CUBA’S ADVERSARY FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE: THE THREAT

By Manuel Cereijo

When the Cold war ended, it was widely believed that a new era of international cooperation had begun. However, simply put, the end of the cold war has not led to a more peaceful world.

The United States is the target of those who challenge the status quo, and one of those is Cuba . Furthermore, the PRC has joined efforts with Cuba in a new axis. The deterioration in China ’s relations with the United States is also being accompanied by a warmer relationship with Russia . There are three nations that use intensively their intelligence services to harm the interests of the United States . These nations are: China , Cuba , and North Korea . These nations continue to expend significant resources to conduct intelligence operations against the United States .

These efforts are centered on producing intelligence concerning the United States military capabilities, other national security activities, and military research and development activities. They have now expanded their collection efforts to place additional emphasis on collecting scientific, technical, economic, and proprietary information. These collection efforts are designed to provide technologies required for the acquisition and maintenance of advanced military systems, as well as to promote the national welfare of these nations. Each one of these countries has the ability to collect intelligence on targeted U.S. activities using HUMINT, SIGINT, and the analysis of open source material. Also, Cuba , China , and Russia have access to imagery products that can be used to produce IMINT. The United States is now the target of those who want to challenge the existing state of affairs. Security threats, in this new era of asymmetric warfare, will inevitable emerge more and more frequently.

The PRC has obtained the HPCs from the United States . The contribution of HPCs to military modernization is also dependent on related technologies such as Telecommunications, Microelectronics, and Computer Networking, areas in which the PRC has been assisting Cuba intensively since 1998. The principal intelligence collection arms of the Cuban government are the Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI) of Ministry of Interior, and the Military Counterintelligence Department of the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The DGI is responsible for foreign intelligence collection.

The DGI has six divisions divided into two categories of roughly equal size: The Operational Divisions and the Support Divisions.

The operational divisions include the Political/Economic Intelligence Divisions, the External Counterintelligence Division, and the Military Intelligence Division.

The support divisions include the Technical Support Division, the Information Division, and the Preparation Division. The Technical Support Division is responsible for production of false documents, communication systems supporting clandestine operations, and development of clandestine message capabilities. The Information and Preparation Divisions are responsible for intelligence analysis functions.

The Political Economic Intelligence Division consists of four sections: Eastern Europe, North America, Western Europe , and Africa-Asia-Latin-America. The External Counterintelligence Division is responsible for penetrating foreign intelligence services and the surveillance of exiles. The Military Intelligence Department was focused on collecting information on the U.S. Armed Forces and coordinated SIGINT operations with the Russians at Lourdes . Presently, it controls the Bejucal base.

The Military Counterintelligence Department is responsible for conducting counterintelligence, SIGINT, and electronic warfare activities against the United States .

The full range of Cuba ’s espionage activities are a very serious matter of concern. Despite the economic failure of the Castro regime, Cuban intelligence, in particular the DGI, remains a viable threat to the United States . The Cuban mission to the United States is the third largest UN delegation. The Cuban diplomats conduct and support harmful activities in the United States . The United States ’ intelligence agencies should devote their resources to the most serious security threats, principally international terrorism, and adverse political trends.

The recent(1998-2008) captured of more than 15 Cuban spies, including Ana Belen Montes, the Meyers, have shown the way that they communicate with the DGI in Cuba. The basic method is called Cryptography, and Cuba ’s uses the method developed in the 1970s, referred to as symmetric encryption, secret-key, or single key encryption. There are three important encryption algorithms: DES, triple DES, and AES.

The encryption used by Cuba ’s intelligence has five ingredients:

•Plaintext: This is the original message or data that is fed into the algorithm as input.

•Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs various substitutions and transformations on the plaintext.

•Secret key: The secret key is also input to the algorithm. The exact substitutions and transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the key.
•Ciphertext: This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on the plaintext and the secret key. For a given message, two different keys will produce two different ciphertexts.

•Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the encryption algorithm run in reverse. It takes the ciphertext and the same secret key and produces the original plaintext.

They use two basic important requirements:

•A strong encryption algorithm. They use one that, at the beginning, the opponent who knows the algorithm and has access to one or more ciphertexts, are unable to decipher the ciphertext or figure out the key. It was difficult, at the earlier stages to decipher their messages.

•Sender and receiver ( Cuba and the agents here) must have obtained copies of the secret key in a secure fashion and keep the key secure. Once the US intelligence discover the key and knows the algorithm, all communication using this key is readable.

The security of this encryption depends on the secrecy of the key, not the secrecy of the algorithm. That is, they need to keep only the key secret. With the use of this encryption, the principal security problem is maintaining the secrecy of the key.

All their encryption algorithms are based on two general principles: substitution, in which each element in the plaintext (bit, letter, group of bits or letters) is mapped into another element, and transposition, in which elements in the plaintext are rearranged. They use multiple stages of substitutions and transpositions.

Both sender and receiver use the same key. The system is symmetric. A block cipher processes the input one block of elements at a time, producing an output block for each input block. A stream cipher processes the input elements continuously, producing output one element at a time, as it goes along.

The process of attempting to discover the plaintext or key is known as cryptanalysis. A summary follows. The Table summarizes the various types of cryptanalytic attacks or means to decipher Cuba ’s communication with its spies. The most difficult problem is presented when all that is available is the ciphertext only.

It is known that Cuba has experimented already sending encrypted messages through the air over 100 Kms., during days and nights. Cuba expects to be able to send through its Bejucal base these ultra-secret messages by the end of this year or early 2003. Of course, encryption of transmitted data is just one part of keeping information secret. It is easier for a would-be interceptor to compromise other aspects of the overall process that are much more vulnerable than encryption, like hacking the sender’s hard drive before the data is encrypted for transmission.

The genius of quantum cryptography is that it solves the problem of key distribution. This ability comes directly from the way quantum particles such as photons behave in nature and the fact that the information these particles carry can take on this behavior. Essentially two technologies make quantum key distribution possible: the equipment for creating photons and that for detecting them. The ideal source is a so-called photon gun that fires a single photon on demand. This is an area where Cuba research and development is highly concentrated and advanced.

The facilities, and the talent, are Cubans. But the financing is from where?

As our reliance on computers has grown, so has our vulnerability to cyberattack. Virtually every critical infrastructure system in this country, whether it be transportation, power, communications, or finance, operates in cyberspace. It is a huge problem, and there are few people trained in the science, or art, of computer security.

We need to have intelligence, we need to monitor our systems all the time, to detect very early warnings. Take digital steganography, a technique for hiding data in seemingly innocuous messages. While it has many legitimate uses, it is also increasingly being used by terrorist groups and countries. However, the effort of a group of engineers has just develop a software package designed to detect digital steganography.

A cyberattack that shut down power to an hospital or prevent fuel delivery in the dead of winter can cost lives. In 2008 a US military exercise tested the country’s preparedness against a cyberattack. The NSA had hired 35 hackers to invade the Defense Department’s 40,000 computer networks. By the end of the exercise, the hackers had gained root level access to at least 36 of the networks-enough to shut down the power of several major cities and take control of a navy cruiser.

We must be ready, ready if our enemies try to use computers to disable power grids, banking, communications and transportation networks, police, fire and health services, or military assets.

APPENDIX

Submarines prowl the ocean floor, while ships above carefully skirts the limits of international waters. On dry land, guards patrol high fences surrounding acres of huge golf ball-shaped radar domes. In the skies, airplanes knife through the stratosphere, while higher up orbiting electronic ears listen to whispers from the planet below.

They are trolling a vast sea of electromagnetic signals in hopes of catching a terrorist plot in the making, a shady arms deal, economic intelligence, or a rogue nation building a weapon of mass destruction. This so called signals intelligence, or Sigint, has been vital to the United States and its allies for decades. This is also vital for Cuba , and China , through the Bejucal base.

The question now is: how useful is the system against terrorists who know not to trust their satellite phones? How effective can it be in an age when almost untaoptic lines carry information at stupefying rates and cheap, off-the shelf encryption systems can stump the most powerful supercomputers on earth?

Modern Sigints

Rather than the creation of ever more sensitive receivers or code-breaking computers, the hot areas of cloak-and-dagger information gathering include tapping fiber optic cables, even at the bottom of the sea; using tiny bugging devices and old fashioned bribery, blackmail, and burglary to get at data before it can be encrypted; exploiting software flaws and poorly configured communications systems to bypass data security measures; and automatically winnoving the vast amounts of intercepted communications.

The old workhouse surveillance system, run by the United States -with the United Kingdom , Canada , Australia , and New Zealand as junior partners, was created in 1947 under the secret UKUSA agreement. It is often referred to as Echelon in the popular press.

Whether or not the modern Sigint system is of value boils down to a technical question: in the face of a telecommunications explosion that has brought e-mails, cellphones, beepers, instant messages, fiber optic cables, faxes, video-conferencing, and the Internet to every corner of the World, can the UKUSA intelligence agencies attain enough access to know what’s going on?

Of course, some communications are easier than others. Wireless communications in particular offer two key advantages-you can intercept them without physically tapping into the target’s communications systems, and there is no way to detect that they have been intercepted. Microwave, radio, telephone, walkie-talkie-communications that are all in the air are all interceptible by some sort of antenna in the right place.

The advantage of the Bejucal base is that it spies, listen to, the United States . However, the disadvantage of the United States is that it has to cover a wide range of territories, disperse terrorist groups, countries. The United States has to go after sporadic miniwars and terrorism.

Fiber optic systems

Before the widespread use of fiber-optic cables, geosynchronous satellite constellations, such as Intelsat, Intersputnik carried much of the international communications traffic. Such links can be comprehensively monitored by placing a receiving station in each satellite’s transmission footprint. In contrast, cables have to be tapped directly. While this is easy enough to do if the cable makes a landfall in a territory controlled by a UKUSA country, someone has to visit the cable clandestinely if it doesn’t, typically in a submarine.

Fiber optic cables are the toughest to crack: fibers don’t radiate electromagnetic fields that can be detected. Eavesdroppers first solved this problem by targeting the signal boosting repeater stations strung along the cables. But the development of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, in which the signal is boosted without ever being converted into electricity, called for a new approach.It is not impossible to tap, but the fiber being one of a dozen hair-thin strands of glass, which are embedded inside a laser welded, hermetically sealed, 3 mm diameter stainless steel tube, makes it harder. This tube is in turn covered by a few centimeters of reinforcing steel wire and cables carrying 10 Kvolts of DC power, all at a depth of of a couple of thousand meters.

It is not impossible, but very difficult. The easiest interception technique is to open up one of the repeaters to get at the fibers. , but it is very difficult, because you have to do it perfectly. Parts must either be sourced from the manufacturer or duplicated exactly.

A big remaining challenge is fiber optic cables that stay on land. One of the things that special troops (including Cuba ’s elite troops) spend a fair amount of time is going ashore and walking to the nearest line.

Computers

By bugging a computer or communication system, information can be captured before it is sent through a fiber optic cable. A tiny microphone dropped into a key-board can pick up the sound made by the keys as they are struck and transmit the sounds to a nearby receiver. ( The Cuban Red Avispa ring was trying to do this). Different keys sound different, each has a specific signature.Those signatures can be used to reconstruct what was typed.

The rise of ubiquitous computer communications has allowed the emergence of widely available strong cipher systems, such as public key cryptography, which rely on mathematical functions that would take the greatest supercomputers on earth to break. For example, the HPCs, that China acquired from the USA in the 1990s, and that supposedly Cuba got two of them from China .

Speech recognition

Speech recognition is already widely used in commercial applications, but it is much harder to convert speech into text when subjects have no intention of getting their meaning across to a computer. Talk printing may give an idea of where the state of the art is going. Variations in pitch, rhythm, and speech volume-information that speech recognition programs typically throw out-to refine word and sentence recognition, to identify speakers, and even to tell casual chats from serious discussions or the dissemination of orders and instructions.

It is assumed that speech recognition is available at the Bejucal base because from 1995 to 1997 Russia had already this technology. It is also assumed that now, with the assistance of PRC, they are trying to develop this latest technology.

Bejucal Base: conclusions

This is where the importance of the Bejucal base lies. New technologies, association with the PRC, proximity to the United States , Cuba ’s elite troops, trained at the Baragua school, in El Cacho, Los Palacios, Pinar del Rio , and the talent of approximately 1,200 Cuban engineers and Computer Scientists working at the Base.

The Base coordinates its activities with: the Wajay facility, the Santiago de Cuba antenna farm, and the base at Paseo, between 11 and 15 Streets.

Is Cuba a conventional military threat to the United States ? Of course not, in the conventional military parameters. it has never been a threat. Presently, there is no country that can be said that it represents a conventional military threat to the United States . Is Cuba an asymmetric military threat to the security of the United States ? Yes, of course. Through biological and cyber attacks. Due to its proximity to the United States , Cuba ’s facilities in bio and cyber developments, and the relative free flow of persons between Cuba and the United States , that has made possible that Cuba be the country with more convicted spies inside the United States in the last 20 years, Cuba possibly represents a higher threat than other rogue nations

Central to the techniques are the strange laws of quantum mechanics that govern the universe on the smallest scale, and the ability to exploit physics on this scale, which has generated huge interest in Cuba , with the development of a new nanotechnology research and development facilities. The beginning stages of the project were coordinated by Castro Diaz Balart. The quantum properties of photons could make encrypted messages absolutely secure.

It is known that Cuba has experimented already sending encrypted messages through the air over 100 Kms., during days and nights. Cuba expects to be able to send through its Bejucal base these ultra-secret messages by the end of this year or early 2011. Of course, encryption of transmitted data is just one part of keeping information secret. It is easier for a would-be interceptor to compromise other aspects of the overall process that are much more vulnerable than encryption, like hacking the sender’s hard drive before the data is encrypted for transmission.