The Pacepa team seeks to shift
discussion away from his relationship with the KGB and from the cessation of Romanian
intelligence cooperation with – and subordination to – the Soviet Union, and to
draw US institutions and officials on their side against Larry Watts and his
book With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s
Clandestine War Against Romania. Pacepa goes so far as to claim (with
emphasis) that the aim of Larry Watts is “to discredit the CIA by discrediting me.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013): 339).
In this
manner they set up former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, provoking him with
their artificial version of “Larry Watts.” Along with the entirely fictitious
biography described in Part I, Pacepa, Bädin and Tismaneanu provide Mr. Woolsey
with gross misrepresentations of my work to compel his negative comment.
Let me be
clear. Mr. Woolsey is persuaded as to the central theses of Disinformation: that the Kremlin
conducted an anti-Vatican campaign; that it proliferated anti-Americanism and
anti-Semitism, especially in the Middle East; and that it sponsored terrorism.
I also consider that the available documentation on Soviet operations bears out
such conclusions.
However, Pacepa’s (and
Tismaneanu’s) allegations concerning alleged Romanian involvement in those
operations after 1963 is so ludicrously at odds with the documentary record of
more than seven countries that they would be laughable if they were not so
damaging to Romanian-American relations.
Exploiting
Mr. Woolsey’s support for the central theses of Disinformation and, in Pacepa’s case, older relationships of trust
that may have been based on accurate information regarding Soviet operations, Pacepa,
Bădin
and Tismaneanu now manage to persuade the former CIA director not to examine my
book, my other publications, or my TV or radio broadcasts, but rather to
believe what they say Larry Watts says about him.
Using this technique they elicit
responses from Mr. Woolsey to statements misattributed by them to Larry Watts,
again careful to avoid any citation or quotation that would allow Mr. Woolsey
to verify their misrepresentations. None of my previous publications attribute
any statement or action to former CIA Director Woolsey (beyond noting his
presence in a publicly-reported symposium). Mr. Woolsey is not mentioned even
once in With Friends Like These.
According to Pacepa in his
“whisper-down-the-line” scenario, Larry Watts claims that former Director
Woolsey stated that “I [Pacepa] had confessed to him [Woolsey], in his CIA
office, that I was a KGB agent.” Pacepa further alleges that Larry Watts refers
“to some undisclosed documents allegedly found in CIA archives” to claim that
Ceauşescu would have broken “away from the Soviet bloc” when he
“was executed in 1989 because the CIA had concealed the truth about him [Ceauşescu]
to avoid having to admit it had granted me [Pacepa] political asylum even
though it knew all along that I had actually been a KGB agent all my life.” (Pacepa
and Rychlak (2013): 339)
Having thus misrepresented the work
of Larry Watts as seeking to discredit the CIA – and suggesting that Watts’s
arguments are not sourced with the utmost precision – Pacepa and Bädin
then paradoxically declare that Larry Watts has been seeking to associate
himself with the very organization that he is bent on discrediting, that he “claimed
to be working for the CIA” and that “Watts wrote in his biography (later also
published in his blog) that he worked in the CIA.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013):
340; Badin.ro, 18/10/12 and 19/10/12)
These are “whoppers” indeed. Whoppers
that Mr. Tismaneanu propagates more obliquely, stating that “known American
personalities are attributed words which they have never uttered. I refer to
Mr. R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA. Thus, resort is made to crass
lies, the intentional disfiguration of the truth, [and] the brutal falsification
of verifiable fact.” (Tismaneanu.wordpress.com, 27/07/13)
Bädin is more explicit
in his exchange with Mr. Pacepa, stating that: “According to Mr. Larry Watts,
the former director of the CIA, Mr. James Woolsey, had said that you admitted
in his bureau at the CIA that you denigrated Ceausescu because you were a KGB
agent.” (Evenimentul zilei, 29/07/13)
Not surprisingly, given his sources, Pacepa’s co-author likewise declares that
“Watts claims that the proof that Pacepa was a KGB agent was provided by former
CIA director James Woolsey, who allegedly disclosed that Pacepa acknowledged to
him, in his CIA office, that he had been a KGB agent all his life.” (http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/ion-mihai-pacepa-hero-to-the-west-and-romania/)
In
conformity with standard disinformation good practices, Pacepa, Tismaneanu and
Bädin
all fail to identify any book, article, page, TV or radio broadcast in which Larry
Watts made such outlandish allegations. They cannot produce them because they
do not exist. Trusting in the word of Pacepa and company, Mr. Woolsey reacts
naturally to such obviously “ridiculous affirmations,” labeling them the lies
they are.
Successfully misrepresenting
Larry Watts as having made these absurd assertions, the Pacepa team manages to
draw out Mr. Woolsey’s uninformed comment that “the affirmations of Watts are
lies.” The affirmations to which Mr. Woolsey is replying are indeed lies. But
they are the lies of Pacepa, Tismaneanu and Bädin, not of Larry Watts.
Mr. Woolsey’s comment is exactly the sort
of jewel that Pacepa, Tismaneanu and Bädin most desired – a clear statement
from a former U.S. official, and a former CIA director at that, dismissing the
work of Larry Watts. This is reflected in the eager insistence on Woolsey’s
comment by an impressive array of websites sympathetic to the Pacepa line. The
Pacepa team members are less successful in achieving their secondary goal, to
have Larry Watts engage former Director Woolsey in a polemic while leaving
Pacepa and his colleagues to continue their mischief unchallenged.
Knowing the mechanism
employed by Pacepa & co., I would prefer to refrain from further comment
were it not for the fact that my lack of response might give the mistaken
impression that these attacks on my credibility have some basis, or that Mr. Woolsey’s current opinion
of Pacepa and of Romanian-Soviet intelligence collaboration represents that of
the community of US intelligence agencies, the CIA especially. Neither is true.
In
fact, there are dozens (at least) of CIA documents detailing the anti-Soviet
independence of the Romanian regime, especially within the Warsaw Pact, that
post-date Pacepa’s defection. Those who wish to verify this can consult, for
example, the collection of reports brought out by Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski,
whose contribution to US and NATO interests far exceeded that of Mr. Pacepa. Kuklinski,
a more reliable source than Pacepa, repeatedly described Romania’s independence
with admiration in both these documents and in his published interviews. (http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/wartime-statutes-instruments-soviet-control, 18 March 2011; Kultura (Paris), 4 475 (April 1987):
3-57)
Mr.
Woolsey’s opinion, that “all of the intelligence services of the Soviet bloc
were, under one form or other, controlled by the KGB,” was presumably formed
when he was acting CIA director (02/92 – 01/94), when the archives of the
Soviet bloc were only just cracking open. At the start of the 1990s I also shared
that opinion, at least in part.
However, that opinion no longer represents
the current state of knowledge among U.S. intelligence agencies or academic
analysts. On the contrary, documentary collections made available since 1991
from the former regimes of the Soviet bloc – as well as further U.S. declassifications
– all confirm the breakdown in Soviet-Romanian intelligence cooperation since
the early 1960s. An ex-KGB foreign counter-intelligence chief, now resident in
the United States, has even explained that, by 1971, “Romanian State
Security terminated its ties with the KGB” while the “other Eastern European
secret services became even more subservient to the Soviets.” (http://hir.harvard.edu/intelligence/window-of-opportunity)
Clearly, my discussion of the fact
that Mr. Pacepa was an agent of the KGB throughout his career in Romania’s
state security apparatus has struck a nerve. Pacepa’s discomfort is somewhat odd.
He boasts throughout his 1987 Red
Horizons that he received his instructions directly from senior KGB officer
Alexander Sakharovsky, and had private meetings with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov.
And he underscored his privileged relationship with KGB leaders in subsequent articles
as well as in his current volume, where Pacepa repeatedly describes the KGB’s foreign
intelligence chief as his “boss and mentor” and the leader of the Soviet Communist
Party as his “ultimate boss,” and credits the Kremlin with “pushing” him “to
the top of Romanian foreign intelligence.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013): 45, 90,
150, 191, 281, 375)
At times he has been quite specific
about the nature of the orders that he received from his KGB bosses. He claims,
for example, that in 1972 the chief of KGB foreign intelligence “gave him
responsibility for illegal operations in Romania.” (The American Spectator, 09/07/10) What that KGB-granted
responsibility meant in terms of the complete breakdown of Romanian-Soviet
intelligence cooperation the year before I will leave to the reader to judge.
Pacepa’s insistence on receiving
orders from the high firmament of the KGB creates a rather large contradiction
when he now claims that he was “never a KGB agent.” His cheering section dismisses
any suggestion that Pacepa might have been a KGB agent as utter nonsense and
addled fantasy. Mr. Tismaneanu decries the fact that “Abracadabra
scenarios are launched conforming to which Ion Mihai Pacepa was a Soviet
agent.” And Pacepa’s co-author labels the claim “that Pacepa was a KGB agent”
as “preposterous.” (Tismaneanu.wordpress.com, 27/07/13; http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/ion-mihai-pacepa-hero-to-the-west-and-romania/,
29 July 2013)
Identifying Pacepa as a KGB agent
is hardly the hallucinatory fantasy Mr. Tismaneanu claims. As Pacepa openly
admits, the U.S. Presidential Administration that granted him asylum in
1978 believed him to “have been a KGB agent,” was convinced that his defection was
“concocted by the KGB,” and even prohibited him “from publishing anything for
the rest of [Pacepa’s] life.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013): 332, 342) Pacepa
received asylum not because of the alleged value of his information but because
it was U.S. policy not to return political defectors likely to be executed on
their return – Pacepa was sentenced to death in absentia – nor was it in U.S. interest to discourage other high-level
Soviet bloc defections (even if defections “in-place” were always preferred.)
The great victory obtained
by Pacepa and company in this current campaign is Woolsey’s statement (retranslated
from the Romanian newspaper account in Evenimentul
zilei) that “Watts maintains that General Pacepa informed me that for many
years he had been a KGB agent,” and that this alleged “affirmation of Watts,
that Pacepa confessed to me that he had been a KGB agent, is a lie.” (http://www.evz.ro/detalii/stiri/fostul-sef-al-cia-james-woolsey-interviu-in-exclusivitate-pentru-b1-si-evz-larry-watts-1050761.html)
No doubt Mssrs Pacepa, Tismaneanu and
Bädin see this as game, set and match.
To be clear, up to this point Mr. Woolsey
was reacting naturally to the disinformation provided him by Pacepa & co.
Now, however, he commits an error of his own. According to Front Page Magazine, in April 2004 Mr. Woolsey participated in a
three-man panel with Mr. Pacepa entitled “KGB Resurrection,” in which Mr.
Pacepa declared that “I spent 27 years of my life working for the KGB, I defected
from it 26 years ago.” (http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13185, 30/04/04)
Barring the unlikely possibility that the
moderator mistook Mr. Woolsey and/or Mr. Pacepa for some other persons, Mr.
Woolsey probably has misremembered. Pacepa did admit in the presence of, if not
directly to, Mr. Woolsey that he “worked for the KGB” for the entire period of
his 27 years in the Romanian state security apparatus. Pacepa acknowledged during
the same panel that Soviet KGB officer Sakharovsky was his “former boss,”
removing any doubt as to which KGB he might be referring.
In any case, as I affirm in my 2010 volume,
Pacepa had indeed “gone on record that he was in fact a Soviet agent throughout
his career in the DSS,” and he has “admitted having ‘spent 27 years’ as a
Soviet agent taking ‘orders from the Soviet KGB,’ the entire length of his
career in Romania’s state security organs.” (Watts (2010): endnote #59 on 206, 660)
Pacepa’s “monster plot” conspiracy
theory, like that of his predecessor, Anatolyi Golitsyn, did win some adherents
within the US intelligence – and especially counterintelligence –
establishment, but the CIA as institution never endorsed it prior to 1985, as
Pacepa and company would have us believe. Nor does the Central Intelligence
Agency endorse it today, contrary to what Mr. Woolsey suggests.
Comintern agent Willi Münzenburg
is credited with inventing the Soviet front organization and the “clubs of
innocents” (or “useful idiots”) through which he manipulated unsuspecting
Western opinion. In similar fashion Pacepa and company persist on running with
the lie that Communist Romania during 1963-1989 was a Soviet Trojan horse and
its independence a sham. That lie falls before overwhelming archival evidence
to the contrary.
Naturally,
Pacepa and his supporters are anxious that we “pay no attention to the man
behind the curtain” that might expose him as a false wizard whose information
is not nearly so great nor so powerful as he would have us believe. Instead, he
insists – along with Mssrs Tismaneanu and Bădin – that we look
almost anywhere other than at the great hoard of publicly accessible documents
detailing the close Romanian-American relationship, the close Romanian-Chinese
relationship and the mutually antagonistic and often outright hostile
Soviet-Romanian and Warsaw Pact-Romanian relationships.
According to one time-tested legal
adage: “If the facts are on your side then argue the facts; if the law is on your
side then argue the law; but if neither are on your side then attack your opponent.”
Unable to combat the avalanche of documentary evidence, Pacepa, Tismaneanu and
Bädin
clearly resort to this approach, attacking their imagined versions of the past
and character of Larry Watts rather than the arguments and evidence presented
in With Friends Like These. No doubt
they will run into similar difficulty with my second volume, Extorting Peace: Romania and the End of the Cold
War (2013).
