Pacepa And Disinformation II

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, “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 originally appeared on 7/25/2013)

Pacepa And Disinformation I

I seldom do book reviews. However, since Ion Mihai Pacepa directly addresses my work in his latest co-authored effort – Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategy for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (WND 2013) – I will make a partial exception, limited to Mr. Pacepa’s allegations, comments and insinuations regarding Romanian-Soviet intelligence cooperation.

Disinformation is well-titled. It presents the detailed background and thoughtful analysis of a probable Soviet disinformation campaign against Pope Pius XII, which falsely projected the pontiff as “Hitler’s Pope.” It also presents an excellent example of disinformation in its own right because almost every one of Pacepa’s claims for significant Romanian involvement in anti-Vatican, anti-American and anti-Jewish operations after 1963 are without any evidentiary basis.

The sections of the book in which Pacepa identifies himself in the first person will be familiar to his readers since they largely reiterate his previous books and journal articles. The central focus of the book is placed on Soviet operations against the Vatican during the Cold War. Given that the book was preceded by his 2007 article – “Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican” (National Review Online (NRO), 25/01/07) – in which he also depicted Romania, its Communist regime, and his former foreign intelligence service as central players in the plot against the Pope, I will make references to both the article and the book. Part II of this blog will address a similar pairing of article and book on alleged Romanian anti-Israel and anti-Jewish operations. Part III will consider Pacepa’s relationship to the KGB and his impact on US policy towards Romania.

In light of his claims to have run penetration agents inside the Vatican at the beginning of the 1960s it is worth noting that, during the period in question, Pacepa was specialized in the theft of western technology and science from West Germany. That does not necessarily preclude him from having been ordered by his Soviet KGB masters to send Romanian “cleric-spies” to the Vatican to steal documents that could be used to compromise the pontiff. But it does suggest that he was performing different tasks for different masters. 

Pacepa claims to have been given the task of placing agents in the headquarters of the Catholic Church by the head of KGB foreign intelligence. The reason why he and his service were chosen for the task was, according to his 2007 article, because he had only recently conducted a “spy swap” (in 1959) in which a Romanian political prisoner, Roman Catholic Bishop Augustin Pacha, was traded for two Romanian intelligence officers incarcerated in the Federal Republic of Germany. Bishop Pacha’s return “to the Vatican via West Germany” allegedly won Pacepa special access to and influence with Vatican officials. (NRO, 01/25/2007)

However, Bishop Pacha never returned to the Vatican. Neither via West Germany nor by any other route. He died and was buried in Romania shortly after having been amnestied five years earlier, in November 1954. Pacepa, operating within the domestic political police at the time, had no role in Pacha’s 1954 liberation either. (W. Totok, “Episcop, Hitler si Securitate,” Observator Cultural, 12/2004) 

This error was publicly exposed between the publication of the 2007 article and the current book, and Disinformation acknowledges it as such in a footnote, although in the third person rather than Pacepa’s own voice. Pacepa now maintains that he “negotiated a ‘spy swap’ with the Holy See” for four prominent Catholics (such a swap did indeed take place) and thus “was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican” for access to its archives (pages 111, 367).

However, those “swap” negotiations were held not with the Vatican but between the Romanian and West German governments – all of those imprisoned in Romania having been ethnic Germans. If Pacepa was involved then it is certainly believable that, in the more than half century since, he might have misremembered Bishop Pacha for another imprisoned clergyman. It is rather harder to believe he forgot that the swap he claims to have “conducted” and “negotiated” involved not one but several (four) Romanian prisoners (including a woman). Especially since his involvement in it would have done serious damage to his trade representative cover story.

The general plausibility of Pacepa’s disinformation is based on the fact that the USSR considered the Vatican and its Pope as one of its main enemies, and the KGB conducted a major espionage campaign against it. The Mitrokhin KGB archives contain many details of the Warsaw Pact campaign against the Holy See. Likewise, a good deal of information has already surfaced regarding Soviet operations to discredit Pope Pius XII, including in a volume written by Pacepa’s co-author, a long-time specialist in Vatican affairs. (See e.g. The KGB vs. Vatican City, Mitrokhin Archive, CWIHP; R. Rychlak, Hitler, The War And The Pope (2010)) 

So far so good. 

But now Pacepa drives off the reservation, compromising the otherwise solid research supplied by his co-author by injecting a series of falsehoods and improbabilities, beginning with his attempt to explain how he and Romania came to be at the center of Soviet anti-Vatican operations. In 2007 he made the farfetched claim that the KGB had no other better access into the Vatican than himself and the Romanian intelligence service. Six years later Pacepa claims that the Romanian “people and foreign intelligence service, the DIE, were asked to help” because “Romania had a fairly large Catholic community.” (page 111) 

But Roman Catholics constituted only 5% of all believers in Romania, comparing poorly with the close to 90% in Poland; 84% in Czechoslovakia; more than 50% in Hungary; and 13% in the German Democratic Republic. It is true that, in 1959, Catholics constituted only about 4% of believers in the USSR. But that was still about five times more in absolute terms than in Romania which, in fact, had one of the smallest Catholic communities in Eastern Europe.

Other Soviet bloc intelligence defectors (KGB included) – and Warsaw Pact archives – confirm that since the 1950s Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had the best access to, and were the most involved in operations against, the Holy See. Polish anti-Vatican operations certainly dwarfed anything that Romania may have mounted. By the early 1960s Hungarian state security was considered by its peers as the best in “penetrating the Vatican hierarchy.” Based on its full access to the Vatican, Hungarian intelligence was even designated by the KGB as the lead service for all Warsaw Pact anti-Vatican operations. (L. Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation (1985): 32; L. Bittman, The Deception Game (1972): 146; C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (2001): 503; A. Grajewski, “Security Services of the Polish People’s Republic against the Vatican in 1956–1978” and S. Bottoni, “A Special Relationship: Hungarian Intelligence and the Vatican, 1961-1978” in The NKVD/KGB Activities and Its Cooperation with Other Secret Services in Eastern and Central Europe (2008)) 

In his article Pacepa asserted that, in the early 1960s, he ran three Romanian agents under clerical cover to whom the Vatican granted immediate access to its archives at his request, and that these agents then stole “hundreds of documents” from the Vatican archives. But new arrivals from the only Orthodox Latin country in the world certainly would have elicited more curiosity than “cleric spies” from the predominately Catholic countries of the Soviet bloc that were already in place. Operating with the speed and effectiveness Pacepa pretends, under conditions of inevitably greater scrutiny, would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.

It is improbable that the KGB would have turned to Romania given its relative lack of Roman Catholic “cover.” Nor is it any less improbable that Romania would have volunteered its relatively few Roman Catholics – who were mostly of Hungarian ethnicity and a traditional target of penetration operations by Hungarian intelligence – for such a mission.

Pacepa describes the main accomplishment of his agents as the theft of letterhead stationery that only may have been used to help create the forgeries used in the campaign against Pope Pius XII, suggesting the marginal nature of Romanian involvement. Given that the letterhead used by Soviet intelligence in its forgery campaign may have reached the KGB through any number of sources, this claim, in the tradition of good disinformation, is almost impossible to prove or disprove. (Disinformation: 112-114, 125)  

Any claim of Romanian involvement in Soviet anti-Vatican operations after 1956 is extremely problematic. In 1960 Khrushchev complained to his entourage that “in Romania, and even in the ranks of its Communist Party, pernicious nationalist and anti-Soviet attitudes were developing which must be cut off the root.” By 1961 tension at the level of security intelligence services was so pronounced that Bucharest unilaterally ended the otherwise common practice within the Warsaw Pact (until 1991) of sending intelligence officers to Soviet institutions in the USSR for training. And, by 1962, the KGB was curbing its intelligence cooperation with Romania and ordering the other Pact services to do so as well. (A. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (1985): 97; J. Sejna, Will We Bury You (1982): 66)

In 2007 Pacepa claimed that KGB disinformation chief Ivan Agayants traveled to Romania in 1963 to congratulate Romania for a job well done against the Pope and the Vatican. However, at that time Romania was unilaterally pulling out of its joint espionage operations with the Warsaw Pact services. That same summer Bucharest called for Moscow to shut down Soviet espionage networks not only in Romania but throughout the Soviet bloc. While Agayants may have congratulated Pacepa at some point for his personal contribution, any visit in the summer of 1963 would have only confirmed the break-down in Romanian-Soviet intelligence collaboration. (G. Herbstritt and S. Olaru, Stasi şi securitate (2005): 66; Working Paper #65, CWIHP, wilsoncenter.org)

Pacepa produces no evidence – old or new – for Romanian involvement in anti-Vatican operations during the 1960s beyond that of his own questionable testimony. But in 1958 the Romanian regime authorized the opening of the first Romanian-speaking Catholic Seminary since Stalin. The Mitrokhin KGB archives also suggest Romanian reluctance to engage in such operations. In 1967, for example, the Romanians explicitly refused to participate in hostile espionage operations “against the Vatican.”  And they refused even to attend Warsaw Pact meetings on anti-Vatican operations in 1970 and 1975. (Andrew and Mitrokhin (2001): 499-500, 645 endnote 87) 

As in his previous books and articles Pacepa’s Disinformation simply ignores or denies Romania’s break with Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence. Indeed, Pacepa’s entire thesis regarding Romanian involvement in these operations is premised and dependent upon the existence of close Soviet-Romanian intelligence cooperation. Unfortunately for Mr. Pacepa the breakdown in Soviet-Romanian intelligence relations in 1963 has now been confirmed and reconfirmed beyond reasonable doubt from the archives of every other Eastern European member of the Warsaw Pact including those of the Soviet Central Committee and the KGB. (G. Herbstritt, “Refused Cooperation: The Relation Stasi – Securitate and Romania’s Aspirations to Independence” in NKVD/KGB Activities (2008); WP #65, CWIHP) As Soviet leaders bitterly complained in 1964, there had been an obvious “limitation of contacts with Soviet institutions” ever since “the end of 1962,” and “beginning in 1963, the Romanian intelligence organs had in fact ended any sort of collaboration with our intelligence organs.”  (Document 4 in e-Dossier #38, CWIHP)  

Pacepa’s refusal even to acknowledge this breakdown, for which the evidence is now overwhelming, calls into question the veracity of his other ‘insider information’ and undermines the otherwise solid research of his co-author on the character assassination campaign against Pope Pius XII. 

(Continued as "Pacepa And Disinformation II." This blog originally appeared as "Mr. Pacepa's Disinformation I" on 7/25/2013)