Targeted as a Spy: Surveillance of an American Diplomat in Communist Romania

By Ernest H. Latham Jr.

This book is a collection of surveillance reports that Dr. Latham obtained from the Romanian archives following the collapse of the Communist regime. They reveal the extent of the surveillance to which Western diplomats were subjected and, more importantly, they reveal a great deal about the system and society that conducted it.Latham' s introduction provides the context of his work and Romanian conditions at that time. This book is essential reading for students of the Cold War as well as anyone interested in the mindset and methods of totalitarian regimes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vita Histria
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781592112562

Book preview

Introduction

This book has its origins long after the December 1989 Revolution in Romania. It was only after much debate and discussion that the Romanian Government finally decided to release the files of the secret police, the despised and feared Securitate. I was delighted to learn that I could join the considerable line waiting to see the files and ultimately satisfy a two-decade curiosity as to what that shadowy presence in my life had really intended and what they really thought about me and my activities. As the Scottish poet Bobby Burns had written in his poem To a Louse: O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us! This was my opportunity, a rare one in life, to see myself and learn from an uncensored and unabridged text exactly what some observant and presumably intelligent as well as hostile people saw when they looked at me.

When after a long wait I was told my file was available, as quickly as possible I went to the C.N.S.A.S. headquarters, paid the modest fee and looked forward to the pleasure of soon having some of my long-standing questions answered. What I had not expected was the elephantine size of the file I would have to wade through in pursuit of those answers. In all it came to five volumes, around 2500 documents and, as many were written on both sides of the paper, well over 3000 pages. Obviously, it would require time and a concentrated effort to make a coherent whole out of such a mass of miscellaneous reports, and I procrastinated about making such a focused effort.

A solution to my procrastination came at a meeting with the Romanian diplomat and historian, Dr. Vadim Guzun, in May of 2017. We had first met around 2011 when he published a collection of documents from the Romanian diplomatic archives, Foametea, piatiletka și ferma colectivă, 1926-1936, and I had reviewed it favorably in Holodomor Studies (Vol. 3, Nos. 1-2). In the years since, we have stayed in touch and he has continued to collect and publish important documents from Central and Eastern Europe in the fields of diplomacy, intelligence, and secret police activities. On one occasion, I happened to mention my unutilized Securitate file, and he asked me if he could see it. That evening I sent him an e-mail with the first of the five volumes. Shortly thereafter he got back in touch saying, I think we may have a book here. Thus encouraged, I e-mailed the other volumes and, pressured by my imminent departure for Washington, I set up an immediate meeting to discuss the project. Initially we agreed to jointly edit the prospective book.

On second thought, I reneged on such an arrangement. Upon further reflection, I decided that Dr. Guzun had far more experience in such documents than I had. He would inevitably have to be the upper hand in our project. Furthermore, I feared if my name appeared as co-editor on the title page, it would imply I had had an equal role in determining which documents to include and exclude. There would always be a suspicion that the selection reflected my personal wishes, and in the end it would detract from the scholarly worth of the finished project.

The one exception to this resolution is the document #55, which already appeared in the Romanian edition and I expressly asked to be included in this English edition. It is a report by some Securitate source Stan on June 27, 1987, towards the end of my tour in Romania. Stan is reporting on a conversation with my driver of four years, Ionel Ripeanu. According to Stan, Ripeanu reported to him that I had been C.I.A. chief for all N.A.T.O. troops in Europe and his appointment to Romania was a sort of vacation. Even assuming that such a position exists in the CIA, which I doubt, it most assuredly would not have been in neutral Vienna, Austria, or in the American Sector of Berlin, miles behind the Iron Curtain, the only posts in Western Europe that I had held before that time. Furthermore, Ripeanu had been my driver over the previous four years. He would have seen the work I had been doing from early in the morning to late at night, frequently reaching into weekends. He knew very well that this was no vacation by any common definition of the word. Assuming that Stan was not making up completely a conversation with Ripeanu, one wonders what Ripeanu thought he was doing with such foolish claims. Was he simply pulling Stan’s leg, or was he enhancing his own importance as the driver and associate of such an important and dangerous person? I wanted the document included because it well illustrates in a concentrated form just how silly and speculative as such files are.

The formula we finally settled on was that I would write an introduction providing background on myself, my career, my activities in Romania, and my feelings about the files at that time and since. The result is the introduction that you are now reading.

Romania played only a limited role in my youth. I was an avid stamp collector, and I suppose there must have been some Romanian stamps in my collection. I’m sure I could have found Romania on a Mercator projection map. For the rest, Romania was another of the states of Central and Eastern Europe that had fallen under the control of the Soviet Union that were collectively known as the Soviet satellites. It was one of those countries united under a communist tyranny, bound together by the Warsaw Pact, the economic ambitions of COMECON, and a rigid hostility to the Western democracies and the freedoms we believed we represented. That was my impression, reinforced by the Berlin Blockade and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, not to mention my four years in uniform as a naval officer in the United States Coast Guard and continuous service thereafter in the reserves.

I joined the American Foreign Service in 1966, serving initially as an Arabist in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. When a number of Arab League countries broke diplomatic relations with the United States in the wake of the June War of 1967, there were few positions left for the junior officers. My record indicated that I spoke German, and I was posted to Vienna in support of the SALT I talks, jokingly remembered as the salt that did not lose its savor. Thus, I restarted my career as a Cold Warrior. From Vienna, I was sent back to Washington for Greek language training in preparation for an assignment in public diplomacy and later as the supervisory political officer at the American Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus.

It is in Nicosia that my involvement with Romania really begins. It was there in the lobby of the American Embassy, sometime in the mid-1970s, that I picked up by chance off a coffee table a magazine with a photo essay on the painted churches of Bucovina. I was fascinated by the subject. Having been raised in a mill town on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts with a large Greek immigrant population served by three Greek Orthodox churches and currently living in Cyprus, I was familiar with the Orthodox tradition of mural painting inside churches. These paintings, however, were on the outside of the churches, more naïve in their execution, and certainly more dramatic in their subject matter, for example the Last Judgment with some souls ascending into Heaven and others being pitch-forked down into Hell or set piece battles before the walls of Constantinople. I resolved then and there I would someday see for myself these marvelous churches, an unlikely resolve for an American diplomat in the midst of the Cold War.

In 1977, in keeping with my newly minted persona as a Cold Warrior, I was posted to the American Military Government in the American Sector of Berlin. The following year I met an American teacher there, and we were married in the summer of 1979. My wife had been living in Europe for several years, and I had been in and out of most European countries. In short, if we wanted to have our honeymoon in a European place completely new for both of us, there were only two possible countries, Albania and Romania. As Enver Hoxha’s Albania was completely out of the question for an American diplomat, even if I could have gotten a visa as I most assuredly could not have. That left Romania, and thus it was in October of that year we flew out of Schoenefeld Flughafen in East Berlin to Otopeni Airport in Bucharest. The centerpiece of the next two weeks was a flight to Suceava, where we rented a car and visited the long awaited, much anticipated painted churches. Their vivid colors and painstaking designs captivated me, and their impact has not diminished after many subsequent visits. They will always be one of the few things in my life that truly exceeded my expectations.

From Berlin, I was posted back to Washington, and I was working as Special Assistant to the director of the United States Information Agency in the fall of 1982 when the position of cultural attaché in our embassy in Bucharest suddenly and unexpectedly became vacant. I was asked if I would allow my name to go forward for the assignment. Without hesitation, I said yes, and shortly thereafter I was in Romanian language training. My wife did not share my Romanian enthusiasms and shortly before we were due to depart in the summer of 1983, she filed for divorce.

This put the United States Government in something of a quandary; for obvious reasons it was the policy not to send single officers to communist countries. Perhaps because of the length of time the position had been vacant or the amount of money invested in my training or the fact that I was now a single parent with a three-year-old daughter in tow or the difficulty in finding on short notice an officer willing and able to go to Romania or perhaps some combination of all four reasons, an exception to the policy was made in my case. So it was late in the summer of 1983 that my daughter, Charlotte, and I headed for Bucharest.

Few readers of these words will need to be informed about the conditions in Romania in the 1980s. No country in the world can be totally independent with an autarchic economy. In the 1980s, it was Romania’s tragic fate to be one of these otherwise blessed lands. Threatened by pressing international debts and encouraged to strive for autarky, the country under the leadership of the Ceaușescus embarked on a mad scheme to import a minimum of goods and export anything that could be sold. By the time we arrived, this misconceived policy had completely dislocated the country’s economy and forced the consuming public to its knees. No one who lived in this economic nightmare will ever forget the rationing, the long lines of patient, hungry citizens waiting for basic foodstuffs that were often sold out before their turn came around. The energy crisis resulted in long lines of cars at filling stations. Apartments and public buildings went largely unheated. I recall attending a concert at the Atheneul Român one winter evening where the musicians in the string section were all wearing gloves with the fingers cut out. The dark, dimly lit streets made night driving a hazardous enterprise. As gas was even more irregular than electricity, the embassy outfitted our houses with all manner of space heaters and microwave ovens. I remember preparing for a sit-down dinner party when the gas turned off half an hour before the first guest arrived and my struggling to concoct some dinner for twelve that could be cooked in a microwave oven.

Of course, our privileged diplomatic position allowed us to draw down on military stores from the American forces in Germany, and regularly every two months a U. S. Air Force C-54 landed at Otopeni with American foodstuffs: meat and fresh fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, Romania was a greater hardship post with additional allowances and vacation time out of the country. It was a short assignment, just two years, but even so Washington had trouble staffing the post. Not a few assigned there found reasons to request a curtailment. One American secretary arrived on a Friday evening after business hours, took a look around that weekend and reported for duty the following Monday morning with a message in hand for Washington requesting curtailment.

The thought of curtailment never entered my mind for several reasons. Perhaps first it was because Romania seemed to be the purpose of my professional life which directly and indirectly had been focused on the rivalry between the West and the communist world. My years as a naval officer two decades before, the eighteen years in the reserves, the subsequent years in diplomacy as an American Foreign Service Officer had all been affected by Soviet communism. Now at last I was in the belly of the beast. I was convinced or perhaps I had convinced myself that what I did was important; and if I did it well, I could make a real difference in events and some people’s lives, a rare reward in a bureaucracy as vast as the United States Government. Whether there was scrap of truth in all this, or it was totally delusional, others not I will determine. There was as well the exhilaration of trying to outwit the Securitate, which seemed determined to minimize any American influence or impact on Romania or indeed any American contact at all with the Romanian people. Thus it was that no thought of curtailment ever occurred to me, and at the end of the stipulated two years I extended for an additional year, and at the end of the third year I extended for a virtually unheard of fourth. Sometime later I tried to use the four years as leverage only to be curtly informed, I don’t think you understand, Dr. Latham, how this is viewed in Washington: three years a hero, four years a lunatic.

A few words about the American Embassy in Bucharest in the mid 1980s may be useful to set my file into its contemporary context. The United States, a leading member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Romanian Socialist Republic, a member, however reluctant and uncooperative, in the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) were in opposing military alliances. The American president during my time in the embassy was Ronald Reagan, a conservative, somewhat populist Republican with little sympathy for communists or communism. The president of Romania was Nicolae Ceaușescu, also General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party. His precise ideology was difficult to discern; it was generally described as a mixture of Romanian nationalism and Stalinist communism. Some pundits styled it national communism. His administration depended heavily on members of his own extended family and individuals from the region of his birth, Oltenia. Prominently among his associates in the administration was his wife, Elena, who sat on the Central Committee, among other honors. Their precise relationship remains shadowy. It appears that they had divided up responsibilities by topic: his primary responsibilities appeared to be national defense, foreign affairs, and most aspects of the economy; hers were apparently personnel in general, especially party cadre, professional assignments, education and culture broadly defined. These last two portfolios touched directly on my work as a cultural attaché.

The bilateral relationship was more complicated than a simple dichotomy would imply. To the degree that Romanian nationalism urged independence from the lockstep, pro-Soviet military posture of the Warsaw Pact and from the preconceived economic development planning of COMECON, the United States heartily cheered the Romanians on. Furthermore, we were prepared to reward this behavior with high level visits, flattering press releases and the more substantive trade benefits of MFN (Most Favored Nation), an agreement signed in 1975, which allowed Romanian goods to enter the United States at the same rates as were granted to our most favored trading partners. The attractions of the MFN considerably withered over time as the American Congress began to condition renewal of the MFN status on Romanian respect for human rights. The Congressional hearings focused on Romanian emigration, largely ethnic Germans wishing to go to the Federal Republic and Jews seeking to leave for Israel, Western Europe and North America. No less at issue was religious freedom, the importation of Bibles and Protestant religious life free from harassment by Romanian authorities. In time, the Congressional hearings accompanying MFN renewal became such an onerous embarrassment to the regime that Ceaușescu voluntarily renounced the MFN relationship in 1988.

I served under two ambassadors during the four years I was assigned to Bucharest. The first was David Funderburk (b. 1944), an academic and a political appointee with close ties to conservative Republican circles in North Carolina, especially Senator Jesse Helms. When President Reagan appointed Funderburk ambassador to Bucharest at age 37, he was one of the youngest ambassadors in modern American diplomatic history. He was also one of the most qualified. He had studied European history since his undergraduate years. As he progressed through graduate studies, his interests increasingly settled on Romanian diplomatic history. He studied the Romanian language while still in the United States and in 1971-1972 did research in Romania as a Fulbright scholar. He received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of South Carolina. His dissertation title was British Policy towards Romania, 1938-40. Both he and his wife, Betty, who had accompanied him in 1971 to Romania, spoke fluent Romanian. His term as ambassador began October 13, 1981, and terminated on May 13, 1985.

The second ambassador, Roger Kirk (b. 1930), came with an entirely different background. He was a career Foreign Service Officer. He had served under both Republican and Democratic administrations; if he had any partisan political feelings, I never saw or heard of them. He inherited a tradition of national service. His father was Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk (1888-1963), a career naval officer, (U.S.N.A – Annapolis 1909). He was the American naval attaché in London in 1939 to 1941 when he was appointed Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the Second World War he was the senior American naval officer in theater planning the amphibious landings in Sicily, Italy and at Normandy on D-Day. After the war he retired and began a diplomatic career as ambassador to Belgium (1946-9), the Soviet Union (1949-51) and Taiwan (1962-63). After completing his military obligation as an Air Force officer, Roger Kirk entered the Foreign Service as a career diplomat. He was ambassador to Somalia (1973-5) and Deputy U.S. Representative at IAEA (1978-83). He presented his credentials in Romania on November 29, 1985; he terminated in that position on July 5, 1989.

A few words about my own position in the embassy may be useful. Contrary to my file and the firm belief of the Securitate officers who contributed to it, I was not and have never been an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other intelligence organizations; throughout my four years in our Bucharest embassy I was the cultural attaché and as such an employee of the United States Information Agency (USIA). The only exceptions to that were during the Funderburk years when he intermittently appointed me Acting Deputy Chief of Mission. As cultural attaché, I relied on the Department of State and the ambassador for policy guidance and the general context within which I worked, but for resources and a career trajectory I was beholden to the United States Information Agency (USIA). It was known overseas as the United States Information Service (USIS), as the translation of agency has pejorative connotations in many languages. USIA was founded in 1953 by President Eisenhower "to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the