The topic of defector Ion Mihai Pacepa is a controversial
one. There are, in fact, lots of controversies regarding Mr. Pacepa. There are
debates over his actual employers, whether he was representative of state
security – Securitate – personnel, the nature of his defection, the degree of
his contribution to the fall of Ceausescu, the extent to which he had
responsibility for Romania’s subsequent democratization, etc. Some of these have
been resolved and should confound us no longer.
Others remain in the realm of supposition. And still others, such as Mr.
Pacepa’s role in the fall of Ceausescu and the collapse of Romanian communism,
are likely to remain topics over which reasonable persons continue to disagree.
Here I address three controversies that frequently emerge in media debates on
the subject.
Did Pacepa work for the KGB?
Pacepa told both his West German and American debriefers
that he worked directly for the KGB – even though he was the deputy chief of
Romanian foreign intelligence. In fact, he has never wavered in stressing his
work as a KGB agent. Throughout his 1987 book “Red Horizons,” he emphasizes his
personal meetings with KGB chief Yuri Andropov and insists that he reported
directly to Alexander Mikhailovich Sakharovsky, the head of KGB foreign
intelligence.
Of course, at the time Pacepa was trying to credit the idea
that the Securitate – and Ceausescu – were Moscow’s agents. But his claims of
reporting directly to KGB commanders were explicit, not metaphorical. In a
public symposium on the KGB, where he shared the dais with former CIA Director
R. James Woolsey and former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, he stated
unequivocally that “I spent 27 years of my life working for the KGB, I defected
from it 26 years ago.” (“Symposium: KGB Resurrection (continued),” FrontPage
Magazine, 30 April 2004) That “27 years” covers the entire period of his career
in the Securitate, from its beginnings in 1951 when Romanian state security was
completely controlled by Moscow center, to his 1978 defection.
Pacepa has consistently reaffirmed that in 1972 his KGB superior
gave him responsibility for “illegal operations in Romania.” (The American
Spectator, 9 July 2010) There is no controversy – not for Pacepa, not for the
CIA, not for the German BND, and not for informed opinion – regarding the
established and acknowledged fact that Pacepa worked for the KGB. Why there
should be one in the Romanian media is a mystery.
Was the Securitate controlled by the KGB?
This is slightly trickier since some interpret the KGB’s
ability to recruit double agents within the Securitate as “proof” of its
control. However, an overwhelming number of sources confirm that Romanian
intelligence as institution stopped all substantive cooperation with the KGB as
early as 1963. Czechoslovak intelligence defectors Ladislav Bittman and Jan
Sejna report that the problems in collaborating with Romania began in 1962.
Soviet leader Nikolai Podgorny specified 1963 as the year collaboration ended.
According to the East German Stasi, KGB leaders informed them of the same
during bilateral service talks in 1967. And Yuri Andropov noted in the annual
report after his first year as KGB chief that his organization received only
minimal information from the Romanians, and only from the Romanian ambassador.
Except for the Bulgarian KDS, which Romania still hoped to recruit to the idea
of a Balkan Pact independent of the Soviet Union, the Securitate had cut-off
all substantive collaboration with the other Pact services by the mid-1960s.
In this regard Pacepa’s claim that he was getting his orders
directly from the KGB leadership in 1972 is particularly interesting. In 1971,
immediately after Ceausescu’s visit to Beijing – the first of any Communist
leader since the Sino-Soviet split – Moscow ordered the other Warsaw Pact
services to sever all intelligence ties of any sort with the Securitate. There
was some lag-time between this instruction and the end of all contacts,
allowing the last “social” visit of KGB officials and their wives to Romania in
early 1972.
The head of that delegation, KGB foreign counterintelligence
chief Oleg Kalugin, noted after he moved to the United States that in 1971,
when the other bloc services became “even more subservient to the Soviet KGB,”
the Romanians “bolted out of the alliance” and “Ceausescu terminated their ties
with the Soviet KGB.” (Harvard International Review, 2002 ) Bulgarian
intelligence documents likewise report that the KGB forced the KDS - Bulgarian State Security - to break off
all ties with Romania in 1971, and to plead “mea culpa” for having preserved
them for so long.
So, on what basis was Pacepa receiving orders from the KGB
leadership for “illegal operations in Romania” in 1972? None of the other Pact
services considered the Securitate a “fraternal, cooperating partner.” Indeed, all
of the other Pact leaders labeled Romania and its leader a “traitor” at their
August 1971 meeting in the Crimea. According to the archives brought out by
former KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin, by the end of the 1970s – around the
same time Pacepa defected – the KGB First Chief Directorate for foreign
intelligence transferred Romania and the Securitate
from its 11th Department for liaison and cooperation with fraternal
socialist services, to its 5th Department, which included NATO
states, Yugoslavia and Albania, all of which were targets of hostile Soviet and
Warsaw Pact intelligence operations. Clearly, the Securitate was treated by the KGB as an enemy service rather than a
subordinate one.
Why did Pacepa defect?
There are competing theories as to why Pacepa defected in
July 1978. One theory holds that he feared imminent exposure either as a KGB
agent or for some illegal dealings, or both. Another, that he was ordered by
the KGB to do so in order to help head off Romania’s dangerous turn towards
away from Moscow and towards the West. Less compellingly, Pacepa claimed in his
1987 book to be motivated by his love of democracy and secret pro-American
sympathies. This remains as yet an area of speculation rather than knowledge.
That said, prima facie evidence
suggests that the first hypothesis is much more likely either of the latter two.
The KGB was generally not anxious for its officers to defect because of the
secrets they might reveal about it. Nor would the KGB be anxious to lose such a
highly-placed agent in both the Securitate
and the Romanian hierarchy – Pacepa was, after all, a principal security
advisor to Ceausescu.
Suspicions linger that the defection was a Soviet operation primarily
because Pacepa made claims about Romanian policy and behavior that he knew to
be false but which fully confirmed Soviet disinformation designed to destroy
the special Romanian-American relationship. And he continued to do so well into
the new millennium. However, it is more
probable that he was courting support from a group within the US interested in
undermining Washington’s support for Romania, for example, one of the
Hungarian-American organizations that insisted Romania practiced genocide
against ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. There is also a remote possibility
that he was expressing a personal grudge of some sort. In any case, the
question as to Pacepa’s motivations for his defection remains an open one.
Recently I was misrepresented by a journalist as claiming to
believe – and to have “proof” – that Pacepa defected to the US as part of a
Soviet operation. I neither said nor believe any such thing. However, there are
precedents in which defectors have fallen back under Soviet influence after
they arrived in the United States.
For example, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn gave very good
information during his initial defection in 1961-1963, before he grew frustrated
at not being allowed to brief President John Kennedy personally and moved to
Great Britain. When he returned in the late summer of 1963 he did so with a
variety of confabulations that confirmed Soviet disinformation, confounded CIA
counterintelligence, and greatly compromised CIA operations in the Soviet bloc
for the next decade. Among Golitsyn’s new revelations were the claims that the
Tito-Stalin, Albanian-Soviet and Sino-Soviet splits were false, that Romanian
independence was a myth, and, a bit later, that the Soviet Union would never
invade Czechoslovakia because Soviet anger over the Prague Spring was a façade
as well. As one US analyst noted, “having established his bona fides during his
first stay in the United States,” Golitsyn now appeared to have “returned to carry out
his disinformation mission.” (David Martin, A Wilderness of Mirrors, 2003)
The CIA eventually concluded that the costs to the KGB were
so great that it would never intentionally have one of its officers defect. However,
the same interdiction apparently did not apply to the officers of allied
services. In 1987, for example, the CIA discovered that “every Cuban agent
recruited by the agency over the past twenty years was a double – pretending to
be loyal to the United States while working in secret for Havana.” (Timothy
Weiner, A Legacy of Ashes: The History of
the CIA, 2007) What was not
permitted the KGB was manifestly permitted the officers of auxiliary services
whose knowledge of KGB center was limited. Of all the Soviet Bloc intelligence
services, the Romanian had the least contact and knowledge of KGB center.
To sum up, we know that Pacepa was a KGB agent and we know
that the Securitate was not
controlled by the KGB – it was not even on a friendly basis with it (although
some Securitate officers like Pacepa
certainly were). These are not opinions. They are established facts repeatedly
confirmed by documents and statements issued at the time.
This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro
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