Ion Mihai Pacepa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ion Mihai Pacepa (born 28 October 1928) is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is now an American citizen.
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, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) described his cooperation as "an important and unique contribution to the United States".
Contents |
[edit] Biography
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, and, between 1972 and 1978, he was the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service.
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 Ceauşescu, who placed a bounty of two million US dollars on his head. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Qaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. [1]
In the 1980s Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars. [2] 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 on Ceauşescu's orders, 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.
[edit] Books
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.
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 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 (see Communist Romania). 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 Online, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.
[edit] References
[edit] Publications
[edit] Books
- Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, 1987. ISBN 0-89526-570-2
- Red Horizons: the 2nd Book. The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption 1990. ISBN 0-89526-746-2
- The Kremlin Legacy, 1993
- The Black Book of the Securitate, a trilogy, 1999
[edit] Articles
- The Arafat I Knew, 2002
- The KGB’s Man (PDF), 2003
- Khaddafi's "Conversion", 2003
- Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD, 2003
- From Russia With Terror, March 1, 2004
- Putin's Duality, August 5, 2005
- Russian Footprints, August 24, 2006
- Tyrants and the Bomb, October 17, 2006
- The Kremlin’s Killing Ways, November 28, 2006
