Daughters of the KGB: Moscow's Secret Spies, Sleepers and Assassins of the Cold War

by Douglas Boyd

  As historian Patrick Brogan once remarked, ‘Romania had had territorial disputes with all its neighbours throughout its modern history.’ One glance at the map explains why. Apart from 100 miles of Black Sea coastline, to the south is Bulgaria, then, clockwise, come Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldova and Ukraine again – the last three all part of USSR in 1945. On every border lies disputed territory and the dormant claims are reflected in the multiple names for major cities like Cluj, which is called Klausenburg in German and Kilosvár in Hungarian.

  King Mihai I, a third cousin of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, was the 22-year-old king of the troubled country who joined a number of pro-Allied politicians in the coup of 23 August 1944 which overthrew the pro-German regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu. After a series of typically Balkan ‘misunderstandings’, i.e. betrayals, Antonescu was handed over by Romanian Communists to the Soviets a week later. In a radio broadcast to the nation at 10.30 p.m. on 23 August the king announced over the state radio, ‘Receive with confidence the soldiers of the Red Army. The United Nations have guaranteed the independence of the country and non-interference in our internal affairs.’

  The broadcast was as far from reality as when his father, King Carol III, told the nation in 1939, ‘Our soldiers will fight gloriously’. Within three weeks of 23 August, 165,000 officers and other ranks had been arrested as fascists and despatched by a number of the few serviceable trains to Gulag camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia.1 Few returned home.

  On 12 September an armistice was signed, which was in effect an unconditional surrender on Soviet terms. The Romanian Communist party Partidul Comunist Român (PCR) numbered fewer than 1,000 members, having enjoyed little support before the war because the country was largely a peasant economy with little concentration of workers in factories for activists to organise. It also supported Soviet plans to divest Romania of some border regions, which did not make it popular with the common people. However, with Soviet support, it now set about ensconcing itself until, in March of the following year, King Mihai was forced to accept a pro-Soviet coalition under Petru Groza, a lawyer and leader of the ‘Ploughmen’s Front’ peasant movement, which had joined the PCR after King Mihai’s coup. Even before the Potsdam Conference, some 70,000 ethnic Germans were driven out of Romania.

  In November 1946 the so-called ‘bloc of democratic parties’ came to power after blatantly rigged elections,2 confirming Groza’s power – on the face of it, as leader of a democratic coalition. Behind the scenes two more of Stalin’s puppets, named Anna Pauker and Gheorghiu Gheorghiu-Dej, both of whom had spent the war years in the USSR, were manoeuvring to build the political base of the PCR by supporting votes for women and land reform to win over the peasants. As one of the four members of the PCR’s central committee, Pauker initiated a recruitment drive that netted a half-million new members without enquiring into their political antecedents. Despite this apparent liberalisation, mass arrests restarted in 1947 and many of Pauker’s recruits would be purged between 1948 and 1950. In November 1947 she became the first woman in the world to hold a political post as high as Foreign Minister, and was hailed by Time magazine as the Iron Lady decades before Margaret Thatcher was given that accolade.

  Paradoxically both a prime mover in the 1945 arrests of thousands of supporters of the Antonescu regime and an advocate of a Romanian path to socialism, Pauker was so much Stalin’s creature that a newspaper cartoon – for which the cartoonist paid heavily – depicted her on a sunny day in Bucharest with her umbrella up. When a passer-by said, ‘Anna, it’s a lovely day, why the umbrella?’ she replied, ‘It’s raining in Moscow’. Gallows humour? Probably, because the Romanian Iron Lady had had her own husband shot for Trotskyist deviation in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.3

  King Mihai was now a figurehead without any real power, except briefly to refuse to sign Groza’s decrees until forced by the UK, USA and USSR to ‘behave’ himself and accept the inevitable as PCR absorbed the other political parties. In November 1947 Mihai was allowed to travel to London for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten. Meeting at that assembly of European royalty his future wife Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma, Mihai decided not to return to Romania, but was pressured to do so by Churchill, among others. On 30 December the king was summoned to Bucharest, where his palace was surrounded by pro-Communist troops of the Tudor Vladimirescu Division, blocking any communication with units loyal to the king. There, Groza and PCR boss Gheorghiu-Dej ordered him to sign an abdication already prepared for his signature and record an announcement of it to be broadcast later. Told they would execute 1,000 political prisoners if he refused, Mihai signed, which enabled them to proclaim a ‘people’s republic’. Four days later, Mihai was fortunate to be allowed to depart into exile with some personal possessions and a few members of his household – although government documents, which may be genuine, attest that the king was paid off with a half-million Swiss francs. According to Sudoplatov, Andrey Vyshinsky – the legally trained prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s – laid down the terms of the abdication, agreeing that half of Mihai’s pension would be paid to him in Mexico.4

  Romania after 1945.

  Because of all these machinations, Romania did not get its Soviet-clone security police until the end of August 1948. Entitled Departamentul Securitatii Statului or Department of State Security, it was almost always called simply ‘Securitate’. From its first day, it was ‘guided’ by MVD officers in the senior posts and employed many former officers of Siguranta Statului, the former royalist secret police, until they were all purged once it was up and running. Initially, its staff totalled 4,641 officers, rising to 11,000 officers controlling a half-million coerced informers in a population of 22 million people.

  To remove any administrative delays between arrest, sentencing and incarceration, the Securitate was itself responsible for running the prisons and labour camps. A victim could be arrested on a Monday and be in a camp before the end of the week. Its extermination camp at Valea Neagra was far more primitive than the industrialised model of Auschwitz but equally fatal for those sent there. A hard-regime prison camp for anti-Soviet political activists was set up at Aiud. Intellectuals – the label was stretched wide – were confined at Gherla. Locked away in several other camps were 180,000 people who had committed no crime; 40,000 of them, or nearly one-quarter of the detainees, were women.5 The regime created a whole network of labour camps ostensibly to fulfil central planning construction projects like the Danube–Black Sea canal, whose stated purpose was to enable shipping to avoid the difficult Danube delta by cutting straight across country to Cernavoda. For much of the interrupted construction, the project was run by the Securitate, using convicted criminals to force political prisoners to work with inadequate machinery – most of the excavation was done by pick and shovel – while on grossly inadequate rations. Reasonable estimates are that up to 100,000 people died in the construction camps. To be killed by the Securitate, it was not necessary to be a detainee. It had its own Smersh team, trained by the NKVD, and also used other more devious methods. For example, striking coal miners were given lethal doses of X-rays by Securitate doctors under the guise of health checks.

  Pauker, herself from a religious Jewish family, also made possible the emigration to Israel of some 100,000 Romanian Jews – including her own parents – between 1950 and 1952, which was not in line with Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ views on Soviet Jews. In the summer of 1950, undergoing surgery for breast cancer in Moscow, she also resisted Stalin’s orders for collectivisation in Romania, releasing the conscripted peasants on her return and encouraging a market economy for their produce, which earned her Moscow’s rebuke that she had drifted into non-Marxist policies. In the bloc-wide purges of 1950, Foreign Minister Anna Pauker was denounced and removed from power; she died in 1961.

  After Gheorghiu-Dej dropped dead in March 1965 a physically unimpressive grey figure emerged from the shadows behind him. The 47-year-old Nicolae Ceausescu and hi
s previously unknown wife, Elena – who would manoeuvre her way to become the second most-important person in the country – were to govern Romania until their grisly end on Christmas Day of 1989. Initially acclaimed for his independent line in foreign affairs, Ceausescu even condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Internally, however, he pursued a personality cult, claiming titles like ‘Great Genius of the Carpathians’, placing family members in positions of power and razing one-third of central Bucharest to make a parade ground like Moscow’s Red Square, flanked by an enormous palace seven storeys high that would have delighted Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. He made any contact with foreigners illegal, limited electricity consumption for each house to one 6-watt bulb – for which there was power between two and four hours a day – and required every woman to produce five children. In this last connection, contraception and abortion were forbidden under a law that obliged women to undergo regular gynaecological examinations to ensure compliance. All internal and international mail, telephone calls and faxes were intercepted. While neither as ubiquitous or efficient as the Stasi, the Securitate did have thousands of informers known as sicuristi – roughly one for every forty-three people – so that no one could trust any friend or even a relative in the deliberately manipulated paranoia.

  The external intelligence operation of Securitate was unimpressive, compared with that of other satellite states, but it did exist. The first time that this came to general attention in the West was in July 1978, when 50-year-old General Ion Pacepa was on a duty visit in Bonn to deliver a message from Ceausescu to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Arriving at the US embassy, he requested and was immediately granted political asylum. The Romanian espionage chief, who was also a confidant of Nicolae Ceausescu, was an important catch for the CIA, which whisked him off to Andrews Air Force base outside Washington in a military aircraft. He was already known to Western services, having served in Germany from 1972 to 1978, and had no reservations about telling all he knew during debriefing. In an attempt to prevent this, he was condemned to death in absentia with a price of $2 million on his head, to which Yasser Arafat and Muammar Al-Gaddafi reportedly each added another million dollars.

  Working in France at the time of Pacepa’s defection was a 30-year-old agent of the Directia Informatii Externe (Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the Securitate). Born Matei Hirsch, but using the name of Matei Haiducu, he was the privileged son of a high official in Ceausescu’s Interior Ministry, whose task was to steal French technology, especially in the realm of nuclear research. However, in January 1981, Haiducu received an order from Bucharest to assassinate two Romanian émigré writers living in France named Virgil Tanase and Paul Goma. In a sense it was a repeat of the Markov murder, with a different method, because the two intended victims had irritated Ceausescu – in Tanase’s case by describing the dictator as ‘His Majesty Ceausescu the First’. Instead of doing that, Haiducu reported his orders to DST, the French counter-espionage service. With Gallic subtlety, they let him squirt poison from an adapted fountain pen into a drink that was to be swallowed by Goma, but he ‘accidentally’ spilled the poisoned chalice. They then assisted Haiducu to stage the kidnapping of Tanase in front of witnesses on 20 May 1982, after which he was spirited away to a quiet hotel in Britanny with Goma. With French President François Mitterrand in on the act, a press conference was called to protest at the flagrant outrage, and Mitterrand cancelled a scheduled visit to Romania to add verisimilitude. This enabled Haiducu to return as a hero to Bucharest and be rewarded with promotion and the rare privilege of a holiday abroad with his family, from which they did not return home.6

  By the 1980s Romania had the lowest standard of living and the most appalling food shortages of the satellite countries. In an attempt to pass the buck, the Securitate arrested 80,000 peasants as ‘saboteurs’ who had obstructed the infallible dictates of the government.7 Photographs of the time show peasants in shabby clothes riding on horse-drawn carts along unmade roads in scenes where little had changed since the previous century. Nothing worked. No home was anyone’s castle: forcible entry was routine, as was the planting of hidden microphones.

  The collapse of the regime was inevitable in 1989. It began on 14 December in Timisoara, a major city in the west of the country, where Securitate officers attempted to arrest a Hungarian pastor named László Tokes. Encouraged by the news from the other satellite states, his parishioners made a human chain around his house. Most unusually, local Romanians joined in the struggle until it seemed the whole population was engaged. After three days, Ceausescu ordered soldiers and police to shoot the demonstrators to ‘restore order’. The Securitate and some soldiers did so; other soldiers refused to obey the order. Tokes was arrested after 100-plus people had been killed and many wounded. Returning from a state visit to Iran on 21 December, Ceausescu ordered a massive rally in Bucharest to endorse his authority. Televised live, its great surprise was the booing from younger people in the crowd, swiftly followed by a roar of anger from most of the people. The screen faded to black as Securitate snatch squads dived into the crowd to arrest the ringleaders. Incredulous at meeting resistance, they began shooting wildly, reportedly killing several hundred people. Ceausescu ordered Minister of Defence General Vasile Milea to send troops against the people. Milea refused and committed suicide, or was murdered. The army then went openly over to the side of the protesters.

  On 22 December an enormous crowd stormed the Central Committee building in Bucharest. The president and his wife escaped from the roof in a helicopter that landed about 60 miles to the north-west, near Târgoviste, where they were recognised and arrested by soldiers. Meanwhile Securitate riot police were launching three days of civil war against the people and army units, in which 1,140 people were killed and more than 3,000 wounded. Their main target was the state television building, where the National Salvation Council of dissidents, students and officials who had fallen foul of the dictator was announcing live to Romanians and the world what was happening.

  On 25 December a show trial was filmed, with the president and his wife helped from an armoured car in which they had been held for three days, moving continuously from place to place to prevent a rescue by Securitate shock troops. The kangaroo court, held in a barracks at Târgoviste, heard no witnesses, just a succession of accusations. Ceausescu seemed too stunned to protest much, in contrast to his wife, who screamed at the guards when the impromptu court, after a 90-minute deliberation, ordered a squad of paras to execute the couple immediately. Caught on film, they were shot in a courtyard and shown lying in pools of their own blood. The film was repeatedly broadcast on television, and may be viewed on YouTube. In one Western television interview, several respectable-looking ladies in Bucharest said that they had watched it many times in the days following the execution. The site of the execution – bullet holes still visible in the wall – is now a tourist attraction.

  Such was the speed of this bloody revolution that many people believed it must all have been agreed in advance with Moscow. The Securitate snipers stopped shooting people after a few days, but that the organisation was merely dormant – even continuing to occupy the same premises as before the revolution – became clear in June 1990 when the new government ordered Securitate units into the streets again to beat up students occupying Bucharest’s University Square. Scuffles turned into a riot, with cars set on fire and overturned, windows smashed and public buildings occupied. Figures of those killed and wounded vary widely. The government then sent trains to ferry Ceausescu’s rent-a-mob of miners to the capital, so they could teach the students a lesson. The miners ran wild for three days of terror, beating up intellectuals, students and people with foreign contacts.

  As in the other former satellites, one difficult problem for the new government was what to do with the Securitate archive containing millions of files. The majority were placed in the care of the new internal security service Serviciul Rôman de Informatii (SRI) and some, presumably relating to foreign
espionage of the Ceausescu years, given to Serviciul de Informatii Externe (SIE), the new foreign intelligence service. This proved not to be a good idea: many files were leaked for political reasons or in return for favours or protection, and so the archives were deposited in a specially created body, Conciliul National pentru Studearea Archivelor Securitâtii (CNSAS). Theoretically, this body works like the BStU in Berlin, granting access to personal files for Romanian citizens who can prove their identity and entitlement to see them. It is, however, widely believed that, like Orwell’s pigs, some politicians and officials have more rights to poke their snouts into the archive trough than has the general population.

  Notes

  1. Dallas, Poisoned Peace, p. 360

  2. This shocked Western leaders, who were still expecting Stalin to abide by the terms of the Yalta conference

  3. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 220

  4. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 232

  5. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, p. 296

  6. Dobson and Payne, Dictionary of Espionage, pp. 347–8

  7. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 220

  21

  ALBANIA

  FROM SERFDOM TO THE SIGURIMI SECRET POLICE

  The break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War has had long-term impact throughout the Balkans, where the mutual hatred of population groups defined by language or religion had been held in check by Constantinople’s hegemony. It unleashed a struggle which still continues a century later with minorities fighting to join their kindred in neighbouring countries, to dominate their ethnic or religious enemies and/or fight off attempts by other peoples to take them over. Nowhere were the consequences worse than in ancient Illyria – modern Albania, whose native name, Shqiperia, is translated as ‘land of eagles’ – which has all the ingredients of medieval struggle and bloodshed.