(purely personal views, based on more than two decades of prior research and publications)

Psychological Warfare and the Widely and Wildly Misunderstood Terrorist Tactics of December 1989 in Romania (I)

https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/psychological-warfare-and-the-widely-and-wildly-misunderstood-terrorist-tactics-of-december-1989-in-romania-ii-cui-bono/

I discussed Dumitru Mazilu’s 1991 description of the guerrilla warfare tactics used in Romania beginning from the evening of 22 December 1989 and who they concluded was responsible for the guerilla attacks in pp. 317-318 of my Ph.D. Dissertation at at Indiana University: Richard Andrew Hall, Rewriting the Revolution: Authoritarian Regime-State Relations and the Triumph of Securitate Revisionism in Post-Ceausescu Romania (defended 16 December 1996).

In 1991, Dumitru Mazilu, who had sought exile in Switzerland the previous year, published excerpts from his memoirs.[20] Mazilu has few kind words for his former Front compatriots, Brucan and Militaru. Nevertheless, Mazilu claims that during the events, “at least seven times they were informed that the ‘Guarding Directorate’ [the Fifth Directorate] had been trained in guerilla warfare.”[21] Mazilu elaborates:

From the evening of 22 December it turned out that the units and soldiers who continued to shoot in the population belonged to the Interior Ministry….this is confirmed by the following findings:

1. a) the places from which the population was shot belonged to the Interior Ministry with certainty (as in the case of the Central University Library, which belonged to Ceausescu’s Guarding Directorate) or with probability (the apartments of the building across from the work offices of the tyrant; the apartments in the vicinity of the villas of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, as well as those near objects of strategic or political importance, such as the Defense Ministry, Romanian Television and Radio, etc.);
2. b) the use of special equipment, especially simulators, specific actions of guerilla warfare in order to confuse the revolting population;
3. c) the actions of snipers with nightscopes around objects of major interest from the inside of neighboring buildings, where the access to other persons was almost non-existent;
4. d) the organization of commando actions, such as what happened at the command post of the Central Committee building on the night of 23/24 December when many suspects were found with four or five identity cards on them–a procedure used by the Interior Ministry.[22]

https://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.com/rewriting-the-revolution-1997-chapter-8-unsolving-december/

Dumitru Mazilu, “Cine sint teroristii?,” Flacara, nr. 39, 25 septembrie 1991, p. 4.

Dumitru Mazilu, Revolutia furata, Cozia, 1991.

Mazilu’s characterization of what transpired in December 1989 as having been “guerilla warfare” is in line with many of the reports in the field in December 1989, as the following excerpts suggest.