Ion Mihai Pacepa
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Ion Mihai Pacepa (born 28 October 1928) is the highest intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc to the West. In July 1978, Pacepa was a two-star Romanian 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 asylum.
Subsequently he worked with U.S. intelligence in various operations against the former Soviet bloc, and the CIA described his cooperation as "an important and unique contribution to the United States."
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In 1987 Pacepa published book, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, which was serialized on Radio Free Europe, arousing "huge interest among Romanians." On 25 December 1989 Ceauşescu and his wife 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 (The Truth), 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 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, reportedly an all-time bestseller in Romania. He occasionally writes articles for American conservative magazines such as National Review and FrontLine, for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.
Pacepa studied industrial chemistry, 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. Between 1972 and 1978 he was the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service.
Pacepa defected in July 1978 by walking into the U.S. Embassy in West Germany, where he had been sent by Ceauşescu with a message to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Pacepa was secretly flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington D.C. in a U.S. military airplane.
In September 1978 Pacepa received two death sentences from Ceauşescu, who placed a bounty of two million dollars on his head. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Qaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. In the 1980s Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in the U.S. in exchange for $1 million. 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.
On July 7, 1999 Romania’s Supreme Court Decision No. 41/1999 canceled Pacepa’s death sentences, restored his military rank and ordered that his properties confiscated at Ceauşescu’s order be returned to him. The country’s government, which was still filled with Pacepa’s former subordinates, refused to comply. This ignited a series of Western articles claiming that Romania was still not a country of laws. In December 2004 the government of Romania quietly restored Pacepa’s rank of general.
Publications
Books
- Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, 1987. ISBN 0895265702
- Red Horizons: the 2nd Book. The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption 1990. ISBN 0895267462
- The Kremlin Legacy, 1993
- The Black Book of the Securitate, a trilogy, 1999
Articles
- The Arafat I Knew, 2002
- The KGB’s Man (PDF), 2003
- Saddam's WMDs, 2003
- Putin's Duality, 2005
- Khaddafi's "Conversion", 2003
External links
- From Russia With Terror — 2004 interviewes:Ion Mihai Pacepa