Ion Mihai Pacepa

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Ion Mihai Pacepa (born 28 October 1928 in Romania) is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is now an American citizen.

In July 1978, Pacepa was a two-star Romanian Securitate general who simultaneously held the rank of advisor to President Nicolae Ceauşescu, acting chief of his foreign intelligence service and state secretary in Romania’s Ministry of Interior. He defected to the United States following President Jimmy Carter's approval of his request for political asylum.

Subsequently, he worked with American intelligence in various operations against the former Eastern Bloc. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) described his cooperation as "an important and unique contribution to the United States".

Contents 1 Biography 2 Books and Articles 3 References 4 Publications 4.1 Books 4.2 Articles 5 External links

[edit] Biography

Pacepa studied industrial chemistry at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, but just months before graduation he was drafted by the Securitate, and got his engineering degree only four years later. Between 1957 and 1960 he served as chief of the Romanian intelligence station in West Germany, and, between 1972 and 1978, he was Ceauşescu's adviser for national security and technological development and the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service.

Pacepa defected in July 1978 by walking into the American Embassy in Bonn, where he had been sent by Ceauşescu with a message to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He was secretly flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. in a United States military airplane.

In September 1978, Pacepa received two death sentences from Communist Romania, and Ceauşescu placed a bounty of two million US dollars on his head. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Qaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. ^[1] In the 1980s Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars. ^[2] Carlos was unable to find Pacepa, but on February 21, 1980, he blew up a part of Radio Free Europe's headquarters in Munich, which was broadcasting news on Pacepa's defection.

Pacepa's defection was a powerful blow against Communist Romania. The country became more isolated and economic growth stopped. Ceauşescu's political police, the Securitate, became subject to heavy infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies, and he started to lose control of the country. To avoid new defections, he invested his wife, Elena, and other members of his family with important positions in the government.

On July 7, 1999 Romania’s Supreme Court Decision No. 41/1999 cancelled Pacepa’s death sentences, restored his military rank and ordered that his properties, confiscated on Ceauşescu's orders, be returned to him. The country's government refused to comply. This ignited a series of Western articles alleging that Romania was still not a country of laws. In December 2004 the government of Romania quietly restored Pacepa’s rank of general.

[edit] Books and Articles

In 1987 Pacepa published a book, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, which was serialized on Radio Free Europe, arousing "huge interest among Romanians". On December 25, 1989, during the closing stages of the Romanian Revolution, Ceauşescu and his wife Elena were sentenced to death at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come word-for-word out of Red Horizons.

The next day, the book began being serialized in the new official Romanian newspaper Adevărul, which wrote that the book had "played an incontestable role in overthrowing Ceauşescu" (according to the text on the back cover of the book’s second edition, published in 1990). Red Horizons was subsequently republished in 27 countries, and is still in print.

In 1993 Pacepa published The Kremlin's Legacy, in which he tried to wean his native country away from its continued dependency on a Communist-style police state. In 1999 he authored the trilogy The Black Book of the Securitate, which has become a bestseller in Romania.^[3]

He occasionally writes articles for American conservative magazines, such as National Review Online, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and the online newspaper FrontPageMag. In a 2006 article, Pacepa describes a conversation he had with Nicolae Ceauşescu, who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill": Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy from Hungary; Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from Romania; Rudolf Slansky and Jan Masaryk from Czechoslovakia; the Shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy; John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong. Pacepa provides some additional details, such as a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by the KGB and notes that "among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy." ^[4] In a 2007 article, he recalls how "In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer."^[5]

[edit] References

[edit] Publications

[edit] Books

• Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, 1987. ISBN 0-89526-570-2
• Red Horizons: the 2nd Book. The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu's Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption 1990. ISBN 0-89526-746-2
• The Kremlin Legacy, 1993
• Cartea neagră a Securităţii, Editura Omega, Bucharest, 1999. ISBN 9-73987-454-1

[edit] Articles

• The Arafat I Knew, 2002
• The KGB’s Man, 2003
• Khaddafi's "Conversion", 2003
• Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD, 2003
• From Russia With Terror, March 1, 2004
• No Peter the Great, September 20, 2004
• Putin's Duality, August 5, 2005
• Who Is Raúl Castro? A tyrant only a brother could love., August 10, 2006
• Russian Footprints, August 24, 2006
• Tyrants and the Bomb, October 17, 2006
• The Kremlin’s Killing Ways, November 28, 2006

[edit] External links