Libya, the country with the laziest flag, have always been seen, and rightly so, as a nation state sponsor of terrorism. This was especially true in the 1970 and 80s and the West never did more than lob a few missiles at Gaddafi, which missed, before they welcomed him back into the worlds community as he came bearing gifts of oil for a Prime Ministers brother. It is acceptable to remove some leaders and fight some wars than others.

With Mister 8 going AWOL, I thought I would take an extract of Ion Pacepa from his book Red Horizons about Gaddafi.

….When the two leaders had finished their scheduled time together, Ceauşescu informed Gaddafi that his personal aide-de-camp and his presidential aeroplane had to fly back to Romania and return the night to bring him an important document.

The next morning Gaddafi arrived punctually, an unusual occurrence in those days. When the two leaders came together, Ceauşescu had a large, antique, chased silver box in his hands. Opening it, he took out a very old, handwritten book. “This is the original manuscript of the first translation of the Koran into the Romanian language, made hundreds of years ago. We have only this one copy, but I only have one real brother. It is for you to keep, my brother.”

Colonel Gaddafi dipped greedily into the beautiful old book. Visibly moved, he literally could not speak. Eventually he managed to stammer, “My brother! You are my brother for the rest of my life!” at the same time vigorously embracing Ceauşescu.

The Koran manuscript was the gift Ceauşescu had planned all along for Gaddafi. “Going by the feel I’ve gotten for Gaddafi, there’s nothing that would hook him better than our antique manuscript of the Koran,” he explained to Nicolae Doicaru and me. Doicaru was the chief of the DIE at the time, and he was personally running the operation. “And nothing,” Ceauşescu continued “would impress him more than for me to present it to him spontaneously, as if in reaction to the force of his personality.” The scenario for transporting the Koran to Tripoli during the night had been worked out long before Ceauşescu left Romania.

According to wikipedia, the source of all truth - “In September 1978, Pacepa received two death sentences from Communist Romania, and Ceauşescu placed a bounty of two million US dollars on his head. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. In the 1980s, Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars.”

Enclosed is a clip of some Libyan terrorists trying execute a thief.

The holiday season has been and gone and we are back to the ritual of codewords with Mister 8 where he is taking readings from spy-master Allen Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence. This week, we still on the subject of eavesdropping and Dulles is catching illegal radio operators where Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is listening to what you say over dinner.

“Approved,” Ceausescu said, moving on to a display showing monitoring equipment for restaurants. The ceramic ashtrays and flower vases caught his attention. Geartu reported that, by the end of the next five year plan, every restaurant would be equipped with only ceramic ashtrays and vases containing thin, battery activated micro-transmitters. They could be turned on by any surveillance officer or waitress-agent, who needed to pull out a needle-like pin.

First invented by the Soviet KGB, ceramic ashtrays and flower vases, containing micro-transmitters are now secretly used by all East European security services for monitoring discussions in restaurants and hotel lobbies. The American journalist Hedrick Smith humorously describes when he witnessed in a Soviet hotel by the Caspian Sea, when word came down that a delegation of foreign ambassadors was about to make a visit there “Like the provincial bureaucrats of Gogol’s rich satire The Inspector General, the staff scurried about in a frenzy to make the hotel more presentable….The regular, glass ashtrays disappeared from the dining room tables and new, more decorative ashtrays appeared. Large, white carnations were placed on each table.” It evidently did not occur to Smith that the new ashtrays and flower vases were not only for show. Their use as portable monitoring devices is still one of the best kept secrets of the Soviet bloc.

Welcome to the fourth 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).

Ceausescu & Elena visit an exhibit on the new inventions of the Romanian General Directorate of Technical Operations.

“This is a telephone device that has been perfected by the DGTO after ten years of work,” Geartu started out slowly and methodically, in sharp contrast to Diaconescu’s rapid manner of speaking. He held an innocuous looking, beige coloured telephone. “This is not a normal telephone. It also serves as a very sensitive microphone, capable of recording all conversations in the room where it is installed. If this telephone is approved as the only kind legally allowed in Romania, it will open a new era of broad-scale electronic surveillance, without the tedious need for surreptitious entries into private homes to install microphones.”
“Could it have different models?”
“We have three models and five colours, and we can have as many as you wish to order.”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for. How good is it?”
“Excellent” broke in the fast talking Diaconescu. “Much better than anything we’ve seen to date. We have samples of similar instruments discovered in our embassies abroad – American, British, and West German-made. Ours is much clearer. Please listen to these comparative tapes.”
“Can we use it on a wide scale?” asked Ceausescu, ignoring the request he listen to the tapes.
“We are only waiting for your command, Comrade Supreme Commander.”
“Approved. Starting today, March 28 ,1978, this is the one and only telephone approved for use in Romania. Period. How many old telephones do we have in use today?”
“More than three million,” Diaconescu promptly replied.
“Replace them with the new ones,” Ceausescu ordered.
………
“May we do a demonstration, Comrade Supreme Commander?” asked Diaconescu.
“Go ahead,” approved Ceausescu, with a large smile on his face and a glow in his eyes. Being addressed as “Supreme Commander” is even more exciting to him than having sex, or so Diaconescu had told me a few days earlier.
“To this portable monitoring centre we have hooked up four phones that are installed in four different, randomly selected apartments. Two are the kind we use now, and two are the new model. The monitoring centre is voice-activated, so it will automatically start recording when anyone of the phones is in use. It’s recording one conversation right now,” said Diaconescu, pointing to a moving recorder. The conversation could clearly be heard in the exhibit room when he pushed a button. “The recording stops when the conversation is over, as it just did. That’s all we can record with the old phones. But now let’s listen to the new one.”
Diaconescu dialed a number and asked if it was the National Theater. “Wrong number” came from the other end of the line, but the tape recorder did not stop after the telephone had been hung up. A woman’s voice could be heard asking who had called. “Some idiot who had put his finger in the wrong hole. Let me finish what I was listening to on Radio Free Europe about the trip the Dictator and his old bag are making to the United States,” the man’s voice replied, before being cut off sharply. Diaconescu’s hand, darting out faster than a snake, had flicked off a switch. He always did have good reflexes.
The deadly silence was interrupted when Diaconescu flicked another switch. A fuzzy noise together with heavy breathing and short yelps came suddenly out of the speaker, but Diaconescu’s quick hand immediately shut it off.
“Turn it back on,” Elena ordered with a biting voice. Her experienced ear was almost as good as Diaconescu’s. “They should be arrested,” she ordered, after listening a few more minutes. “At eleven in the morning, working people should be out working, not making love.”

This article is in response to Mister 8s A Dulles moment #4

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

Welcome to the second 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).

…..I asked about the ambassadors wife.
“When the ambassadress makes love with ‘Teodorescu,’ nobody would recognize her. She becomes a different woman,” Moga began.
“Who’s ‘Teodorescu’?” I asked.
“My officer. The best ladies’ man I’ve ever had. He works under cover as the American ambassador’s driver.”
“What about the ambassador?”
“Naive as they come. He knows as much about his wife as he does about Romanian politics. He’s swallowed ‘Horizon’ hook, line and sinker.”
According to Moga, the Counterespionage Directorate had kept a much closer eye on the American ambassador than any of his predecessors. He spoke Romanian, had many friends among Romanians, and was very sympathetic to Bucharest’s trumped independence. His personal involvement in smuggling dissidents’ manuscripts out of Romania in the diplomatic pouch, as well as his close relationship with the CIA officers working at the embassy., had raised suspicions that he might be a deep-cover CIA officer, just as Ambassador Nicolae Nicolae was a deep-cover intelligence officer. Moga had run several attractive and well-educated female agents against the American ambassador, without success. the astonishing result of the coverage was that his wife, not the ambassador, had the roving eye. That helped Moga to get the ambassadress and “Teodorescu” into bed together, and then to turn inot a casual fling inot a real love affair. Moga was now waiting for Ceauşescu’s approval to send “Teodorescu” to the United States to revitalize the affair and to use the ambassadress’ influence over her husband to facilitate the driver’s emigration to the United States. “Teodorescu’s” task in the long run was to continue developing the wife of the American ambassador towards recruiting as an influence agent. Her initial task would be to manipulate her husband in accordance with Bucharest’s interest.
“Having an affair is a long way from being an agent. You know that, Moga” I said after he finished.
“Not in the whore’s case. The ambassadress is head over heels in love with ‘Teodorescu,’ who’s already wormed a lot of things out of her that she’s learned from her husband. I’ve got everything down on tape.”

………
“We’ve never before had an American ambassador with a whore for a wife. What’s his job now?”
“Head of Personnel at Foggy Bottom (United States Department of State).”
“Couldn’t be better.”.

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

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