Secret police

This article is about secret police as organizations. For a list of such organizations, see List of secret police organizations.

Secret police (sometimes political police) are a police organization which operates in secrecy for the national purpose of maintaining national security against internal threats to the state. Secret police forces are typically associated with totalitarian regimes, as their activities are not transparent to the public, their primary purpose is to maintain the political power of the state rather than uphold the rule of law, and they have often been used as an instrument of political repression. A state with a significant level of secret police activity is sometimes known as a police state.

Secret police forces may be contrasted with the domestic security agencies found in modern liberal democratic states, which are generally subject to government regulation, reporting requirements and other accountability measures. Nevertheless, such agencies may sometimes be pejoratively described as “secret police”.

Organizations with the role and function of a secret police force have existed throughout history, whether or not they have had policing functions, and whether or not they have been described as "secret".

Methods and history

Secret police forces in dictatorships and totalitarian states usually use violence and acts of terror to suppress political opposition and dissent, and may use death squads to carry out assassinations and "disappearances".

Secret police have been used by many types of government. Their proliferation was most significantly brought about by the puppet regimes that Napoleon installed in northern Italy and in the lands between France and the Rhine. When he was overthrown, so were his puppets, and the reinstated monarchical governments maintained secret police to defend their rule against republicanism. The republics of France have in turn had to defend themselves against Bonapartists as well as monarchists. The dictatorships of Latin America, few of which have ever developed totalitarian pretensions, have used secret police almost as much as true fascists.

They employ internal spies to root out the instigators of protest and revolt, and also employ agents provocateurs to get their opponents to perform a violent criminal act in protest, whereupon they can be captured and tried on grounds that are made public so as to get the general public to side with the regime. Mail is opened, read, and resealed; telephones are tapped; prostitutes, friends, and relatives are tricked, blackmailed, or coerced into telling what they know about suspects. The secret police are renowned to appear at one's house between midnight and dawn, to take people away. These people are not tried openly, they may seem to have disappeared. Many of them are tortured.

The classic example of the political power that a secret police can provide a dictatorship is the destruction of the communist party in Germany by rooting out and imprisoning the "ward leaders". Thus the leaders of the party had no way of mobilizing the party members at the lowest level.

The secret police of East Germany, the Ministry for State Security or Stasi, is considered to be one of the most formidable historical examples.

This may also happen in states which describe themselves as "democratic". There are, of course, different varieties of democracy and, in times of emergency or war, a democracy may lawfully grant its policing and security services additional or sweeping powers which, in hindsight, may smack of "secret police"

Slang terms

In Tito's Yugoslavia, the slang term for a secret policeman was a 'historian'.

Controversy over the term

Template:Mergesection Which government agencies may correctly be classed or characterised (in whole or part) as "secret police" is hotly disputed, as it is considered to be a highly pejorative phrase in democratic and even quasi-democratic societies. Some, for instance, would include the CIA and MI6 under the heading of "secret police," while others maintain that organisations engaged in foreign intelligence-gathering and monitoring are not "police" at all.

Another controversy is over whether the FBI and United States Secret Service, for instance, may be correctly referred to as "secret police" because of activities such as wiretaps and what critics characterise as "home invasions" are sanctioned (in addition to the acknowledged Secret-Service practice of seeking psychiatric confinement of those who, while a threat or supposedly a threat to "protectees" are not alleged to be mentally ill), while the other side of the argument argues that such organizations do not engage in the repression, torture, and summary executions characteristic of other "secret police" organizations.

There are some allegations, however, primarily by so-called "fringe" organisations but sometimes by the mainstream as well, that those agencies have engaged in some of those activities, if to a lesser extent than other "secret police" organizations. Recent FBI use of, and attempts to expand the use of, "administrative subpoenas," have also accelerated such criticism by some.

A major issue of the argument is whether the term "secret police" connotes repression or rather the extensive use of low-visibility tactics. The biggest allegations that the FBI constituted a secret police relate to the Vietnam era, when the organization infiltrated and attempted to subvert political organizations deemed dangerous under the directive of the COINTELPRO.

Secret police in literature

The concept of secret police is also popular in fiction, usually portraying such an institution at its most extreme. Perhaps the most famous example is the Thought Police from George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-four. In that world, the Thought Police used psychology and virtually omnipresent surveillance to find and eliminate members of society who have the mere thought of challenging ruling authority.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the White Witch makes use of secret police. These dreaded individuals are vicious Talking Wolves, and their leader is named Maugrim.

See also

• Death squad
• Intelligence agency
• List of intelligence agencies
• List of secret police organizations
• Mass surveillance
• Menwith Hill
• Police
• Reichstag Fire Decree
• Secret service
• Stalinism
• Surveillance

References

• R. J. Stove, The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003). ISBN 189355466X

External links

• America's Secret Police - FBI COINTELPRO in the 1990s
• MSNBC - Domestic spying vs. secret police
• Police State