On Romania: pacepa

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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

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)

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Trapping Woolsey: How to Hoodwink a CIA Director Part 2

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 toFront 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 inWith 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).

[This blog originally appeared as "Pacepa, The Great and Powerful II", August 28, 2013]

Trapping Woolsey: How to Hoodwink a CIA Director Part I

On 28 July 2013 Romania’s B1 TV ran a 6-hour marathon program to launch the latest literary effort by Romanian Cold War defector Ion Mihai Pacepa - Disinformation (2013), co-authored by Ronald J. Rychlak – and to praise Pacepa as a hero allegedly responsible for bringing down communism in Romania and, apparently, in Europe. (http://inregistrari.b1.ro/view-aktualitatea_rom%C3%A2neasc%C4%83-127.html, 28 July 2013)

As part of the supplementary media extravaganza Mssrs Pacepa, his interviewer Andrei Bädin, and Vladimir Tismaneanu attacked my person and my book With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s Clandestine War Against Romania (2010). Ironically, the title and central topic of the Pacepa-Rychlak volume are ideally suited for assessing their attacks against Larry Watts.

For readers who may be unfamiliar with the concept, disinformation is spurious information designed to deceive decision-makers and/or public audiences into taking action – including non-action – damaging to their interests. In the case at hand, this might refer to the misrepresentation of a source as reliable and worthy of consultation or as exactly the reverse – as a charlatan whose reports should be neither read nor considered. Since disinformation cannot withstand serious verification, every effort is made to discourage critical analysis. Even the most bizarre allegations can be sold to target audiences when disinformation is tuned to the pre-existing beliefs, suspicions, cultural prejudices or political biases of the receiver.

Most disinformation shares several characteristics. First, aside from minor details that lend it plausibility the main allegations are difficult or impossible to verify. Secondly, disinformation is difficult to trace back to its original source. Source references, when given at all, are only general and no specific citations, page numbers, or broadcast programs and times are provided. This encourages the receiver to believe that the allegation is documented while discouraging him or her from examining or verifying any specific reference. A case in point: none of the quotations that Pacepa presents as coming from his discussions with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, from KGB foreign intelligence chief Alexander Sakharovsky, or from Nicolae Ceausescu has any documentary basis whatsoever.

The allegations of the Pacepa-Bädin-Tismaneanu team regarding post-1963 Soviet-Romanian intelligence collaboration and their attacks against my person and my work follow this pattern exactly. They claim the existence of post-1963 collaboration against the U.S., the Vatican and Israel yet they provide no evidence or proof to back up that allegation beyond the ‘authority’ of Pacepa, insisting on what he wrote in Red Horizons. And they invent their own “Larry Watts” in order to attack assertions that I have never expressed in speech or writing, while seeking to draw unwitting U.S. personalities to join them in their campaign against assertions for which they are solely responsible. This latter tactic corresponds to a standard disinformation “game” in which conflict is incited between the target and a third party until it becomes self-sustaining, thus diverting the target’s energies and weakening its position.

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey fell into this trap because he trusted Pacepa and therefore did not undertake due diligence in verifying Pacepa’s allegations. The same technique was used to ensnare Albert Einstein and a number of US Senators and Congressmen in unwitting support of Soviet front organizations purporting to be working on social welfare issues during the 1920s and 1930s. (www.foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/einstein.htm;New York Times, 09/02/22)

Mssrs Pacepa and Tismaneanu have sought to enlist some U.S. authority to discreditWith Friends Like These since its initial publication. This was no easy task given that the book received favorable reviews from leading specialists on Romania and the Cold War in the region such as Prof. Keith Hitchens, Prof. Dennis Deletant, and Director of National Security Policy and Strategy at the US Army War College, Colonel Charles Van Bebber. (Southeastern Europe, 36 1(December 2012); Slavic and East European Review, 90 1(January 2012);Parameters, 41 3(Autumn 2011))

With Friends Like These also received endorsements from a former head of British intelligence assessment, a senior CIA analyst responsible for the Balkans, several former senior US diplomats who served in the area, and professors from both the United States and Europe. In Romania the book has been praised by Academicians, university professors, archivists, both current and former post-communist intelligence directors, defense ministers, chiefs of the general staff, etc. (for reviews and excerpts of the books seewww.larrylwatts.com)

Faced with such a formidable challenge, Pacepa and company have elected to avoid the book altogether. Instead, they make an appearance of referring to the book while actually citing claims and allegations of their own manufacture. And to make those claims and allegations more credible, they impute a character and past to the author that have little or no basis in reality. Their “Larry Watts” is a disloyal American who fled the United States during the Cold War, sold his services to Romania’s communist regime, and even betrayed his country – misrepresenting me as a Pacepa in reverse. Meanwhile, Pacepa is comfortably wrapped in several layers of the American flag, writing “love letters” to the United States.

Such incredible claims can only be made believable by “framing” targets that otherwise lack any credible motivation for the imputed behavior. Vladimir Tismaneanu, for example, began insinuating that I was an adept of Stalinism and that I worked for theSecuritate almost immediately after the publication of With Friends Like These, suggesting that I had “gone native” from “too much contact” with Romanian military historians prior to 1989. (Tismaneanu.wordpress.com, 28/05/11, 30/05/11, 20/12/11 and 11/05/13)

Andrei Bädin, Pacepa’s interviewer in the “major television event,” tells the rather far-fetched tale of a Larry Watts who “moved to the Romania of Ceauşescu” after “obtaining political asylum” from that regime, and then “embraced the ideals of Romanian communism” and “collaborated with the Securitate.” (Badin.ro, 18 and 19/10/13; evz.ro, 29/07/13)

Pacepa, their source of ‘reliable’ intelligence, declares that “in reality, Watts had settled in Romania during Ceauşescu’s reign and had worked for Ceauşescu’s brother, General Ilie Ceauşescu.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013): 340)

None of these allegations can resist even rudimentary fact-checking. My various trips to Romania were always on U.S. government or Congressionally-financed fellowship programs. Thus, I spent two years in communist Romania on a Fulbright Fellowship; a couple of months on IREX fellowships; and a couple of months on what used to be called the National Resource fellowship, for example. I never met a single member of the Ceausescu clan during that time, much less accepted employment from one.

Nor was I huddling in cozy asylum and conspiring with the Ceausescu regime during the late 1980s, as Pacepa and Bädin insist.

Leaving aside the Pacepa team's alternate universe, in this reality, the one where individuals actually leave paper trails, I was conducting research on a Woodrow Wilson Center grant in Washington D.C., conducting research at the University of Denver in Colorado, completing doctoral work in Los Angeles, in a program run jointly by the RAND Corporation and UCLA, and working as a RAND consultant. I provided research assistance and analysis for Pentagon-ordered studies regarding the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact. Those studies were conducted by RAND’s principal KGB expert, Jeremy Azrael, and by RAND’s various Warsaw Pact and Eastern European specialists, for example, J. F. Brown, A. Ross Johnson, John Van Oudernaren, and F. Stephen Larrabee. I also had the privilege of participating in the odd “war game” with the likes of McGeorge Bundy, Frank Fukuyama, Arnold Kantor, etc.

By 1988 Romania’s prospects seemed to me so bleak that I temporarily left it as a field of study, re-focusing my analytical attentions on the then-extraordinary evolution and liberalization of the USSR. That autumn and winter, with the aid of a RAND grant, I even spent several months in Leningrad, the Baltic republics and Moscow, actually presenting a seminar paper at what used to be called Zhdanov University in today’s St. Petersburg on “The KGB and Reform.”(See www.larrylwatts.com) Only the overthrow of Ceausescu in the revolution of December 1989, and the persuasiveness of IREX personnel, convinced me to return to the topic of Romania from my teaching post at the University of Washington in Seattle.

I have been resident in post-communist Romania at least half-time since 1991 – working on NATO integration and security sector reform and, since 2009, teaching and writing. My residence in Romania has always been on the basis of a series of temporary visas and that remains the case today. I have neither requested nor applied for Romanian citizenship. All of this is part of the documentary record that can be verified at each of the institutions mentioned.

Pacepa’s rapid-fire ability to compound untruths is impressive. In one ‘revelation,’ obviously considered by him to be the “smoking gun,” Pacepa proclaims with emphasis that the English language version of my book was published only “a year after its Romanian ‘translation’”. “Clearly,” the triumphant defector announces, “Watts’s book was first written in Romanian,” and that “proves its role as disinformation.” (Pacepa and Rychlak (2013): 340)

Once again, Pacepa’s fable crumbles when subjected to even the most superficial verification. The launch of the English edition of my book, including close-ups not only of the front and back covers but of the English language text and maps inside, has been on the internet since November 2010. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7T7vDf1i4, 10/11/10) It was also presented to a Romanian meeting of the Trilateral Commission at the time. The maiden launch of the first Romanian edition in May 2011, seven months later, has also been available on the internet since then. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HucNXn8TOY, 19/05/11) The English “horse” did indeed come before the Romanian “wagon”.

Such basic fact-checking is hardly rocket science. And Pacepa’s failure to bother with it while insisting that reality was exactly the reverse raises some very serious questions about other information for which his testimony is the sole source. Trotting out a series of former U.S. officials and other Americans who have been gulled by Pacepa hardly reduces this basic credibility problem.

Pacepa singles out my work in the final chapter (before the epilogue) of hisDisinformation and insists that it is dedicated to discrediting him. However, With Friends Like These is over 760 pages long and Pacepa appears only on seven pages of the text, the first time only on page 550. (Watts (2010): 550-552, 554, 581-582, 660) And, in contradistinction to his practice, I do not target him with ad hominem attacks. The few brief references I do make to his past in Romania are primarily based on his own, sourced utterances and on recent discoveries by the hard-working staff at Romania’s National Council for the Study of the Security Archives. (e.g. Liviu Ţăranu, Ion Mihai Pacepa in the Securitate Files 1978-1980, CSNAS 2009)

That said, my book does detail the Soviet Bloc’s clandestine war against Romania up until 1978, on the basis of archival documents from the former Warsaw Pact members principally. And its central finding, that the independence of Romania’s communist regime was not only real but far more real and genuinely anti-Soviet than we in the West realized at the time, strikes at the heart of the Pacepa legend, so heartily supported by Mssrs Tismaneanu and Bädin.

Pacepa’s main theme remains as it always has been – that communist Romania was a Soviet Trojan horse and that none of its independence was genuine. The Pacepa team demands, on the one hand, that we dismiss all of the overwhelming documentation to the contrary that has emerged from the archives of the former Warsaw Pact states – and to ignore “the man behind the curtain,” a glimpse of whom would destroy the entire myth created by long repetition of this lie.

His bottom line is that Romania hoodwinked Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan (in his first term), along with CIA directors John McCone (1961-1965), William Raborn (1965-1966), Richard Helms (1966-1973), James Schlesinger (1973), William Colby (1973-1976), George Bush, Sr. (1976-1977), Stansfield Turner (1977-1981) and, apparently, William Casey during the first half of his tenure (1981-1987). This was highly improbable even before the post-communist avalanche of documentary evidence to the contrary from Soviet and Warsaw Pact authorities – documents that are now publicly available at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project and the Parallel History Project for Cooperative Security (for example). (http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/;http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/index.cfm)

On the other hand, Pacepa throws a “curtain” of culpability over the entire Romanian state security apparatus, the various Romanian communist regimes, and Romania itself so that they might be identified with Pacepa as agencies of the KGB and Kremlin. Hewould have us believe that the wealth of documents now made available by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian and at the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act Reading Room, which illustrate the special Romanian-American relationship, are unreliable because the U.S.A. had been hoodwinked from the early 1960s until almost a decade after he arrived in the United States. (http://history.state.gov/; http://www.foia.cia.gov/)

Always an unlikely proposition, insistence upon it is now ridiculous. Not only can US intelligence reporting be compared with that from within the Warsaw Pact, but it is even possible to triangulate the documentation from the former Soviet bloc made available through official declassification and vetting processes with the impromptu East German intelligence leakage during the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, the KGB archives smuggled out by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, and the Soviet Central Committee and KGB documents remaining in the archives of the Republic of Moldova (and other former Soviet republics), which Moscow has been desperate to reclassify (without success as of this writing).

[This blog originally appeared as "Pacepa, The Great and Powerful I", August 19, 2013]

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Pacepa, The Great and Powerful II: Or, How to Trap a Former CIA Director - 3 August 2013

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)

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).

This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro.