being routinely deployed on them so that individual citizens are more able to resist the effects of these forms of psychological manipulation and better able to make independent, informed political choices consistent with fundamental democratic and social contract principles.
Most of this FVEY-nation PsyWar activity is carefully cloaked by “classification,” shrouded in mystery and confidentiality agreements, and jealously guarded from disclosure to citizens and the general public. However, by examining the structure and practices of historic totalitarian organizations such as the GDR and its Stasi, highly effective PsyWar methods developed and deployed before the advent of modern 21st-century digital communications and data storage technologies can be identified and understood. Because these methods are based on fundamental truths relating to human psychology, they are timeless. Whether or not Stasi methods are consciously used as models for modern FVEY State PsyWar strategies and tactics, examining the methods used by the Stasi can provide insight and comprehension of these modern internet-exploiting “dark” operations, strategies, and tactics.
In contrast to most modern comprehensive PsyWar operations, strategies, and capabilities, the Stasi almost exclusively focused on pre-crime psychological manipulation of individuals and smaller groups, which were identified as potential threats to the State. Therefore, by examining Stasi methods and practices, current FVEY State operations that target individuals and groups can be better understood, and potential future trends in PsyWar strategies and tactics can be anticipated.
For those unfamiliar with the dark history of the German Democratic Republic and its Stazi, Britannica provides an excellent brief synopsis that includes historical videos. It may be useful to review this information now before diving into the details that follow.
Britannica summarizes Stazi operations:
Under Erich Mielke, its director from 1957 to 1989, the Stasi became a highly effective secret police organization. Within East Germany it sought to infiltrate every institution of society and every aspect of daily life, including even intimate personal and familial relationships. It accomplished this goal both through its official apparatus and through a vast network of informants and unofficial collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), who spied on and denounced colleagues, friends, neighbours, and even family members. By 1989 the Stasi relied on 500,000 to 2,000,000 collaborators as well as 100,000 regular employees, and it maintained files on approximately 6,000,000 East German citizens—more than one-third of the population.
All of this Stasi capability relied on old-school data collection and massive archives of written and typed paper-based files. In contrast, modern FVEY PsyWar surveillance and data storage capabilities support an analogous but much more comprehensive, automated capacity at a level that the Stasi could only dream of. For example, modern FVEY PsyWar censorship-industrial public-private partnerships integrate with and have directly sponsored the development of the comprehensive Surveillance Capitalism business model and activities that power Amazon, “X”, Facebook, TicTok, and virtually all other social media and online activities. The Stasi files were housed in a massive central government building. The modern FVEY surveillance files are located in a variety of mirrored, redundant server farms, which are distributed across the United States and the World, and are operated by both State agencies (for example the massive Utah Data Center of the National Security Agency) and by private contractors (Amazon cloud services, Microsoft cloud services, Google/Alphabet, etc.).
Figure 2: Former GDR Stasi building, now the Stasi museum of unified Germany.
Concerned that Stasi officials were destroying the organization’s files, East German citizens occupied its main headquarters in Berlin on January 15, 1990. In 1991, after considerable debate, the unified German parliament (Bundestag) passed the Stasi Records Law, which granted to Germans and foreigners the right to view their Stasi files. By the early 21st century nearly two million people had reviewed the surveillance files archived at the Stasi museum.
Figure 3: Utah Data Center of the US National Security Agency.
This data center facility is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake, and was completed in May 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion. Critics believe that the data center has the capability to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'. In response to claims that the data center would be used to illegally monitor the email of U.S. citizens, in April 2013 an NSA spokesperson said, "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center, ... one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, U.S. citizens. This is simply not the case." In April 2009, officials at the United States Department of Justice acknowledged that the NSA had engaged in large-scale over-collection of domestic communications in excess of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's authority but claimed that the acts were unintentional and had since been rectified. In August 2012, The New York Times published short documentaries by independent filmmakers titled The Program, based on interviews with former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Binney. Binney alleged that the Bluffdale facility was designed to store a broad range of domestic communications for data mining without warrants.
The Stazi were experts in using PsyWar to neutralize individuals and groups suspected or accused of being pre-crime threats to the State.
Although the Stasi employed a wide range of more traditional totalitarian PsyWar and psychological crowd manipulation techniques, the unique set of strategies and tactics that they developed and deployed was known as Zersetzung (pronounced [t͡sɛɐ̯ˈzɛt͡sʊŋ], German for "decomposition" and "disruption"). Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities. People were commonly targeted on a pre-emptive and preventive basis, to limit or stop activities of dissent that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind "a facade of social normality" in the form of "silent repression".
For further information on Zersetzung, including documentation and details, see “Annie Ring. After the Stasi: Collaboration and the Struggle for Sovereign Subjectivity in the Writing of German Unification. 280 pages, Bloomsbury Academic (October 22, 2015) ISBN 1472567609.”
The Stasi used Zersetzung tactics both on individuals and groups. There was no particular homogeneous target group, as opposition in the GDR came from a number of different sources. Tactical plans were thus separately adapted to each perceived threat. The Stasi nevertheless defined several main target groups, some of which are similar to groups known to be targeted by the US Department of Homeland Security:
associations of people making collective visa applications for travel abroad
artists' groups critical of the government
religious opposition groups
youth subculture groups
groups supporting the above (human rights and peace organizations, those assisting illegal departure from the GDR, and expatriate and defector movements).
The Stasi also occasionally used Zersetzung on non-political organizations regarded as undesirable, such as the Watchtower Society of Jehovah's Witnesses.
British journalist Luke Harding, who had experienced treatment on the part of Russia's FSB in Vladimir Putin's Russia that was similar to Zersetzung, writes in his book:
As applied by the Stasi, Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they are unable to continue their "hostile-negative" activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim's private life. They would then devise a strategy to "disintegrate" the target's personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children. [...] The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to "switch off" regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state. Best of all, the Stasi's role in the victim's personal misfortunes remained tantalizingly hidden. The Stasi operations were carried out in complete operational secrecy. The service acted like an unseen and malevolent god, manipulating the destinies of its victims.
It was in the mid-1970 that Honecker's secret police began to employ these perfidious methods. At that moment the GDR was finally achieving international respectability. [...] Honecker's predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, was an old-fashioned Stalinist thug. He used open terror methods to subdue his post-war population: show trials, mass arrests, camps, torture and the secret police.
But two decades after East Germany had become a communist paradise of workers and peasants, most citizens were acquiescent. When a new group of dissidents began to protest against the regime, Honecker concluded that different tactics were needed. Mass terror was no longer appropriate and might damage the GDR's international reputation. A cleverer strategy was called for. [...] The most insidious aspect of Zersetzung is that its victims are almost invariably not believed.
The Stasi manipulated relations of friendship, love, marriage, and family by anonymous letters, telegrams and telephone calls as well as compromising photos, often altered (akin to the modern practice of developing and deploying of “Deepfakes” and “Cheapfakes”). In this manner, parents and children were supposed to become strangers to one another systematically. To provoke conflicts and extramarital relations the Stasi put in place targeted seductions by Romeo agents (otherwise known as Sexpionage). One well documented example of this was the attempted seduction of Ulrike Poppe by Stasi agents who tried to break down her marriage.
For the Zersetzung of groups, the Stasi infiltrated them with unofficial collaborators, sometimes minors. This practice is similar to the use of infiltrating chaos agents (and their children) which I have personally observed during the COVIDcrisis (see for example “Disruptors and Chaos Agents” and “Controlled Opposition, Black Propaganda”. In some cases, those infiltrating/chaos agents were directly involved in disrupting the US and Canadian trucker protests, and were actually able to obtain employment by self-proclaimed “medical freedom movement” leaders as social media managers.
The Stasi hindered the work of opposition groups by permanent counter-propositions and discord on the part of unofficial collaborators when making decisions, a tactic which I also personally observed when interacting with various “medical freedom” groups during the COVIDcrisis. To sow mistrust within the group, the Stasi made believe that certain members were unofficial collaborators; moreover, by spreading rumors and manipulated photos, the Stasi feigned indiscretions with unofficial collaborators or placed members of targeted groups in administrative posts to make others believe that this was a reward for the activity of an unofficial collaborator. They even aroused suspicions regarding certain members of the group by assigning privileges, such as housing or a personal car. Moreover, the imprisonment of only certain members of the group gave birth to suspicions. The use of this tactic can be observed in the present with the operational management practices involved in the investigations and prosecution of the January 6 protesters.
The Stasi used Zersetzung essentially as a means of psychological oppression and persecution. Findings of operational psychology were formulated into method at the Stasi's College of Law (Juristische Hochschule der Staatssicherheit, or JHS), and applied to political opponents in an effort to undermine their self-confidence and self-esteem. Operations were designed to intimidate and destabilize them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others, as in social undermining.
In the modern context of social media, the “social undermining” of Zersetzung is synonymous with Crowdstalking and Gangstalking, the methods repeatedly deployed by the CDC Foundation-funded groups “Public Good Projects” and “Shots Heard Round the World”.
The aim of Zersetzung was to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism. The Stasi intentionally concealed their role as mastermind of the operations.[Author Jürgen Fuchs was a victim of Zersetzung and wrote about his experience, describing the Stasi's actions as "psychosocial crime", and "an assault on the human soul". These activities remind me of the personal targeting and persecution experienced by many dissidents during the COVIDcrisis, and which continue to this day. I will avoid naming names out of respect for those who have been harmed, but those readers who have been paying attention can readily fill in the gaps with real-world examples.
Although its techniques had been established effectively by the late 1950s, Zersetzung was not rigorously defined until the mid-1970s and only then began to be carried out in a systematic manner in the 1970s and 1980s. It is difficult to determine how many people were targeted, since the sources have been deliberately and considerably redacted; it is known, however, that tactics varied in scope, and that a number of different departments implemented them. Overall there was a ratio of four or five authorized Zersetzung operators for each targeted group and three for each individual. Some sources indicate that around 5,000 people were "persistently victimized" by Zersetzung. These strategies and tactics remind me of the social media attacks on many (including the Hon Andrew Bridgen and myself) by the UK Army unit known as the 77th Brigade and its “Mutton crew” of affiliated irregulars.
The formation and mission scope of the seventy-seventh brigade is detailed in a November 2018 article in Wired magazine titled “Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine”. In his reporting, journalist Carl Miller described seventy-seventh brigade warfighters as knowing “how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defense Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.” The description of this battle unit personnel clearly demonstrates the integration of modern civilian sector commercial sales capabilities within military propaganda operations. Miller provides additional details and nuances of the group and its mission:
The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since… Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers", “reach", “traction". ““Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. .. Ever since NATO troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that NATO soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of NATO information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumors and producing videos of NATO troops happily working with Baltic hosts. Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn't have to look like it came from the military and doesn't have to necessarily tell the truth. I saw no evidence that the seventy-seventh do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.
According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.
JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.
At the College of Legal Studies, the number of dissertations submitted on the subject of Zersetzung was in double figures. It also had a comprehensive 50-page Zersetzung teaching manual, which included numerous examples of its practice. I have no doubt that a similar number of PhD dissertations will eventually be filed concerning the activities of the 77th Brigade, mutton crew, and the many similar military/civilian/censorship-industrial complex organizations which have been developed and deployed by the FVEY nations over the last decade, initially justified as necessary to combat Russian disinformation and then deployed to combat “anti-vaxxers”, “climate change deniers” and now pretty much any purpose which the State (or UN, or WHO, or WEF) chooses to select and justify on the basis of accusations of mis- dis- and mal-information.
Largely due to a lack of documentation, corporate media failures to document these nefarious activities, resulting lack of public awareness, and the general population's failure to express sustained outrage beyond the initial protests, there have been few consequences of these Stasi actions and resulting harms to individuals, and essentially no compensation for damages incurred. A similar pattern is likely to be seen in the case of the PsyWar deployed by FVEY governments during the COVIDcrisis.
Involvement in either the planning or implementation of Zersetzung activities was not enforceable by the German courts. Because this specific legal definition of Zersetzung as a crime didn't exist, only individual instances of its tactics could be reported. Even according to GDR law, acts that were offenses (such as the violation of Briefgeheimnis, the secrecy of correspondence) needed to have been reported to the GDR authorities soon after having been committed to not be subject to a statute of the limitations clause.[68] Many of the victims experienced the additional complication that the Stasi was not identifiable as the originator in cases of personal injury and misadventure. Official documents in which Zersetzung methods were recorded often had no validity in court, and the Stasi had many files detailing its actual implementation destroyed.
Unless they had been detained for at least 180 days, survivors of Zersetzung operations, in accordance with §17a of a 1990 rehabilitation act (the Strafrechtlichen Rehabilitierungsgesetzes, or StrRehaG), are not eligible for financial compensation. Cases of provable, systematically affected targeting by the Stasi and resulting in employment-related losses and/or health damage can be pursued under a law covering settlement of torts (Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz, or 2. SED-UnBerG) as claims either for occupational rehabilitation or rehabilitation under administrative law. These overturn certain administrative provisions of GDR institutions and affirm their unconstitutionality. This is a condition for the social equalization payments specified in the Bundesversorgungsgesetz (the War Victims Relief Act of 1950). Equalization payments of pension damages and loss of earnings can also be applied for cases where victimization continued for at least three years and where claimants can prove that compensation is needed. The above examples of seeking justice have, however, been hindered by various difficulties victims have experienced, both in providing proof of the Stasi's encroachment into the areas of health, personal assets, education, and employment and in receiving official acknowledgment that the Stasi was responsible for personal damages (including psychological injury) as a direct result of Zersetzung operations.
The history of developing and deploying East German Stasi Zersetzung methods provides a cautionary tale for all FVEY nation citizens. There but for the grace of God go we all. History teaches that once the deployment of censorship, propaganda, and PsyWar technologies on citizens by the State becomes normalized, it is almost inevitable that these more extreme totalitarian tactics will eventually be deployed by the State. And now the State has powerful new digital surveillance technology the likes of which the world has never seen before.
You have been repeatedly warned. Now, what are you going to do about it?
By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms… elections, parliaments, supreme courts and all the rest… will remain.
The underlying substance will be a new kind of Totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly like they were in the good old days. Democracy & freedom will be the theme of every broadcast & editorial. Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite will quietly run the show as they see fit.
Aldous Huxley, 1962
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