Welcome to the first in a regular Friday series with Mister 8 where I shall be responding to the words of his capitalist spy master Allen Welsh Dulles with the words of Ion Pacepa from his book Red Horizons.

Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the former Eastern Bloc. Pacepa was Ceauşescu’s adviser for national security and technological development and the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service – DIE (Departamentul de Informatii Externe).

Recruiting agents in the intelligence communities of NATO countries is one of Ceauşescu’s highest priorites, not just to honour his Warsaw Pact obligations but especially to protect his most highly classified secret, codenamed “Horizon”. This was a vast influence operation he was persoanlly running to gain Western political support, money and technology.
It had all begun on the evening of February 22, 1972, when Ceauşescu personally took over the management of the DIE. “Our experience shows that today the West is commendably eager to encourage the slightest sign of independence within the Soviet bloc. Let’s take advantage of their eagerness” said Ceauşescu cynically, in the memorable speech he made that evening in his office before the DIE’s board of directors. “We must make cleverness our national trait….Stop showing a sullen, frowning face and clenched fist to the West. Start making it feel compassion for us, and you’ll see how fast Western boycotts change into magnanimity. Let’s present Romania as a Latin island in the Slavic sea….Our millenia-old traditions of independence are now up against Moscow’s political centrism…A pawn between two superpowers….”
As was his wont, Ceauşescu followed up his philosophy lesson with orders for its practical application: The DIE should start an organized influence offensive against the West. It should carefully plant little hints of independence – without affecting the fundamentals of Communism – and then hammer away at them, in order to stir up the West’s sympathy for Romania and and gain its political and economic assistance. The DIE’s agents of influence should help Romania gain political and economic advantages in the West, turn Third World governments into political allies, transform hostile emigrés into supporters, sway the international news media. These agents should also use Romania’s new prestige to unlock doors opening onto highly classified technology prohibited to Communist countries. Romania should make a substantial increase in its contribution to the defense not only of the Warsaw Pact but also of Peking and the whole Communist world.

Ceauşescu’s “horizon” had everything: overt and covert propaganda in the West, hints dropped into concealed microphones discovered in Romanian embassies in the West and kept in place for sending misleading messages; documents “signed” by the heads of foreign governments, counterfeited in Bucharest and “accidentally lost” in luxury hotels or leaked to the West in other ways; intelligence officers operating under the cover of the robes of ambassadors and archbishops; Swiss bank accounts rewarding high-ranking, corrupt Westerners who agreed to present Romania as a “maverick”; intelligence officers disguised as lovers, recruiting Western officials as agents of influence.

This article is in response to Mister 8s A Dulles Moment