Ion Mihai Pacepa
Bucharest, Romania
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| Ion Mihai Pacepa | |
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Ion Mihai Pacepa |
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| Born | October 28, 1928 Bucharest, Romania |
| Occupation | Writer, columnist |
| Known for | Securitate general, defector |
Ion Mihai Pacepa (born 28 October 1928 in Bucharest, Romania) is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the former Eastern Bloc. He is now a United States citizen, a writer, and a columnist.
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". 1
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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. During the 1960's he was involved in the establishment of a Romanian automobile industry.[1]
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-Gaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. 2 In the 1980s, Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars. 3 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 cancelled Pacepa’s death sentences, restored his military rank and ordered that his properties, confiscated on Ceauşescu's orders, be returned to him. Romania'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 new government of Romania quietly restored Pacepa’s rank of general.
Pacepa occasionally writes articles for The Wall Street Journal and various American conservative publications, such as National Review Online, The Washington Times, and the online newspaper FrontPage Magazine.
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.4
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 stillwhen? 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.5
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; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy; US President John F. Kennedy; and CCP Chairman Mao Zedong. Pacepa provides some additional details, such as an alleged plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by the KGB.4
Pacepa said 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", and that KGB fingerprints are all over Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby.46 Pacepa has since had a book published on the topic, "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination," in which he asserts that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered Kennedy's assassination. Khrushchev is said to have annulled the plan, but Soviet agents were unable to reach Oswald before he could execute his orders.
According to author Joseph Goulden in The Washington Times, Pacepa's belated account "rests rather flimsily on circumstantial evidence and supposition."7 In a review of Pacepa's book published in Human Events, Michael Ledeen, former adviser for terrorism to President Reagan, writes: "A new book from General Ion Mihai Pacepa is cause for celebration, because he is among a tiny handful of people who know a lot about the intelligence services of the Soviet Empire, and because he writes about it with rare lucidity, always with an eye to helping us understand our world. His first book, 'Red Horizons,'is indubitably the most brilliant portrait of a Communist regime I've ever read. 'Programmed to Kill' is equally fascinating. Pacepa painstakingly takes us through the documentary evidence, including invaluable material on Soviet bloc cyphers that throws new light on Oswald's letters to KGB officers in Washington and Mexico City. … No novelist could have written a more exciting story, made all the more compelling because of Pacepa's first-hand involvement in the Russians' efforts to hide their Oswald connection."
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."8 A May 12, 2009 article published in the Jerusalem Post, which dealt with Pacepa’s claim, stated that “former CIA director James Woolsey has vouched for Pacepa's personal credibility. Pacepa's memoir ‘Red Horizons’ formed the basis for the indictment and conviction of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989.” A June 2009 article published in the American Catholic shows that new documents found in the Vatican archives also support Pacepa’s claim. Gary Krupp, president of the Pave the Way Foundation, is analyzing these documents—over 25,000 that have never before been seen.
Ion Mihai Pacepa has supported United States military action to disarm Iraq. In opposition, large anti-war demonstrations were held in cities across the world. Pacepa contends that these protests were contrived and "anti-American", in which Moscow had a supporting hand.9 Pacepa wrote in October 2003 that it was "perfectly obvious to me" that the Russian GRU agency helped Saddam Hussein to destroy, hide, or transfer his chemical weapons prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.10 To this end, he claims that an operation for the removal of chemical weapons ("Operation Sarindar") was prepared by the Soviet Union for Libya, and that such a plan existed and was implemented in Iraq.10 Subsequently, the Iraq Survey Group did not find any significant holdings of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were present in the country decades earlier. It issued its findings in the Duelfer report in September 2004.
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