Red Horizons, by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa. Former head of DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence agency (their CIA/KGB). He defected from Romania to the US in 1978 and eventually wrote a book about all the nasty stuff his boss, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was up to during his reign from 1965-1989. Here are some of the most interesting points:
1. Yasser Arafat. Major league homo. Along with J. Edgar Hoover, another grotescquely ugly homosexual. Who says they are all handsome perfect saints? Arafat told Ceausescu that the Palestinians were not ready for their own state and any such state, if created, would be an immediate and complete failure. Realizing this, however, he was still pushing for Israel’s eradication and refused to agree to any recognition of Israel. Ceausescu was angling to mediate between Begin and Sadat, i.e. to take the role that Carter would eventually have; instead of a Camp David accord, it would have been a Bucharest accord, and hopefully result in a Nobel Peace Prize for him. However, we all know who ultimately won that competition. (In Nelson’s voice: “HA HA!”)
2. Ceausescu and Arafat were good friends: Pacepa said they were very much alike.
3. Ceausescu stuttered when he was nervous or under pressure. His wife, Elena, was a total cunt with delusions of being a scientist; she weaseled various channels to get phony “honorary degrees” and had scientific textbooks ghostwritten in her own name; yet knowing how bogus this all was, still considered herself to be a shining scientific mind in her own right.
4. The Romanians were the vanguard of the Warsaw Pact’s attempt to steal Western technology for their own military and industrial uses: the top of the industrial espionage tier. To try to get these secrets, Ceausescu tried to pretend to the West that Romania was independent of the USSR and striving to be even more so, as if Romania would use any such assistance received from the West to promote its independence. The reality was that it was a game: the Soviets depended on the satellites to get them what they themselves could not get from the West; far from using this technology against the Soviets, the Romanians had every intention of sharing it with them to get favors in return, in a mutual bargaining relationship which continued behind the scenes. Ceausescu’s predecessor, Georghe-Dej, managed to use a particularly fantastic piece of espionage-theft from the West to get Krushchev to remove Soviet troops from Romania.
5. Another element was influence. The usual deal with foreign intelligence is the goal of stealing enemy military technology. But Ceausescu believed influence was just as important. INFLUENCE to get US to give Romania favorable trade terms and lower its restrictions on technology transfers.
6. Qadafi hated Araftat. Ceausescu had a great relationship with Mr Libya.
7. They had three kids. Valentin and Zoia were actually fairly well adjusted (and embarrassed by their parents). Valentin was educated overseas and had no use for Marxism. Zoia managed to discover what life was like for the ordinary Romanians and wasn’t too keen on abusing the system; she tended to have anti-communist boyfriends her parents hated (somewhat like the older daughter in “Beautician and the Beast”). Younger son Niku was the enfant terrible: boozing, whoring, etc. abusing his position to get whatever he wanted. Total asshole. Remarkably, despite (maybe because of) his behavior, they considered him perfect to replace his father as ruler of Romania. They were notorious nepotists.
8. Ceausescu was heavily anti-Hungarian and anti-Semitic. He loved “Kojak” and other American crime TV shows.
9. His wife was very contemptuous of the US, and of Carter and his wife in particular, who she referred to as Mr. & Madame Peanut; there were thought of as peasants, and the weakness of the US system was that even a peasant could end up running the country. Sounds a bit elitist, doesn’t it? Aren’t the communists the proud champions of workers and peasants? Clueless woman. Overall they looked down on the US. Hmmm...how many wars has Romania won? Less than one? What does Romania have to be proud of, compared to the US? See, this is arrogance where there is nothing to justify it. Of course, part of their antipathy to Carter may have been this rivalry to mediate in the Middle East (as noted above).
10. Also, Ceausescu – probably copying a cue from the Chinese – was cozying up to Nixon, and was super pissed when Congress forced him out of office, undoing all the hard work he had done establishing the personal rapport with Nixon. He did have a problem with US presidential term limits: the maximum amount of time any US President would have in office is 8 years, so every 4 or 8 years Ceausescu would have to start all over. When it came to Congress, he only focused on influencing Senators (6 year terms) and not Representatives (2 year terms). He tried to characterize Romania as a “maverick” within the Soviet Bloc and curry favor among Western countries. Some of it worked, but it dried up when Pacepa defected.
11. The bright sides are the following:
A. The author was the head of DIE, equivalent to the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA Director) – and the highest level East Bloc official to ever defect. He has all the juiciest details on all the shit Ceausescu was up to, so when he defected, he fucked up Ceausescu big time. The day he arrived in the US he told the FBI about all the secret ops Ceausescu had all over the US and Western Europe. He notes that defections and anti-Ceausescu demonstrations drove Ceausescu nuts, physically ill and vomiting. I can only imagine what happened when Pacepa himself defected. His defection essentially destroyed the DIE and it never recovered.
B. We know now what happened to Ceausescu and his wife, so we know the story has a happy ending.
12. Ceausescu and his wife visited the US in 1978. On the trip to New York, his hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria) was surrounded by anti-Ceausescu protesters – Romanians and Hungarians, putting aside their usual mutual ethnic antipathy to attack a mutual enemy – and his limo was pelted with eggs and tomatoes, which really pissed him off. He complained to the US State Dept., which referred him to Ed Koch, who was then the Mayor (somehow they couldn’t grasp that this was the Mayor’s responsibility, not Carter’s). Koch was totally cool when he spoke to them in person. “Hey, they protest me, they protest Carter, no one thinks twice about it. What’s the big deal? It was just eggs and tomatoes.” Ceausescu wanted the protestors shot; his advisors, and the US, said, “uhh, you can’t do that here.”
13. When they visited Dallas, Texas, Ceausescu was terrified; this was the city where Kennedy was assassinated (“Texas is the reason the President’s dead!!”). Apparently he felt Dallas was some dangerous wild place where the local population routinely killed Presidents who visited, and that security was non-existent. For the record, only three US Presidents were assassinated, and the score is Washington, DC 1 (Lincoln, 1865); Buffalo, New York 1 (McKinley, 1901); and Dallas, Texas 1 (Kennedy, 1963). I suppose DC gets a half point for Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan, but this hadn’t happened by the time Ceausescu was there. As it was, we know that Ceausescu and his wife were shot in the capital, Bucharest...not in Dallas.
14. I was watching TV in Paris with my friend Phil at his family’s house back around 1982-83. The news came on with footage of French TV from 1974. It was in black & white! Shit, 1974, and French TV was still in black & white! Well, the Romanians have the French beat. As late as 1978, Romania was one of two countries in Europe (Albania the other) to still broadcast TV in black & white. The Ceausescus refused to budget money to change over, believing that color TV was a luxury the Romanian people didn’t need.
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