Welcome to the third in the 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).

Ceauşescu has never received a penny of wages during his entire adult life. Before World War II he was an apprentice to a shoemaker, who paid him with room and board and Marxist indoctrination. During the war Ceauşescu was in and out of jail as a Communist and became a Party activist immediately after it’s end. Since he has been Romania’s supreme leader, it has been a matter of pride for him to emphasize that he has never been paid for what he has done. “My whole life has been devoted to the World Revolution of the Proletraiat,” is Ceauşescu’s favourite definition of himself.

Ceauşescu is also proud of the fact that he has never purchased anything for himself from a store. In fact, it was not until 1970 that Ceauşescu, mainly under pressure from Elena, set foot in a department store for the first time. This happened on an official visit to New York, when he accepted an invitation from the management of Macy’s to visit their main store at Herald Square. Ceauşescu was astonished.
“How long did it take them to set up that show?” he asked, when he got back to the Romanian Mission to the United Nations.
“Macy’s is the largest department store in the world,” hedged a puzzled ambassador.
“I mean, to fill up the store with a ll that stuff we saw there?”
It finally dawned on the ambassador that Ceauşescu believed the whole store had been stocked just as a show for him, and the ambassador started to explain what he knew about Macy’s.
“Do you subscribe to Scinteia, monsieur?” Elana interrupted suspiciously.
“Of course, comrade. Everybody does.”
“Then you ought to read it. Read it monsieur, and learn something about America. It’s written in there in black and white that American stores are nothing but window dressing, that Americans can’t buy anything unless they borrow money. And that after they buy something they get laid off and everything is taken away from them again. Show, monsieur. Everything is show, to cover up the poverty, to hide how people are sleeping in the streets. Read Scinteia, you peasant, you mascalzone!”
“Everything I know is from Scinteria,” the ambassador said, trying to expiate himself.
“When you ‘re talking to me, keep your mouth shut!”
“Let him speak, Elena. He lives here.”
“Don’t listen to his garbage, Nick. He ought to be sent to back to Bucharest and enrolled in a political course.”

The next morning Ceauşescu told me to check Macy’s out and report back to him with the truth. A year later he opened the first-and-only department store in Bucharest. On the day of it’s inauguration by Ceauşescu himself, the store was chock full of merchandise gathered from all over the country. A few days later, its shelves were virtually empty. Periodically the store was “prepared” for visits by high-level foreigners or by Ceauşescu himself. It would be closed off to the public and and stuffed with merchandise. For his part, Ceauşescu never really believed that Macy’s was not especially stocked for his visits.

In 1971, Ceauşescu began taking a careful look at money for himself, as insurance “for a rainy day.” In that year his old friend Juan Peron, then living in exile in Spain, came to Bucharest begging for financial assistance. Peron badly needed funds to mobilise his labour union bastions in Argentina in preparation for a return to power, and to also maintain his elegant residence in one of Madrid’s most fashionable suburbs and to support his wife’s pretensions. A special diplomatic pouch I set up began carrying monthly bags of cash to Madrid for Ceauşescu’s exiled friend. As a sign of gratitude, two weeks after Peron’s re-inauguration as president of Argentina he invited Ceauşescu and Elena to come to Buenos Aires on an official visit. I was there in the presidential palace when Peron told Ceauşescu: “The first time I was president, I thought it would last forever. Now I’ve learned that everything is ephemeral but money.”

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