Ion Mihai Pacepa returns to sell more snake oil to gullible Western journalists.

There is no faster way to get my undivided attention than to whisper sweet nothings about Cold War myths into my ear. Consider me captive. And don't expect me to be ashamed of the shiver which bolted down my spine when I read the first paragraph Lauren St. John's delicious piece on the Transylvanian sex schools. Alas, the shame came later. For in postcommunist history, rapture comes rarely.

St. John opens the book to the forests and mountains of Transylvania, where she locates a myth from the cold war era:

This, some say, was the location of an extraordinary “sex school”, one in which the most beautiful and handsome of cold-war spies were trained in lovemaking before being sent forth to seduce and inveigle secrets from western diplomats and agents. In the mid-1960s, one American author claimed he’d been taken to one such school, housed in a former royal hunting lodge outside Brasov. He alleged that it had a curriculum of sex studies run by the Romanians and that at least three of its young students were jaw-droppingly beautiful.....Four decades on, the myth of an intelligence school for government whores is still deeply ingrained in the Romanian psyche. So is there any truth in it?

So far, so good. Unfortunately, after speaking with a few dismissive Romanians, St. John decides to seek the truth from one of the most notorious Romanian defectors of the Cold War-- Ion Mihai Pacepa. St. John displays her Western vulnerabilities when she admits:

I was told that one of the few people alive who might be able to confirm if such a school ever existed was Lt-Gen Pacepa, the former deputy chief of Romania’s espionage service. Now living in the US, where he is one of the country’s leading authorities on cold-war spies, he resides under cover so deep that, despite two Ceausescu-imposed death sentences and a $4m bounty on his head — $2m from the Romanian state, $1m from Yasser Arafat and $1m from the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi, who sent Carlos the Jackal after him — he has never been found, officially. But thanks to the internet I reached him in days. He dismissed the idea of the “school” as pure fantasy, but in a letter confirming Romania had, nevertheless, employed prostitutes as spies, five words stood out: “You are onto something real.”

Ah yes, Pacepa. Everyone's favorite sell-out, "dissident", truth-teller, expose-writer, scum-dwelling ex-Secret Police-man. Suddenly St. John's article rankles. Who is this man, Ion Pacepa, that provokes my skepticism? I'll start with the facts and end with my opinion. Pacepa was the former head of the DIE (Departamentul de Informatii Externe), Romania’s foreign intelligence service. In other words, he was a top Communist whose skills at deception, propaganda, and counterintelligence led him to the top post in Ceausescu's socialist paradise. St. John, like many Western Newsweek intellectuals, buys into Pacepa's latest incarnation as anti-communist hero when she writes nonsense like this:

He helped trigger — with his 1987 defection and autobiographical book Red Horizons — the revolution that destroyed one of the cruellest, most corrupt dictatorships of modern times; Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were sentenced to death in 1989 largely on the basis of the evidence it contained.

Did Pacepa provide St. John with this extraordinary piece of information which crowns him as king of the Romanian revolution from his cush home in the United States? As a matter of fact, he did. St John proudly announces Pacepa's exclusive participation in an interview with The Sunday Times.

In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times, Pacepa, who ran the DIE from 1968 to 1978, revealed that, while all communist countries, including Russia and East Germany, used prostitutes, both male and female, as spies, “my DIE excelled at it”. But there wasn’t any school. “All training was individual and was done in special safe houses that were studded with hidden microphones and video cameras. But these were no ordinary agents. They were, for the most part, “illegals”, recruited for their very particular skill sets and attributes, the most important of which was their genitalia. The highly classified PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye — KGB foreign intelligence) manual for illegal operations puts it this way: “A regular foreign-intelligence officer has an official position, a diplomatic passport and a country behind him; an illegal officer acts under a foreign flag and has only his penis — that’s his cover, his source of information, his immunity.”

My excitement, by now, assumes the character of a haunting. St John proudly reports the dirty details from the trenches:

Having, as Pacepa calls it, a “king-size penis” was still the rule for male Soviet-bloc illegal officers from 1972 to 1978, when he ran the ultra-secret DIE component dealing with this category of spy. “These lady-killers were supposed to exploit their unusual sexual endowment [and outstanding academic or technical credentials] to achieve social status, usually by marrying wealthy or influential women,” he says. Hence the PGU manual’s dictum that an illegal’s penis is “his cover, his source of information, his immunity”. It was up to the agent to use his sexual and technical prowess, as well as his wits, to gain all those things. 

St. John leads Pacepa away from large penises and back to the Transylvanian sex schools, but Pacepa cannot be distracted from the "big" picture:

In Romania, the training of these “sexy” illegals took three to eight years and was done not in a Transylvanian school but in 150 safe houses where trainee agents were kept under round-the-clock control. Many of these safe houses were ordinary flats, moved from time to time to avoid suspicion. There, illegal agents perfected the language of their target country, learnt appropriate skills, such as tennis and bridge, and were taught how to infiltrate western scientific and industrial targets.

Despite the high priority given by the DIE to recruiting illegals with huge penises, Pacepa says only one seduction operation was used externally by his organisation, and that was a honeytrap involving a female Stasi agent, also used by the DIE. In May 1958, he was at a meeting in East Berlin with Markus Wolf, the famed chief of the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence service, when Wolf heard that a Moscow-trained DIE illegal, Gheorghe Mandache, who’d been moved to the city to perfect his German, had vanished with his East German girlfriend. It took over a year to find them; they were living under new identities in Düsseldorf, West Germany. The PGU wanted Mandache killed to discourage other illegals from defecting, and decided that “Gerda”, a German-born Romanian spy, would seduce him.

Pacepa is pitiful enough to ignore, but powerful enough to require refutation. I'll let him speak for himself again, this time, on the Kennedy assasination:

Gerda was one of a number of agents who Pacepa claims underwent cosmetic surgery on their genitals by specialist PGU surgeons. This surgery was most commonly practised on “wives” — women illegals whose role came into being in the 1950s and early ’60s, when the DIE’s Soviet advisers insisted they provide Romanian “wives” to as many western agents as possible in order to keep them “tied” to the DIE for ever. Under PGU guidelines, a “wife” had to have a “tight sex orifice, so that she could squeeze her lover’s penis like a vice,” alleges Pacepa. “PGU doctors specialised in mould-ing the sex orifice according to the particularity of each case,” he explained. It was crucial that the “wife” was sexually experienced. “Each candidate was secretly filmed making love; those selected were helped to perfect their sexual technique by illegal officers who could no longer be sent abroad.” In Programmed to Kill, Pacepa builds a convincing case that Marina Oswald, the wife of Kennedy’s assassin, was a KGB “wife” created specially for Lee Harvey, a loner who was unlikely to have had the social skills necessary to marry a Russian woman in the brief time he courted her.

St. John ends on an ominous note:

Unfortunately, if Pacepa is to be believed, the devastation suffered by victims of Romeo and Juliet agents, and the activities of illegal officers in general, did not end with the cold war, and we may still be at risk even now. This assertion was proven by the 2006 arrest in Montreal of the Russian spy known as Paul William Hampel, who confessed to being an officer of the SVR (the PGU’s successor). “The concept of the illegal officer was and still is unique to Russian intelligence,” says Pacepa. “It is Russia’s most secret weapon of the future.”

Apparently, there are still Russians with large penises that might pose a threat to our freedom. Call me crazy but I am more concerned about the threats posed by Pacepa's continuous media disinformation campaigns than by sex as usual. What better way to distract interested parties from a true investigation of Cold War myths than sordid blatherings about penis size?

Pacepa has demonstrated his talent for exaggeration and embellishment before. As a strong supporter of the Iraq war and Bush-style big government conservatism (which shares some principles with Ceausescu's national socialism), Pacepa penned a piece for the gullible gentlemen at the National Review arguing that international opposition to the war in Iraq was actually a communist plot originating in Moscow. When Pacepa's attempt to initiate a Red Scare failed, he decided it might be better to make Moscow a part of the international terrorist threat. So Pacepa published an article agruing that Moscow had moved Saddam's WMD. Of course, when St. John asked Pacepa about the Transylvanian sex schools, he could be counted on to provide the most lurid, exciting, and conspiratorial account.

I am disappointed in St. John's reluctance to research Pacepa's past and provide a genuine reportage of the Transylvanian sex school myth. Responsible journalists wishing to revisit history should never offer their sources an open podium without first checking to see if they preached snake-oil in the past. Rather than getting anti-communist Romanian emigres like myself aroused by the possibility of an honest report on historical myth, St. John gives the microphone to the Master snake-charmer/myth-maker and elevates him to the status of a prophet.

Of possible further interest:

• "Am tradat Romania in anii cand am servit Securitatea", Pacepa's interview with Ziua in 2006.
• Ovidiu Jur's wonderful website chronicling the history of Ceausescu in documents and images.
  
• "CIA dezumfla mitul Pacepa si il trimite la consult...", a fascinating post at Frauda si Vot Illegal in Senat.
  

[Cross-posted at totalitarianism today.]