The Amazing, Disappearing Romanian Counter-Revolution of December 1989
by Richard Andrew Hall, Ph.D.
Standard Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
I am an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have been a CIA analyst since 2000. Prior to that time, I had no association with CIA outside of the application process.
“LOST”…DURING INVESTIGATION: WHEN ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE.[1]
From early in 1990, those who participated in or were directly affected by the December 1989 events have attested to efforts to cover-up what happened. Significantly, and enhancing the credibility of these accusations, those who claim such things come from diverse backgrounds, different cities, and from across the post-Ceausescu political spectrum. Further enhancing their credibility, in many cases, they do not attempt to place these incidents into larger narratives about what happened in December 1989, but merely note it as a fact in relating their own personal experiences.
Let’s take the case of Simion Cherla, a participant in the December 1989 events in Timisoara. Here is how Radu Ciobotea recounted Cherla’s story in May 1991:
Simion Cherlea also arrives, agitated. He received a death threat, wrapped in a newspaper. Next to it, in his mailbox, a bullet cartridge was also found. To suggest to him that that is how he would end up if…
–If I talk. Or if I have a copy of the file that I removed on 22 December 1989 from the office of the head of the county Securitate. There was a map of the 8 Interior Ministry formations from Timisoara and “registry-journal of unique ordered operational activities.” I gave them to Constantin Grecu (since transferred to the reserves), who gave them to Colonel Zeca and General Gheorghe Popescu. These documents were of great use…in the Army’s fight against the terrorists.
–Do you know what the deal is with such formations?…When I looked at the map, my eyes glazed over. Their formations were for entire zones where 10 to 12 nests of gunfire were programmed to shoot at a precise hour and minute! Can you imagine! And I, because I was trying to help in the fight against the terrorists, I turned it over to them! So now I asked for it to be used at the trial. In the registry everything was written: who ordered, who executed the mission, the place, the hour, how long it last, the impact. Great, all these documents are now said to have disappeared. And I am threatened that I too will disappear like them.[2]
The discovery and then disappearances of such maps showing the placement and actions of Interior Ministry units—in particular, the Securitate—was recounted by others in the early 1990s.[3]
Nor, as we saw earlier from Dr. Nicolae Constantinescu’s testimony above, could one count on the military prosecutor’s office. Jean Constantinescu [no apparent relation], who was shot in the CC building on 23 December 1989, stated the following in a declaration he gave just last year (as recounted by the investigative journalist Romulus Cristea):
I had two encounters with representatives from the prosecutor’s office. The first prosecutor visited me at home, around two months after the events, he listened and noted my account, and as a conclusion, informally, he said something to me such as “we already know a good part of the shooters, they can be charged and pay civil damages, you can be part of the lawsuit and request appropriate damages.” After hesitating, I added such a request, at the end of my written declaration, which I signed….
The second prosecutor, who later came to head the institution [the procuracy], invited me after several months to the office near Rosetti Square. At the end of the conversation, he attempted to convince me that we shot amongst ourselves [ie there was no real enemy, no terrorists].[4]
The second prosecutor’s actions, according to Constantinescu’s recounting, are very familiar. Already in mid-January 1990, participants in the gunfights of Brasov were telling the press that important evidence was missing and that the former Securitate were attempting to change the story of December 1989:
Florin Crisbasan: Now the securisti are spreading their version: “You guys shot into one another like a bunch of idiots.”…About 100 people were arrested as terrorists, but now they tell us they no longer have them…documents are missing, they don’t know how or what type: a video cassette that I wished to access, with film from the events, can no longer be found….
Emil Ivascu: If they tell us that “we shot among ourselves,” how the hell do you explain the ammunition with which they [the terrorists] fired? A bullet would rip your foot apart. We saw for ourselves these type of arms. Could just average civilians have been in possession of these?[5]
In May 1991, Gheorghe Balasa and Radu Minea described in detail for journalist Dan Badea the atypical ammunitions they found in the headquarters of the Securitate’s Vth Directorate (charged with Ceausescu’s personal security) building, including dum-dum bullets and special bullets (apparently vidia bullets). They noted the civilians and soldiers who had witnessed this find, and mentioned that a certain Spiru Zeres had filmed the whole sequence, cassettes that were available for the military procuracy.[6]
Journalist and documentary-maker Maria Petrascu, who with her since deceased husband Marius, had for years investigated the Brasov events, also drew attention to the type of ammunition used in December 1989 when she recalled in 2007 that, “For a long time the Brasov Military Procuracy didn’t do anything, although they had evidence, statements, documents, photos and even the atypical bullets brought by the families of those killed or wounded.”[7] A soldier shot on 23 December 1989 in Buzau recently admitted that his doctors changed their declarations regarding the bullet with which he had been hit—identified by another soldier with whom he was interned as a ‘vidia’ bullet—to standard 7.62 mm ammunition.[8] In fall 2006, the daughter of a priest recalled:
In December ’89, after he arrived from Timisoara, my father stayed with me on Stefan Cel Mare Boulevard [in Bucharest]. We returned to our home, on the corner of Admiral Balescu and Rosenthal. I found the cupboard of the dresser pure and simple riddled with bullets, about 8 to 10 of them. Someone who knew about such things told me they were vidia bullets. They were brought to a commission, but I don’t know what happened to them.[9]
This echoes something that Army Colonel Ion Stoleru was saying back in 1992: that the “terrorists” had “weapons with silencers, with scopes, for shooting at night time (in ‘infrared’), bullets with a ‘vidia’ tip. Really modern weapons,” to which he added, significantly, “The civilian and military commissions haven’t followed through in investigating this…”[10]
And yet, amazingly—despite all these testimonies regarding the existence and use of atypical munitions, or perhaps better put, precisely because of them—as of August 1991, Rasvan Popescu could report that “of the thousands of projectiles shot against the revolutionaries during December 1989, the Prosecutor’s office has entered into the possession of…four bullets. A ridiculous harvest.”[11]
[1] The origin of this phrase is apparently ascribed to the astronomer and scientist Carl Sagan, and only later became a favorite of former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
[2] Radu Ciobotea, “Spitalul groazei nu are amintiri,” Flacara, nr. 19 (8 mai 1991), p. 4.
[3] See the sources listed in endnote 59, Hall 2006.
[10] Army Colonel Ion Stoleru with Mihai Galatanu, “Din Celebra Galerie a Teroristilor,” Expres, no. 151 (22-28 December 1992), p. 4, and “Am vazut trei morti suspecti cu fata intoarsa spre caldarim,” Flacara, no. 29 (22 July 1992), p. 7. Cited in Hall, 2008.
[11] Rasvan Popescu, “Patru gloante dintr-o tragedie,” Expres, nr. 32 (81) 13-19 August 1991, p. 10 (?).
Posted by romanianrevolutionofdecember1989 on October 20, 2010
Bullets, Lies, and Videotape:
The Amazing, Disappearing Romanian Counter-Revolution of December 1989[1]
by Richard Andrew Hall, Ph.D.
Standard Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information. [Submitted 19 November 2009; PRB approved 15 December 2009]
I am an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have been a CIA analyst since 2000. Prior to that time, I had no association with CIA outside of the application process.
Part I
His name was Ghircoias…Nicolae Ghircoias.
And in Romania in December 1989 and January 1990, Nicolae Ghircoias was a very busy man.
We know, officially, of Nicolae Ghircoias’ actions in the last days leading up to the fall of the regime of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on 22 December 1989, as a result of what he and others said at a trial later in January 1990. In bureaucratic parlance, Colonel Nicolae Ghircoias, was the Director of the Criminalistic Institute of the Militia’s [Police’s] General Inspectorate. In colloquial terms, in December 1989 it appears that this amounted to being something of a “cleaner,” or “fixer,” the kind of guy who could make unpleasant things—such as corpses—go away, without leaving a trace.
After regime forces opened fire on anti-regime protesters in the western city of Timisoara on 17 and 18 December 1989, Colonel Ghircoias was dispatched to recover the corpses of those with gunshot wounds from the city’s morgue. The unautopsied cadavers of 43 demonstrators were stolen from the morgue in the dead of night and then transported to the outskirts of the capital Bucharest by refrigerated truck, where they were cremated.[2] Ghircoias was also in charge of collecting and destroying the hospital records and any other incriminating material that might indicate not just the death, but also the life of those who had perished—the official explanation for the disappearance of these citizens was to be that they had fled the country, thus taking their documents with them. In other words, Colonel Nicolae Ghircoias’ job was primarily, it seems, the destruction of evidence.[3]
COLONEL GHIRCOIAS MAKES THE ROUNDS OF BUCHAREST’S HOSPITALS
Unofficially, we also know of Colonel Ghircoias’ exploits after the Ceausescu regime collapsed on 22 December 1989, exploits for which he was not charged at his trial and for which he has never been charged. Of the 1,104 people killed and 3,352 people injured during the December 1989 bloodshed, 942 of them were killed and 2,251 wounded afterNicolae and Elena Ceausescu fled power on 22 December 1989. At the time, personnel of the communist regime’s secret police—known as the Securitate—and allied foreign mercenaries fighting to restore the Ceausescu regime—collectively christened “the terrorists”—were thought to be the primary source behind the post-22 December bloodshed.
It was in this context, that doctors from Bucharest’s various main hospitals recall Colonel Ghircoias’ sudden, unannounced appearances during the last days of December 1989 and first days of January 1990. Professor Andrei Firica of the Bucharest “Emergency Hospital” recounted in a 2004 media interview largely the same details he had conveyed to the press in the summer of 1990. According to Firica, some 15 to 20 suspected terrorists had been interned at the “Emergency Hospital” in varying states of medical distress. He says he made a small file of the medical situations of these patients. A Militia colonel, whom he later was to see in [prisoner] stripes on TV as a defendant in the Timisoara trial—i.e. fairly clearly Ghircoias—came one day and counseled him to keep nosy foreign reporters away from the beds of the “terrorists,” stating ominously that “these were just terrorist suspects and he [Dr. Firica] didn’t want to wake up one day on trial for having defamed someone”! The colonel later came and loaded the wounded terrorist suspects onto a bus and off they went. Firica maintains the files he kept on the terrorist suspects “of course, disappeared.” He noted, however, that he asked his son, who had studied theater and film at university, to film the terrorists tied down to the hospital beds, and he claims he gave copies of this cassette to the Procuracy.[4]
[In viewing these photos, witness what Constantin Fugasin recounted in “Unde ne sint teroristii?” Zig-Zag, in 1990, based in part on an interview with Dr. Andrei Firica:
At the Emergency Hospital 13 suspected of being what we call terrorists were interned. Among these a few were definitely foreign, even though all had Romanian papers. Two clearly had ‘Mongoloid’ (‘Asiatic’) features (one stated that his mother was Romanian, while his father was from Laos), while four others were Arabs. Nevertheless, they spoke Romanian very well. Doctor Nicolae Staicovici, who worked a time in Egypt and who treated them for a time spoke with them. At a moment, he formed a question in Arabic. One of the injured responded to him perfectly. All were well-built, one was a ‘mountain of a man.’ He said nothing, although he probably had terrible pains. There were also two terrorists who were not wounded. One arrived at night, under some pretext. Those on guard suspecting him, immobilized him. He had on three layers of clothing and several ids. They tied him to the stretcher, but although he appeared rather frail, at a given moment he ripped the restraints off.[6]]
[Dr. Andrei Firica, 2004: From a diagnostic perspective, those who maintain that the terrorists didn’t exist are telling an outrageous lie…In the Emergency Hospital, people were brought who were shot with precision in the forehead, from behind, just a few yards in the crowd of demonstrators, such people who did this can only be called terrorists…[8]]
—
Dr. Nicolae Constantinescu, chief surgeon at the Coltea Hospital, also was paid the honor of a visit by Colonel Ghircoias during these days:
I remember that on 1 or 2 January ’90 there appeared at the [Coltea] hospital a colonel from the Interior Ministry, who presented himself as Chircoias. He maintained in violent enough language that he was the chief of I-don’t-know-what “criminalistic” department from the Directorate of State Security [ie. Securitate]. He asked that all of the extracted bullets be turned over to him. Thus were turned over to him 40 bullets of diverse forms and dimensions, as well as munition fragments.
To the question of whether he informed the Military Procuracy?
Of course, I announced the Prosecutor’s Office, and requested an investigation [of those shot in the revolution]. For example, when I showed them the apartment from where there were was shooting during the revolution, on the fourth floor of the ‘Luceafarul’ cinema, the prosecutors told me that they sought to verify it and uncovered that there was a Securitate ‘safehouse’ there and that was it.
In 1992, I signed along with other doctors, university professors, renowned surgeons, a memorandum [see page 5 (below) for an article apparently linked to the memorandum] addressed to the Prosecutor General in which we requested an investigation regarding the wounded and dead by gunfire. Not having received any response, after six months I went there to ask what was going on. They told me they were working on it, and they showed me two or three requests and that was it. One of the prosecutors took me into the hallway and told me “I have a child, a wife, it is very complicated.” He asked me what I thought I was doing…I lit back into him, I told him I wasn’t just any kind of person to be blown off.
I showed him the x-rays of those who were shot, I showed him the bullets in the liver. The x-rays exist, they weren’t my invention, I didn’t just dream all this up to demand an investigation! I told them that there are some people who wish to find out the truth and they signed a memo to the Procuracy and they aren’t just anybody, but doctors with experience, experts in the field. In vain, we requested ballistics tests and other research, in vain we presented forms, documents, x-rays, studies. They did not want to undertake a serious investigation.[9]
[1]For some of my previous publications on this topic, see Richard Andrew Hall:
Richard Andrew Hall, “Theories of Collective Action and Revolution: Evidence from the Romanian Transition of December 1989,” Europe-Asia Studies 2000, no. 6 (September 2000).
Richard Andrew Hall, “The Uses of Absurdity: The ‘Staged-War’ Theory and the Romanian Revolution of December 1989,” East European Politics and Societies vol 13, no. 3 (Fall 1999) (University of California Berkeley Press).
[2] For a good discussion of this in English, which explains how cremation practices were at odds with Romanian burial traditions, see the article entitled “The Red Mask of Death: The Evil Politics of Cremation in Romania 1989,” in the journal Mortality, no. 15 (1).
[4]Professor Andrei Firica, interview by Florin Condurateanu, “Teroristii din Spitalul de Urgenta,” Jurnalul National, 9 March 2004, online edition, cited in Hall, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html. For similar accounts, see Florin Mircea Corcoz si Mircea Aries, “Terorist ascuns in Apuseni?” Romania Libera, 21 August 1992, p. 1–“Colonelul Ghircoias, former director of the Securitate’s penal investigative unit, brought together the individuals accused of being terrorists and made them disappear”; Andreea Hasnas, “Reportajul unui film cu TERORISTI,” Expres, no. 10 (6-12 aprilie 1990), p. 5; Constantin Fugasin, “Unde ne sint teroristii?” Zig-Zag, 1990.
[6] Significantly this video is in direct contradiction and contests the claims of the Sorin Iliesiu who maintains that “General Dan Voinea has said clearly: The terrorists did not exist. Those who seized power lied to protect the real criminals….The diversion of the ‘terrorists’ has been demonstrated by [the] Justice [System], not a single terrorist being found among the dead, wounded or arrested (Sorin Iliesiu, “18 ani de la masacrul care a deturnat revoluţia anticomunistă,” 21 December 2007, http://www.romanialibera.com/articole/articol.php?step=articol&id=6709). For a discussion, see Hall 2008.
[8] Professor Andrei Firica, interview by Florin Condurateanu, “Teroristii din Spitalul de Urgenta,” Jurnalul National, 9 March 2004, online edition.
[9] Dr. Professor Nicolae Constantinescu, interview by Romulus Cristea, “”Nici acum nu-mi dau seama cum am putut sa operez nonstop timp de trei zile,” Romania Libera, 20 December 2006, online edition.
Posted by romanianrevolutionofdecember1989 on October 5, 2010
“ORWELLIAN…POSITIVELY ORWELLIAN:”
PROSECUTOR VOINEA’S CAMPAIGN TO SANITIZE
THE ROMANIAN REVOLUTION OF DECEMBER 1989
by Richard Andrew Hall
Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
This paper MAY be cited when accompanied by a full, proper citation. Thank you.
Orwellian Sanity
Prosecutor Voinea’s campaign to “sanitize” the Revolution—to simplify the story to make it more “sane” and digestible for the outsider…by cleansing it of the “terrorists”—has generally succeeded to date. Of course, the credit is hardly his alone: he has had almost seventeen years of word-of-mouth, print, broadcast, and electronic revisionism to help him out, and he has, as we saw in the introduction, repeated the same accusations almost like clockwork upon the anniversary of the Revolution for the past decade.
But my use of the term “Orwellian” in the title of this paper is not only designed to capture Voinea’s uncanny ability to make definitive statements that are demonstrably wrong, to argue that black is white and white is black—from his denial of the use of gunfire simulators in December 1989, to his claim that the only “lunetisti” who acted after 22 December were from the Army, to his denial of the existence of weapons and (especially “vidia”) bullets not in the arsenal of the Army, to his denial of the existence of “terrorists,” to his denial that any military unit was attacked during the events, to his denial of the role of foreigners in the events….
I use the term “Orwellian” here as much to describe the ease with which he has gotten and gets away with errors, misunderstandings, and falsehoods that could easily be challenged, if not combated by his interlocutors in the Romanian media and intelligentsia. For it is the fact that he has been able and is able to get away with all this that is truly “Orwellian” and that is indeed a tragedy for Romania’s citizens. The tragedy is thus less the predictable “supply side” of the post-authoritarian lie, than the enthusiastic consumption and appetite for it. This is why I believe, accurately I would argue, that “December 1989” long ago became more about post-Ceausescu Romania than about what happened in December 1989.
Still, there are those who will respond to the information presented here—in part, in tacit admission that it is pretty hard to challenge what I have presented here—with the argument that Prosecutor Voinea is doing his best, that he has done and is doing more than his predecessors, that at least those senior Army officers who were responsible for the repression of demonstrators in Timisoara, Bucharest, and elsewhere before the Ceausescus’ flight on 22 December 1989 will finally be brought to account. Indeed, I don’t discount that in the trials of Stanculescu, Chitac, and others this can and will perhaps happen—but even then as I will show below, this will be partial justice for those events, as key elements of the context (including other guilty parties) will remain expunged from the story, and there is likely a heavy element of post-December 1989 political and personal payback in their trials and sentences.
Moreover, I should add, I do not necessarily doubt Prosecutor Voinea when he says that there is no “juridical basis” or that his investigations have not revealed the existence of “terrorists” in December 1989. As multiple quotes above should make clear, already in 1990 and 1991, maps of Securitate safehouses, bullets, weapons, and video entered as evidence in files on the Revolution had disappeared or been lost. And, of course, the question of investigations is a tricky one: someone who lived their formative years and much of their adult life in a totalitarian regime such as Ceausescu’s communist Romania knows well the questions not to ask, the places where not to look, the people not to interview. A military prosecutor since 1982, Voinea likely knows that doubly-well. Certainly, the wealth of detail provided above suggests that Voinea has hardly turned up every stone in searching for the truth.
Others may respond with an understandable question: how could so many people have gotten things so wrong? This is the numbers game and it is powerful where as we saw earlier already a decade after the events 90% of those polled rejected “the lie with the terrorists.” I will demonstrate that it is indeed possible, by showing the about-face that occurred in the media regarding the role of the USLA in the repression prior to 22 December 1989. One could argue that this change in treatment of this question does not necessarily have implications for the treatment of the “terrorist” question after 22 December, and the role of the USLA. In all probability it does have implications, however, and it is unlikely that it was just happenstance that the unit involved in this change in understanding was precisely the USLA. Certainly, one would have hoped that a realization that they had gotten things so wrong with the USLA before 22 December would have translated into a more skeptical and critical reassessment of USLA actions after 22 December, but that did not—and has not—happened.
One of the interesting and unexpected elements of Romulus Cristea’s late 2005-early 2006 Romania Libera series on the Revolution, is what it communicates—mainly through the selected quotations of participants in the events—about the role of the USLA prior to Ceausescu’s flight from power on 22 December, namely their direct involvement in repression, particularly in University Square in Bucharest on the night of 21-22 December 1989. For example, the title of Cristea’s article in the 22 March 2006 (online) edition of Romania Libera could not be more direct: “The Militia and the USLA tortured demonstrators.”
Readers unfamiliar with the Romanian press of the early 1990s might be surprised to learn that what Cristea reports almost prosaically—as if it were uncontroversial—was vigorously and repeatedly contested back then…but perhaps nowhere more so than in the pages of the same Romania Libera daily. After the then freshly-appointed Defense Minister, Victor Athanasie Stanculescu, had declared in late February 1990 that not only had the USLA not had any connection to the post-22 December “terrorism” but that they had not been involved in the repression of demonstrators in Timisoara, Bucharest, or elsewhere during the week preceding the 22nd[141], Petre Mihai Bacanu had gone out of his way to assure readers of his series on the demonstrations in University Square in Bucharest on the night of 21-22 December 1989, that “We must clarify that the USLA detachments did not fire a single shot, nor arrest a single person among the columns of demonstrators” (16 March 1990), and “…we have incontrovertible proof that the USLA officers had only one mission, to defend the American Embassy and the El Al Israel Airlines ticket office” (17 March 1990).
Won’t Get Fooled Again…
Unintentionally indicative of the coverage of the USLA’s pre-22nd role that has predominated since February 1990 is that when it comes to the role of the USLA in Bucharest from the afternoon of 21 December to the early morning hours of 22 December 1989, Siani-Davies chooses to shunt this issue to a footnote and suddenly whereas the issue for other forces is the role they played, for the USLA it is the role they “may have played [emphasis added].”[142] According to Siani-Davies, Horia Alexandrescu’s March 1990 “Heroes in Action” series in Tineretul Liber, “undoubtedly painted a rosy picture of the [USLA] unit, [but] they do seem to hold a kernel of truth.”[143] To say that this is a charitable interpretation of Alexandrescu’s articles is to say the least: it certainly places the bar incredibly low. A “kernel of truth”…yes, but on a cob or core of falsehood.
Alexandrescu denies any responsibility by the USLA for either repression of demonstrators before 22 December or the terrorism after! Alexandrescu’s comments are just plain weird at points: “Without pusti cu lunete, without vidia bullets, without sophisticated simulators,” he says the USLA operated in December.[144] If they didn’t have these things, then why mention them, and why be so specific? But as we have seen, specifically, with the revelations of USLA officer Alexandru Cristescu earlier in the discussion of “lunetisti,” the USLA clearly did have these PSLs and were posted with them on rooftops at least on 21 December. Moreover, to raise the issues of vidia bullets and sophisticated simulators is to almost admit their presence in December—which as we have seen was the case. Finally, as we have seen, somehow out of nowhere, the otherwise bizarre interest in the fate of a TAROM flight to Warsaw in late January 1990, filled with Libyans, found its way into Alexandrescu’s series on his USLA “Heroes in Action.”
Alexandrescu, it should be noted, was not the first journalist to whitewash the role of the USLA in December 1989. That distinction goes, it appears, to Octavian Andronic, senior editor of Libertatea who wrote on 6 January 1990 that, “The USLA was one of the first units belonging to the Interior Ministry that declined any participation in the repressive actions against demonstrators on 21 and 22 December [emphasis added].”[145] Like Alexandrescu, who had been editor of the chief sports daily in the late Ceausescu era, Andronic had been editor of Libertatea’s immediate Ceausist predecessor, Informatia Bucurestiului—in other words, intimately and almost unavoidably entangled in the politics and the blind spots of the old regime. The difference when Alexandrescu was writing was that, as he notes in his article introducing the series, after two months of suspicions, the new Defense Minister Stanculescu had, as one of his first acts in late February 1990 “lifted the haze that had enveloped” the unit during the interim.
Timisoara, Iasi, and Cluj, 14-21 December 1989
To support his argument, in the “Heroes in Action” series Alexandrescu wrote that Colonel Popescu, “director of the USLA service in Timisoara” had four times refused to obey orders to engage in repressive actions against the demonstrators. In point of fact, in accordance with Order No. 2600 Colonel Ion Popescu as head of the General Inspectorate of the Militia had ordered into action the “intervention platoon” (that included USLA personnel) that violently dispersed protesters from Piata Maria on the evening of 16 December 1989 in Timisoara.[146] Vasilevici and the anonymous USLA recruit quoted earlier have both maintained the USLA played a repressive role in Timisoara, with the latter claiming directly they opened fire.[147] Weapons inspections immediately after December 1989 revealed that the USLA had been armed and had indeed fired their weapons:
“The witness Constantin Gheorghe, former junior officer in the Timis USLA Service, declares that, on the afternoon of 17.12.1989, upon the order of Lt. Col. Atudoroaie Gheorghe (editor’s note: deputy of the Timis County Securitate), 43 machine guns and ammunition were distributed, some to USLA cadre and others to Securitate cadre who reported. The witness specifies that he distributed arms and ammunition without any documentation and that when he ran out of arms from the stockade, he sent some other personnel to…The witness M.M. Pantea Ambrozie, supervisor of the Militia Inspectorate’s armory, who acknowledged that he signed out 272 machine guns and ammunition…Upon examining the table drawn up by M.M. Pantea Ambrozie, it follows that the first to be armed were 114 officers and junior officers of the Securitate, out of which 29 were from the USLA….It is worth mentioning in this regard that a part of the Securitate personnel repeatedly collected new ammunition, for example Captain Bratosin Tudor from Service I, Lt. Dragomir Florin PCTF, and Lt. Iaru Florin and Plutonier Timbula-Cojocaru Gheorghe, both from the USLA Service. And, not accidentally, upon the investigation of mixed Defense and Interior Ministry teams, it was established that the arms of these personnel showed gunpowder marks, denoting the fact that these had been fired (see the exchange S.201/12.01/1990 copied in the charges). Moreover, gunpowder marks were found on the weapons of 28 Securitate cadre.”[148]
Does this sound like the USLA in Timisoara were “reluctant to intervene?” Did Horia Alexandrescu, barely two and a half months after the Revolution, just “happen” to give Colonel Popescu and the USLA in Timisoara the benefit of the doubt?
Nor was it, of course, simply “incidental” that the USLA were included among the forces of “crowd control” and repression. The abortive 14 December 1989 demonstration in Iasi, saw in the words of Dan Emilian Stoica, “the city fill up with securisti and policemen to which was added an USLA company.”[149] In 2001, the deputy Militia chief for Cluj county, Vasile Pintea, admitted at a trial concerning the killing of demonstrators on 21 December 1989 in Cluj, that “…amid the street clashes in Piata Libertatii a special antiterrorist brigade of the Securitate was dispatched, although he didn’t specify if the soldiers from this platoon used their weapons.”[150] This then led the former commander of “Brigade 60” of the Securitate, Vasile Mihalache, who had moments earlier affirmed that the only people to fire in demonstrators in Cluj in December 1989 had been soldiers of the Defense Ministry, to suddenly recall that “…indeed, among the soldiers there had been these Securitate men, who were dressed in uniforms similar to those of the Defense Ministry cadre, although he denied they shot demonstrators.”
So, in other words, both General Stanculescu and Horia Alexandrescu were “incorrect” when they denied any repressive role for the USLA during the week of 16-22 December 1989. Forgive me, but this seems a little more than just a “rosy” picture.
Sibiu, 19-22 December 1989
In Sibiu, Siani-Davies tells us:
Controversy also continues to surround a commercial TAROM flight, which is alleged to have brought up to eighty USLA troops from Bucharest to Sibiu on December 20, 1989. It is not clear if the USLA forces were actually on the airplane, or, even if they were, what they actually did in Sibiu…[Serban] Sandulescu (c1996), 57-58…suggests they were not members of USLA but the DIA [Army’s Intelligence Unit].[151]
From the standpoint of Siani-Davies’ unsuspecting reader such a conclusion may seem not only credible, but judicious. But one of Siani-Davies’ habits—identified negatively by even those who praise the book—is his tendency to draw negative equivalencies: i.e. there is about as much evidence to support x as there is to support y, in order to disprove or discount both propositions. In a review, Doris Mironescu writes:
“Very common are claims such as the following: ‘Finding the proof to sustain such an explanation of the events [that the Army’s Intelligence arm, the DIA simulated the “terrorist diversion,” to permit the Front’s takeover and a possible Warsaw Pact invasion of the country] is as difficult as proving that special units of the securitate took up arms against the revolution’ (p. 154). Mutually contradictory hypotheses are invoked in order to negate each other, not so much because of the weight of the claims, but through the ideological similarity of both.”[152]
This tendency definitely affects Siani-Davies’ analysis of the “terrorists” and its accuracy. To begin with, in the very book (Sandulescu) invoked by Siani-Davies, the head of the DIA (Battalion 404 Buzau), Rear Admiral Stefan Dinu, is quoted as having told the Gabrielescu commission investigating the December events (of which Sandulescu was a member) that “we hardly had 80 fighters in this battalion.”[153] It is known that 41 of them were in Timisoara from the morning of 18 December and only returned to their home base in Buzau on 22 December.[154] This makes it highly unlikely that they were on the 20 December TAROM flight to Sibiu that is in question.[155]
Contrast this with the signs that exist pointing to the mystery passengers as having been from the Securitate/Interior Ministry, in particular the USLA. Nicu Silvestru, chief of the Sibiu County Militia, admitted in passing in a letter from prison that on the afternoon of 19 December 1989, in a crisis meeting, Nicolae Ceausescu’s son, Nicu, party head of Sibiu County, announced that he was going to “call [his] specialists from Bucharest” to take care of any protests.[156] Ceausescu’s Interior Minister, Tudor Postelnicu, admitted at his trial in January 1990 that Nicu had called him requesting “some troops” and he had informed Securitate Director General Iulian Vlad of the request.[157] If they were, indeed, DIA personnel, why would Nicu have called Postelnicu, and Postelnicu informed Vlad of the request—would such a request not have been relayed through the Defense Minister?
The first two military prosecutors for Sibiu, Anton Socaciu and Marian Valer, identified the passengers as USLA. Even Nicu Ceausescu admits that this was the accusation when he stated in August 1990:
“…[T]he Military Prosecutor gave me two variants. In the first part of the inquest, they [the flight’s passengers] were from the Interior Ministry. Later, however, in the second half of the investigation, when the USLA and those from the Interior Ministry began, so-to-speak, to pass ‘into the shadows,’ – after which one no longer heard anything of them – they [the passengers] turned out to be simple citizens…”[158]
Beginning, at least as early as August 1990, with the allusions of Major Mihai Floca, and later seemingly indirectly confirmed by former USLA officer Marian Romanescu, it was suggested that when USLA Commander Ardeleanu was confronted at the Defense Ministry on the night of 23/24 December 1989, Ardeleanu reportedly admitted that “30 were on guard at [various] embassies, and 80 had been dispatched to Sibiu with a Rombac [aircraft] from 20 December 1989 upon ‘orders from on-high’.”[159] Finally, and along these lines, we bring things full circle—and recall our “phantoms in black” again in the process—with the testimony of Army officer Hortopan to the same Serban Sandulescu at the Gabrielescu Commission hearings:
Sandulescu: About those dressed in black jumpsuits do you know anything, do you have any information about whom they belonged to?
Hortopan: On the contrary. These were the 80 uslasi sent by the MI [Interior Ministry], by General Vlad and Postelnicu to guard Nicolae Ceausescu [i.e. Nicu]. I make this claim because Colonel Ardelean[u] in front of General Militaru, and he probably told you about this problem, at which I was present when he reported, when General Militaru asked him how many men he had in total and how many were now present, where each of them was: out of which he said that 80 were in Sibiu based on an order from his commanders. Thus, it is natural that these are who they were.[160]
Bringing us up to the morning of 22 December 1989, and setting the stage for what was to come, Lt. Col. Aurel Dragomir told the Army daily in November 1990:
Dragomir: Events began to develop quickly on 22 December. In the morning some of the students posted in different parts of the town began to observe some suspect individuals in black jumpsuits on the roofs in the lights of the attics of several buildings.
Reporter: The same equipment as the USLAsi killed out front of the Defense Ministry…
Dragomir: And on the roof of the Militia building there were three or four similar individuals…[161]
Of course, the fact that these individuals were posted on the top of the Militia building on this morning, speaks volumes in itself about their affiliation. Indeed, in a written statement dated 28 January 1990, Ioan Scarlatescu, (Dir. Comm. Jud. Sibiu), admitted that he was asked by the Army on that morning if the unknown individuals “could be from the USLA?”[162]
Bucharest and Tirgoviste, 21-22 December 1989
As for the events in Bucharest on 21-22 December 1989—the events about which Siani-Davies refers to the role the USLA may have played—Romulus Cristea appears to have finally clarified the source of a transcript of communications among the Securitate, Militia, and senior political figures on the afternoon and evening of 21 December 1989 and from the morning of 22 December. According to Cristea, the intercepts and transcripts were made on the personal initiative of some of the radiotelegraph operators and others employees of the Central Control [Office] of Radio[tele]communications at Strada Oltenitei no. 103 “at great risk to themselves, as recording the frequencies of the Securitate and Militie was illegal.”[163] That explains in part the incomplete nature of the transcripts—in particular, the gap of key hours in the middle of the night when regime forces opened fire on the demonstrators in University Square and brutally carted those who weren’t killed off to jail (48 people were killed, 604 wounded, and 684 arrested).
Cristea does not note—and may not know—that the text of the transcripts appears to be the same as what was published in Libertatea between 27 January and 15 February 1990 under the heading “Dintre sute de…catarge! [From hundreds of “masts!” (the radio identification for USLA officers conducting surveillance)].” When they appeared at the time, it was not clear from where the transcripts had come, although the absence of exchanges from the period of bloodiest repression overnight was obvious even then. Still, the truncated transcripts nevertheless revealed clear USLA involvement in the repression in Bucharest. According to the transcript, upon the orders of Securitate Director General Vlad, the USLA launched tear gas grenades at demonstrators. They also show USLA “intervention units” claiming to have “restored order” and one USLA member communicating in reference to protesters, “These hooligans must be annihilated at once. They are not determined. They must be taken quickly. The rest are hesitating.”
That more than a decade and a half would pass before these transcripts were reproduced is telling in itself. For what appeared in the Romanian press in January and February 1990 concerning the USLA’s culpability was to melt away beginning with Army General Stanculescu’s exoneration of them on 26 and 28 February 1990 in an interview with the very same Libertatea. The USLA had already been trying to “correct” the memories of citizens, prior to Stanculescu’s “clarification” of their role. When a participant in the demonstrations at Piata Romana in central Bucharest related on 12 January 1990 in Libertatea the role of the USLA in beating demonstrators there on the 21st and later the presence of the USLA among the gunmen who killed demonstrators in University Square in the early hours of 22 December, USLA chief Ardeleanu rushed to issue a public denial in the paper several days later. But it was, as I have noted, Stanculescu’s official sanction of the revisionist history of the USLA’s actions that opened the floodgates.
It took almost four years—following Horia Alexandrescu’s “Heroes in Action” series and Petre Mihai Bacanu’s impassioned postscripts in his “Intercon 21/22” series protesting the USLA’s innocence—before Bacanu returned in Romania Libera and declared that, on the basis of what he claimed was “new” information from Army soldiers who had been in the square that bloody “longest night of the year,” he had changed his mind about the USLA’s role:
“Very many officers talk about these ‘civilians’ in long raincoats and sheepskin coats, who arrested demonstrators from within the crowd and then beat them brutally…No one has been interested until now in these dozens of ‘civilians’ with hats who shot through the pockets of their clothes…For a time we gave credence to the claims of the USLA troops that they were not present in University Square. We have now entered into the possession of information which shows that 20 USLA officers, under the command of Colonel Florin Bejan, were located…among the demonstrators.”[164]
In March 2006, Cristea quoted Nicolae Victor Gheorghe, 38, as saying:
“…Around 23:30 I was arrested with a group that had fled toward the History Museum. We were surrounded by USLA. I was surprised to observe that among us several individuals dressed in fur-lined coats stepped forward and pointed out to the ones with the shields who to arrest….We were beaten. I lost consciousness and when I woke up I was face-down in a van. I was full of blood. On top of me had been thrown a pile of other demonstrators. We were taken directly to Jilava [jail].”[165]
Significantly, USLA Commander Gheorghe Ardeleanu admitted in passing in court testimony that USLA personnel operated in civilian clothes on this evening.[166] At the very least, it is clear that uniformed USLA personnel participated in the repression. An official at the National Theater—located next to the Hotel Intercontinental in University Square—claims USLA troops beat demonstrators and policed the building to see if any were hiding there.[167] According to the Military Prosecutor’s 4 June 1990 charges: “The witness [Spiru Radet] specified that one of the soldiers from the USLA troops, who had a machine gun in his hand, fired warning shots and then shot at the demonstrators. At that point, the witness was wounded in the hand by bullets and transported to Coltea Hospital.”[168]
Certainly, USLA who were involved in the events of 21-22 December 1989 or who came in contact with the demonstrators who were involved were merciless, and behaved as if they had something to hide. In summer 1990, Expres reported on two young men recovering in an Italian hospital from wounds inflicted during the December events.[169] They recalled how, at the Intercontinental on 21-22 December, “those in kaki [i.e. Securitate, likely USLA] shot us. The first two rows of troops [Army] shot tracers, while those behind them opened live fire.” The two, one injured on the 21st, the other on the 23rd, claimed that after they arrived in Italy, a certain 40 year old Iordan Cristian, who admitted to them he had been USLA, visited the hospital—he had been shot in the hand at an earlier time and recovered (!)—snatched any reading material showing photos of the 13-15 June rampage against the opposition in Bucharest, and kept them in a general state of fear. In addition, he asked them to surrender their passports, something which “made even the Italians realize something was not quite right in all of this.”
Similarly, in an article that captures in a microcosm the complexity and fluidity of the first years of the post-Ceausescu era, one-time leader of the small “Liberal Democratic Party,” Elena Serban, maintains she was blackmailed in 1990 by Radu Grigore (a name that was to crop up again in some of the more underhanded political affairs of 1991-1992) who threatened her that “…if I betrayed him, he would kill me, and that I only needed to remember he had been an USLA officer…who had been in charge of the USLA machine-gun detachments on the night of 21 December in University Square.”[170]
It is noteworthy that eyewitnesses who reached the top of the CC building in Bucharest at noon on 22 December 1989 report that they were prevented from arresting the Ceausescus by two armed individuals in “dark jumpsuits”—i.e. likely either V-a or USLA/C.[171] In Tirgoviste, where the Ceausescus were later to meet their end, shortly after 12:30 PM on 22 December 1989, Army Colonel Gheorghe Badea relates the following:
“At a given moment, after spirits had calmed a bit, I heard a voice: ‘Colonel, get out of here or we’ll shoot you!’ I turned in the direction from which the voice had come and, behind me, I saw a detachment of USLA troops, with shields, arms, the whole nine yards…I don’t know who addressed me, but I said to them: ‘Don’t shoot boys…We are your brothers…’ At that point, the crowd surrounded them and they retreated.”[172]
Constantin Paisie, one of the Militia officers involved in the transport and custody of the Ceausescus later that afternoon of 22 December, makes clear upon whom the Ceausescus were placing their bets to rescue them:
“Sir, they didn’t know what was going on. Indeed, they gave indications that they were waiting for someone to come and take them away to some place in which they would be more secure, for, you see, first and foremost they were banking on the Securitate. I know that at a moment, Nicolae Ceausescu told me to take him to a unit of the Securitate, a special unit at Baneasa, but from the Militia and the Army he didn’t expect any immediate help.”[173]
Here’s betting that the “special unit” at Baneasa in question was the one Marian Romanescu departed from above (page 39)—using a cover ID—the “Special Unit for Antiterrorist Warfare,” based at Baneasa…
One thing should be abundantly clear here: notwithstanding the overwhelming consensus that prevailed for years in the Romanian media denying USLA involvement in the pre-22 December repression, it turns out the USLA were, after all, deeply implicated. This fact should be kept in mind when one considers the reluctance of Romanian journalists and intellectuals to reassess the question of the USLA and the “terrorists” after the realization of the USLA’s pre-22nd role, and the current and continuing overwhelming consensus that denies the “lie with the terrorists.”[174]
[142] Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, p. 87, fn. 107: “For a detailed discussion of the part USLA may have played see Hall (1997), 219-224.”
[143] Ibid., p. 151. I may in part have myself to blame for Siani-Davies some inappropriate choice of language here: i.e. the term “rosy image.” Siani-Davies highlights my use of the phrase “less-than-pure intentions” in describing the actions of the USLA unit at the Defense Ministry on 23-24 December (p. 152, fn. 31)—perhaps to suggest that even I had my doubts about their actions (see discussion of this episode earlier in article). My phrasing was inspired by the description of the event by Captain Victor Stoica who witnessed the incident: “Anyhow, based on how these two vehicles behaved, it is clear that they did not come with friendly intentions (‘intentii prietenesti’)” (Major Mihai Floca, “Crima?!, Armata Poporului, no. 23, 6 June 1990, p. 3.)
[144] Horia Alexandrescu, “Eroi Cazuti la Datorie: Adevarul despre U.S.L.A.,” Tineretul Liber, 4 March 1990, p. 3.
[145] Octavian Andronic, “Combaterea terorismului—o chestiune la ordinea zilei,” Libertatea, 6 January 1990, p. 3. After the waters had subsided, and he had been “vindicated” in his beliefs about the USLA, he published a response to that article by people who asked “does the author have a vested interest in the rehabilitation of the USLA,” leaving off their names since ,as they wrote, they did not want the USLA to “come defend [them]”, “Din Nou Despre U.S.L.A.: teroristi sau antiteroristi?” Libertatea, 9 May 1990, p. 2. As Libertatea was to remain in the Iliescu-Front camp in the initial years, allegations appeared against Andronic in Evenimentul Zilei that his house was rented from the SRI, the Securitate’s institutional successor, and had formerly been a safehouse of the Securitate, 14 May 1993, p. 3. If memory serves correct, years later in Curierul National, Andronic was to refer to finding out about the collapsing of the Ceausescu regime from USLA officer, Alexandru Ioan Kilin. These are circumstantial allegations but they suggest the possibility of at least close relations with former Securitate people—not unheard of for the former editor of a Ceausescu era paper.
[146] See Hall, 1997, pp. 183-184. It seems worth pointing out that the doctor who treated Dorneanu, the head of the USLA intervention brigade, at Piata Maria, and was involved in altercations with protesters, appeared to the doctor as “having been drugged.”
[147] As we saw, the anonymous USLA recruit referred to “the masked ones” shooting in Timisoara. Although the Army clearly did fire on and kill many demonstrators in Timisoara, and the notion of unknown “phantoms in black” being responsible for the carnage is a useful alibi, I don’t believe things are so simple—given the actions of those in “combinezoane negre” across the country, as discussed in detail earlier. In early 2006 at the “Timisoara trial” against most notably generals Stanculescu and Chitac, former Army Colonel Dumitru Daescu could not identify those who fired in December 1989, but declared “fire was opened by some men dressed in combinezoane negre” (“Noi martori in procesul Revolutiei de la Timisoara,” Romania Libera, 16 March 2006, online edition), while Army officer Gheorghe Ciubotariu stated “they fired shoulder strapped machine guns in front of the Cathedral, first toward the roof then in the demonstrators…those who fired were civilians and people in combinezoane negre from the Interior Ministry.” (I.D., “General Stanculescu se apara cu amanari si absente,” Gandul, 19 January 2006, online edition).
[148] Laurian Ieremeiov, “Lista securistilor si militienilor care au tras la Timisoara,” Ziua, 20 July 1998, online edition. To this, it is interesting and pertinent to add the following information. In 1991, Grid Modorcea went to interview the priests of Timisoara’s Orthodox Cathedral. Sorin Leia, age 22, was shot during a demonstration on the steps of the Cathedral on the evening of 18 December 1989. Father Ioan Botau related the following: “…Sorin Leia pulled a flag out and began singing ‘Awake Romanians!’ At 5:15 pm he was shot by a lunetist and killed. The crowd then fled and scattered and there was no more shooting. They brought this young person who had been shot inside the church and put a candle in his hand. He had been hit by the bullet in his upper torso and had not died on the spot. Father Mituga came out and called the ambulance. But the youngster was already dead. There was a pool of blood around him….Who shot people in Timisoara?…The Army didn’t shoot. Camouflaged securisti shot and today they have made them into heroes!…Until when did they shoot?…They shot on Christmas day, all the way up until 29 December” (Grid Modorcea, “Dumnezeu citat ca martor in procesul de la Timisoara,” Expres Magazin, 1991.) The late Iosif Costinas wrote in that same year that “a former Securitate officer, currently employed by the SRI, recently called two neighbors to repair a pipe in the bathroom. He got drunk and told them: ‘on 17 December I shot from the Cathedral’s [bell-]tower. I also shot later. And now, if I wish, I can shoot.’ The two told the story but didn’t want their names published.” (related in Laura Ganea, “La Timisoara se mai trage inca,” Tinerama, no. 77 (July 1991), p. 3.)
[149] Quoted in M.P., “‘Revolutia de la Iasi trebuie legitimata’,” Evenimentul, 15 December 2003, online edition. “Lunetisti” were spotted on the first and second floors of hotels surrounding the square where the demonstration was to take place—those rooms apparently occupied by participants of the “Dinamoviada” martial arts festival from the Interior Ministry, see Vasile Iancu, “Sa nu uitam!,” Romania Libera, 14 December 1990, p. 1.
[150] A.A., “Un fost ofiter de Securitate acuza Armata de crimele din decembrie ’89,” Ziua, 16 January 2001, online edition. A soldier from the Someseni unit, Gheorghe Timis, spoke about what happened in a different square in Cluj, Piata Marasti, as follows: “…it was not possible that no one would die, because there was shooting from the balconies and blocs by Securitate cadre. When I heard the first use of a weapon, I recognized, from the whistle, that it wasn’t a caliber that we had in our arsenal. After this I saw a man on the asphalt, who had a hole in the top of his head, a sign that he had been shot from above, from the buildings, and not by the soldiers, as is always maintained,” A.A., “In procesul Cluj ’89, militarii pun mortii pe seama Securitatii,” Ziua, 2001, online edition.
[153] Serban Sandulescu, Lovitura de Stat a Confiscat Revolutia Romana (Bucharest: Omega, 1996), p. 214. Sandulescu’s book was marketed and printed by Sorin Rosca Stanescu’s Ziua press. Rosca Stanescu was a former USLA informer between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Who was Sandulescu’s chief counselor on these matters? Stefan Radoi, a former USLA officer in the early 1980s! These are the type of people who, of course, believe the passengers were DIA and not USLA! See my discussion of this whole fiasco in “The Securitate Roots of a Modern Romanian Fairy Tale,” RFE “East European Perspectives” 4-6/2002, online.
[154] See Dinu’s testimony in Sandulescu, Lovitura de Stat, p. 220. Also see the claims of another senior DIA officer Remus Ghergulescu in Jurnalul National, March 2004, online edition.
[155] Speaking even more broadly, Army parachutists (whether from Buzau, Caracal, Campia Turzii, or Boteni) were in Timisoara, Caransebes, and Television, Piata Palatului and the Otopeni Airport in Bucharest during the December events, but that clearly leaves many places where there were “terrorist actions”—including Sibiu—without them, decreasing their likelihood as plausible suspects. See Catalin Tintareanu, “Sarbatoare la Scoala de Aplicatie pentru Parasutisti ‘General Grigore Bastan,” Opinia (Buzau), 10 June 2005, online edition.
[156] Nicu Silvestru, “Cine a ordonat sa se traga la Sibiu?” Baricada, no. 45, 1990, p.5.
[157] Emil Munteanu, “Postelnicu a vorbit neintrebat,” Romania Libera, 30 January 1990, p. 1
[158] Interview with Nicu Ceausescu in Zig-Zag, no. 20, 21-27 August 1990.
[159]Adevarul, 29 August 1990. Also, Romanescu with Badea “U.S.L.A, Bula Moise…” 1991.
[160] “Virgil Magureanu sustine ca revolta din 1989 a fost sprijinita din interiorul sistemului,” Gardianul, 12 November 2005, online edition.
[161] Lt. Col. Aurel Dragomir, interview by Colonel Dragos Dragoi, “Sub tirul incrucisat al acuzatiilor (II),” Armata Poporului, no. 46 (November 1990), p. 3. Remus Ghergulescu specified USLA appearance as follows: “Over their black jumpsuits (‘combinezoanele negre’) in which they were dressed they had kaki vests. This was normal. They were equipped with the jumpsuits as “war gear,” while the vests were “city wear.’” (Colonel Remus Ghergulescu, interview with Razvan Belciuganu, “Teroristii au iesit din haos,” Jurnalul National, 29 November 2004, online edition.)
[162] See Evenimentul Zilei, 25 November 1992, p. 3.
[163] Romulus Cristea, “Huliganii astia trebuie anihilati,” Romania Libera, 28 March 2006, online edition.
[164] Petre Mihai Bacanu, “Au evacuat materiale…stropite cu sange,” Romania Libera, 28 December 1993, p. 10. As I have noted elsewhere, the revelations were not “new” and what they describe is remarkably similar to what Army recruits had described to Armata Poporului in the 17 January 1990 issue.
[165] Quoted in Romulus Cristescu, “Astia ne impusca, ca la Timisoara,” Romania Libera, 29 March 2006, online edition.
[166] Paul Stefanescu, Istoria Serviciilor Secrete Romanesti (Bucharest: Editura Divers Press, 1994), p. 288.
[167] Vasile Neagoe, Expres, 30 March-5 April 1990, p. 6.
[168] The Military Prosecutor’s report dated 4 June 1990 is reproduced in Mircea Bunea, Praf in Ochi: Procesul celor 24-1-2 (Bucharest: Editura Scripta, 1994), quote found on p. 88.
[169] Victor Radulescu, “Excursii prin Contul Libertatea,” Expres, no. 11 (August 1990), p. 5.
[170] Dan Badea, “Securitatea—un joc in numele trandafirului,” Expres, 8-14 September 1992, p. 9.
[171] In Simion Buia, jr. “Justitia ‘cocheteaza’ cu Puterea Politica?” Romania Libera, 13 June 1991, p. 2a, quoting Ioan Itu. The aforementioned Liviu Viorel-Craciun claimed he was told by a Securitate officer who claimed to have been on the roof when the helicopter departed that “they could not do anything against Ceausescu there because on the roof were ‘lunetisti.’” (Liviu Viorel-Craciun, “Ex-ministrul de interne CRACIUN LIVIU-VIOREL isi continua destainiurile,” Expres, no. 14-15 (1990).)
[172] Colonel Gheorghe Badea, quoted in Domenico, p. 164, from an interview 3 June 1997.
[173] Constantin Paisie, interview by Marius Tuca, “Ceausestii au crezut ca o sa-I salveze cineva,” Jurnalul National, 18 March 2004, online edition. USLA training in the Baneasa area is mentioned in Stoian, 1993, pp. 85-85.
[174] I fully expect that when the “house of cards” about post-22 December finally crumbles—with the same sudden, thunderous crash of the Ceausescu regime itself—that as with the about-face on the USLA’s role in the pre-December 22 repression, it shall occur with little reference to the vats of ink spilled in years before denying such accusations—as if the previous articles had never been written…Winston Smith would recognize the method…
Posted by romanianrevolutionofdecember1989 on September 25, 2010
THE 1989 ROMANIAN REVOLUTION AS GEOPOLITICAL PARLOR GAME: BRANDSTATTER’S “CHECKMATE” DOCUMENTARY AND THE LATEST WAVE IN A SEA OF REVISIONISM
By Richard Andrew Hall
Disclaimer: This material has been reviewed by CIA. That review neither constitutes CIA authentification of information nor implies CIA endorsement of the author’s views.
Please Note: This article is not to be cited, reproduced, translated, or used in any form without the acknowledgement and permission of the author.
Part 5: Opportunity Lost
–“Now, three months after the revolution, everyone is with the people and the Army…So then who was shooting?…The idea that only the Army fired in December is being advanced with great skill…” (Major Mihai Floca, “Armata Poporului,” 14 March 1990).
Many Romanians and foreign observers will tell you the great “secret,” the most prized and protected issue in post-Ceausescu Romania, is who among the appartchiks who assumed power under the banner of the “National Salvation Front” knew one another before the December 1989 events, what were the dimensions and plans of this conspiracy, when was the “Front” formed, and what were their relations with the Soviet Union, etc. Nonsense. By comparison to the issue of the identity of the “terrorists,” the former are lightly guarded. The question of the “terrorists” is THE issue of the Revolution precisely because it has far more weighty criminal and moral repercussions and implications associated with it.
OPPORTUNITY LOST
There are, perhaps, few sadder stories of historical revisionism in modern times than that of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. This is, of course, not because of the magnitude of the event or the number of lives lost (1,104)—unspeakably painful for their loved ones and for the citizens of the country, but a minor total in the scheme of the world’s great historical tragedies. Instead, it is because rarely have the victims and prisoners of a former political system played such an unwitting, zealous, and unfortunate role in serving, assimilating, and perpetuating a revisionist falsehood. In the case of the Romanian Revolution, this revisionist falsehood, it must be admitted, is undeniably seductive, popular, and deeply-embedded in the Romanian popular consciousness and the country’s observers abroad.
The beginning of the burial of the truth about the “terrorists” of December can be dated to 17 February 1990, when General Victor Atanasie Stanculescu replaced General Militaru as Defense Minister. Significantly, the same former Securitate and USLA personnel who are bitterly critical of Stanculescu’s actions during the days of the Revolution praise him for his actions later, particularly after assuming this post. For example, former USLA officer turned author, Teodor Filip (not to be confused with the aforementioned Filip Teodorescu), writes: “On the first day he was appointed, Stanculescu convened all USLA personnel (at least those engaged in ordinary missions) and addressed them with words of encouragment (Filip 1998, p. 109; for his criticism of Stanculescu during the Revolution, see, for example, p. 148).” Indeed, such a revelation—and likely the source of Filip’s claim—came from Gheorghe Ardeleanu, Commander of the USLA at the time of the December events, who told the former Securitate’s journalistic mouthpiece in “Europa,” Angela Bacescu:
“As is known, General Stanculescu came to the helm of the Defense Ministry, and upon this occasion, I addressed him, in the name of USLA personnel and their grieving families, thanks, recognition for all he had done to honor the memory of those who had fallen, by declaring them heroes post mortem and promoting them. In the first day after being named to the post, General Stanculescu came to our unit and before the entire group, addressed them with words of encouragement, and promised then, and he delivered on it, that the situation of those who had fallen on duty would quickly be resolved in the spirit of truth and human dignity.” (from a 1991 interview, in Bacescu 1994, p. 123).
It was Stanculescu’s public presentation of the former Securitate and in particular the USLA that was perhaps most appreciated. In the days after the appointment, while many domestic and foreign observers were scrutinizing Stanculescu’s revelations on the bureaucratic makeup and membership of the Securitate—the first hard numbers, however flawed, to be released by the Front up until that time—Stanculescu was making critical, if generally unnoticed, revisionist statements about the USLA’s role in the December events. (At the time, at least one foreign observer picked up on the suspicious nature of Stanculescu’s revisionism and interpreted it as an attempt to rehabilitate the Securitate (Strudza, pp. 33-34). The Securitate’s official institutional successor, the Romanian Information Service, SRI was unveiled in late March 1990.) In his comments to the press, Stanculescu not only denied that the USLA had been responsible for the “terrorist actions,” but that they had any role in the repression in Timisoara and Bucharest during the week preceding Ceausescu’s fall (ROMPRES 8 March 1990 in FBIS 15 March 1990).
We’ll leave the first of these allegations alone for the moment. As for the second, it can only be called Orwellian, a true whopper among lies, that could only stand if the newspapers of the previous two months were disposed of and memories of those papers and the events purged from minds. In the same daily, “Libertatea,” to which Stanculescu related this new understanding of the USLA’s actions in December (26 and 28 February 1990), between 27 January and 15 February, transcripts of regime communications, including USLA communications, from the afternoon of 21 December and then again from the morning of 22 December, had been published under the headline “Dintre sute de…catarge! [From hundreds of “masts!” (the radio identification for USLA officers conducting surveillance)].* Although rather conveniently missing from the transcripts is the key period in the early hours of 22 December when regime forces opened gunfire in University Square, killing 48 and wounding 604 (684 people were also arrested), these truncated transcripts nevertheless reveal USLA involvement in the repression in Bucharest. According to the transcript, upon the orders of Securitate Director General Vlad, the USLA launched tear gas grenades at demonstrators. They also show USLA “intervention units” claiming to have “restored order” and one USLA member communicating in reference to protesters, “These hooligans must be annihilated at once. They are not determined. They must be taken quickly. The rest are hesitating.”
The USLA had already been trying to “correct” the memories of citizens, prior to Stanculescu’s “clarification” of their role. When a participant in the demonstrations at Piata Romana in central Bucharest related on 12 January 1990 in “Libertatea” the role of the USLA in beating demonstrators there on the 21st and later the presence of the USLA among the gunmen who killed demonstrators in University Square in the early hours of 22 December, USLA chief Ardeleanu rushed to issue a public denial in the paper several days later. Particularly in Timisoara, the presence of the USLA among the forces of repression has been detailed by so many sources—including former USLA who participated—that there is not much point in seeking to prove Stanculescu’s contention false. Indeed, even elsewhere, beyond eyewitness/demonstrator contentions, the presence of USLA among repressive forces in the week of 16-22 December has occasionally been accidentally acknowledged by Securitate officials, essentially speaking to their sympathizers. The Securitate chief for Sibiu County, Theodor Petrisor, wrote in April 1991:
“On Monday, 18 December 1989, upon the order of the [Militia’s] Inspector General, I activated the antiterrorist intervention group. This group had been reorganized in September 1989 and was made up of Securitate officers who were involved in informational-operational services…Militia officers and officers from the joint units of the inspectorate. I’ll note that the existence of this group was to intervene in order to neutralize terrorist activities, not for other street actions. In the command chain, the coordination of the group’s activity was the responsibility of the special unit for antiterrorist warfare (U.S.L.A.) in Bucharest. [Emphasis added]” (Theodor Petrisor, “Revolutia din decembrie 1989 in Sibiu County (I),” “Europa” no. 22 (April 1991), p. 8).
None of this should come as a great surprise, since the USLA—employing their tell-tale A.B.I. armored vehicles, which they alone among regime forces possessed—participated in the repression of protesting workers in Brasov on 15 November 1987 (see “Jurnalul National,” 14 November 2004; the former USLA officer Marian Romanescu in Dan Badea, “USLA, Bula Moise, teroristii si ‘Fratii Musulmani’,” “Expres” (2-8 July 1991), p. 8), and since there was a juridical basis to their key role in combatting civil unrest, as confirmed by Interior Ministry Order 02600 (July 1988). Indeed, as recently as January 1990, in the first—and soon to be, almost last—trial to sentence those accused of participating in the repression before 22 December, one of the defendants was an USLA officer (Burian), charged with having opened fire on demonstrators on 21 December in the western city of Cugir.
Stanculescu’s “revelations” essentially opened up the floodgates of revisionism, some of it accidental and the result of the confusion Stanculescu’s comments had sewn, some of it very clearly motivated. Horia Alexandrescu, former editor of the primary Romanian sports’ daily during the Ceausescu era, and later editor of “Curierul National” and “Cronica Romana” among other dailies, wrote in March 1990 as editor of “Tineretul Liber” a multi-part series extolling the work of the USLA before December 1989, and arguing not only that they had not been the post-22 December “terrorists,” but that they had not played a role in the repression of demonstrators between 16 and 22 December. Clearly, the most unexpected journalist to run to the defense of the USLA was Petre Mihai Bacanu of the daily “Romania Libera,” who had been imprisoned earlier in 1989 for attempting to publish an underground newspaper and who arrived emaciated and haggard at television in the hours following Ceausescu’s flight, direct from Securitate custody.
In his March-April 1990 series on the events of 21-22 December in Bucharest, Bacanu vigorously sought to make clear for his audience, on two occasions during a multi-part series, that the USLA had not been responsible for the repression of demonstrators at Bucharest’s University Square on the night of 21-22 December. In fact, he clarified that “we have incontrovertible proof that the USLA officers had only one mission, to defend the American Embassy and the El Al Israel Airlines ticket office” (17 March 1990). To say that this was confusing to the researcher is an understatement, particularly as the “Libertatea” transcripts had clearly shown USLA officers discussing that their mission was to “block” the access of demonstrators to these locations (i.e. fearing that they would seek refuge there.) Moreover, despite claims to the contrary of civilian and military eyewitnesses in the Army daily, “Armata Poporului” in January and later in the Military Prosecutor’s report released on 4 June 1990 (discussed Hall, 1997, pp. 219-224), Bacanu declared, “We must clarify that the USLA detachments did not fire a single shot, nor arrest a single person among the columns of demonstrators” (16 March 1990).
Significantly, almost four years later, based on what he claimed was “new” information from Army soldiers who had been in the square that bloody “longest night of the year,” in an example of professional integrity, Bacanu admitted that he had been duped:
“Very many officers talk about these ‘civilians’ in long raincoats and sheepskin coats, who arrested demonstrators from within the crowd and then beat them brutally…No one has been interested until now in these dozens of ‘civilians’ with hats who shot through the pockets of their clothes…For a time we gave credence to the claims of the USLA troops that they were not present in University Square. We have now entered into the possession of information which shows that 20 USLA officers, under the command of Colonel Florin Bejan, were located…among the demonstrators” (28 December 1993, p. 10)
USLA Commander Gheorghe Ardeleanu admitted in passing in court testimony that USLA personnel operated in civilian clothes on this evening (Stefanescu 1994, p. 288). At the very least, it is clear that uniformed USLA personnel participated in the repression. An official at the National Theater—located next to the Hotel Intercontinental in University Square—claims USLA troops beat demonstrators and policed the building to see if any were hiding there (Vasile Neagoe, “Expres” 30 March-5 April 1990, p. 6). According to the Military Prosecutor’s 4 June 1990 charges: “The witness [Spiru Radet] specified that one of the soldiers from the USLA troops, who had a machine gun in his hand, fired warning shots and then shot at the demonstrators. At that point, the witness was wounded in the hand by bullets and transported to Coltea Hospital” (in Bunea 1994, p. 88).
In April 1990, two important articles would appear in the opposition weekly, “Zig-Zag.” One was by Gheorghe Ionescu Olbojan, who sought to accredit the idea that 40 corpses transported from Timisoara to Bucharest for cremation were not civilian demonstrators, but members of those Army “special forces,” the DIA unit. As Marius Mioc has noted, this was a clear effort to muddy the understanding of the Timisoara uprising (Mioc 2000). The other article was by Angela Bacescu, who wrote that the USLA anti-terrorist troops had no responsibility for repression and bloodshed before or after 22 December; instead, they were victims of those events, cynically targeted to leave Romania defenseless. Bacescu would transfer to the Ceausescu nostalgic weekly “Romania Mare” in the fall of 1990, and then the former Securitate’s favored mouthpiece, “Europa,” where she has stayed ever since. Ion Cristoiu, editor of “Zig-Zag” at the time was later asked if Bacescu had infiltrated his opposition weekly. Cristoiu responded that Bacescu came with a lot of documents and no need for money, but that it was important that the former Securitate’s side of the story be told.** Olbojan would admit openly and in detail from 1993 onward that he had been a Securitate officer (for a discussion of all this, see Hall 1999; 2002a).
It was these articles, as I suggested in the last segment of this series, that set off writers in the Army press, with the intentions and ties of both Bacescu and Olbojan being questioned. Elsewhere, Octavian Andronic of “Libertatea” finally published on 10 May, a letter he had received from unnamed Army officers who had written in response to Andronic’s seemingly anomalous article in early January devoted to the bravery of the USLA in defusing bombs in the 1980s. The authors expressed dismay over Andronic’s article and wondered about his motivations in trying to burnish the image of the unit that was still considered at that time the source of the “terrorists.” It was only four months later, when Andronic’s views had been “vindicated” by the change in the official history of the USLA’s actions in December that he published that letter.
Nor was the damage wrought by Bacescu and Olbojan in the pages of “Zig-Zag” over yet. In June, in an article that would be republished almost verbatim in “Romania Mare” two months later, Bacescu wrote “The Truth about Sibiu” suggesting that there were only “imaginary terrorists” in Nicu Ceausescu’s town and declaring that all those Secruitate and Militia people arrested were innocent and unjust victims (no. 15, 19-26 June 1990, p. 8). Meanwhile, in July (no. 19, 17-23 July 1990, p. 13), Olbojan would continue his push to turn the DIA into the villians of December, describing the unit as: “‘The special forces’ of the Defense Ministry troops [who] were used in diversion operations last December to create the impression that Interior Ministry forces were putting up resistance to the revolutionary wave sweeping Timisoara, Bucharest, [and] Sibiu.” In other words, the notion of a “fictitious war with fictitious terrorists,” whose victims were the Securitate and Militia.
AND NOW, WITH YOUR PERMISSION DEAR FRIENDS…BACK TO THE “TERRORISTS”
Let us ask: if this was a “fictitious war with fictitious terrorists,” “a staged war,” what would be evidence of it, and what information would falsify it? The “staged war” theory suggests that in reality there existed no “terrorists,” but just unfounded (if perhaps understandable) suspicion and fear, confusion, and insufficient, poor, or inappropriate military training. This resulted in Army units, other forces, and civilians firing haphazardly at “phantoms,” at each other and at civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or it suggests that there were “terrorists” but they were acting upon the orders of those who had seized power—Iliescu and his friends—or whose actions were known or understood by those officials, but allowed to continue because they were seen as legitimating their seizure of power. As we have seen, in the latter scenario, very frequently these “friendly terrorists” are identified as Soviet or other foreign “tourists”/agents, and or the Army’s DIA unit.
In either scenario, one must explain why, either intentionally or accidentally, during the events, the Securitate—primarily from the USLA anti-terrorist unit—was suspected and publicly accused of being the “terrorists” and responsible directly and indirectly for the death of 942 people and wounding of 2245. It is difficult to “prove” the first scenario, because it is essentially the process of proving a negative. It is possible to infirm it, however. If people who would have been in the position to know, to have access to such information, claim that there were no actual terrorists, then we have to take such an allegation seriously—although we also have to examine their credibility and if they might have some institutional or personal agenda. It should be pointed out, however, that if this or that Army officer or soldier speculates post-facto that because they found no terrorists, that therefore there were none and that they had intentionally been sent on a wild-goose chase designed to create military confrontations and victims to legitimate the seizure of power, this cannot be interpreted as confirmation of the thesis: since it is speculation, conflates personal experience with collective experience, and runs into the problem of proving a negative.
In the scenario alleging that there were terrorists but that they were intentionally serving those who seized power, we must have people from the institution, group, or unit, and/or would have been in a position to have knowledge of that information, make the allegations. To have someone from a different institution or political perspective make this allegation, does not necessarily invalidate it, but it is clear that the credibility of the allegation is substantially enhanced if it comes from one’s associates. Thus, the Army officer who suspects the Securitate of having been the “terrorists” is not as convincing as the Securitate officer who alleges the same thing—and therefore is at the very least taking an implicit risk by breaking ranks with his colleagues. Similarly, in the scenario where the DIA are thought to be the “terrorists,” one needs admissions from current or former members of the unit, or at least from senior Army officials who would have been in the position to know, in order for the scenario to be credible.
It is important to emphasize—particularly in the case of the historiography of the Romanian Revolution—that all “revelations” are not equal. This point has simply been lost on many analysts of the December 1989 events. “Revelations” in which an individual blames an institution of which he was not a member are less credible because 1) it is less likely that the individual would have access to knowledge about the actions of those he accuses, 2) the risk he incurs by such revelations is far less than if he were a member of that institution—in which case he violates a written or unwritten code of loyalty to the organization, and perhaps more important, to his colleagues. “Revelations” that damage one’s institution or impugn one’s colleagues are, as we know, far more dangerous to the individual who makes them, if that institution is based on secrecy. In the Romanian context, it is clear that the institution most strongly based on secrecy—and with the capability and record of enforcing its maintenance—was the Securitate. To suggest that such laws of silence were—and, in particular, still are—stronger among those in the Communist Party, the military, or the nomenklatura as a whole is an extraordinary proposition.
What is significant in the case of the Romanian Revolution is that we have not just one, but several “whistleblowers” who worked in the former Securitate, and in two cases served in the USLA, who have admitted that components of the USLA were the hub of the December 1989 “terrorist” actions. The effort these individuals have gone to in order to mask their identities, the fear of retribution from the former Securitate they have expressed in their revelations, the lengths to which other former Securitate officials have gone to in order to publicly identify these “whistleblowers,” and the vitriol with which these former Securitate officials have attempted to discredit these whistleblowers and their claims, sharply differentiate these revelations from the ocean of accusations by other former regime members who have spoken or written on the topic. These circumstances also attest to their credibility: why do they fear to speak? Why do their former colleagues make such efforts to find out who they are and publicly identify them? Why the obsession of their former colleagues with silencing these “whistleblowers?”
It is precisely the admissions that exist and the gaping gaps in opposing accounts that lead me to conclude that the 1) terrorists existed, 2) they were primarily from the Securitate, and that 3) the core source within the Securitate was the USLA/USLAC.
Those who deny that there were terrorists or that their key component was members of the Securitate’s “Special Unit for Antiterrorist Warfare (USLA)” fighting to prevent the collapse of the Ceausescu regime have yet to confront or respond to the following four critical questions:
1) If there were no terrorists, why do there exist people who have come forward to declare their existence?
2) Why are the only people to declare that the terrorists came from their institution or unit those from the Securitate/Militia, and specifically the USLA?”
3) Why have former Securitate members made such efforts to discover the sources of these allegations, write with such vitriol against them, and threaten them?
4) Why has nobody from the Army come forward to state that the terrorists were from their particular unit? (Particularly significant considering that the “law of silence” in the Securitate/Militia was inevitably far more deeply-embedded and enforced that in the Army.)
* USLA’s chief of operations Alexandru Cristescu admitted elsewhere that those posted at observation points had sniper rifles (pusca cu luneta) and live ammunition (see “Lumea Libera,” 18 March 1995, p. 21). It is also very important to specify, given the events of the next several days in the area of the Central Committee (CC) building and the allegations since, that both Securitate Director Vlad (“Dimineata,” 25 November 1996) and senior communist party official Silviu Curticeanu (“Jurnalul National,” November 2004) have admitted that on 21 December, the Securitate installed gunfire simulators in the area. Demonstrators who investigated the Romarta bloc in the following days, found several of them (“Expres,” 7-13 January 1992, p. 10).
**Although Cristoiu’s motives remain unclear, like so many in the post-Ceausescu media, he has displayed a “laissez-faire” attitude toward the former Securitate: publishing anything that comes his way, whether it be blatant revisionist falsehoods such as those of Bacescu or Olbojan, or documents incriminating the Securitate, such as the text of Order 2600 in “Expres” 1991, or a host of documents on the December events in 1993 in “Evenimentul Zilei.” The former Securitate have been somewhat serendipitous beneficiaries of the—perhaps inevitable given the situation at the time—mercenary and sensationalist temptations confronting those working in the post-Ceausescu media.
SOURCES
“Armata Poporului,” 1990.
Bacescu, A. 1994. Din Nou in Calea Navalirilor Barbare [In the Path of Barbaric Invasions Again] (Cluj-Napoca: Zalmoxis).
Bunea, M. 1994. Praf in Ochi. Procesul celor 24-1-2 [Dust in the Eyes. The Trial of the 24+1+2] (Bucharest: Editura Scripta).
“Dimineata (online),” 1996.
“Europa,” 1991.
“Expres,” 1991
Filip, T. 1999. Secretele USLA [Secrets of the USLA] (Craiova: Editura Obiectiv).
Hall, R. A., 1999, “The Uses of Absurdity: The Staged War Theory and the Romanian Revolution of December 1989,” in “East European Politics and Societies,” Vol. 13, no.3, pp. 501-542.
Hall, R. A., 2002, “Part 1: The Many Zig-Zags of Gheorghe Ionescu Olbojan,” “The Securitate Roots of a Modern Romanian Fairy Tale: The Press, the Former Securitate, and the Historiography of December 1989,” Radio Free Europe “East European Perspectives,” Vol. 4, no 7.
Posted by romanianrevolutionofdecember1989 on May 1, 2010
THE ROMANIAN REVOLUTION FOR DUM-DUMS:
(like me…and perhaps even you)
by Richard Andrew Hall, Ph.D.
Standard Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
I am an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have been a CIA analyst since 2000. Prior to that time, I had no association with CIA outside of the application process. [Submitted for clearance 22 April 2008, approved 22 May 2008]
I have been researching the Revolution for the better part of the past 18 years. I first visited Romania in 1987 while backpacking through Europe, and I spent a total of about 20 months in the country during the years 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993-1994, and 1997, when I conducted pre-dissertation, dissertation, and post-dissertation research on the Revolution.
I have written on the topic of the Revolution, voluminously some might say, publishing in 1996, 1999, and 2000 before joining the Agency, and since I entered the Agency in 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.
It will and should be hard to believe for the outsider to this problem, but my work has been essentially the only systematic, ongoing investigation of the ballistics evidence—such are the shortcomings of small “communities of interest” investigating a peripheral historical topic and the perils of “group think.”
This article is, for lack of a better description, about “connecting the dots.”
–The story of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 since December 1989 has been the struggle of disparate voices who share their memories, often with great frustration and a sense of resignation. They are hardly a unified chorus.
The accounts of ideologues seek to suggest to us that “the truth” miraculously is the province of people of this or that particular political persuasion in post-communist Romania. That is morality play and fairy tale; it is not the work of the serious historian. Would that history were so neat and tidy! It is not.
Instead, what one finds is that the people with the details that matter most are spread across the ideological and political spectrum—including people with what many of us might term distasteful, illiberal, ultranationalist, and nostalgic views.
There are those who relate these details in a narrative consistent with where those details lead.
There are those who relate these details even though it contradicts their narrative and ultimate conclusions about December 1989.
Finally, there are those—and there are many of them—who just know they experienced what they experienced. They aren’t sure exactly how it fits in with a larger narrative: they merely want to tell their story.
Together, they relate these details in the face of cynicism, indifference, and an often stunning intellectual conceit and deaf ear.
Theirs, however, and not the ideologues’, is the story of December 1989.
There was a lot of talk during the crimes of December ’89 about the special bullets with which the young and old alike were killed, bullets which—it is said were not in the arsenal of our military units. There was so much talk that there was no more to say and after there was no more to say for a sufficient amount of time the discussion was reopened with the line “such things don’t exist!” The special bullets didn’t exist!—our highest authorities hurried to tell us…In order to search for proof a little work is necessary by our legal organs that they are not terribly inclined to take….
[Dan Badea, “Gloante speciale sau ce s-a mai gasit in cladirea Directiei a V-a,” Expres, 16-22 April 1991]
The Internet allows the researcher to piece together history as never before. That’s a pretty bland statement, but the reality of it never ceases to amaze me. Take the case of those killed in the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (officially 1,104 people perished in those events). Scroll through the list of those killed on the procesulcomunismului (“the trial of communism”) and portalulrevolutiei (“the portal to the revolution”) websites. For most, there is only limited information about the circumstances in which they died. For others, however, there is greater detail. As one scrolls through the names and photos, one of the similarities that begins to become apparent is that in cases where there is more information about the circumstances of the death, dum-dum bullets are mentioned. Thus, for example, we find the following five cases:
BUTIRI Florin, born in Joia Mare, 11 April 1969, he was living in Bucharest and was employed by the Bucharest Metro. He played rugby. On 22 December he participated in the demonstration at Sala Dalles [next to University Square]. On 23 December he went to defend the Radio Broadcast center on str. Nuferilor, and while he was saving some old people from a burning building he was shot. Brought to the Military Hospital because of a wound to his hip, caused by a dum-dum cartridge, they tried to ampute a leg. His stomach was also ravaged by a bullet. On 26 December 1989 he died. (http://www.procesulcomunismului.com/marturii/fonduri/ioanitoiu/aeroi/docs/album_2.htm)
FILOTI Claudiu
Profession: Lieutenant major UM 01171 Buzau, post-mortem Captain
Born: 30 July 1964
Birthplace: Vaslui
Date of death: 22 December 1989
Place of death: Bucharest, in the area of the Defense Ministry
Cause of death: Shot in the chest with dum-dum bullets (http://www.portalulrevolutiei.ro/index.php?menu=1&jud=53)
LUPEA Ion- Gabriel from Hunedoara, born in 1970…In 1989 he was sent from Bucharest to Anina [Resita], then to UM 01929. On 9 December 1989, he went on leave, but he was recalled. On the evening of 23 December he was on duty defending the unit [Anina-Resita], at the checkpoint, when around 11 pm they were attacked from the front and from the left flank. While crawling on hands and knees to bring more ammunition he was hit by a dum-dum bullet that entered above his left leg and exited through his left hand. Brought to the hospital he died Christmas Eve, making him the unit’s first hero; he was posthumously awarded the rank of sub-lieutenant.(http://www.procesulcomunismului.com/marturii/fonduri/ioanitoiu/aeroi/docs/album_5.htm)
MANESCU Dan, born 25 March 1964, a student in the Transportation Department, he joined with the other young people on 21 December and participated in the demonstrations in the center of the town [Bucharest]. Friday morning he went with his brother to the demonstrations and he returned after the flight of the dictator. He changed his clothes and returned for good, when on the night of 22/23 December a dum-dum bullet punctured his stomach in Palace Square. Brought to the Emergency hospital, he could not be saved. (http://www.procesulcomunismului.com/marturii/fonduri/ioanitoiu/aeroi/docs/album_5.htm)
POPTEAN Petre, born 27 December 1965, in Margau near Huedin, living in Bucharest…he worked as a driver for the Bucharest Transportation Department. On 21 December he went into town to protect his sister on her way home from work. The two of them left on Calea Victoriei and arrived at [Sala] Dalles, where in horror they watched…Petre called to his sister to aid the wounded. While on the ground, he was hit in the abdomen and left hip by dum-dum cartridges that caused him major wounds. His sister, Monica, was able to stop an ambulance with a Targoviste license number, but he didn’t make it to Hospital 9. At around 6 pm Petre passed away. (http://www.procesulcomunismului.com/marturii/fonduri/ioanitoiu/aeroi/docs/album_7.htm)
Let me draw the attention of the reader to two important details here. First, the use of dum-dum munitions was not confined to Bucharest (multiple locations), but includes the southwestern city of Resita (the case of Ion Lupea). Second, the use of dum-dum munitions occurred not just after communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu fled at midday on 22 December 1989, but also before, on the evening of 21 December (the case of Petre Poptean).
Dum-dum bullets—which fragment and cause substantially more and more lethal damage to the organs of those who are hit—are outlawed by international convention (see more below). Moreover—or perhaps better-put, officially—no Romanian institution had them in their arsenal in December 1989. Yet, as we can see, almost two decades after the events, the obituaries of those gunned down in December 1989 include references to those munitions as having played a role not only in the wounding of people, but also in their deaths.
Despite the claims above attesting to not just the wounding, but the death of several people (civilians and soldiers) over several days in several locations from dum-dum bullets in December 1989, what did General Dan Voinea—removed from his post in December 2007 by Attorney General Laura Codruta Kovesi for violating basic judicial norms in another case[1]—who headed the investigations into December 1989 for well over a decade, have to say about them in late 2005? “Such things didn’t exist!”:
Romulus Cristea: “Did special ammunition, bullets with a vidia tip or dum-dum bullets, claim [any] victims? The press of the time was filled with such claims…”
Dan Voinea: There were no victims (people who were shot) from either vidia bullets or dum-dum bullets. During the entire period of the events war munitions were used, normal munitions that were found at the time in the arsenal of the Interior Ministry and the Defense Ministry. The confusion and false information were the product of the fact that different caliber weapons were used, and therefore, the resulting sound was perceived differently.[2] (Emphasis added)
So, there is no wiggle room here, no room for misinterpretation: according to Prosecutor Voinea , nobody was killed by dum-dum bullets in December 1989.
That’s a common claim among officials of the former communist regime—Voinea was a military prosecutor since 1982 and he was directly involved in the trial of the Ceausescus. Such conclusions were also repeated in late 2005 by Dr. Vladimir Belis, who was the head of the Medical Forensics Institute (IML) in Bucharest in December 1989: asked if other than the standard 7.62 mm caliber weapons belonging to the Army were used, he did not know and couldn’t say because he claimed no autopsies were ever performed.[3] The apparent official disinterest in munitions and autopsies is—ahem—shall we say “interesting” given the comments attributed to Belis’ subordinates and to doctors at Bucharest’s main hospitals—comments made in the early 1990s, but also made well over a decade later, in the mid 2000s.[4]
General Dan Voinea spoke in late 2005. Voinea’s argument that there were no dum-dum bullets, that there were no atypical munitions used, is directly linked to his contention that there were therefore “no terrorists” in December 1989. It has been routinely repeated in various forms by the media for well over a decade and by his supporters in intellectual circles at home and abroad. The encomia for General Voinea before and since that December 2005 interview by noted Romanian intellectuals and Romanianists are breathtaking. Tom Gallagher refers to him as the “indefatigable General Voinea”[5] and Western journalists have described him as “a one-man mission to uncover the truth about exactly what happened during those days.”[6] Sorin Iliesiu justifies his claims about the Revolution squarely on Voinea’s words:
General Dan Voinea has said clearly: The terrorists did not exist. Those who seized power lied to protect the real criminals….The diversion of the ‘terrorists’ has been demonstrated by [the] Justice [System], not a single terrorist being found among the dead[7], wounded[8] or arrested[9].”[10][11]
Highly problematic and damning for General Dan Voinea, Dr. Vladimir Belis, and fellow deniers are the following, detailed written testimonies of Gheorghe Balasa and Radu Minea presented by Dan Badea in April 1991, attesting to what they had found in December 1989 in the headquarters of the Securitate’s Fifth Directorate:
Balasa Gheorghe: From [Securitate] Directorate V-a, from the weapons depot, on 23-24 December 1989, DUM-DUM cartridges, special cartridges that did not fit any arm in the arsenal of the Defense Ministry were retrieved. Three or four boxes with these kinds of cartridges were found. The special bullets were 5-6 cm. in length and less thick than a pencil. Such a cartridge had a white stone tip that was transparent. All of these cartridges I personally presented to be filmed by Mr. Spiru Zeres. All the special cartridges, other than the DUM-DUM [ones] were of West German [FRG] make. From Directorate V-a we brought these to the former CC building, and on 23-24 December ’89 they were surrendered to U.M. 01305. Captain Dr. Panait, who told us that he had never seen such ammunition before, Major Puiu and Captain Visinescu know about [what was turned over].
In the former CC of the PCR, all of those shot on the night of 23-24 December ’89 were shot with special bullets. It is absurd to search for the bullet in a corpse that can penetrate a wall…
[of course, V-a worked hand-in-hand with the USLA, or the Securitate’s “special unit for anti-terrorist warfare,” and thus it was not suprising that in Directorate V-a’s headquarters…] Among things we also found were:…the training manual for the USLA. It was about 25 cm thick, and while there, I leafed through about half of it…[and I also came across] a file in which lots of different people under the surveillance of USLA officers were listed…
(Interviewed by Dan Badea, “Gloante speciale sau ce s-a mai gasit in cladirea Directiei a V-a,” Expres, 16-22 April 1991.)
Moreover, we know from the 2005 publication of the testimony of a detained V-th Directorate officer dated 2 February 1990, that he must have been asked to comment specifically on the existence of dum-dum ammunition—since he makes a point of emphasizing that “we didn’t have dum-dum ammunition or weapons with special properties, of foreign origin.”[12] So, in other words, we know from this interrogation document that six weeks after the Revolution, those who had taken power or at least the military prosecutors of the time were still interested in the existence of these munitions—thereby suggesting that they must have had some reason for believing in their existence, say for example the character of the injuries suffered by those shot during the events, as well as perhaps recovered bullet fragments, the testimonies of the doctors who operated on those wounded, etc…
Voinea’s ceaseless interviews and revelations during this period have been reprinted repeatedly since they took place and his conclusions been given wide circulation by journalists and people such as Sorin Iliesiu. Yet those who just relate what happened in December 1989 continue to mention the existence of dum-dum munitions. Thus, if one turns to the tourism site for the western border town of Curtici (near Arad) one can read the following about the history of the city, including the events of December 1989:
The following night [at the train station], the first team of five doctors from the Austrian “Lorenz Bohler” Hospital , who arrived in Curtici with a “hospital-wagon” took 18 people in critical condition to Austria for special treatment that lasted two to three months. That is, they needed organ transplants or special care, because of the monstrous results of dum-dum bullets.[13]
Or take the case of a poster on the 18th anniversary of the Revolution, who begins:
The Romarta (central Bucharest) file? What about the file on those who fired at me at the Astronomical Observatory on Ana Ipatescu Boulevard or those who at 1700 on 24 December fired near Casa Scanteii [press building] where I found a dum-dum cartridge in my bed—us having had to sleep in the bathroom.[14]
Finally, there are the cynical comments of those—no matter what they believe about December 1989—who cannot help but remember the dum-dum munitions and the horrible pain and trauma they caused their victims, many still living with the consequences of those wounds today…and how nobody wishes to remember them; for them, this is essentially a cruel, open secret.[15]
Unfortunately, no one in Romania has tied together such claims and the evidence I present above. I do not know how many of these people are still alive, but if the Romanian media were interested, the names are there for them to contact in order to confirm the claims above: Gheorghe Balasa, Radu Minea, Spiru Zeres, Major Puiu, and Captain Visinescu.
D’oh…Dum-Dum…(Tweedle) Dumb and (Tweedle) Dumber: Dum-Dum=Vidia
When I first viewed the youtube video “Romanian Revolution USLA attack Dec 23 1989 Revolutia” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlBRSxUVQ5E ), what struck me was: here, finally, after a decade and a half of almost unopposed revisionist denial, here was someone who claims to have been an eyewitness and has photos and details of the incident, and who maintains the now almost heretical idea that the Securitate’s “Special Unit for Anti-terrorist Warfare”(USLA for short) had indeed attempted to attack the heavily-guarded Defense Ministry Headquarters on Drumul Taberei in Bucharest on the night of 23-24 December 1989! But, in fact as we shall see, although important, that is actually not the most important thing about the one and only youtube video posted by “destituirea.”
For me the transcript of the USLA unit claiming to have witnessed army units attacking their own ministry and thus the supposed reason that the USLA men who witnessed it “had to be silenced by being killed”—a transcript leaked to the press in 1993 and which led scholars such as Denis Deletant and Peter Siani-Davies to consider this “case closed” essentially—was always highly problematic. It supplied what was said, but, if we are to believe the words of the USLA Commander Gheorghe Ardeleanu, speaking to the notorious Securitate cheerleader Angela Bacescu, it did not supply the much needed context: Ardeleanu claimed that he had been placed under arrest and that it was he who chose the names of the USLA officers who were to report to the Defense Ministry. The USLA units thus came in a situation in which those who had taken control of the country were in the Defense Ministry holding their commander under arrest.[16]
But more importantly, the transcript could not explain a) the lack of any corroboration since of these supposed Army units attacking the Defense Ministry on the night of 23-24 December 1989—truly hard to believe, given all the young recruits and given their comparative willingness to talk to the media after all these years, in comparison to the former Securitate, and b) the claims in summer 1990 by the Army cadre who had been involved in the firefight with the USLA and the interviews of civilians in the surrounding blocs of flats who had lived through the fighting in December 1989 and related what they had seen.[17] The interviewees had detailed the suspicious actions of the USLA convoy and made it clear that they came with less-than-friendly intentions.
Now, here, 17 years after those famous articles by Mihai Floca and Victor Stoica is a video supporting the claim that the USLA units attempted to force their way into the Defense Ministry. The photos of the inside of the USLA ABI vehicles and of the dead USLA men (wearing black jumpsuits underneath Army clothing) are perhaps the most extensive and detailed seen to date, and the anonymous poster plays coy as to where he got them from (he claims he does not want to reveal the source—something which, given the sensitivity of the issue, I am not surprised by).
But, as I mentioned previously, it is actually not the confirmation of this understanding of the Defense Ministry incident that is the most significant thing about this youtube video. It is at the 2:01-2:05 of 8:50 mark of this silent video that the poster makes the following interesting and critical insight/claim…
USLA’s bullets were called “vidia” or “dum-dum” were usually smaller than the regular army’s bullets…Most of the capital’s residents have found this type of bullets all around the military buildings near by. (at 2:01 of 8:50)[18]
And thus, it becomes clear that the discussion of “vidia” bullets and “dum-dum” bullets is interchangeable (or at least is treated as such)! (Hence, perhaps why Romulus Cristea asked his question of General Voinea as he did in December 2005: “Did special ammunition, bullets with a vidia tip or dum-dum bullets, claim [any] victims? The press of the time was filled with such claims…”) “Vidia” translates as “grooved,” and thus describes the modified feature of the bullets which makes them so lethal, thereby making the treatment of vidia and dumdum as de facto synonyms understandable.
This is critical because as I have previously written in detail, citing interviews and reminiscences in the Romanian press…vidia bullets showed up across the country in December 1989. In “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian: Prosecutor Voinea’s Campaign to Sanitize the Romanian Revolution of December 1989” (http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html) I detail examples of vidia bullets showing up across the country—Brasov, Sibiu, Bucharest (multiple locations), Braila, Caransebes, Craiova, and Hunedoara—as recounted by civilians and Army personnel, at various times since the events—not just during or right after. Such wide dispersion of the use of officially non-existent munitions is critical too because it infirms the notion that somehow demonstrators or the Army put their hands on such “free floating weapons” and used them during the December 1989 events—that it would have happened in one or two places could be explained, but that the same thing would happen in so many geographic centers is scarcely plausible.
Recall from our earlier extract from Prosecutor Dan Voinea’s December 2005 interview, his unambiguous denial of the use of vidia munitions. Nevertheless, significantly, since that interview we continue to find people who remember what they remember and they remember the use of vidia munitions. I have found yet more references. Alexandru Stepanian, who writes under the motto “Dreptate si Onoare! (Justice and Honor!),” not only claims to still have a vidia bullet from 22-23 December 1989 in the area around the TV Station in Bucharest, but he has placed a photo of it on the portalulrevolutiei website.[19] In fall 2006, the daughter of a priest recalled:
In December ’89, after he arrived from Timisoara, my father stayed with me on Stefan Cel Mare Boulevard. When we returned to our home, on the corner of Admiral Balescu and Rosenthal. I found the cupboard of the dresser pure and simple riddled with bullets, about 8 to 10 of them. Someone who knew about such things told me they were vidia bullets. They were brought to a commission, but I don’t know what happened to them.[20]
In 2007 a book entitled The Tales of the Terrorists was published in Galati. In one section, a Eugen Stoleriu recounts his dispatch to Bucharest as a military recruit during the events and how for the first time in his life he came across vidia bullets that were shot at him.[21]
Another apparent synonym for “vidia” is “crestata” or “notched.” I take it that the reference is to the same type of munitions because the damage caused to those wounded by them was equally catastrophic. In December 2007, Alexandru Tudor, a soccer official famous apparently for his stern, unsmiling demeanor, who was shot on 23 December 1989 around 10 am in the area of Piata Aviatorilor near the TV studio, recounted the episode that ended his career:
They brought me to Colentina Hospital and there I had the great fortune of two great doctors. If they had operated on me, they would have to amputate both my legs beneath the knee, but instead they left the bullets in there 12 days. Their explanation was that the bullets were too close to arteries, and since they were gloante crestate (notched bullets), it was very dangerous. After they were removed, I kept the bullets, I have them at home. I was on crutches for six months, I went through therapy, but I had to give up soccer.[22]
Also on the 18th anniversary of the Revolution, a frustrated poster to another site asked pointedly:
Who in Romania in 1989 had 5.5 mm caliber NATO-type munition, that in addition was “notched”—something outlawed by the Geneva Convention, while it is known that the Romanian Army had only the caliber used by Warsaw Pact nations for their weapons, that is to say 7,62 mm….At that time even the Olympic speed shooting champion, Sorin Babii, expressed his surprise….I had in my hand several samples of this cartridge: small, black, with a spiral on the top, or with 4 cuts (those who know a little bit about ballistics and medical forensics can attest to the devastating role caused by these modifications). I await a response to my questions…perhaps someone will be willing to break the silence. I thank you in advance. [emphases added][23]
In other words, the existence of crestate/vidia/dum-dum bullets is known, and not everyone has so blithely forgotten their existence.
A Dum-Dum by Any Other Name: Gloante explosive (exploding bullets), gloante speciale (special bullets)
Crestate, vidia, dum-dum…by now we know: these are very dangerous munitions…
In the field of firearms, an expanding bullet is a bullet designed to expand on impact. Such bullets are often known as Dum-dum or dumdum bullets. There are several types of dum-dum designs. Two popular designs are the hollow point (made during the manufacturing phase) and X-ing made usually by the user by making two notches perpendicular to each other on the tip of the bullet, commonly with a knife. The effect is that the bullet deforms and sometimes fragments upon impact due to the indentations. This creates a larger wound channel or channels with greater blood loss and trauma.
The hollow-point bullet, and the soft-nosed bullet, are sometimes also referred to as the dum-dum, so named after the British arsenal at Dum-Dum, near Calcutta, India, where it is said that jacketed, expanding bullets were first developed. This term is rare among shooters, but can still be found in use, usually in the news media and sensational popular fiction. Recreational shooters sometimes refer to hollow points as “JHPs”, from the common manufacturer’s abbreviation for “Jacketed Hollow Point”.
To be most correct, the term “Dum Dum Bullet” refers only to soft point bullets, not to hollow points, though it is very common for it to be mistakenly used this way.
The Hague Convention of 1899, Declaration III, prohibits the use in warfare of bullets which easily expand or flatten in the body, and was an expansion of the Declaration of St Petersburg in 1868, which banned exploding projectiles of less than 400 grams. These treaties limited the use of “explosive” bullets in military use, defining illegal rounds as a jacketed bullet with an exposed lead tip (and, by implication, a jacketed base).[24]
Thus, under the synonym for dumdum/vidia/crestate bullets of “exploding bullets,” we find the following on the Internet:
On the evening of 27 December 1989, Eugen Maresi, 20 years old, a military draftee, was sent to organize a checkpoint on soseaua Chitilei, at the entrance to Bucharest….A group of 25 soldiers came under fire from the belltower of a church. Eugen was the first shot…. “The doctors told me my only child was shot with (gloante explosive) exploding bullets. The fragments shattered all of his internal organs,” says Dumitru Maresi, the father of the [Drobeta Turnu] Severin hero. http://2003.informatia.ro/Article42788.phtml
and
Gheorghe Nicolosu, was shot in the leg…After he was operated on, it was established that the bullet with which he was shot did not figure in [the arsenal of] the Romanian Army. Nicolosu was operated on in Hunedoara, then arrived in Italy, where he underwent another surgery…In the same area, on Lipscani, Cristea Valeria, 36 years old, was shot in the stomach by ammunition that did not belong to the army. He died a few hours later, the doctors trying to save his life, but the glontul exploziv (exploding bullet) perforated his intestines. Another youngster, 18 year old Ion Gherasim was shot in the back at the entrance to UM 01933 by munition that did not belong to the army. (Emphases added) http://www.replicahd.ro/images/replica216/special2.htm
Once again, we are speaking here of far-flung locations across the country—Chitila (Bucharest) and Hunedoara—which makes the idea of accident and “free floating weapons” unlikely.
Ammunition…Consistent with the Confessions of Former Securitate Whistleblowers
And so, who was it, who has told us about “exploding bullets” and “special cartridges” like this, and who has it been said possessed them in December 1989?
For years I have been essentially the sole researcher inside or outside the country familiar with and promoting the claims of 1) former Timisoara Securitate Directorate I officer Roland Vasilevici—who published his claims about December 1989 under the byline of Puspoki F. in the Timisoara political-cultural weekly Orizont in March 1990 and under the pseudonym “Romeo Vasiliu”—and 2) an anonymous USLA recruit who told his story to AM Press Dolj (published on the five year anniversary of the events in Romania Libera 28 December 1994…ironically (?) next to a story about how a former Securitate official attempted to interrupt a private television broadcast in which Roland Vasilevici was being interviewed in Timisoara about Libyan involvement in December 1989).
Vasilevici claimed in those March 1990 articles and in a 140 page book that followed—both the series and the book titled Pyramid of Shadows—that the USLA and Arab commandos were the “terrorists” of December 1989. What is particularly noteworthy in light of the above discussion about “exploding bullets” was his claim that the USLA and the foreign students who supplemented them “used special cartridges which upon hitting their targets caused new explosions.”[25]
The anonymous USLA recruit stated separately, but similarly:
I was in Timisoara and Bucharest in December ’89. In addition to us [USLA] draftees, recalled professionals, who wore black camouflage outfits, were dispatched. Antiterrorist troop units and these professionals received live ammunition. In Timisoara demonstrators were shot at short distances. I saw how the skulls of those who were shot would explode. I believe the masked ones, using their own special weapons, shot with exploding bullets. In January 1990, all the draftees from the USLA troops were put in detox. We had been drugged. We were discharged five months before our service was due to expire in order to lose any trace of us. Don’t publish my name. I fear for me and my parents. When we trained and practiced we were separated into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies.’ The masked ones were the ‘enemies’ who we had to find and neutralize. I believe the masked ones were the ‘terrorists’. [emphases added]
As I have pointed out, despite the short shrift given these two revelations by Romanian media and Romanianists, one group has paid close attention: the former Securitate. That is not accidental. [26]
With the advent of the Internet, unverifiable bulletin board postings also pop up. On 23 December 2003, under the name of “kodiak,” the following appeared:
In ’89 I was a major in the USLA…and I know enough things that it would be better I didn’t know…15, 16, 20, 30 years will pass and nothing will be known beyond what you need and have permission to know…” (http://www.cafeneaua.com)[27]
Clearly, the legal constraints of security oaths and fear continue to cast a long shadow, long after the events of December 1989.
Si totusi…se stie [And nevertheless…it is known]
It took over three years into my research on the Revolution—and physically being in the Library of the Romanian Academy—before I came to the realization: oh yeah, that’s a good idea, yeah, I should systematically compare what the former Securitate have to say about December 1989 and compare it with what others are saying. It took a maddening additional half year before I came to the conclusion: oh yeah, and how about what the Army has to say? It may seem ridiculous—and it is in some ways indefensible from the perspective of performing historical research—but you have to understand how Romanian émigrés dominated early investigations of the Revolution, and how they divided the post-communist Romania media into the pro-regime (untrustworthy) press and the opposition (trustworthy) press, and the influence this “research frame” and methodology had at the time upon younger researchers such as myself.[28]
A more systematic mind probably would have come to these revelations long before I did. Instead, it took the accidental, simultaneous ordering of issues from 1990 and 1991 of the vigorous anti-Iliescu regime university publication NU (Cluj), the similarly oppositional Zig-Zag (Bucharest), and the former Securitate mouthpiece Europa to discover this. There I found Radu Nicolae making his way among diametrically opposed publications, saying the same things about December 1989. And it mattered: the source for example of Radu Portocala’s claim that there were “no terrorists” in December 1989 was Radu Nicolae. But more important still, was the discovery of Angela Bacescu revising the Defense Ministry incident, exonerating the USLA, and claiming there were no Securitate terrorists in Sibiu (only victims) in Zig-Zag…only to show up months later in Romania Mare and Europa months later writing the same stuff, and in the case of the Sibiu article republishing it verbatim. Nor was Bacescu alone among the former Securitate at Zig-Zag: she was for example joined by Gheorghe Ionescu Olbojan, the first to pen revisionist articles about the Army’s DIA unit.[29]
But without a broader comparative framework and approach to the Romanian media, all of this eluded the highly partisan Romanian émigré writers on the events. Nestor Ratesh alone among this group did seem puzzled and bothered by the similarity of Romania Libera Petre Mihai Bacanu’s conclusions on the V-th Directorate and those of Bacescu (he only alluded to her dubious reputation, however, and did not name her.) But Bacanu was fallible: memorably, but also upstandingly, in December 1993, he admitted based on what he claimed were new revelations, that his previous three and a half years of exonerating the USLA had been in vain since they were erroneous: they had after all played a significant role in the repression and killing of demonstrators on the night of 21-22 December 1989 in University Square. That alone should have precipitated a rethinking about assumptions and approaches to investigating the December 1989 events and particularly the role of the Securitate and the USLA, but it did not, and has not to this day…
Romanians and Romanianists like to indulge in the reassuring myth that the “schools” of research on the Revolution were separate from the beginning—that the defining feature was the political orientation of the author and whether he or she viewed the events of December 1989 as a revolution or coup d’etat. To the extent they are willing to admit that discussions of the “terrorists” cross-pollinated and became intertwined across the borders of the political spectrum, they assume that this must have happened later, after views had become consolidated.[30] But such a view is simply ahistorical and wishful-thinking. It is simply impossible to defend honestly when you have Angela Bacescu who “showed up with lots of documents and didn’t need any money” and wrote her revisionist tracts in the oppositional Zig-Zag, when she and Olbojan were the first ones to voice theses that later became staples of the anti-Iliescu opposition—long after they had left its press.
It is indicative that Romanians still have yet to confront this methodological flaw that one of the few studies in the country to read Securitate and Army sources in addition to journalist and participant accounts, still failed to address the key similarities across the political spectrum regarding the existence and identity of the “terrorists.” Smaranda Vultur wrote in a review of Ruxandra Cesereanu’s (otherwise, groundbreaking in comparison to what had appeared before it in Romanian in book form) Decembrie ’89. Deconstructia unei revolutii (Iasi: Polirom 2004):
Beyond this, I would underscore however a deficit that results directly from the choice of the author to classify her sources based on how the source defines the events: as a revolution, a plot, or a hybrid of the two. Because of this one will thus find, contained in the same chapter, Securitate people and political analysts, revolutionaries and politicians of the old and new regimes, and journalists.[31]
In other words, my exact indictment of the approach inside and outside Romania to the study of the Revolution, and the reason why people are simply unable to acknowledge the similarity and even identicality of views of the “terrorists.”
After the aforementioned realizations in 1993-1994 about the need to be more comparative and systematic in investigating accounts of the Revolution, it took yet another two maddening years before I started to realize the significance of the ballistics evidence. It thus came comparatively late in the dissertation process. My timing was fortuitous, however. I wrote a short article in November 1996 that was published in two different forms in 22 and Sfera Politicii in December 1996—the mood in Romania was euphoric as seven years of the Iliescu regime had just come to an end through the ballot box. [32] True, it didn’t spark debate and loosen some lips as I had hoped, but it made my visit to Bucharest the following June —especially my interviews on one particular day with a journalist at Cotidianul and, several hours later, a member of the Gabrielescu Parliamentary Commission investigating the events (Adrian Popescu-Necsesti)—memorable to say the least….
Of course, not then, or even since, has anybody who has investigated the December 1989 events inside or outside Romania systematically attempted to replicate, test, or expand upon my earlier findings—other than myself. As I have noted elsewhere,[33] in Peter Siani-Davies’ otherwise excellent The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 he devotes essentially a paragraph to the ballistics’ topic in a 300 plus page book—and it is only in the context of addressing my own earlier research. Monica Ciobanu could thus not be more wrong in her declaration that Peter Siani-Davies’ 2005 volume had disproven the “myth of Securitate terrorists.”[34] Siani-Davies has nothing to say about dum-dum/vidia/exploding ammunition: hence why he does not believe in Securitate terrorists!
Since then, I have written on Securitate revisionism, “the terrorists,” and the ballistics evidence of Romanian Revolution of December 1989, in the words of one critic who seems unable to call things by their name “voluminously, although never exhaustively, elsewhere”—publishing in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.[35] Now, more than a decade after those original ballistics’ articles, I return here putting things together I should preferably have put together long before…
The high stakes of what was at play in late December 1989 become all the clearer here. Nicolae Ceausescu’s successors faced not only the dilemma of having foreign citizens arrested for firing at and killing in cold blood Romanian citizens[36], but members of a Romanian state institution—the Securitate—in addition to those foreign citizens, had injured, maimed, and killed Romanian citizens using munitions that were outlawed by international conventions to which Romania was a party. Thus, beyond the culpability of an institution that was key to the ability of the nomenklaturists who had seized power to continue in power—i.e. the Securitate—and who undoubtedly had compromising information on those leaders, the new potentates were faced with a problem of international dimensions and proportions.
Dan Badea’s April 1991 article with which I opened this paper concluded thusly:
There are in these two declarations above[–those of Gheorghe Balasa and Radu Minea–] sufficient elements for an investigation by the Police or Prosecutor’s Office. [Dan Badea, “Gloante speciale sau ce s-a mai gasit in cladirea Directiei a V-a,” Expres, 16-22 April 1991]
That, of course, never appears to have happened. I hope that the information I have supplied above—significantly, much of it new, much of it from the Internet in recent years—should at the very least encourage Romanians and Romanianists to reopen and reexamine the ballistics evidence. Let us hope that on the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, we may be able to read serious investigations of the ballistics evidence, rather than be subjected to the false and jaded refrain… such things did not exist!
[1] See, for example, Dorin Petrisor, “Procurorul Voinea, acuzat ca a lucrat prost dosarul Iliescu 13 iunie 1990,” Cotidianul, 7 December 2007, online edition. Voinea’s removal generally went unpublicized abroad—it was understandably not a proud day for his supporters. Kovesi claimed to have been taken aback by Voinea’s inexplicable, seemingly incompetent handling of the June 1990 files.
[2] General Dan Voinea, interview by Romulus Cristea, “Toti alergau dupa un inamic invizibil,” Romania Libera, 22 December 2005, online edition. Cristea’s apparent effort/belief—shared by many others—to suggest that it was only “the press of the time”—something I take to mean December 1989 and the immediate months after—that was filled with such claims and accusations is untrue. (The suggestion is to say that civilians with no knowledge of weapons and munitions repeated rumors spread out of fear and fueled by those who had seized power but needed to create an enemy to legitimize themselves and thus exploited those fears…) For examples of such claims “in the press of the time,” see the words of an employee of the Municipal Hospital (“In the room was a boy, very badly wounded by dum-dum bulletsthat had blown apart his diaphragm, his sacroiliac, and left an exit wound the size of a 5 lei coin,” Expres no. 10 (6-12 April 1990), p. 5) and the discussion of how Bogdan Stan died (“vidia bullets which explode when they hit their ‘target,’ entered into the bone marrow of his spine,” Adevarul, 13 January 1990). But such claims also appear long after the December 1989 events. Two and a half and three years after the December 1989 events, Army Colonel Ion Stoleru maintained in detail that the “terrorists” had “weapons with silencers, with scopes, for shooting at night time (in ‘infrared’), bullets with a ‘vidia’ tip [more on this and the relation to dum-dum munitions below]. Really modern weapons” and added, significantly, “The civilian and military commissions haven’t followed through in investigating this…” (see Army Colonel Ion Stoleru with Mihai Galatanu, “Din Celebra Galerie a Teroristilor,” Expres, no. 151 (22-28 December 1992), p. 4, and “Am vazut trei morti suspecti cu fata intoarsa spre caldarim,” Flacara, no. 29 (22 July 1992), p. 7.) Voinea’s steadfast denials would seem to validate Stoleru’s allegations more than a decade after he made them. Not surprisingly, but highly unfortunate, Cristea’s interview with Voinea forms the basis of conclusions about the terrorists on the Romanian-language Wikipedia webpage on the Revolution: see http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolu%C5%A3ia_rom%C3%A2n%C4%83_din_1989.
[3] Laura Toma, Toma Roman Jr. , and Roxana Ioana Ancuta, “Belis nu a vazut cadavrele Ceausestilor,” Jurnalul National,25 October 2005, http://www.jurnalul.ro/articole/34668/belis-nu-a-vazut-cadavrele-ceausestilor. “Frumos (Nice)…” as the Romanians say. Belis may not have interested himself in the ballistics evidence—but some of his employees apparently did (see IML Dr. Florin Stanescu’s comments in Ion Costin Grigore, Cucuveaua cu Pene Rosii (Bucharest: Editura Miracol, 1994), pp. 70-72). Moreover, there were exhumations. (“For a long time the Brasov Military Prosecutor didn’t do anything, even though there existed cases, declarations, documents, photos and even atypical unusual bullets brought in by the families of the deceased and wounded.” http://www.portalulrevolutiei.ro/forum/index.php?topic=1.msg214) On 14 June 1990, General Nicolae Spiroiu, future Defense Minister (1991-1994), appears to have been in the city of Brasov, assisting at the exhumation of people killed there during the December 1989 Revolution. Such a step was a rarity, and apparently followed earlier talks between Spiroiu, five other officers, and the staff of the local newspaper Opinia, who were seeking clarification over who was responsible for the deaths of their fellow citizens. “They found in particular bullets of a 5.6 mm caliber that are not in the Army’s arsenal,” wrote the journalist Romulus Nicolae of the investigation. (Romulus Nicolae, “Au ars dosarele procuraturii despre evenimente din decembrie,” Cuvintul, no. 32 (August 1991), pp. 4-5, cited in Richard Andrew Hall, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian: Prosecutor Voinea’s Campaign to Sanitize the Romanian Revolution of December 1989,” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html.)
[4] Dr. Nicolae Constantinescu, surgeon at Coltea Hospital: “I remember that on 1 or 2 January ’90 there appeared at the [Coltea] hospital a colonel from the Interior Ministry, who presented himself as Chircoias. He maintained in violent enough language that he was the chief of a department from the Directorate of State Security [ie. Securitate]. He asked that all of the extracted bullets be turned over to him. Thus were turned over to him 40 bullets of diverse forms and dimensions, as well as munition fragments. I didn’t hear anything back from Chircoias or any expert. Those who made the evidence disappear neglected the fact that there still exist x-rays and other military documents that I put at the disposition of the [Military] Prosecutor.”
[5] Tom Gallagher, Modern Romania: The End of Communism, the Failure of Democratic Reform, and the Theft of a Nation, (NY: New York University Press, 2005), p. 190.
[6] Jeremy Bransten, “Romania: The Bloody Revolution in 1989: Chaos as the Ceausescus Are Executed,” RFE/RFL, 14 December 1999 at http://www.rferl.org/specials/communism/10years/romania2.asp. This unfortunate comment aside, Brantsen’s series is an excellent journalistic introduction to the December 1989 events.
[7] Iliesiu is dead wrong. See the signed testimony to the contrary by Ion Lungu and Dumitru Refenschi dated 26 December 1989, reproduced in Ioan Itu, “Mostenirea teroristilor,” Tinerama, no. 123 (9-15 April 1993), p. 7. I translated the important parts of this document in Hall, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html. Significantly, according to this document, Dr. Belis had access to the dead terrorists:
Dead Terrorists. Although their existence is vehemently denied by all official institutions, we are able to prove that they existed and have sufficient details to identify them.…We continue with some excerpts of the declaration of Ion Lungu, head of the group of fighters who guarded the ‘Institute of Legal Medicine’ [IML, the main Bucharest morgue], beginning from the evening of 22 December 1989:
“Starting from the 23rd, there were brought, in succession, more ‘special’ corpses. They were brought only by military vehicles and were accompanied by officers. They were all dressed the same: kaki uniforms, with or without military insignia, fur-lined boots, cotton underwear. All the clothes were new. The established procedure at that point was that when the bodies were unloaded from the trucks, at the ramp to the back of the IML, to be disrobed and inspected. The documents found were released to Prosecutor Vasiliu and criminology officers. The weapons and munitions we found and surrendered—on the basis of a verbal procedure—to the officer on duty from UM 01046. Weapons and ammunition were found only on those ‘special’ corpses. Those who brought them said that they were terrorists. I turned over to this military unit five pistols (three Stecikin and two Makarov—all 9 mm caliber), two commando daggers and hundreds of 9 mm and 7.62 mm cartridges (compatible with the AKM machine gun). They were held separately from the other corpses, in a room—I believe that it used to be the coatroom—with a guard at the door.…
Access to the room with the terrorists was strictly forbidden. Only Prosecutor Vasiliu, criminologist officers, Dr. Belis, and the chief of autopsies could enter. On top of them, next to the arms, there were personal documents, passports (some blank), all types of identity cards—one of them was clearly false, it stated that the dead terrorist was the director at Laromet (at that plant no director died)—identity cards that were brand new, different service stamps in white. All had been shot by rifles (one was severed in two) and showed evidence of gunshots of large caliber. Some had tattoos (they had vultures on their chests), were young (around 30 years old), and were solidly built. I believe that their identity was known, since otherwise I can’t explain why their photographs were attached to those of unidentified corpses. They were brought to us in a single truck. In all, there were around 30 dead terrorists. [The document is signed by Ion Lungu and Dumitru Refenschi on 26 December 1989]”
[8] Once again Iliesiu is wrong. Professor Andrei Firica at the Bucharest “Emergency Hospital” apparently also was paid a visit by Colonel Chircoias (aka Ghircoias), see fn. 4. He claims that he “made a small file of the medical situations of the 15-20 suspected terrorists from [i.e. interned at] the Emergency Hospital,” but as he adds “of course, all these files disappeared.” Firica reports that a Militia colonel, whom he later saw on TV in stripes as a defendant in the Timisoara trial [i.e. Ghircoias], came to the hospital and advised him “not to bring reporters to the beds of the terrorists, because these were just terrorist suspects and I didn’t want to wake up one day on trial for having defamed someone” (!) The colonel later came and loaded the wounded terrorist suspects into a bus and off they went. (Professor Andrei Firica, interview by Florin Condurateanu, “Teroristii din Spitalul de Urgenta,” Jurnalul National, 9 March 2004, online edition.) Cited in Hall, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html.
[9] I don’t even know where to begin on this one. As I have written before, not all of those detained were terrorists, and many of the terrorists seemed to have eluded arrest, but there are so many accounts of people arrested as terrorists who legitimately fit that description that I don’t even know where to begin. See the multiple translations in Hall, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html.
[10] Sorin Iliesiu, “18 ani de la masacrul care a deturnat revoluţia anticomunistă,” 21 December 2007, found at http://www.romanialibera.com/articole/articol.php?step=articol&id=6709 (note: this is NOT the Romania Libera daily newspaper). One will find many well-known names in the West among those who signed this petition: Dragoş Paul Aligică, Matei Călinescu, Ruxandra Cesereanu, Anneli Ute Gabanyi, Tom Gallagher, Gabriel Liiceanu, Norman Manea, Nicolae Manolescu, Mircea Mihaies, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Horia-Roman Patapievici, Radu Portocală, Nestor Ratesh, Lavinia Stan, Stelian Tănase, Alin Teodorescu, and Vladimir Tismăneanu. Sorin Iliesiu, who is a filmmaker and Vice President of the “Civic Alliance” organization, has written that he was part of the “team” that “edited” the seven page chapter on the Romanian Revolution contained in the Report of the Presidential Commission to Analyze the Communist Dictatorship of Romania (PCACDR). He is not a scholar and most certainly not a scholar of the December 1989 events. A textual comparison of the Report’s chapter on the Revolution and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s chapter in a Dawisha and Parrott edited volume from 1997 is unambiguous: the introductory two paragraphs of the Report’s chapter are taken verbatim in translation from p. 414 of Tismaneanu’s 1997 chapter, and other verbatim paragraphs, sentences, and phrases from pp. 414-417 make up parts of the rest of the Report’s Revolution chapter without any reference to the 1997 chapter. As the author(s) of an earlier chapter in the Report cite(s) Tismaneanu’s 1997 chapter (see p. 376 fn. 55) correctly, this leaves really only two possible explanations for the failure of Iliesiu et. al. to cite that they have borrowed wholesale from Tismaneanu’s 1997 chapter: a) an absence of scholarly knowledge, or b) an attempt to mask their dependence upon and deference to Tismaneanu, the Chair of the Commission, since the citations that do appear are the exact citations from the 1997 chapter and claims are translated word-by-word, so much so that Iliesiu et. al. did not even bother to change verb tenses despite the passage of a decade. Iliesiu et. al. can attempt to avoid answering questions and attempt to change the subject, but the textual analysis is unambiguous: Tismaneanu’s unattributed 1997 chapter forms the bulk of the Report’s chapter on the Revolution. The only question that needs to be answered is: why and why are they unwilling to admit the textual identicality?
[11] All of this eludes Charles King in his Winter 2007 Slavic Review essay “Remembering Romanian Communism.” In his five page essay, he pauses no less than four times to mention the Revolution, despite the fact that its coverage takes up barely one percent of the PCACDR report. He relates the most banal of conclusions—“The report thus repeats the common view (at least among western academics) of the revolution as having been hijacked…”—yet misses or avoids what Iliesiu clearly seems most proud of: having inserted the claim that Nicolae Ceausescu was responsible for “only 162 deaths,” thereby insinuating Ceausescu’s successors bear responsibility for the other 942, and the claim to which such a reckoning is intimately related, namely Voinea’s that there were “no terrorists.” (It is interesting to note how Iliesiu et. al., the eternally suspicious of the state, miraculously become assiduous promoters of “official” and “state” claims once they turn out to be their own, thereby suggesting that their skepticism of the state is primarily situational rather than inherent—these are not equal opportunity skeptical and critical intellectuals.) King’s treatment of the Report is overall insufficiently informed, and as a consequence contextually-wanting and one-sided. He cites a handful of Romanian reviews of the Report, but they are almost uniformly positive accounts, almost as if supplied by the Chair of the Commission himself (see fn. 1, p. 718). He pauses to cite the former head of Radio Free Europe’s Romanian Research Division Michael Shafir’s 1985 book, yet makes no mention of Shafir’s trenchant criticisms (he gave the report a 7 out of 10 and mixed the positive with the negative) in a 1/12/07 interview in Ziua de Cluj, his extended critique “RAPORTUL TISMĂNEANU: NOTE DIN PUBLIC ŞI DIN CULISE” available in spring 2007 at http:// www.eleonardo.tk/ (no. 11), or his “Scrisoare (ultra)deschisa” in Observator Cultural no. 382 (25 July-1 August 2007) [given the timeline of scholarly publication, I am attempting to give King the benefit of the doubt here …He would certainly do well to read Shafir’s most recent discussion in Observator Cultural NR. 148 (406) 17 – 23 ianuarie 2008, “Despre clarificari nebuloase, plagiate, imposturi si careerism,” to see what a venerable critic and serious scholar was subjected to as a result of deigning to not wholeheartedly embrace the Report. Shafir’s treatment by the Report’s zealots has little to do with the liberal democratic view of the open society the Report’s authors ceaselessly profess.] Finally, had Charles King bothered to read Ciprian Siulea’s “Tentatia unui nou absolutism moral: Cu cine si de ce polemizeaza Vladimir Tismaneanu?” (Observator Cultural, nr. 379, 5-11 iulie 2007, once again conceivably within the publishing timeline) he might have refrained from parrotting the polarizing and unhelpful plebiscitary logic applied to the Report when he closed “The question is now whether the commission’s report will be used as yet another opportunity to reject history or as a way of helping Romanians learn, at last, how to own it” (p. 723). This, of course, suggests a certain infallible quality to the Report—which is far from the case—a conclusion only enhanced by King’s willingness to focus on the “hate speech” directed against the Report, but yet failing to cite and discuss any of the Romanian scholarly criticism of it.
[12] “Aghiotantii lui Ceausescu povestesc minut cu minut: O zi din viata dictatorului,” Romania Libera, 2 December 2005, online at http://www.romanialibera.ro/a5040/o-zi-din-viata-dictatorului.html. “Declaratie Subsemnatul TALPEANU ION, fiul lui Marin si Elena, nascut la 27 mai 1947 in comuna Baneasa, judetul Giurgiu, fost aghiotant prezidential cu grad de lt. col. in cadrul Directiei a V-a – Serviciul 1. Cu privire la armamentul din dotare arat ca, noi, aghiotantii aveam pistol “Makarov” cu 12 cartuse, iar sefii de grupa si ofiterii din grupa aveau pistolet “Makarov”, pistolet “Stecikin” si pistol-mitraliera AKM, cu munitie aferenta, care era cea obisnuita, in sensul ca nu aveam gloante dum-dum sau cu proprietati speciale, de provenienta straina.” (Dated 2 February 1990). His denial of dum-dum bullets is, of course, par for the course for former Securitate officers, who remember and thus “know nothing.”
[13] Quoted from http://www.tourismguide.ro/html/orase/Arad/Curtici/istoric_curtici.php. This raises an interesting point: there were foreign doctors who participated in Romania or in their home country in the surgery, treatment, and rehabilitation of those wounded. It would be interesting to hear what they remember and what they have to say regarding the munitions.
[25] Puspoki F., “Piramida Umbrelor (III),” Orizont (Timisoara), no. 11 (16 March 1990) p.4, and Roland Vasilevici, Piramida Umbrelor (Timisoara: Editura de Vest, 1991), p. 61.
[28] I refer here to, for example, the works of Vladimir Tismaneanu, Matei Calinescu, Andrei Codrescu, Anneli Ute Gabanyi, Radu Portocala, and Nestor Ratesh. Some, like Tismaneanu in a 1993 article in EEPS, “The Quasi-Revolution and its Discontents,” were more explicit about this rather rigid dichotomous approach to the Romanian media, but it also comes through clearly in the sourcing, citations, and footnotes/endnotes of the others. (It continues to haunt the historiography of post-communist Romania, as works such as Tom Gallagher’s aforementioned Modern Romania make clear). To say the least, the issue of ballistics evidence essentially goes unanalyzed in these accounts. Moreover, although as we have seen, these authors have no problem affixing their names to petitions and the like, none of them has published any research on the December 1989 events since the early 1990s. It should tell you something that they continue to rely on and repeat the accounts they wrote in 1990 and 1991…as if nothing had been discovered or written since. In that way, it is almost fitting that the Report of the PCADCR reproduced Tismaneanu’s 1997 Dawisha and Parrott chapter in some places verbatim, down to failing to even change verb tenses when it states that certain questions “remain to be clarified.” I deconstructed the methodological faults in source selection in these émigré accounts in “The Romanian Revolution as Geopolitical Parlor Game” at http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/checkmate040405.html.
[29] For earlier discussions of all of this, see Richard Andrew Hall, “The Uses of Absurdity: The Staged-War Theory of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989,” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 13, no. 3, and Richard Andrew Hall, “The Securitate Roots of a Modern Romanian Fairy Tale,” Radio Free Europe East European Perspectives, April-May 2002, three part series, available at http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/romania%20securitate%205-2002.html.
[30] In “The Romanian Revolution as Geopolitical Parlor Game,” I demonstrated how even the so-called French and German schools (really the schools of Romanian émigrés in those countries) in 1990 were not and could not be independent from accounts in Romania, and that the accounts fed into and reinforced one another. It is simply intellectual myth—and an all too convenient one—to argue the antisceptic separation of these accounts as independent.
[32] Richard Andrew Hall, trans. Adrian Bobeica, “Ce demonstreaza probele balistice dupa sapte ani?” 22, no. 51 (17-23 December 1996), p. 10, and Richard Andrew Hall, trans. Corina Ileana Pop, “Dupa 7 ani,” Sfera Politicii no. 44 (1996), pp. 61-63.
[34] Monica Ciobanu’s review of Siani-Davies The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 and Tom Gallagher’s Modern Romania: Theft of a Nation is entitled “The Myth Factory” (found at http://www.tol.cz).
[35] Charles King, “Remembering Romanian Communism,” Slavic Review, Winter 2007, p 719. In King’s short article, he does not hesitate to make occasionally gratuitous citations for things he did not need to cite. Yet in discussing December 1989 and using the term “elsewhere”—which usually prefaces a description of “where else” one might find these things—there are no citations. “Although never exhaustively” is itself a gratuitous choice of words and far from accidental: in my last work on December 1989, I made light of how ridiculous it was for Daniel Chirot to claim that Peter Siani-Davies’ The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, an otherwise excellent work, was “near definitive” when so much was missing from Siani-Davies’ discussion—notably, for our purposes here, the question of dum-dum/vidia/exploding munitions. One could indeed be left with the impression that King intends to deliver a put-down, that some fellow Romanianists will no doubt catch, but yet deny the broader audience references to what he alludes and simultaneously protect his image from having delivered such a “palma” as the Romanians would say. It would appear that at least for readers of this paper, his goals won’t go completely fulfilled.
Continuare –declaraţia inculpatului Nicu Ceauşescu
Pr.-În legătură cu cea de a doua învinuire şi anume deţinerea, fără drept sau în condiţii nelegale, a mai multor arme de foc şi a muniţiei aferente acestora, a muniţiei în general, ce aveţi de spus? Deci aţi deţinut, şi câte astfel de arme, în ce condiţii?
In.-Da.
Pr.-Ce aveţi de relatat vizavi de această învinuire ?Deci, în primul rând, ce arme aţi deţinut la locuinţele dumneavoastră?
In.-Domnule preşedinte , acuma trebuie, ţin să specific acelaşi lucru-armele nu au fost găsite la locuinţa mea din Sibiu.Nici armele, nici muniţia. Armele au fost găsite la Centrul de Dresaj-Câini.
Pr.-Da.
In.-Armele erau proprietatea tatălui meu pe care le foloseam şi eu.
Pr.-Deci, care sunt aceste arme?
In.-Poftiţi?
Pr.-Care sunt aceste arme? Să-ncepem unde le-aţi deţinut şi cu ce titlu, să ne spuneţi.
In.-Aşa. Aceste arme, deci-nu ştiu exact denumirile…
Pr.-Cele din rechizitoriu corespundeau, ca să putem să vă facilităm…
In.-Da,da,da.
Pr.-Atunci aţi posedat un pistol mitralieră,fără serie, confecţionat tip CUGIR…
In.-Da.
Pr.-de 5,6 calibru?
In.-Da.
Pr.-Unde s-a aflat acest …
In.-Acest pistol mitralieră s-a aflat o perioadă la taică-miu, o perioadă la mine, o perioadă la Şcoala de câini.
Pr.-Când anume, de ce a ajuns la Şcoala de Câini?
In.-Păi, la Şcoala de Câini a ajuns în ziua de 22, când am spus, existând pericolul…
Pr.-Deci, până în 22, unde a fost?
In.-Păi,la…depinde de când?
Pr.-Deci, de-atuncia…
In.-Bun. La Sibiu ,deci, de 2 ani de zile ca să nu mai…la mine!
Pr.-Era al dumneavoastră?
In.-Nu!
Pr.-Dar?
In.-Era al lui taică-miu, io-l foloseam. De fapt, ar…ăăă…regimul era în felul următor(puţin mai complicat),deci în fosta Direcţie 5 a fostului Departament al Securităţii Statului avea, din câte cunosc eu, toate armele înregistrate. Ea se ocupa de înregistrarea lor, deci,practic trecerea lor în registru sau în … asta de port-armă, muniţie, întreţinere, toate celelalte probleme. Am avut două discuţii, în legătură cu aceste arme, cu fostul şef al Direcţiei a 5-a ,respectiv fost general sau actual general-Marin Neagoe.
Şi l-am întrebat: toate armele sunt normale?(armele care erau în posesia mea). Mi-a spus:„Nu e nici o problemă, toate armele sunt trecute în evidenţa miliţiei şi există un permis general pe ele).
Pr.-Deci aţi auzit că există un permis general pe aceste arme?
In.-Pe fiecare, adică toate sunt trecute pă un singur permis.
Pr.-Aparţinând cui?
In.-Aşa.
Pr.-Deci există un permis ! Ce fel de permis?
In.-Un permis de arme în care sunt trecute toate armele care există în casă…
Pr.-Un permis pe numele cui? Sau pentru cine?Sau al cui?
In.-Această întrebare n-am pus-o.
Pr.-Nu vi se pare nefiresc că n-aţi pus-o?
In.-Nu!
Pr.-Şi că v-aţi mulţumit?…Da.
In.-Nu mi se … ştiţi de ce? Să vă spun foarte sincer –datorită faptului că era Departamentul Securităţii Statului.
Pr.-Acest pistol-mitralieră, de tip CUGIR, calibrul 5,6, de cât timp se află în detenţia dumnea, în deţinerea dumneavoastră?
In.-Doi ani jumate.
Pr.-„Am deţinut un pistol mitralieră-calibrul 5,6, tip Cugir, primit în urmă cu circa doi ani, de la tatăl meu…”. Pistolul SCHMIDT, unde l-aţi avut, tot la Sibiu? Pistol Schmidt?
In.-Pe care aveam permis de port-armă sau…?
Pr.-Pistolul SCHMIDT ca atare, şi pe urmă cu permisul…
In.-Păi, nu ,dar nu ştiu care este, vă rog să mă scuzaţi, da’ io nu ştiu exact, după denumire, cum arată, asta e partea mai…ăăă…
Pr.-Problema aceasta de tip de arme militare sau nu şi de mărci , nici nouă nu ne este foarte familiară, dar…
In.-În rechizitoriu spune că io-am avut permis de port –armă cu un singur pistolet.
Pr.-Câte pistoale aţi avut atunci? Câte pistoale,pistolete aţi deţinut?
In.-SCHMIDT? Păi, dacă-i aici e…tot de 2 ani de zile.
Pr.-Ca număr vă întreb.
In.-Păi, câte sunt în rechizitoriu.
Pr.-Nu, nu! Câte aţi avut dumneavoastră? Nu ştiaţi câte arme?
In.-Nu!
Pr.-„Nu pot preciza câte pistolete am deţinut…”
Dar, la Bucureşti, câte v-au fost găsite în maşină?
„…dar,la Bucuresti, au fost găsite în maşina cu care călătoream 2 pistolete,…”. Vă aparţineau acestea ?
In..-Da.
Pr.-„…care îmi aparţineau .” Câte carabine aţi avut?
In.-Două.
Pr.-Două sau trei?
In.-Două puşti de vânătoare şi două de 5,6 fiindcă şi…
Pr.-Deci două? Două cu lunetă şi două fără?
In.-Da.
Pr.-„Am mai deţinut 2 carabine cu lunetă şi 2 puşti de vânătoare”. Toate acestea la Sibiu, ce-am discutat?…
Pr.-Toate acestea la Sibiu, ce-am discutat până acuma?
In.-Da.
Pr.-„Toate acestea în locuinţa mea, din Sibiu, până la data de 22 decembrie…”
Cine a dispus să fie duse la Şcoala de Câini? Când,înainte de a pleca spre aeroport?
In.-Nu! Dimineaţa la şapte.
Pr.-„…când, dimineaţa, eu am dispus să fie transportate la Şcoala de Creştere şi Dresaj-Câini”. În locuinţa din Cosmonauţilor aţi deţinut un pistol de tip aer comprimat?
In.-Cred că da. Da!
Pr.-„Am deţinut la locuinţa din Bucureşti, strada Cosmonauţilor, un pistol de tir, cu aer comprimat, marcă germană”.
Contestaţi muniţia şi tipul de muniţie şi numărul din procesele verbale, care le-aţi văzut la dosar?
In.-Nu,păi…
Pr.-Că s-ar fi găsit la locuinţa dumneavoastră, că vă aparţineau?
In.-A, tot ce se poate! Acuma, singurul lucru, care pot să spun io , e că n-am văzut procesul verbal de percheziţie, da’, merg pe bună credinţă, înseamnă că aşa e.
Pr.-Da, atuncia ne puteţi dumneavoastră spune câte anume?
In.-Nu!Nu.
Pr.-„Am deţinut muniţie atât la locuinţa mea din Sibiu,…
In.-La Sibiu toată a fost dusă la…
Pr.-…care a fost, şi ea, transportată, la Centrul de Creştere şi Dresaj-Câini…”
La Bucureşti aţi avut muniţie? În Cosmonauţilor?
In.-Cred că da. Dacă spun c-am avut …
Pr.-„…şi cred c-am avut muniţie şi la locuinţa din Bucureşti”.
In.-Am înţeles că s-a găsit un cartuş, două cartuşe,mă rog.
Pr.- „Nu pot reda numeric şi, ca tip, muniţia deţinută , dar consider reale menţiunile din actele de la dosar”. Acestea v-au fost,în parte, date de tatăl dumneavoastră sau le-aţi primit dumneavoastră personal,sau cum? Aceste arme : carabine, puşti cu lunetă, pistoale?
In.-Da. Adică, am încercat de la început să explic un lucru. Deci nu numai astea le-aveam. Aveam la Direcţia 5-a mai multe.
Pr.-Nu. Asupra dumneavoastră şi-n locuinţele dumneavoastră?
In.-Bun!Asupra mea s-a găsit un pistol.
Pr.-Aşa.
In.-Dar…ăăă…problema care e – ei se ocupau de toate problemele astea.
Pr.-De unde aţi primit acestea despre care am vorbit?
In.-Aa, bun! O parte, de exemplu, o parte le-am primit şi eu, o parte erau de la tată-miu.
Pr.-„O parte din aceste arme le primisem de la tatăl meu , altele le primisem în mod direct.”
In.-Aşa. De exemplu, pistol…
Pr.-„Cert este că generalul Neagoe îmi comunicase că, pentru toate aceste arme există înregistrări legale , precum şi un permis general, iar eu nu am cerut alte precizări.”
Consideraţi că le deţineţi legal,practic?Consideraţi că sunteţi în deţinerea legală a acestor arme şi a acestor muniţii?
In.-Foarte greu de spus.Adică, domnule preşedinte, vă daţi seama că, în funcţia pe care o aveam io, ca să deţin permis, adică să obţin permis de port-armă şi muniţie aferentă era un lucru foarte simplu.Era, practic îl chemam pe cel de la…
Pr.-În funcţia în care…
In.-Era…
Pr.-…aţi deţinut-o, multe probleme le puteaţi rezolva foarte simplu,dar, aicea, este altă problemă.
In.-Bun, io-am…
Pr.-Tocmai în funcţia pe care o deţineaţi, eraţi dator să cunoaşteţi dispoziţiile legilor şi legislaţiei române.
In.-…am plecat de la buna…
Pr.-Vizavi de această legislaţie…
In.-Da?
Pr.-…dumneavoastră vă consideraţi un om cu studii superioare şi cu o anumită…deci, din acest punct de vedere consideraţi legală, privitor la legea română ?
In. -Am de făcut 2 precizări: nu cunosc legea din ` 71 privind regimul armelor …
Pr.-Deci nu cunoaşteţi această lege?
In.-Da.Aşa. Şi…ăăă…la momentul respectiv, consideram legal, dacă era vorba de…
Pr.-„Nu cunosc legea, actul normativ din 1971, privind regimul armelor şi muniţilor…”
In.-Da’ , acuma cunoscând, ştiu că nu-i legal.
Pr.-Şi deci, atunci, apreciaţi că sunteţi în cadrul unei deţineri legale?
In.-Nu,acuma…
Pr.-Nu acuma. Atunci ?
In.-Atuncia? Atuncia da, fiind…
Pr.-„…şi am considerat, în permanenţă, că mă aflu într-o deţinere legală a armamentului şi muniţiei, abia acum realizând că am încălcat dispoziţiile legale.”
Aţi avut,totuşi, un permis de port-armă ?
In.-Da.
Pr.-Şi la acest permis de port-armă, ce armă era trecută?
In.-Un pistol .
Pr.-Cine, de ce vi s-a dat? L-aţi solicitat dumneavoastră sau…?
In.-Nu! Era singura armă care nu provenea de la Direcţia 5.
Pr.-Da.
In.-Şi provenea direct de la Postelnicu. Şi-atuncia, când am zis , mi-au dat arma…
Pr.-Nu vi s-a părut normal că pentru acest pistol aveţi permis de port-armă, iar pentru toate celelalte-şi pe numele dumneavoastră categoric-?
In.-Dupa-ceea. Ăsta a fost şi motivul pentru care l-am întrebat pe Neagoe.
Pr.-E clar!
„Eu am primit un pistolet de la…direct de la Tudor Postelnicu şi un permis pentru acest pistolet, şi atunci l-am întrebat pe generalul Neagoe despre situaţia celorlalte arme, aflând despre ceea ce am numit un permis general”. În legătură cu aceste probleme, legate de învinuirea , în legătură cu armamentul şi muniţia mai aveţi ceva de declarat?
In.-Nu. Nu.
Pr.-În conformitate cu dispoziţiile legale, dacă aţi relatat tot ceea ce-aţi avut de relatat în legătură cu învinuirea, Instanţa vă va adresa câteva întrebări.
The Archive of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 