Secret Police / Real Life

Real Life examples of active and defunct Secret Police agencies from around the world.

Also see Big Brother Is Watching This Index, a list of intelligence agencies from the real world.

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The Americas

• The Chilean DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. Actually, all of the various organizations of this type during Operation Condor would qualify, but the DINA is perhaps the most infamous.
• The Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961), the inspiration for The Generalissimo, had the infamous Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM, Military Intelligence Service), which was both a secret police force and a death squad which was formed during the later years of the Trujillo era and lasted until his death and the ousting of his son from power a year later. SIM and other security forces killed many people on Trujillo's orders, up to and including 12,000-30,000 Haitians during the Parsley Massacre from 1937, and SIM kidnapped and murdered others such as Jesús Galíndez, a Dominican exile living in New York City, in 1956.
• Nicaragua during the Sandinista period (1979-1990) had the DGSE, the General Directorate for State Security, which was modeled after the East German Stasi.
• Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship had the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale/Volontè pou Sekirite Nasyonal (VSN, "National Security Volunteers"), a rather terrifying organization that specialized in murdering and disappearing opponents of the regime. Their adeptness at disappearances lent them their nickname, the Tonton Macoute—literally "Uncle Gunnysack", the Haitian/Vodou version of The Krampus. Many Tonton Macoute officers were fully-fledged Vodou leaders, and fully exploited the popular impression they had supernatural powers to terrorize the public.
• During Mexico's Dirty War, which lasted roughly from the 1960s until the early 1980s, there were many versions:
  • The Brigadas Blancas (White Brigades) were a combination of Mexico City police, Federal District police, and Mexican soldiers with the aim to dismantle the September 23 Communist League, a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group that opposed the Priista government. While they had been active in several Northern and Central Mexico states since the early 1970s, it wasn't until 1976 when then-President Luis Echeverría would sign his approval for operations in Mexico City. Every agent working for the Brigada Blanca received a monthly wage of 3,000 pesos and "as much as needed" for general expenses (not bad for 1970s Mexico).
  • Los Halcones: Prior to the White Brigades, Los Halcones was a paramilitary group created to sabotage popular movements, repress demonstrations and prevent big movements from arising. Also, the general public was told they were going to be "to ensure security in the (then-recently inaugurated) Metro".
  • The Olympia Battalion: A mixture of many security forces (presidential guards, mayor presidential state officers, policemen and soldiers) intended to bring security for the Olympic games. They were identified by a white glove or handkerchief in their left hands. Since the Student Movement of 1968 was deemed subversive and a threat to national security and could damage Mexico's view in the upcoming Olympic Games, the security forces were turned into a shock group and repressed, beat, tortured and killed/disappeared many of the movement's sympathisers (including Ana María Regina Teuscher Krueger, who was going to be an aide-de-camp for the Olympic Ceremony).
  • The Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Direction) was a Mexican intelligence agency created in the late 1940s. It was infamously corrupt and tortured many people they considered "criminals"; they even assassinated a journalist for reporting on their ties with the DEA, CIA, and high-ranking corrupt officials.
• From 1950-1983 the Canadian government operated a secret program called PROFUNC which spied on suspected Communists and Communist-sympathizers. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed dossiers on 16,000 Communist party members/supporters and over 50,000 suspected sympathizers including details on their families, exact movements, and including pre-filled arrest documents. In the event of war with the Soviet Union (the so-called Mobilization Day), the RCMP would immediately round up everyone on the PROFUNC list and send them to internment camps.
• Even in the mostly democratic United States, a few agencies have at least approached this status:
  • During the Civil Rights Era, after the Brown v. Board ruling banning school segregation, several Deep South states set up agencies to fight "racial agitators;" Mississippi, with its Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, is the most known example. Its mission was to "protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states" from "encroachment thereon by the Federal Government" (read: prevent integration and the demise of Jim Crow) and, to do this, they had an extensive network of spies and informants. Both White and Black, in fact. Although murder was discussed by some agents but never actualized, methods such as assaults, blacklisting and intimidation were used against "racial agitators" and their allies; for example, Clyde Kennard was railroaded to Parchman after attempting to integrate the White-only Ole Miss. They also broadcasted pro-segregation propaganda. Founded on 1957, they lasted until 1973, by which time they had shifted their focus to target anti-Vietnam War "subversives".
  • Historically, the FBI were very close to becoming a straight example under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, focusing on the suppression of political dissent at the expense of a worsening organised crime problem and amassing large files of potential blackmail material on radicals... and elected officials, according to some sources.
  • The Department of Homeland Security as a whole is often accused of this ever since its founding in 2002 following 9/11. Issues included data mining, using fusion centers to infringe on civil liberties, wrongful deportations and arrests, sexual abuse of women and separation of families at the border, and kidnapping citizens in Portland during the George Floyd protests. As a result, critics describe them as this and acting as the National Police.
  • Subverted, however with the Secret Service. They were originally formed to combat counterfeiting, and only investigate threats to the President's life by sheer dint of them having been the biggest Federal Government investigative body at the time the US Government finally decided they needed a dedicated outfit for Presidential protection^note The FBI had not yet been formed at that time, the aftermath of William McKinley's assassination in 1901.

Russia

For a variety of reasons, Russia is the historical king (or tsar, if you will) of secret police. Russia has had some kind of secret police-like agency for most of its history:

• The first—dating from the 16th century—was Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina. They were almost like a monastic order, where the Oprichniki were the "monks" and Ivan was their "abbot". The Oprichniks had free rein to terrorize the Russian population, and not even the nobility were spared. One of the scariest things about them was the banners they flew during their raids—severed dog heads mounted on spears.
• The Oprichnina was dissolved before the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign, but the Russian Crown always had informal networks of domestic spies to keep an eye and a lid on dissent. In 1826, Emperor Nicholas I systematized and expanded these networks under the "Third Section of His Majesty's Own Chancellery." The Third Section was a great boogeyman in Russia for the middle part of the 19th century, as for all the spying of earlier regimes, the Third Section's ability to catch you talking politics one day and send you to Siberia the next was spooky and new. However, by the 1870s it was undone by its own shortcomings, of which it had two big ones. First, it was an Oddly Small Organization; it never had more than 40 fulltime agents and a few hundred gendarmes at its disposal. Second, it had developed some bad habits—most particularly, it never realized that it needed to spy on anyone other than nobles and bureaucrats. This led it to make several key mistakes, of which the biggest was its utter failure to suppress the terrorist campaign of assassinations against high Imperial officials pursued by the group of largely anarcho-collectivist socialist revolutionaries—mostly students, teachers, and university graduates unable to find professional work—calling itself Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will"). The Third Section's repeated failures at putting down People's Will led to its dissolution in 1880, to be replaced by...
• The Okhrannoye otdeleniye (Security Section), better known in the West as the Okhrana (literally "Security", "Protection", or "Guards"). (In Russia, it was just as likely to be called the Okhranka—an ironic "cutesy" diminutive for a terrifying organization, a bit like calling them "the Guardlings" or even "the Guardely-Wardelies"). Much larger than the Third Section, and better organized, it managed to finally put down People's Will and end the assassination campaign, though not before People's Will successfully killed Tsar Alexander II himself (in March 1881). Most late-19th and early-20th-century secret police organizations across Europe took notes from the Okhrana's playbook.
• The Okhrana was (understandably) abolished after the February Revolution of 1917. However, after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks established a new security agency, the Cheka, less than a month after taking over. The Cheka was even bigger and more efficent than the Okhrana, and its exploits—particularly those of its leader, Felix Dzerzhinski—were legendary (and legendarily frightening). Due to ongoing shakeups in the structure of the Russian and then Soviet government, the Cheka was reorganized and renamed several times between the Revolution and the death of Joseph Stalin. Its most famous incarnation during this period is probably as the General Directorate of State Security (Glavnoye Upravleniye Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, GUGB) under the umbrella of People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, NKVD), which existed 1936-41. It was during this period that the secret police agencies first got involved in foreign intelligence, as well.
• After Stalin's death, there was a power struggle over who would control the secret police and how it would be managed. In 1954, Khruschchev's faction won out and established the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), more commonly known as the KGB. The KGB was by this point the premier Soviet foreign intelligence agency in addition to being the secret police domestically, which led to some weirdness.
• The New Russia inherited the Soviet security apparatus. While it underwent several reorganizations, around early 2000s it mostly came to the shape reminiscent of the old days.
  • After the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB's foreign and domestic functions were split between the Foreign Intelligence Service (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, SVR) and the Federal Security Service (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, FSB). While the FSB was originally envisioned as the kind of domestic counterintelligence-cum-law-enforcement agency that exists in Western democracies (e.g. the FBI), it never really gave up its old ways and is now pretty much Vladimir Putin's KGB (or, if you like, his Okhrana). Some intelligence world wags have commented about the FSB, "New name, same friendly service!"
  • The secret police a modern Russian citizen is the most likely to run afoul of is the MVD E-Department, or the Center for Counteracting Extremism, or Center E (there is no established translation). This political police handles most of the low-profile dissidents and Internet badmouthers, while the FSB only works with high profile cases.

Europe

• Some scholars have suggested that the Spartan Crypteia played this role: they were ordered to spy on the helot (slave) population, and were given permission to kill anyone who were suspected of conspiring to overthrow the government. This would make them among the very first secret police organizations of the ancient world.
• The Roman Empire had the Frumentarii (lit. 'foragers') who were spies tasked with infiltration of foreign groups and collecting information about the situation in various regions. Together with Speculatores (the military scouts) they were also conducting arrests, interrogation and elimination of the most dangerous traitors, dissenters and troublemakers.
• The Council of Ten in Venice during the days when Venice was a sovereign state. It had a fearsome reputation, (which it probably didn't mind) but according to at least one writer it focused mostly on those who were actually powerful enough to pose a threat. Thus it was a more downplayed version.
• Until it became defunct, The Spanish Inquisition was basically this for the Spanish crown. Quite possibly the Ur-Example... Which explains why no one expected it. Unlike the Inquisition in most other countries, the Spanish Inquisition was unique in that the Spanish crown had usurped the Church's authority in Spanish territory to collect tithes, appoint bishops, and prosecute Church-related crimes (at its height, the Spanish Empire was that powerful), largely as a legacy of the Reconquista (which the Church in Rome regarded as a Crusade and therefore to be aided in any way possible). The Inquisition in Spain became the political police as much as (if not more than) ecclesiastical police. By contrast, the Inquisition in most other Catholic countries was separate from (and usually more fair and consistent than) the secular legal authorities of the time.
• All over the place in Napoleonic France, one of the most ruthlessly efficient police states of the period (especially towards the end). In addition to the "regular" force under the Minister of Police (Fouché, later replaced by Savary, although Fouché retained a vast and powerful network of informants and assorted thugs), there was the gendarmerie (a section of the army), Davout's military police (another section of the army), the Palace's police under General Duroc^note That one was especially scary because it effectively applied martial law to anyone who fell under its jurisdiction... even though most of these people were civilians... mutual suspicion was rampant and even encouraged between all of these.
• The Austrian Empire and then Austria-Hungary had one that (fascinatingly) went from hypercompetent and scary to incompetent and woefully underfunded. They went from being able to intercept and copy almost all correspondence into and out of Vienna during the Congress of Vienna (1814) to a service so badly overstretched that a staff of 20 people was expected to monitor all postal traffic in the nation post-Metternich, including clerical assistants and servants. Despite this, it was still treated as some monolithic instrument of repression and censorship, generally by people not actually within the nation. Its history is interesting, in that Metternich was insistent on keeping it funded and capable, while his rival, the Finance Minister Kolowrat, argued that the organization (1) was too expensive for the Empire's limited budget and (2) wasn't even particularly effective at preventing the spread of subversive ideas. The later ineffectiveness of the Austrian/Austro-Hungarian secret police was basically because Kolowrat was right—Metternich's secret police was unable to prevent the Revolutions of 1848 from breaking out across the Empire, and even though the Habsburgs were able to reassert central control, they decided that investing in police-state repression wasn't worth the expense (especially with other tools at their disposal).
• While there is no real consensus on what body did what, Imperial Germany also had some form of this. Each constituent state maintained its own service, the most notable of which was the Trope Namer, the Preußische Geheimpolizei (Prussian Secret Police) established by Karl Ludwig Friedrich von Hinckeldey following the 1848 revolution — which would later become the basis for the Nazi Gestapo. Most other similar organizations did not use the word "secret" in their names or descriptions.
• For sheer notoriety, nothing tops the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police Service), much better known as The Gestapo, from Nazi Germany. In addition to its role in suppressing resistance to the Nazi regime and making resisters to the regime disappear under Hitler's "Night and Fog" Decree, the Gestapo also played a key role in The Holocaust, with one of its departments, headed by Adolf Eichmann, in charge of "resettlement" of the Jewish people of Europe to the concentration and extermination camps. There was even a junior Gestapo, called the Hitlerjugend Streifendienst (Hitler Youth Patrol Force), middle-school kids who spied on and reported other kids for setting up unlawful youth organizations... or their parents for opposing the regime.
  • For all its infamy, the actual efficiency of the Gestapo depended significantly on other security organizations in the area — most notably the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) headed by Reinhard Heydrich — due to being constantly underfunded and understaffed. After their takeover, top-ranking Nazi officials continuously worked to undermine the Gestapo in favor of the Nazi Party-aligned SD, due to mistrust of the previous agency that harassed the Nazis among others before, and a desire to keep internal security in the hands of a home-grown entity.
• The East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), known as The Stasi, were far worse than the Gestapo. While they were privately mocked for their use of Incredibly Obvious Bugs, they were also feared for their ability to get people to rat out their friends and neighbors. Estimates of the prevalence of informers range from 1 in 50 to 1 in 7, essentially turning East Germany into a Police State. The Stasi was also infamous for gaslighting political undesirables by messing up their private lives so they would have a mental breakdown and have no stomach to challenge the government. The biggest advantage of Zersetzung, as this tactic was called, was that its subtle nature enabled Plausible Deniability.
• Most other Eastern European communist regimes had their notorious units: the Czechoslovak StB, the Romanian Securitate, the Hungarian ÁVH... (although none of them took mass surveillance to quite the same extremes as the Stasi).
• The OVRA of Fascist Italy, who are the subject of The Conformist and who harass the title character in Porco Rosso. Secret enough nobody's sure what OVRA meant (there are various possible meanings) or even if it actually existed; there are rumours that Mussolini invented it to scare political enemies and distract everyone from who actually did the job, namely the MVSN (the original Black Shirts) and the Public Safety Agents Corps (the normal police).
• Great Britain:
  • A secret cell within London's Metropolitan Police Special Branch - the Special Demonstration Squad. From 1968 to 2008, these elite policemen would go on deep-cover 'tours' in political activist groups; mainly to provide information to the regular police ahead of any protest or illegal activity, but also to smear and discredit them. A tactic they found useful was to get into a relationship with a high-ranking member of a group - the end of a tour saw the operative vanish from the group and the person's life, which had a side-effect akin to the Stasi's 'Zersetzung', especially when one officer left his partner in the group with a baby.
  • The British Army's 14 Intelligence Company a.k.a 'the Det', a secretive special forces unit tasked with covert surveillance in Northern Ireland with gadget-strewn 'Q cars'. Along with their parent regiment, the Special Air Service, they faced accusations of torture and brutality up to and including murder levelled by Irish republican groups. Bear in mind that the IRA are not necessarily the most impartial source when it comes to the British Army. It isn't impossible, however.
• In Belarus, the KGB remains, under the same name. Given that Belarus sadly is still a Soviet-esque dictatorship, this likely is not surprising.

Asia

• The Joseon Dynasty's Amhaeng-eosa (Secret Censors), specially appointed by the King to keep tabs on his own administration and yangban nobility, but never as fully institutionalized as some others on this list. Oddly, or perhaps not when one considers their preferred targets, they also tend to be viewed positively today as agents opposed to government corruption.
• The Ming Dynasty's Jinyi Wei ("Brocade-Clad Guard") and the Dongchang ("The Eastern Commission of Investigations"). This is the first incarnation for the modern concept of "secret police". The Ming Dynasty Jinyi Wei originally begin as bodyguards to the emperor, but later evolved to a full-blown intelligence agency. They blended into the public and were responsible for thought-policing, domestic-espionage, political assassination, and during times of war, acted as political commissars. The Jinyi Wei often served as Judge, Jury, and Executioner without any concerns for due-process.
• The Shinsengumi, pro-Shogunate and their pro-Meiji rivals/counterparts, the Ishin-Shishi. Most of the Ishin-shishi later became advisers to the emperor.
• Prewar Japan had two of these forces; one for overseas territories, and one for the Japanese mainland.
  • The former was known as Kempeitai (憲兵隊), or "military police corps", and was the IJA's military police. It also doubled as a Gestapo-esque secret police for conquered Japanese territories during the 1930s and 1940s, up until the end of World War II.
  • The latter, lesser-known Japanese secret police was the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu (特別高等警察), or "special higher police". In modern times it's often referred to as Tokko (特高) for short. Tokko carried out similar acts of repression that the Kempeitai did, but was a purely domestic force. Tokko inspired the term "thought police" ('shisou keisatsu', 思想警察), but during its time, it was often referred to as 'chian keisatsu' (治安警察)—the Peace Police.^note Definitely not to be confused with the "Piece Police" from The Puzzle Place. IJN admiral Takeo Takagi, who commanded the Imperial fleet during the 1941 invasion of the Phillippines, said about Tokko: 泣く子も黙ると言われた恐怖の「特高」。^note If you say "Tokko", even a crying child falls silent.
  • Due to the brutality of prewar Japan's secret police, modern-day Japanese intelligence and security services^note Mostly carried out the Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA, 公安調査庁) which is under the Ministry of Justice, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Public Security Bureau (警視庁公安部) have far more limited powers of surveillance compared to even their modern western counterparts (in the case of PSIA, the efforts to keep it in check arguably went so far that it is seen by some as the most redundant security organization of the present day).
• Modern-day China has several secret police units, as one would expect from a country that has managed to keep over 1 billion people in line, even more than 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Most of them are organs within the dreaded Ministry of State Security (国家安全部) and the Chinese Communist Party, but the Ministry of Public Security (公安部), responsible for day-to-day law enforcement in China, also contains secret police units. These include the Enemy Investigations Bureau (敵偵局), and Office 610 (610弁公室). The latter is tasked with disappearing Falun Gong activists (and, allegedly, harvesting their organs). The Ministry of Public Security also deploy their police officers overseas, known as Overseas 110 (海外110), and erecting their own stations there (disguised as an office to help out Chinese immigrants) in order to keep track of dissidents living abroad and have them captured to be bought back to the mainland.
• Taiwan boasted two oddly-named versions, which operated at the same time: (1) the General Department of Political Warfare, which maintained both political officers and general high-ranking commanders in every military unit, down to the company or battery level, as well as in many police units — and (2) the Taiwan Garrison Command, commanded by a three-star general, which acted to suppress political activism and ensure political orthodoxy, and was tied to various unsavory political murders or assassinations, and kept a hand in influencing society, economics, culture and education. These were the descendants of secret police organizations in pre-1949 China, in which the present Taiwan has institutional continuity with-the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, and the Military Bureau of Investigation and Statistics. It also showed some influence from the Russian system of political commissars.
• Pakistan has the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), which notably helped train the Afghan Mujahiddin during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and later the Taliban following Soviet withdrawal. They also have proported connections with Islamic militant groups and helped anti-Indian insurgents in Kashmir. Following the The War on Terror, many US intelligence officals began to preceive that the ISI is an unoffical terrorist organization akin to Al-Qaeda, while India accused them of helping the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• The National Intelligence and Security Authority was the Philippines' most notorious intelligence agency responsible for cracking down on anti-Marcos opposition in the 1970s and 80s under the command of General Fabian Ver. Formerly replacing the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, the NISA was rebranded to its current name after the EDSA Revolution.
• North Korea's version of the KGB was called the State Security Department, widely considered to be one of the most repressive police forces in the world, as it's been noted to have been involved in countless human rights abuses, including forced disappearances and public executions. And unsurprisingly, North Korea is a totalitarian Police State, where the government controls every aspect of its citizens' private lives, including the clothing they can wear and the TV shows they can watch, making it the perfect example of an Orwellian Dystopia. Dissenters and their immediate family members are sent to concentration camps, where they are subject to harsh and brutal Gulag-type conditions, including slavery and torture.
• For its part, South Korea had the KCIA (Korean Central Intelligence Agency) that oversaw intelligence activities, investigations, and occasional kidnappings at home and abroad, and wielded nearly absolute power in the country, to the point where in 1979 the KCIA director assassinated then-president of South Korea, Park Chung Hee. Several decades and two major reorganizations later, the organization is still functioning as the National Intelligence Service — though its powers were obviously cut back in the years of democratization.
• It is said that the Singaporean intelligence services (the Internal Security Department and the Security and Intelligence Division) work much like this.

Middle East and North Africa

• Iraq:
  • Iraqi Secret police, which was notoriously known for torturing and silencing Shias and Kurds who opposed the Iraqi government. This worsened by the Saddam Era, where hundreds of Iraqis ranging from teenagers to the elderly were sent off to be killed. Secret Police would perform extreme methods of torture, from rape to the gouging of eyes to extract evidence. They would even wiretap homes and then send off anyone in the night if they were suspected of anything slightly off place.
  • The Republican Guard was also notorious in silencing dissent, though not a secret police and more of an actual military orginization, their atrocities are associated with actual military operations performed during the late 80s.
• Iran:
  • The Basij, a plainclothes militia, is controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who sometimes act as a political secret police. Consisting mostly of male volunteers, the Basij are known for their fanatical devotion to the Ayatollah of Iran. Although it's a semi-decentralized force with many local bands, they have armed battalions controlled directly by the Revolutionary Guards. For most volunteers, their job is to enforce Islamic laws on the population, like making sure the women in the streets wear head scarves. And they have long been criticized by human rights organizations-the most recent controversy was during the "Twitter Revolution" in 2009. The Basij broke up mass protests by shooting into the crowds, killing at least a hundred. During their nighttime raids on universities, they broke into dorms and beat up the students, and several female protesters were taken into custody and gang-raped. The most disturbing part is that the Basij have adolescent members, called Puyandegan. Apparently, the Basij went so crazy on the protesters that the Ayatollah himself had to step in and curb them.
  • The SAVAMA is another secret police under the Islamic Republic. After the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the Islamic government inherited the intelligence apparatus of the old SAVAK (Which was also pretty bad), the secret police during the previous regime.
  • SAVAK, being the original originization under Imperial Iran, was on the same level due to imprisoning and torturing anyone from religious clerics to human rights activists. It never got as bad as the revolutionary period, but was notorious and despised throughout the country.
• The Mabahith in Saudi Arabia.
• Egypt's State Security Investigations Service proved to be remarkably like the Stasi after revolution revealed its piles and piles of documents, indicating (according to some sources) that as much as 1 or 2 percent of the country's population of 80 million was on its payroll (mostly as informants). It also proved to have had a taste for Electric Torture, although that was well-known beforehand (1975's The Karnak Cafe, one of the greatest Egyptian films ever, depicts torture under the 1953-1970 regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in graphic detail).

Sub-Saharan Africa

• In The Apartheid Era, the South African Bureau for State Security ^note Given the incorrect but apropos abbreviation B.O.S.S. by journalists. (Apropos because besides being a boss-like entity, the English word "boss" comes from Dutch, to which Afrikaans is very closely related.) The official Afrikaans was die Buro vir Staatsveiligheid fulfilled this function for the white government. BOSS was notorious for its general paranoia, for enthusiastically interrogating black suspects and facilitating their "suicides" from very high windows, and invented the euphemism "care package" for letter bombs — on the grounds that receiving one of these really takes care of people. This was replaced in 1980 by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), and following the end of apartheid, a revised and re-educated version persists as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).
• The hideously inappropriately named "State Research Bureau" of Idi Amin's Uganda.

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