RED HORIZONS
Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1987
446 pp., $19.95
Red Horizons can be read on several levels:
· as the memoir of the final six months of a top communist official's life before he chose freedom in the West;
· as a broad farce, featuring the Red Queen, her consort, and her court of sycophants in a squalid burlesque of nineteenth-century middle European nobility;
· as a detailed account of the varieties of clandestine operations conducted by a small communist country against the outside world; or, most importantly,
· as a unique account of the strategic use of deception, manipulation, and disinformation as the fundamental means for the realization of state policy goals.
Those who have studied the Soviet bloc's use of covert action (called "active measures" by the KGB) have rarely succeeded in passing on to the uninitiated a full understanding of the way these techniques are used by communist regimes. Red Horizons, written by a man who ran the system, does, however, succeed where others have failed because he provides an authentic view of the whole apparatus--not just descriptions of pieces of the elephant from which deductions can be made, but the whole beast. [See related article on Romania in the Current Issues section.]
A basic policy of the Romanian communist regime for close to two decades has been to deceive the Western world about the nature of its relations with the Soviet Union. The purpose of the deception has been to further the acquisition of Western technical information, concessionary loans and grants, and favorable trade and joint venture opportunities, and to extort payoffs for Romania's ruling family from Western firms and governments. Many Western leaders have been led to believe that Romania was steering a course independent from the Soviet Union and would be encouraged by further generosity from the West. Romanian leaders and their Soviet bosses have regularly profited from Western concessions, and unless the West understands Pacepa's book well, they will continue to. Indeed, Pacepa emphasizes that an integral part of the state's covert activities was the acquisition of hard currency to be kept in secret accounts in Western banks for the use of President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. One wonders whether even that part of the loot wasn't also split with Ceausescu admirers in Moscow.
Behind the plotting, the greed, the viciousness, and the farce of Ceausescu's court, there is the sad story of an exploited people, doomed to perpetual poverty by their capricious, ignorant, and corrupt rulers. The communists' obsession with secrecy and deception, their pursuit of foreign technology in lieu of the development of their own cadre of competent scientists and engineers, and their fixation with heavy industry, grandiose projects, and state-of-the art technology instead of consumer goods have all helped to bring not only Romania, but the entire Soviet bloc to a crisis that only radical reform can resolve. In Ceausescu's Romania today,
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