Ion Mihai Pacepa
'Ion Mihai Pacepa' (born
28 October 1928 in
Bucharest,
Romania) is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the former
Eastern bloc. He is now an
American citizen.
In July 1978, Pacepa was a two-star Romanian
Securitate general who simultaneously held the rank of advisor to
President Nicolae Ceauşescu, acting chief of his foreign intelligence service and state secretary in Romania’s Ministry of Interior. He defected to the
United States following
President Jimmy Carter's approval of his request for
political asylum.
Subsequently, he worked with
American intelligence in various operations against the former Eastern Bloc. The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) described his cooperation as "an important and unique contribution to the United States".
Biography
Pacepa studied industrial
chemistry at the
University Politehnica of Bucharest, but just months before graduation he was drafted by the Securitate, and got his
engineering degree only four years later. Between 1957 and 1960 he served as chief of the Romanian intelligence station in
West Germany, and, between 1972 and 1978, he was Ceauşescu's adviser for national security and technological development and the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service.
Pacepa defected in July 1978 by walking into the American Embassy in
Bonn, where he had been sent by Ceauşescu with a message to
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He was secretly flown to
Andrews Air Force Base near
Washington, D.C. in a United States military airplane.
In September 1978, Pacepa received two death sentences from
Communist Romania, and Ceauşescu placed a bounty of two million
US dollars on his head.
Yasser Arafat and
Muammar al-Qaddafi set one more million dollars reward each.
[1] In the 1980s Romania’s political police tasked
Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars.
[2] Carlos was unable to find Pacepa, but on
February 21,
1980, he blew up a part of
Radio Free Europe's headquarters in
Munich, which was broadcasting news on Pacepa's defection.
On
July 7,
1999 Romania’s Supreme Court Decision No. 41/1999 cancelled Pacepa’s death sentences, restored his military rank and ordered that his properties, confiscated on Ceauşescu's orders, be returned to him. The country's government refused to comply. This ignited a series of Western articles alleging that Romania was still not a country of laws. In December 2004 the government of Romania quietly restored Pacepa’s rank of general.
Books and Articles
In 1987 Pacepa published a book, ''Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief'', which was serialized on
Radio Free Europe, arousing "huge interest among Romanians". On
December 25,
1989, during the closing stages of the
Romanian Revolution, Ceauşescu and his wife
Elena were sentenced to death at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come word-for-word out of ''Red Horizons''.
The next day, the book began being serialized in the new official Romanian newspaper ''
Adevărul'', which wrote that the book had "played an incontestable role in overthrowing Ceauşescu" (according to the text on the back cover of the book’s second edition, published in 1990). ''Red Horizons'' was subsequently republished in 27 countries, and is still in print.
In 1993 Pacepa published ''The
Kremlin's Legacy'', in which he tried to wean his native country away from its continued dependency on a Communist-style police state. In 1999 he authored the trilogy ''The Black Book of the Securitate'', which has become a bestseller in Romania.
[3]
He occasionally writes articles for ''
The Wall Street Journal'' and various
American conservative publications, such as ''
National Review Online'', ''
The Washington Times'', and the online newspaper ''
FrontPage Magazine''. In a 2006 article, Pacepa describes a conversation he had with
Nicolae Ceauşescu, who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill":
Laszlo Rajk and
Imre Nagy from
Hungary;
Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from Romania;
Rudolf Slansky and
Jan Masaryk from
Czechoslovakia; the
Shah of Iran;
Palmiro Togliatti from Italy;
John F. Kennedy; and
Mao Zedong. Pacepa provides some additional details, such as a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of
Lin Biao organized by the
KGB and notes that "among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy."
[4] In a 2007 article, he recalls how "In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the
Vatican, by portraying
Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted
Nazi sympathizer."
["Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican", by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, January 25, 2007]
References
1. "Book Inspired Counter-Revolution" by Alfred Regnery, published in ''Human Events'', October 22, 2002
2. "The Securitate Arsenal for Carlos," ''Ziua'', Bucharest, 2004
3. "Romania’s Rebirth", by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, July 27, 2006
4. "The Kremlin’s Killing Ways", by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, November 28, 2006
Publications
Books
★ ''Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief'', 1987. ISBN 0-89526-570-2
★ ''Red Horizons: the 2nd Book. The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu's Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption'' 1990. ISBN 0-89526-746-2
★ ''The Kremlin Legacy, 1993
★ ''Cartea neagră a Securităţii'', Editura Omega, Bucharest, 1999. ISBN 9-73987-454-1
Articles
★ ''
The Arafat I Knew'', 2002
★ ''
The KGB’s Man'', 2003
★ ''
Khaddafi's "Conversion"'', 2003
★ ''
Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD'', 2003
★ ''
From Russia With Terror'', March 1, 2004
★ ''
No Peter the Great'', September 20, 2004
★ ''
Putin's Duality'', August 5, 2005
★ ''
Who Is Raúl Castro? A tyrant only a brother could love.'', August 10, 2006
★ ''
Russian Footprints'', August 24, 2006
★ ''
Tyrants and the Bomb'', October 17, 2006
★ ''
The Kremlin’s Killing Ways'', November 28, 2006
External links
See also
★
Active measures
★
Operation Sarindar
★
Russia and Saddam WMD allegations
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