Throughout his ouvre Pacepa paints a portrait of intimate and enthusiastic Romanian
complicity in Soviet-sponsored anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish espionage
operations. His work admits no hint of genuine clash of interest or serious
friction between Bucharest and Moscow. He continues this same line in Disinformation (co-authored with Ronald
J. Rychlak), thus infusing the work with disinformation rather than merely
explaining the phenomenon.
Pacepa’s portrait of Romanian
cooperation with the state security services of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact at
critical points in 1963, 1972 and 1978 does not accord at all with the internal
documents of other Soviet bloc members. Where he imagines strengthened
collaboration and subordination, they speak only of greater strain, relations
entirely broken off, and even of mutually hostile operations. In 1987 the
disinformation Pacepa presented in his Red
Horizons was influential primarily because its most important aspects could
not be verified and its general line was inherently plausible – two characteristics
of any effective disinformation. However, what could be asserted without too
much fear of verification or contradiction in 1987, before the collapse of
Communism and the opening of Warsaw Pact archives, is now easily disproven.
Compare, for instance, the state of
Romanian relations within the Warsaw Pact as described by its other members
with Pacepa’s ‘revelations’ of alleged Soviet-Romanian cooperation in Operation
Horizon launched against the United
States in February 1972. Five months earlier Brezhnev informed the other Pact
members that Romania led “the fight against us” and was “the fundamental
obstruction to our line.” According to János Kádár, the Ceauşescu regime
“always abandoned” their common line and pursued one “directed against the
Soviet Union Union and the Warsaw Pact.” The other leaders agreed on the
necessity of recruiting agents within Romania “who in the future will support
us” in order “to exert influence on developments inside the country” because
Romanian policies were “anti-Soviet” and aimed “against the Warsaw Pact” (Record of the Meeting Between Leonid
Brezhnev and East European Party Leaders in the Crimea, 02/08/71, Parallel History
Project on Cooperative Security (PHP), www.php.isn.ethz.ch)
Former KGB foreign counterintelligence
chief, General Oleg Kalugin, confirmed the final breakdown of the already entirely
superficial Romanian-Soviet intelligence cooperation in 1971, observing that
“Romanian State Security terminated its ties with the KGB” altogether,
precisely as all other Pact services became more directly subordinate to KGB
authority. KGB chief Yuri Andropov even intervened directly with the Bulgarians
in December 1971, ordering them to sever completely what he regarded as their “incautious
close relations” with Romanian intelligence. (Kalugin in Harvard International Review, v. 24, no. 3 (Fall 2002); J. Baev and
K. Grozev in A Handbook of the Communist
Security Apparatus in Eastern Europe 1945-1989 (2005): 49, 85)
Pacepa’s allegations – repeated in
his 1987 Red Horizons and in Disinformation – that Romania participated
in a massive anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign on behalf of
the Soviet Union at the start of 1972, were designed for American audiences.
The Warsaw Pact leadership and KGB documents that rebut them were not produced
for U.S. consumption.
As to Moscow’s allegedly ‘stage-managed’
advertisement of Romania as an independent actor, Pacepa is only about a decade
too late. The ship of Western praise for Romanian defiance of Moscow had been sailing
for almost a decade before Pacepa’s imagined Operation Horizon. The fame of Romanian independence reached global
proportions with its refusal to assist Soviet clients or break off relations
with Israel in June 1967 and its defiance against the Soviet-led invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. (See e.g., “Rumanians Widen Independent Line: Seek
‘Spiritual’ Tie to West,” New York Times,
19/12/64; “Rumania Opposes Soviet on Control of Armies,” The New York Times, 18/05/66)
Pacepa is so wildly off base with
his accusations of Romanian-Soviet complicity that it would be laughable were
it not for the very real negative impact they have had on the American-Romanian
relationship since the beginning of the 1980s.
As in the case of anti-Vatican
operations, Pacepa’s claim for an important Romanian role in the KGB’s
anti-American and anti-Jewish operations in the Middle East was outlined in an
article several years prior. In both his 2006 article and in Disinformation Pacepa insists that, in
1972, the KGB launched Operation SIG (“Zionist Governments”) that fell within the
responsibility of Romanian state security since it involved Libya, Iran,
Lebanon, and Syria (the article includes Iran, the book does not).
Thus, he alleges, “all” of the “thousands
of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors”
that were sent from Romania to those countries ostensibly to participate in
“joint ventures to build hospitals, houses and roads” were actually on the
mission of “portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish
fiefdom” aiming to subordinate “the entire Islamic world.” (I.
Pacepa, “Russian Footprints” National
Review (NRO), 24/08/06; Disinformation:
38. 94, 261-2, 277-8)
Pacepa’s intent here is neither
subtle nor anchored in any reality. He stigmatizes virtually every Romanian
involved in economic ventures or humanitarian assistance in the Middle East
from 1972 through 1989 (at least) as a purveyor of rabid anti-Americanism and
an instigator of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli hatreds and violence. Romanian
relations with and activity in the Middle East, Pacepa insists, should be
interpreted – by Washington and Tel Aviv, by the allies of both, and by the Islamic
countries where Romanians were present – as “enemy action” for which Romania
should be punished.
Pacepa persistently
shifts his dating of hostile operations to 1972 – his annus mirabilis for Soviet-Romania intelligence cooperation against
the United States, Israel and Jewry. In 2006, for example, he had claimed that Romania
followed KGB orders “in the mid 1970s” to recruit members of Islamic ethnic
groups to sow “rabid, demented” anti-American and anti-Jewish disinformation
and to support terrorist operations in the area. In Disinformation, however, Pacepa consolidates his accusations so
that Operation SIG, his imagined Operation Horizon, and the alleged recruitment of “Islamic”
ethnics for disinformation and terrorist operations were all launched in 1972. (NRO,
24/08/06; Disinformation: 262)
In 2006 he also claimed that before
he defected in July 1978, “my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover
agents to Islamic countries.” In Disinformation
he embellishes upon that by claiming that Romania “continued to send such
agents until the Soviet bloc collapsed, in 1989,” and by stressing that “most
of them were engineers, medical doctors, teachers, and art instructors.”
Pacepa
performs a similar consolidation of Romania’s alleged “showering” of the
Islamic world with the anti-Jewish Protocols
of the Elders of Zion and with other KGB-fabricated documents alleging a
U.S.-Zionist conspiracy to convert “the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.” In
his article Pacepa dated this operation to “the mid-1970s” while in Disinformation he moves it up to 1972 as
well, adding as an aside that during his “later years in Romania” – that is,
the end of the 1970s – his service “disseminated thousands of copies throughout
its Islamic sphere of influence” on the order of the KGB. (NRO, 24/08/06; Disinformation: 262)
Again, internal
Soviet documents not designed for American consumption contradict Pacepa
entirely. In 1972 Soviet authorities requested more KGB units along the USSR’s
frontier with Romania in part because “the anti-Soviet activity of Zionist
organizations on Romanian territory has intensified.” Apparently, this was a
chronic problem. In 1978 the Soviet Moldavian leader pleaded with KGB chief
Andropov for forty more KGB units to combat Romanian subversion, including the “intense
subversive activity among persons of Jewish nationality” undertaken by
“formations of a Zionist and clerical nuance on Romanian territory.” And in
1987 KGB authorities complained that “the propagandistic and religious centers”
of Romania (which internal KGB documents now codenamed “Objective 24”)
continued their subversive “inspiration of nationalist manifestations and
hostile pro-Zionism.” As late as November 1989 the KGB was bewailing the
“anti-Soviet” subversive activity of “the special services of the adversary,
principally the USA, FRG, Israel, and the special organs of Objective 24,”
regarding “artificially exaggerated positions on the Bessarabian and Jewish
questions.” (Documents 3, 14, 26, 27 in WP #65, CWIHP, wilsoncenter.org)
Instead of the ‘intense’ Romanian-Soviet
cooperation against the US, Israel and Jewry, upon which Pacepa doggedly
insists, Romania was actively supporting anti-Soviet groups and tendencies
within the Bloc, within the larger socialist community, in the West, and
globally. And the internal reports of the other Pact members, including
Romania, reflect this. For example, the East Germans directly contradicted
Pacepa’s claim of renewed Romanian commitment to Bloc-wide cooperation against
the West in 1972, reporting instead that Romania’s “unprincipled” foreign and
security policies “harmed the agreed approach of the socialist countries on the
main international issues” and damaged the “unity and cohesion of the socialist
world system.” (Analysis of
Romanian-Chinese Relations by the East German Embassy in Bucharest,
18/12/72, PHP)
The Soviet Union was indeed behind
a campaign of spreading anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish literature and in exacerbating
anti-Semitism throughout the Middle East. But Romania did not assist Moscow in
carrying it out. In propagating these falsehoods Pacepa’s originally
Soviet-directed aim was to distract attention from the real purveyors of that
anti-Semitic campaign. More importantly still, the Kremlin sought to obscure
the fact that at that time and ever since the early 1960s Romania encouraged
and supported the anti-Soviet Left wherever in the world it possibly could – in
the Middle East, in Asia, in Latin America, in Western Europe, and even within
the Soviet bloc itself. (Document 3 in CWIHP WP #65)
Romania interceded with Santiago
Carillo on behalf of Juan Carlos to facilitate a transition to constitutional
monarchy in Spain incorporating a legalized Spanish Communist Party that was
not subservient to Moscow. (C. Power, Juan
Carlos of
Spain: Self-Made Monarch (1996): 88-90) Romania also mediated between the
military junta and Portuguese communists in order, as the CIA pointed out, “to
head off a radical swing to the left that could bring Portugal under
considerable Soviet influence.” (National
Intelligence Bulletin, 03/11/75, foia.cia.gov) And several days before
Pacepa sought asylum in the West, Soviet authorities described Romania’s
support of anti-Soviet Eurocommunism
in a report entitled “Information
Regarding the Intensification in Romania of a Propaganda Campaign that Harms
the Interests of the USSR.” (Document 15 in WP #65, CWIHP)
Moscow and
its partners within and outside the Soviet bloc were well aware of Romanian behavior,
even if Pacepa appears to be oblivious to it. Fidel Castro complained to the Bulgarian
leader that Romania was sabotaging the “unity” of Latin American communism, “brainwashing”
their leaders, and “instigating conflicts” with and “rousing distrust toward
the Soviet Union.” Within a year of Pacepa’s departure Brezhnev frontally
attacked the Romanians for refusing to support pro-Soviet “revolutionary”
groups in Nicaragua and Southeast Asia. (Minutes
of the meeting between Todor Zhivkov and Fidel Castro in Sofia, 11 March
1976, CWIHP; Document
5 in WP #65, CWIHP)
Pacepa
lists as the main targets of Romania’s alleged anti-American and anti-Semitic
campaign – Syria, Lybia, Lebanon, Iran. In at least three of these countries
Romania struggled mightily to persuade their regimes of Israel’s right to exist
– and, of the danger of close relations with the Soviet Union. It is hardly mysterious
why Pacepa decided to drop Iran from this list between the publication of his
2006 allegations and the 2013 publication of Disinformation. In the interim Soviet documents had surfaced
revealing how, within a year of Pacepa’s defection, Soviet authorities reported
that “after the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran, the Romanian leadership
quickly sent a Moslem delegation [to Teheran] to warn [Ayatollah] Khomeni not
to invite specialists of the USSR into Iran.” The Romanians, Moscow complained,
approached Afghanistan in the same sense, advocating policies of an “overtly
anti-Soviet character.” (Document 4 in WP #65, CWIHP)
On the very
day of Pacepa’s defection (27 July 1978), Moscow bitterly condemned Romania for
seeking to “convince” the other socialist states “to combat together,
through joint action, the actions and measures of the USSR within the Warsaw
Pact [and] on many other issues regarding the resolution of a series of
problems of international importance.” A year after Pacepa arrived in the
United States the Kremlin was still decrying the “insistent” efforts of the Romanian
leadership “to draw to its side, in anti-Soviet actions, the leaderships
of Bulgaria, Poland, and the GDR.” (Documents 2 and 4 in e-Dossier #29, CWIHP)
According
to internal Kremlin communications that were never meant to see the light of
day, Romania was “supporting, aligning with and exploiting” U.S. foreign
policies. And the Americans, according to internal Soviet discussions, were
“using” Romania “in order to undermine the unity of the fraternal countries
from inside, for the ‘loosening’ of the political-military union of the
socialist states.”
Pacepa’s
confabulation of Romanian participation in virulent anti-Americanism
and anti-Jewish operations is simply that, a fantasy that can be maintained
only through repetition and studious avoidance of the facts.This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro
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