“Red Horizons” and Ceausescu’s crimes

I finished reading this book, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

I say “this book”, even though the photo shows two books. It’s really the same book, just two editions of it. The left is an earlier UK edition, published in 1988, that’s kind of hard to find, and was published before Romanian revolution of 1989, so it’s a bit of a collector’s item. On the right is a newer edition.

As far as I can tell, the content in them is identical, except that in the newer edition, there is an additional preface and a transcript of Ceausescu’s trial which ended in his and Elena Ceausescu’s execution. This book is historically significant, and had a role to play in those events. Romanian revolution is the only one of Eastern European revolutions of 1989 where the people violently overthrew their dictator, and it is largely through this book, distributed as newspaper serializations in Romania in 1989, from where the people of Romania learned of Ceausescu’s crimes agains them.

The author Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest ranking defector from the former Eastern Bloc, who defected to the US in 1978. He was a close advisor to Ceausescu, and the chief of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service. He had good insight into the whole apparatus of Ceaucescu’s tyranny, crimes, and personality cult, which is present in this book.

The book is a wild ride, and highly entertaining and informative. It contains Pacepa’s first-person recollections across his working days where he interacted with a vast number of themes and people. The pace is high and dizzying; there aren’t really any slow moments. Although the book is written about Pacepa’s period in Romania, a lot of it is generalizable to other communist regimes, modern russia, and other dictatorships of the past and present.

I’ll now provide a sampling across themes in the book. Pacepa’s style and substance are such that I don’t really have much to add; I’ll just provide some quoted passages.

Recruiting agents in the intelligence communities of NATO countries is one of Ceausescu’s highest priorities, not just to honor his Warsaw Pact obligations but especially to protect his most highly classified secret, codenamed “Horizon”. This was a vast influence operation he was personally running to gain Western political support, money, and technology.

It had all begun on the evening of February 22, 1972, when Ceausescu personally took over the management of the [foreign intelligence agency] 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 Ceausescu 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 superpowers. …”

“Horizon” was the code name Ceausescu himself gave to this operation, one of the many masterful deception and influence operations that he himself built up, brick by brick, starting in 1972. Its purpose was to give the West the illusion that his Romania was a new kind of Communist country, independent of everyone else, including Moscow, which deserved to be supported by the West, so as to create cracks in the walls around the Soviet bloc. (pp. 8-9)

Emil Georgescu had been working for the United States government as a supervisory program editor in the Romanian Department of Radio Free Europe since January 1974, shortly after his defection from Romania to West Germany. His public denouncements of the personality cult in Romania and of abuses committed by the Romanian security forces had spelled his doom. …

“Emil Georgescu must be silenced forever,” Ceausescu ordered. “He should have his jaw, teeth, and arms broken, so that he will never be able to speak or write again.” He added that the job should be done by foreign criminal mercenaries, without any possible connection with Romanian authorities, and that no written record be kept of this conversation and the operation against Emil Georcescu. …

On October 19, 1976, Emil Georgescu was seriously injured in an automobile accident staged by a team of French drug smugglers working for the DIE. (pp. 162-163)

In 1976, Ceausescu proposed to Arafat that they exchange intelligence advisors. The addition of a few PLO officers brought about a dramatic improvement in the terrorist component of the DIE, called “Service Z”—Z as the lat letter of the alphabet representing the “final solution.” To this service Arafat and Hassan assigned two teams of PLO professional terrorists, who had been especially trained for Romanian operations and were later used for kidnaping and assassination assignments in the West at Ceausescu’s order. A DIE general, Constantin Munteanu, was transferred to Beirut as the head of a group of advisors who were to teach the PLO how to run deception and influence operations, in order to get recognized by the West. (p. 19)

“The next step is your job. Your influence agents in the Austrian government should whisper into [Austrian chancellor] Kreisky’s ear every day that he was the first Western leader to take a step toward the reconciliation between the Palestinians and Israel, and that he should also be the first to recognize the PLO officially. That such a gesture would make Arafat even more moderate. And that only someone who had good official relations with both parties could mediate in a conflict,” said Hassan, unfolding his plans. (p. 32)

Soviet geological studies made in the 1950s discovered new oil fields on both sides of the Romanian Carpathian mountain chain, but most of them lay at a depth of four or more miles. That made drilling virtually impossible for the ill-equipped Romania, which was also unwilling to allow any other foreign foinger to touch them. Confidential geological research indicated that there were also oil reserves under the Black Sea. At Ceausescu’s personal direction, the DIE began getting deeply involved in intelligence operations to procure technical data on offshore drilling rigs. At the beginning of 1978, a Romanian offshore drilling rig constructed with illegally obtained technology was almost ready to be launched, and now Ceausescu wanted to see an American original with his own eyes. (p. 316)

“Without exception all this microelectronics manufacturing equipment is American,” Sirbu began his new subject, “and all was obtained by the DIE and DIA without the knowledge of the producers.” The DIA was the military intelligence service. “Following the valuable guidelines given us by our Supreme Guide, Comrade Ceausescu, we are making wide-scale use of venal and corruptible East-West traders as well as of our own proprietary firms in the West for worming the equipment out of the United States.”

Sirbu then presented several of the main scenarios for smuggling equipment out, using dummy firms or offices created in West Germany, Austria, or Japan by DIE illegal officers documented as Westerners. These companies allegedly imported the American equipment for some non-Communist country. Somewhere during the shipment, the markings and accompanying documents were exchanged for deceptive descriptions, represending the equipment as something innocuous like photographic or laboratory supplies, and the crates were then loaded onto Romanian commercial airplanes or ships. For security reasons, the dummy firms, which were also used for obtaining embargoed equipment requested by Moscow, were dissolved after several important operations and replaced by new ones. Sirbu emphasized that such firms were being widely used to obtain every kind of embargoed Western equipment, from robotics to military avionics. (p. 45)

A waiter came in with a silver platter full of oysters. “Put it here, in the middle,” ordered [Ceausescu’s drunkard son] Nicu, pointing toward the table. “Is there any seasoning on them?”

“They are just fresh and raw, Comrade Nicu,” replied the waiter.

“They need seasoning, you idiot. This isn’t a cat house, it’s a VIP club.” He precariously climbed up onto the table and started urinating on them, careful to “season” every oyster. “Come on, comrades. Let’s have an oyster,” he urged the guests, while unsuccessfully trying to pick up an oyster for himself. It took Andrei and Pacoste some time to get Nicu back into a chair. “Nobody’s eating? Who doesn’t loike my seasoning? Nobody? Then I’ll wash them off.” And Nicu started squirting with a syphon bottle over the oysters and over the rest of us sitting around the table. Andrei and Pacoste, half intoxicated, thought it was funny. Burtica and the Lord, half sober, tried to protect themselves as much as possible.

Around three o’clock the party finally broke up. Two waiters and three drivers had a hard time helping Andrei and Pacoste into their cars. I left with Burtica and the Lord, both of whom were singing, but could also still walk. We left Nicu pushing a waitress toward the edge of the table while tearing off her blouse. “I want to fuck you, here. Right here on this table, you slut.” (p. 39)

This book was published over thirty years ago, and it feels disturbingly timely in 2025. There are many challenges to democracy and freedom around the world, including in Romania itself, and among many people and countries who should know better.

This was the seminal book to open the West’s eyes to the crimes and corruption of communist leaders, and it feels like the Western world is being run like most people haven’t really read it or learned from it. I highly encourage everyone to be better than that, and read this book. It’s an easy read, and I would say entertaining, if it wasn’t so timely and frightening.

To end this post, I again give word to Pacepa, who wrote these words as the last passage of the preface to the paperback edition in January 1990. Again, his context is Romania of the day, but this transcends time and space.

The overthrow of Ceausescu was, however, the end of a tyrant, not of the system that brought him to power. Many of the leaders of the current government are mentioned in Red Horizons. In the absence of any organized opposition and democractic framework, Romania’s Communist structure of government remains essentially in place, able, perhaps in time, to produce another Ceausescu. Let us hope this does not happen, but if it does, let us hope the West does not make the same mistakes it made with Ceausescu—mistakes I document in this book.