The world of espionage may sound thrilling, patriotic and out of reach to a common person. But this specialty or activity is not as fancy and true as Ian Fleming’s books. It’s even more boring, silent and dirtier than John le Carre’s best written novels. In truth, the espionage practice is common, and happens so much near the lives of the common people. They might be professional spies, employed by their nation’s embassy in a foreign soil or they might happen to be people hired by another business to harm other businesses, or they might even be petty criminals seeking revenge, stalking or finding opportunities to strike as they please.
In the espionage game you cannot be too paranoid, and as an ordinary human neither you should become a target of it in any way. However, what we think of espionage as modern is not really modern at all. In fact, vintage and centuries old ‘tradecraft’, as we call it are never going to go away entirely. One such thing that is not going away and takes many different forms is something called in German as ‘Zersetzung’. It was one of the insidious forms of surveillance created in East Germany by it’s well-hated Stasi. Broadly speaking, zersetzung was a form of psychological harassment that was designed to wreak havoc on an individual without any need to arrest or torture the target. It was a nightmare to the general public, and as the German historian Hubertus Knabe described it; “The word is difficult to translate because it means originally ‘biodegradation.’ But actually, it’s a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of the people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organising failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.”
So what would some of these techniques be? How did they work? Well, as Knabe mentions, some of them were semi overt. The Stasi would arrange for example, for your work to go poorly. Though, the causes might not be known to the subject of the attack, the effects were pretty evident. Other techniques were more insidious. It would sometimes for example spread rumors about a target amongst his or her friends and colleagues, stories of alcoholism, parental neglect or the like. Sometimes, the Stasi would play mischievous mind games with a target, they might for example enter his or her house and move the furniture around or they might change the time on an alarm clock, or replace the tea bags with different types of tea. Talk about messing with your mind. Other tactics were similarly abusive, reports exist of the Stasi arranging for a target to get deliberately incorrect medical treatment, or to receive doctored photographs, purporting to show them in a compromising position. One report perhaps apocryphal, has the Stasi sending a vibrator to the wife of the target of one of their operations. Evidently as a way of sending a message about his lovemaking. A system of evil far more dangerous and sinister than comical.
So, why use zersetzung? Is it that good and necessary? For any number of reasons. The first and foremost is the interim effect of the technique, the victim doesn’t know what’s happening. The mystery makes the adverse situation all the more difficult and everybody around the target can watch as he or she crumbles under the relentless pressure of state harassment. Think of the psychological effects such a pervasive system must have had on the population. Think of the times that a German citizen was convinced, that the person on the train next to him, was a government agent. And yet that fear was purely in his head. It speaks to the paranoia that builds up once you start to think that some enormous, invisible, sinister organisation is out to get you. Against any adversary, that sense is very very effective, and in an authoritarian state like East Germany, it was a wonderfully effective means of control. But in any democracy, even like in the United States, Europe, UK, any other stable country, it is a serious problem when your own citizens develop that same sense of dread, and it’s nearly impossible to erase once started. Second, holding someone in a cell was expensive and messy. Harassing them every third day is much less so, and it is effective. Finally, an added advantage of psychological operations was their deniability. The Stasi could plausibly say it had no idea about what was happening, and thereby allow the East German regime to maintain a false facade of international respectability. The hate, adaptability and paranoia was so strong that when East Germany became unified with the West, almost every East German flocked to know and see whether what had been written on their files. The expectations were so high that many people whose records were never created expressed great disappointment. Some even felt ashamed and lower that they weren’t important to a tyrannical regime of social control. Even Barak Obama described the Stasi’s activity as; “[A] cautionary tale of what could happen when vast, unchecked surveillance turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their own homes”.
Now, you may all be wondering if these applications are still relevantly being used today. The answer is yes, in a number of ways, similar methods are employed daily by a variety of non-state and state actors. For instance, U.S. may want Al-qaeda to think it knows more about them than it’s people actually do, and in many countries where hurdles might be created for almost anyone, it is a wonderfully effective means of control. Although, if you were to scour various news stories these days, you may find such similar activities of this kind against, journalists, activists, dissidents, diplomats, etc.
In conclusion, if you want to get at least an entertaining simple idea of zersetzung, no other good movie comes as near to touching upon this method than ‘The Lives Of Others’.
