See Admission I from USLA Commander Gheorghe Ardeleanu 25 December 1989 from Orwellian Positively Orwellian Part Five Former Securitate Confess

Admission I:

It will—and should—be mind boggling to the outsider, but an alleged meeting on the evening of Christmas Day 1989 at the USLA Headquarters shortly after the execution of the Ceausescus, has garnered almost no investigation and discussion inside or outside Romania.  Enough people have made reference to the meeting, from enough different entities and with different interests and equities—including USLA Commander Gheorghe Ardeleanu himself, a civilian representative of the Front (Mihai Montanu), former USLA officer Marian Romanescu, and Army General Tiberiu Urdareanu—to suggest that at the very least the meeting took place.[63] One would think this meeting might be of some historical interest, since the next day, 26 December 1989, the official order was issued integrating the remnants of the former Securitate and Interior Ministry into the Defense Ministry.

In 1991, former USLA Captain Marian Romanescu described Ardeleanu’s comments to his troops at this alleged meeting as follows:

“On 25 December at around 8 pm, after the execution of the dictators, Colonel Ardeleanu gathered the unit’s members into an improvised room and said to them:

‘The Dictatorship has fallen!  The Unit’s members are in the service of the people.  The Romanian Communist Party [PCR] is not disbanding!  It is necessary for us to regroup in the democratic circles of the PCR—the inheritor of the noble ideas of the people of which we are a part!…Corpses were found, individuals with USLAC (Special Unit for Antiterrorist and Commando Warfare) identity cards and identifications with the 0620 stamp of the USLA, identity cards that they had no right to be in possession of when they were found…’ He instructed that the identity cards [of members of the unit] had to be turned in within 24 hours, at which time all of them would receive new ones with Defense Ministry markings.”[64] (emphasis in the original)

Ardeleanu’s statement begs the question:  if these were non-USLA personnel, why exactly were they trying to pass themselves off as USLA personnel…to the point of losing their lives?  At the very least, his statement informs the idea that the individuals with these identity cards were innocent victims—because otherwise he would likely not have stated that they had “no right” to possess these identity documents, but instead would have presented them as heroes who had died in the name of the Revolution.  Ardeleanu’s comments can be interpreted as the beginnings of a cover-up, designed to reverse the popular understanding of the USLA’s responsibility for the December bloodshed.  This was a classic case of “plausible deniability”—now dead, and clearly having been involved in suspicious behavior, Ardeleanu denied any knowledge of them and any affiliation of them with his unit and command.