COMING OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Noel Malcolm on the

secret files that haunt post-communist Rumania

Bucharest LECTURES organised by the Goethe- Institut in Bucharest do not normally hit the Rumanian headlines. But one such meeting last month filled the hall to over- flowing, and furnished the main story of all the next day's newspapers. It was a lecture by Hans-Joachim Gauck, whose `Gauck Commission' is now sifting through the files of the old East German secret police, the Stasi. Rumanian politicians, lawyers and journalists listened carefully as he explained how Germany is now trying to deal with the records of state terror in accordance with the principles of a state of law. And no one seemed to be listening more intently than a shadowy figure who had slipped into the back of the room, the head of the new Rumanian security ser- vice, Virgil Magureanu.

Mr *Magureanu knows better than any- one the truth of the old axiom that knowl- edge is power. One senior opposition politician encountered him recently in the corridors of the Senate and asked if he could see his own Securitate file. 'My dear fellow', said the intelligence chief, 'I'd be happy to release your file. But I warn you that once I start publishing the files of all the politicians, a large number of opposi- tion MPs will find that their careers come to a very sudden halt.'

To be revealed as a former Securitate agent would indeed be a career-wrecking embarrassment for a democratic politician. However, it seems to be no disqualification for the post of head of the security service in the new, democratic Rumania. Mr Magureanu, who had alweys claimed to have been a mere academic (he taught Marxist philosophy at the Stefan Gheo- rghiu Academy, the training school for the Communist Party elite), was himself a little irked when an independent magazine pub- lished documents in March this year show- ing that he had also been an officer in the Securitate. In the fierce debate which fol- lowed that revelation, the Rumanian par- liament decided in principle to make all the old Securitate files public, but left the practical details to be worked out later. Now, with the general election called for 26 July, it is clear that nothing further will be done before then, and that the new security service (modestly entitled the `Rumanian Information Service', or 'SRI') will therefore retain this fistful of trump cards throughout the crucial period of the election campaign itself.

Just how effectively those cards can be played has already been demonstrated. Two of the most prominent and respected journalists on the leading opposition news- paper, Romania Libera, have been denounced as having worked as informers for the Securitate: signed affidavits describing the work they used to do were sent out from the SRI, unprecedentedly, by special couriers to a number of newspa- per offices and Western embassies. The two journalists, Florin Gabriel Marculescu and Sorin Rosca-Stanescu, were peremp- torily sacked — a move which led to protests by their colleagues, the resigna- tion of their news editor and their own rapid re-employment on a rival opposition paper. Such is their standing with the rest of the anti-Communist press in Rumania that the damage to their own careers may turn out to have been slight. But the most important thing about this episode is not 'It doesn't look as though we're going to get a wretched seat.' its consequences for their careers, but its effect on opposition politicians and jour- nalists in general, who must now be mutter- ing to themselves, 'There but for the grace of Magureanu go I.'

Of the two case-histories, Marculescu's is the more commonplace. Before the revolu- tion he worked as a lawyer in a government office which dealt with fishing rights and the law of the sea. This brought him into contact with foreigners, on whom, it is now stated, he wrote reports for the Securitate. Few Rumanians are shocked by this revela- tion, since it was in any case obligatory for conversations with foreigners to be report- ed to the police. 'He wasn't a spy or an agent,' one of his colleagues told me. 'It was just part of his job, like doing the accounts.'

Rosca-Stanescu's case, on the other hand, is unusual. The section of the Securi- tate he reported to was the 'anti-terrorist' branch: for several years, starting in the mid-1970s, he submitted reports on Middle Eastern students (mainly Palestinians, who were studying in Rumania. Today, he even insists that he went to the Securitate volun- tarily after his first encounter with a stu- dent who confided in him that he was in fact a guerrilla with the Al Fatah move- ment. Some Rumanian journalists are pri- vately sceptical about this story, wondering why a professional guerrilla should have confided such a thing to a complete stranger, and pointing out that Palestinian guerrillas were receiving secret assistance from Ceausescu anyway. But since Rosca-

Stanescu has now started a legal action against the SRI to have his Securitate file

published in full, it is hard to believe that he is making all this up. 'I am not a kamikaze', he told me. 'I have nothing on my conscience. I would never have written the articles I have published over the last few months if I had thought there was any- thing on my file that could be used to destroy me.'

Rosca-Stanescu could hardly have done more to bring down the wrath of the old - and new — Securitate upon himself. He is one of the organisers of the new indepen- dent 'Association of Rumanian Journal- ists'. He is also the spokesman (and reputedly, though he will neither confirm nor deny it, the head) of a clandestine organisation called 'Patriot', which aims to

expose the activities of the old Securitate in the new SRI. As if that were not enough,

he has also published a stream of articles during the course of this year, not only attacking Magureanu, but also investigating prominent Rumanians abroad — such as the former defence minister, General Stan- culescu, whom he accused of involvement in the activities of a Securitate-run trading company specialising in arms dealing. With so many black marks against Rosca-Stanescu's name, there can be no shortage of reasons for the SRI's decision to expose him. Normally one would stop the story at this point and look no further for explanations. But Rumania is not, alas, a normal sort of place. Rosca-Stanescu himself believes that the decision to reveal his own past history was taken not because of any of his attacks on the SRI, but because of one article in particular in which he `exposed' an employee of the BBC Rumanian service in London, Nico- lae Stoian, as a long-term Securitate agent. This is Rumania's version of Russian dolls: every strange story has an even stranger story nestling inside it. And few stories could beat Nicolae Stoian's for sheer bizarrerie.

In 1977, having spent several years in the West as a political refugee and broadcast- er, Stoian returned to Bucharest and began giving courses in Transcendental Meditation. According to Rosca-Stanescu, he was received with open arms by Elena Ceausescu and was given an office, for the next four years, at the Institute of Psychol- ogy. Many independent-minded intellectu- als joined his courses, for which they had to fill in forms with their names and per- sonal details. In early 1982, using these records, the Securitate made a clean sweep of all the participants, removing many from their posts and charging some with subversion. Stoian meanwhile had been allowed to leave the country; he returned to England and rejoined the BBC, where he still works. Rosca-Stanescu argued (as have some of those who lost their jobs and still feel bitter about the whole episode) that it was all an elaborate Securitate plot to round up potential dissi- dents.

It certainly sounds like one; but that may be because Rosca-Stanescu has mis- represented some of the details. Stoian did not go back and live in Rumania for four years, which would indeed have been an unheard-of thing for a refugee to do. He had a French passport, and merely visited Rumania on tourist visas during that peri- od. Nor did he have a permanent office at the Institute of Psychology: it was just one of several institutes where people arranged for him to use a room for his evening classes. Nor, he insists, did he ever have any dealings with Elena Ceausescu; he thinks this rumour probably grew up because the national Centre for Science and Technology, of which she was the offi- cial head, took an interest in his work. As for the personal notes on the participants, these just gave names and the reasons why each person had joined the course (e.g. for the cure of insomnia or stress): standard enrolment procedure, he says, on Tran- scendental Meditation courses anywhere.

Stoian himself had been introduced to TM by his French wife, and had become so absorbed in it that he had qualified as a teacher of the method. When the move- ment's Swiss headquarters received a request for information from someone inside Rumania, they asked Stoian to go there because he was the only teacher they had who spoke Rumanian. 'No doubt I was followed everywhere,' he now says, `Would it help if someone wrote a book about us?' `and no doubt they sent informers to my courses to report on what I said. But I was trying all the time to get the courses offi- cially recognised: I wasn't trying to hide anything from the authorities. I deposited an official request at the state registry office, and was once asked to give a demonstration to some people in the Min- istry of Education.' People from several ministries and departments showed an interest in his methods, which claimed to improve people's mental abilities in various ways. But, says Stoian, `I came up against a sort of bureaucratic fog. I could never find anyone senior enough who was willing to take responsibility for making the whole thing official.'

That remark about the bureaucratic fog rings true. And, bizarre though the story sounds, we should remember that no coun- tries took more official interest in such matters than the heartlands of `scientific socialism'. In Bulgaria President Zhivkov's daughter, Ludmilla, was engaged in research into paranormal powers, and so was an institute in Moscow. Inside Ruma- nia, details are only now emerging of strange experiments conducted for the Securitate on prisoners, who were subject- ed to long-term hypnosis. It is quite possi- ble that TM, which claimed at its highest levels to endow people with thought-read- ing powers, appealed to different elements in the Communist power-structure for dif- ferent reasons — some of them very sinis- ter. But in the end they decided that the best use they could make of it was to take the opportunity it gave them to round up two or three hundred Bucharest intellectu- als. That they let Stoian leave the country before they seized his list of names from his parents' flat is not necessarily a sign of his complicity: they may have thought it would just be an embarrassment to have him wittering on in court about higher lev- els of consciousness when they were trying to accuse his pupils of subversion.

The whole story is indeed strange; but then so too was Rosca-Stanescu's story about being approached by a Palestinian guerrilla at a mountain resort in the Carpathians. When Rosca-Stanescu's arti- cle about Nicolae Stoian appeared in Romania Libera, Stoian sent a detailed reply, which Romania Libera failed to pub- lish. Stoian now plans to sue the paper. If that action goes ahead, Rosca-Stanescu may find himself spending half his time in

one court, pursuing his own demand that the Securitate publish the details of the work he did for them, and the other half in another court, trying to counter Stoian's denial that he did any work for the Securi- tate. But those cases will merely be two of the most colourful examples of the whole destructive process of recriminatory selflac- eration which is going to consume Ruma- nia before long, unless the hundreds of thousands of old personal files can be taken out of the hands of the security ser- vice and placed under proper legal control.