Key Cold War defector Ion Mihai Pacepa dies at 92
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior Romanian intelligence official and an adviser to his country’s president, Nicolae Ceaucescu, arrived in Bonn, West Germany, one day in June 1978 on a diplomatic mission. Ceaucescu had given him a message for the German chancellor — and orders to devise a plan to assassinate an American journalist who covered Romania.
An engineer who specialized in industrial espionage, Pacepa had no interest in murder. And so, he entered the U.S. Embassy and announced his intention to defect. When he landed at Andrews Air Force Base a few days later, he became one of the highest-ranking officials to flee the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
Ceaucescu offered a $2 million reward for his death and reportedly hired Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, to find him.
Pacepa spent the rest of his life living under an assumed name in the United States. He died Feb. 14 at a hospital in an undisclosed location. He was 92.
His death, from COVID-19, was confirmed by Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi who wrote a 2013 book with Pacepa, “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret
Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.”
In Pacepa’s 1987 book “Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief,” he exposed the corruption and cruelty of the Ceaucescu regime at a time when the Romanian leader was courting the West as a moderate, pragmatic Communist leader. After the regime fell, excerpts were read at the trial of Ceaucescu and his wife, Elena. They were both executed.
Pacepa was also among the first to talk about the Communist strategy of manipulating information to sow dissent and tension among the Soviet bloc’s enemies. Disinformation was a constant theme in his writing, which primarily appeared in conservative opinion outlets like National Review, The American Spectator and The Wall Street Journal op-ed page.
“He came with a complete blueprint for what the Romanians, and therefore the Russians, were trying to do to us,” said Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank, and a former consultant to the National Security Council.
Ion Mihai Pacepa was born in Bucharest on Oct. 28, 1928. His father worked for the country’s General Motors subsidiary.
He is survived by his daughter, Dana, from a first marriage in Romania, and a second wife, Mary Lou, whom he married in the United States. His daughter, who arrived in the United States in 1990, lives under an assumed name, as does his wife. Even after the Romanian government officially rescinded the death sentence, Pacepa and his family maintained their assumed identities to avoid upending their new lives.
Pacepa studied chemistry at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and later joined the Securitate, Romania’s intelligence service. At the time of his defection he was the acting head of Romania’s foreign intelligence service and an adviser on industrial policy to Ceaucescu.
Once in the United States, he became a favorite of antiCommunists; Ronald Reagan reportedly called “Red Horizons” his “Bible” for dealing with dictators.
But while many in the U.S. intelligence community welcomed his insights into Soviet strategy, others came to feel he relied too much on the disinformation strategy as an all-encompassing explanation for the world’s ills. He claimed, for example, that the Soviets had created the left-leaning doctrine of Liberation Theology, planted stories about American war crimes in Vietnam and fomented Islamic terrorism by seeding anti-Semitism around the Middle East.