AMBASSADOR R. JAMES WOOLSEY
R. James Woolsey Jr. is a lawyer and diplomat who was director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton.
He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford (Phi Beta Kappa), his master’s degree from Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and his law degree from Yale, where he was founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President and prominently active in the anti–Vietnam War movement.
He was a captain in the U.S. Army and a program analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, then held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including National Security Council staff and adviser with the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and general counsel to the Committee on Armed Services for the U.S. Senate.
He was undersecretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979 and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. He was ambassador and U.S. representative for negotiations on conventional armed forces in Europe from 1989–91.
His career also has included time as a professional lawyer and venture capitalist.
LT. GENERAL ION MIHAI PACEPA
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official from an enemy country ever to have been granted political asylum in the United States. His defection made him the most hunted American citizen alive. Romania’s tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu, created a super-secret intelligence unit staffed with a thousand officers charged to kill Pacepa and set a $2 million bounty on his head. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat set other multi-million-dollar rewards.
In 1982, Ceausescu also hired the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal to kill Pacepa and to blow up with explosives the headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Munich, which was broadcasting Pacepa’s revelations. At that time Carlos was famous for attacking the French embassy in the Hague, capturing the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, and firing rocket-propelled grenades the Orly Airport near Paris.
In mid-September 1980, the leaders of Hungarian foreign intelligence, which provided shelter in Budapest to Carlos, asked Moscow’s approval for Pacepa’s assassination. A few days later, Moscow informed them that the Soviet Politburo approved Pacepa’s assassination.
On October 11, 1980, Carlos and his girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, moved to Bucharest, where they lived in a villa owned by the Romanian political police, the Securitate. The next day the Romanian foreign intelligence service opened bank account # 47 11 210 350 2 at the Romanian Bank for Foreign Trade under the names “Michael Mallios” and “Anna Luise Toto-Kramer.” They spent a month of training in Romania.
Carlos was unable to find Pacepa, but on February 21, 1981, he exploded a plastic bomb at RFE headquarters in Munich, injuring eight RFE employees. Five Romanian diplomats assigned to West Germany were expelled because of their involvement in this bloody operation. In a public speech, French president Francois Mitterrand called Romania’s foreign intelligence service “a band of assassins” and postponed a scheduled official visit to Bucharest.
In 1994, Carlos was captured in Khartoum, Sudan, by the French counterintelligence service, the DST, with which Pacepa had cooperated after he defected. Carlos was sentenced to life in prison. He is currently incarcerated in Clairvaux Prison in France.
In May 2015, Pacepa’s book Disinformation, coauthored with Professor Ronald Rychlak, was included among the best ten political books ever written, next to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In 2019, when Romania celebrated thirty years since the execution of Ceausescu, Pacepa’s book Red Horizons was republished there as The Golden Book of the War Against Communism.