CHAPTER 7

GHEORGHIU-DEJ, CEAUSESCU, AND “RADU”

Seven days after Khrushchev was arrested by the KGB, Romania’s communist ruler, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, concluded that the Kremlin was in a rout. He decided to take advantage of the confusion. On October 21, Dej called in the Soviet ambassador to Romania and asked him to withdraw the KGB advisors from Romania. Dej was tormented by the idea that the Kremlin was quietly using the KGB advisors in Romania to plan to kill him, just as the KGB had killed the communist leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was in Dej’s interest to have that potential source of danger closed off.

Moscow did not react well. The very next day, KGB chairman Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny sent a scathing letter to his Romanian vassal, Minister of Interior Alexandru Draghici, pointing out that Romania was living under Moscow’s “protective nuclear umbrella” and demanding that the KGB advisors be kept in place. A similar letter, couched in even harsher terms and signed by Soviet foreign intelligence chief Sakharovsky, landed on the desk of General Nicolae Doicaru, Romania’s foreign intelligence chief at that time. In November, on just two hour’s notice, General Sakharovsky arrived in Bucharest. Then General Semichastny himself put in an appearance. The discussions between Bucharest and Moscow regarding the withdrawal of the KGB advisors from Romania dragged on until the end of November 1964.

“We created the Securitate,” was General Sakharovsky’s refrain during those November days. According to him, the Romanian request had set off a whole chain of explosions, from the KGB’s Romanian desk all the way up to the KGB chairman. “Semichastny is raging mad,” Sakharovsky emphasized. “He’s ready to tear him limb from limb with his own two hands.” “Him” meant Dej, who had good reason to believe Sakharovsky in this instance.

General Pacepa never met Semichastny, but on two separate occasions Sakharovsky told him that he was a wild and ambitious man who had recriminated harshly against Boris Pasternak and several other Soviet dissidents. “Iron Shurik” was also seeing red, Sakharovsky added, referring to Aleksandr Shelepin, the former KGB chairman, who by then was a Politburo member and secretary of the Central Committee with responsibility for the Red Army and the KGB.

In the end Dej got his way. In December 1964, the Romanian DIE became the first foreign intelligence service in the Warsaw Pact community to function without KGB advisers. To the best of our knowledge, it remained the only one until the 1989 revolutionary wave changed the face of Eastern Europe. Pacepa accompanied the KGB advisers in the DIE to the Bucharest North train station a couple of days before Christmas. There he ran into the Romanian minister of interior, Alexander Draghici, who was saying farewell to the KGB advisers in the domestic Securitate.

On Sunday, February 24, 1965, Pacepa paid his last visit to Gheorghiu-Dej, who had just come back from another trip to Moscow. As usual Pacepa found him with his best friend, Chivu Stoica. “This is for you,” Dej said, handing Pacepa a leather-bound book by Karl Marx entitled Notes on Romanians. In his customary violet lead, Dej had inscribed the first page to Pacepa: “Well done!”

That was Dej’s thanks to Pacepa for an intelligence operation that had paid off politically for Dej. In 1963 a DIE agent had come across four unfinished and never published manuscripts of Karl Marx’s in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam that provided ammunition to contest the Soviet territorial claim to Romania’s Bessarabia and Moldova. Dej ordered the manuscripts printed in the form of a booklet issued by the Romanian Academy but was reluctant to let it go on the open market, afraid it might blow too cold in Moscow’s face.

Now, on that early spring day, Dej and Stoica decided to go for a walk in the garden. General Pacepa tagged along behind them. Dej complained of feeling weak, dizzy, and nauseous. “I think the KGB got me,” he said, only half in jest.

“They got Togliatti,” Stoica squeaked ominously. Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party, had died on August 21, 1964, while on a visit to the Soviet Union. There was a rumor going around at the top of the bloc’s foreign intelligence community that he had been irradiated by the KGB on Khrushchev’s order while vacationing in Yalta.

Togliatti’s assassination was rumored to have been provoked by the fact that, while in the Soviet Union, he had written a “testament” in which he had expressed profound discontent with Khrushchev and suggested the need for fundamental changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign policies. Togliatti reportedly questioned Khrushchev’s honesty and criticized him for failing to understand the genesis of Stalinism using these words: “The most serious thing is a certain degree of scepticism with which some of those close to us greet reports of new economic and political successes. Beyond this must be considered in general as unresolved the origin of the cult of Stalin and how this became possible. To explain this solely through Stalin’s serious personal defects is not completely accepted.” Togliatti’s frustrations were rumored to echo those of Leonid Brezhnev. In September 1964, Pravda published portions of Togliatti’s testament. After that, Khrushchev was overthrown. This was seen as confirmation of those rumors.

Pacepa saw Dej shiver. He too had been critical of Khrushchev’s foreign policy. Moreover, during the previous September he had expressed to Khrushchev his concern about Togliatti’s “strange” death.

During the March 12, 1965, elections for Romania’s Grand National Assembly, Gheorghiu-Dej went out to vote. A week later, he suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. “Assassinated by Moscow” is what the new Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, whispered to Pacepa a few months after that. “Irradiated,” he murmured in an even lower voice and added that it was “firmly established.” The subject came up because Ceausescu had ordered Pacepa to secretly acquire the most sensitive Western radiation detection devices (based on Geiger-Müller counters) and install them throughout his offices and residences. In Ceausescu’s view, Dej’s “strange death” was proof that the KGB had improved its irradiation technique to reliable operational use.

Until he replaced Dej, Ceausescu had been a member of the Politburo in charge of managing Romania’s security and armed forces. He was therefore thoroughly informed about KGB operations. When Pacepa discussed this subject with Ceausescu’s personal physician, Dr. Abraham Schechter, Schechter agreed that Dej had been irradiated. “I have all the documents attesting to that,” the physician said, adding that he was just waiting for a “favorable moment” to make them public.

Dr. Schechter was never able to disclose his documents, but in the spring of 1970 the Securitate received an irradiation weapon from Moscow that Moscow claimed would kill the target in less than a month—a new generation of the radioactive thallium used unsuccessfully in Germany against the Soviet defector Nikolay Khokhlov in 1954. “I told you they had it,” Ceausescu remarked to Pacepa after he found out about the new weapon from the minister of interior. Ceausescu baptized it with the codename “Radu,” from the Romanian radiere (radiation), and ordered the Securitate to try it out on some arrested dissidents who were on his enemies list. “It’s not just free men who get sick and die,” Ceausescu said with an evil wink. He also asked his personal physician—still Dr. Schechter—to study the new weapon and come up with supplementary measures to protect Ceausescu’s offices, residences, and cars against a Soviet attempt to irradiate him.

In February 1973, the Securitate secretly purloined a letter and its attached medical documents from Dr. Schechter’s apartment, attesting to Dej’s irradiation as well as providing a technical description of the new KGB irradiation weapon, the “Radu.” The minister of the interior, Ion Stanescu, informed Ceausescu that electronic coverage of Schechter showed that he was intending to smuggle the documents out to the West and publicize the KGB’s use of lethal radiation against its targets. On March 15, 1973, Dr. Schechter just happened to “fall” out of a window and crash to the pavement below.

Ceausescu was sure the KGB had killed Dr. Schechter following a Securitate leak. A later investigation concluded that Dr. Schechter had indeed been murdered. “Masaryk revisited,” Ceausescu remarked when he was informed about Dr. Schechter’s death. Ceausescu was referring to Jan Masaryk, who had served as foreign minister in the Czechoslovakian government in exile during World War II and in the first postwar coalition government. In February 1948 Masaryk refused to resign his post as Moscow demanded and, a few weeks later, “fell” out of a window at the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ceausescu always stuttered when he was scared. “N-Now it’s m-my t-turn!” Pacepa often came face-to-face with Ceausescu’s paranoid fear of being killed by Moscow. Eventually he would wash his hands with alcohol after every handshake (even President Jimmy Carter’s) and while abroad would eat only after a poison-tester had tried his food.

Less than an hour after learning of Dr. Schechter’s death, Ceausescu fired Ion Stanescu, Romania’s minister of interior and head of the Securitate, expelling him from the Political Executive Committee (the new name for the Politburo) of the Communist Party. Then Ceausescu called together the deputy ministers of interior in charge of managing the Securitate and the DIE and ordered that all Securitate officers who had graduated from the KGB school in Moscow be transferred into the reserves.

Once those steps had been taken, Ceausescu ran for cover. He put Romania’s armed forces on alert, locked himself into his summer residence in Snagov some thirty miles north of Bucharest, and surrounded the whole area with tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the special military unit in charge of his personal security.

ASSASSINATIONS AS A FOREIGN POLICY TOOL

In June 1971, after returning from talks in China with Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng (then minister of public security and, in 1977, China’s supreme leader), Ceausescu told Pacepa and a couple of other close advisers that “the Kremlin has killed or tried to kill ten international leaders.” “Ten,” he repeated, counting them off on his fingers. First, Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary. Lucretiu Patrascanu and Gheorghiu-Dej in Romania made four. Rudolf Slansky, the head of Czechoslovakia; Jan Masaryk, its chief diplomat; the shah of Iran (a book written by KGB defector Vladimir Kuzichkin a few years later minutely described this unsuccessful KGB operation1); Palmiro Togliatti of Italy; John F. Kennedy; and an attempt to kill Mao Zedong, which was botched.

After Gheorghiu-Dej’s suspicious death, Ceausescu—now afraid for his own life—sought to align himself with Red China rather than the USSR. The Chinese were deeply concerned over a recent assassination attempt against Mao Zedong, planned with the help of Lin Biao, the head of the Chinese Army, and organized by Moscow. Lin Biao had been educated in Moscow and still had a girlfriend there. When the plot failed, Lin Biao tried to escape to the Soviet Union but was killed when his plane crashed in Mongolia.

According to Mao and to Zhou Enlai, the KGB intended to use Chinese who had studied in Moscow to install a Soviet puppet government in Beijing. “All were Chinese security or military officers,” Ceausescu explained, adding that Mao had now decided to purge the Chinese army and security police of all their Moscow-educated personnel.

“The B-Bear is a p-pig!” Ceausescu concluded, referring to Brezhnev. Ceausescu ordered DIE management to form a special counterintelligence unit to protect him from Soviet assassination. “You have one thousand personnel slots for this,” Ceausescu told Pacepa. The new unit must be “nonexistent,” he added—no name, no title, no sign on the door—in-visibly concealed under the DIE umbrella, whose own existence was virtually unknown in Romania at that time. Ceausescu ordered that the unit be covered for operational purposes under U.M. 0920/A (in which U.M. meant “military unit,” 0 signified a classified unit, 920 was the code number legally assigned to the DIE, and A indicated the brand-new unit).

The new undercover unit was housed in a large apartment building located within walking distance of Ceausescu’s residence (on Rabat Street, next to the West German consulate). It was identified as the “Institute for Marketing.”

To the best of our knowledge, U.M. 0920/A was the only major anti-KGB counterintelligence organization in the Soviet bloc. A couple of years later, U.M. 0920/A learned that Moscow was indeed after Ceausescu’s scalp. That operation, codenamed “Dnestr,” was activated in August 1969, a few days after a previously scheduled visit to Romania by Brezhnev and his prime minister, Aleksey Kosygin, had been cancelled and a year after Ceausescu publicly denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Against Moscow’s recommendation, Ceausescu had also invited President Richard Nixon to visit Romania a few days before the launch of “Dnestr.”

As U.M. 0920/A would later learn, the Soviet Dnestr operation recruited seven Romanian military generals. All had been educated in the Soviet Union. Bucharest military garrison commander General Ion Serb and a few others were arrested by Ceausescu on trumped-up charges. The rest were shifted around from one job to another, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to put down roots or for Moscow to maintain continuous, secret operational contact with them.

Just before Pacepa was granted political asylum in the United States in 1978, U.M. 0920/A uncovered another major KGB operation connected with the Dnestr plan. Lt. General Nicolae Militaru, a graduate of the Soviet Frunze Military Academy and now the commander of Romania’s Second Military Region (Bucharest), had become a Soviet agent. Ceausescu was livid when told. He had just chosen Militaru for the position of first deputy minister of defense and chief of the General Staff.

In July 1978, when Pacepa reported to Ceausescu that Gen. Militaru had agreed to work for Moscow, the Romanian despot and his wife hid themselves inside their Snagov residence and had it surrounded by tanks. A Romanian proverb, however, says that what you fear is what you get.

THE END OF CEAUSESCU

On December 22, 1989, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown by angry masses of people who had burst forth into the streets of Bucharest and other major cities of the country. Just hours after the popular uprising forced Ceausescu to flee in his helicopter, retired General Nicolae Militaru showed up at the Bucharest television station, now in the hands of the rebels, and appointed himself chief of Romania’s armed forces. This was the same General Militaru who in 1978 had been picked up by microphones of the DIE’s U.M. 0920/A at a secret meeting with a Soviet intelligence officer in Bucharest recruiting him for Moscow’s Dnestr operation.2

Because Gen. Pacepa left Romania for good a few weeks after that report came in, he never learned if the Soviets had finalized General Militaru’s recruitment. After Ceausescu’s overthrow, however, Mihail Lupoi, a leader of the 1989 Romanian uprising who became minister of tourism in the first post-Ceausescu government but then had a falling out with it and defected to Switzerland, said in an interview published by the Italian newspaper L’Unità on March 1, 1990, that Militaru had become a Soviet intelligence agent. He indicated that evidence of Militaru’s agent status could be found in a Securitate file codenamed “Corbu.”

Shortly after Militaru appealed on television for other “comrade generals” to unite against Ceausescu, Romania had a new surprise. Ion Ilich Iliescu, a Moscow-educated member of Romania’s Communist Party Politburo, whose father was so devoted to the founder of the Comintern that he named his son Ilich, stepped in front of Romanian television cameras and declared himself the chairman of an ad-hoc Provisional Committee for National Unity. U.M. 0920/A had begun monitoring Iliescu in 1972 because of his secret ties with Moscow.

The Western media quickly dug out an earlier report saying that Iliescu and Soviet leader Gorbachev had studied together in Moscow, where both had been party secretaries, one Soviet, the other for foreign students. The media also recalled a 1987 Iliescu article calling for “restructurare” (the Romanian word for perestroika, or restructuring), which he had published in the Romanian magazine Romania Literara and the West German magazine Der Spiegel had made known in the West.3

Originally, Iliescu was proud to acknowledge his acquaintance with Gorbachev. Dumitru Mazilu, a former intelligence colonel jailed as a dissident before Ceausescu’s overthrow, who then became Iliescu’s deputy in the Provisional Committee, told the Romanian media that Iliescu had called Gorbachev on the telephone during the Committee’s first plenary session to report what he had already achieved.⁴

After that phone call, which Mazilu claimed to have personally witnessed, Iliescu suddenly denied that he had ever actually met Gorbachev. He admitted, however, that Ceausescu removed him from the Romanian Politburo after Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and that Ceausescu had kept him away from Bucharest when Gorbachev was visiting. Those facts about Iliescu’s past were common knowledge in Romania by then. Moreover, in those early days of the revolution, Iliescu constantly emphasized that only Soviet-style glasnost and perestroika could save Romania.

What happened in Romania from that moment on no longer came as a surprise to us. Everything seemed inexorably to follow Moscow’s Dnestr plan. The night of December 22, self-appointed President Ion Ilich Iliescu created the National Salvation Front as stipulated in the plan, which resembled KGB plans for the installation of puppet governments in Greece and Spain, and appointing himself as head. Another of U.M. 0920/A’s prime targets due to his longstanding ties with Moscow was the ideologue of the 1989 Front, Silviu Brucan. Immediately after the Front came into being, Brucan acknowledged that it had Moscow’s blessing. A couple of days later, however, he swallowed his own words when an “outraged” Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, vehemently denied there were any Soviet fingers in the events currently taking place in Romania.

At 2:00 p.m. on December 23, Romanian television announced that the National Salvation Front had asked the Soviet Union for military help, saying that “unidentified foreign terrorists” in Romania were trying to reinstate Ceausescu. That was exactly what the Dnestr plan had called for: to find a pretext for Soviet military intervention, which would occur should the coup not succeed on its own. The Soviet embassy promptly entered the picture, publicly stating that its personnel were in danger. In Moscow a few hours later, the Soviet television newscast Vremya stated that Ceausescu was being supported by “foreign mercenaries” (which was never proved). That night the Kremlin reportedly advised Iliescu that it would provide the military help he had requested. Misinformed and uninspired, as it had been for years in Romanian affairs, the United States Department of State immediately announced that Washington would take a sympathetic view of Soviet military intervention in Romania.5

In the end the Kremlin was spared both the political and the financial cost of a military adventure in Romania. On that same December 23, the self-appointed president Iliescu announced that Ceausescu had been arrested the previous day, and a spokesman for the National Salvation Front promised that he would be given a public trial.⁶ Nevertheless two days later, on Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian television came on the air with the news that the Ceausescu couple had been tried, sentenced to death, and executed by a military firing squad that same day. The loudly trumpeted videotape of the event was not broadcast until a day later.

Andrei Codrescu, an American writer and correspondent for National Public Radio, returned to visit his native Romania a few days after Ceausescu’s killing. He conducted a thorough investigation of the events that followed. In a 1991 book, Codrescu concluded that the two Ceausescus’ executioners, a professor of Marxism for Securitate officers at the Communist Party Academy (Virgil Magureanu) and an alleged astrologer previously sentenced as a common criminal by Ceausescu (Gelu Voicules-cu-Voican), were propelled to the top of Romania’s leadership as soon as the dictator and his wife were dead, becoming respectively the head of Romania’s new security police and the deputy prime minister.⁷

In 2019, former President Ion Ilich Iliescu, the chief of his political police Virgil Magureanu, and Romania’s Deputy Prime Minister Gelu Voiculescu Voican were charged with crimes against humanity for their role in the aftermath of the violent revolt that toppled the communist regime in 1989.⁸ According to Romania’s prosecutor, 862 Romanians were killed in this event.