TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/01080011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4.0 KB | 81 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

Vicious Keepers of the Faith


    "They are like cockroaches -- ugly, numerous, been around
a long time and hard to kill," said a U.S. analyst in
Washington last week. "They" are the Securitate, the Ceausescu
dictatorship's ever present and dreaded security apparatus,
whose members fought savagely for several days to keep the
tyrant in power. Among the most vicious of such outfits in the
history of the communist world, the Securitate was established
in 1945, partly as a counterbalance to the regular military,
and later, under Ceausescu, competing with it for funds. Its
estimated 180,000 troops regarded themselves as being part of
an elite unit; they were never saddled with the manual chores
-- constructing bridges and the like -- routinely assigned to
soldiers, and they were equipped with the latest in weaponry
even as the 180,000-member, mainly conscripted armed forces
suffered budget cutbacks. Securitate members were indoctrinated
to equate Ceausescu's well-being with their own and were
rewarded with lavish perks. Even after the revolutionary
government last week threatened to execute Securitate members
found at large, many remained defiant. The few who surrendered
were imprisoned, to await trial by the new government.

    According to Ion Pacepa, a Rumanian lieutenant general who
defected to the U.S. in 1978, the Securitate under Ceausescu
had various functions. One was to serve as a kind of Praetorian
Guard for members of the Communist Party's Central Committee
and specifically the Ceausescu family. Many of the 75,000 or
so troops were recruited from orphanages and raised to regard
their job with a loyalty bordering on fanaticism. Other
uniformed crack troops, equipped with armored vehicles and
helicopter gunships, were assigned to supervise the country's
border patrol and guard the political prisons. A particularly
brutish department known as Service K specialized in torturing
political prisoners. Apart from these overt operations, as many
as 3 million informants and collaborators -- in a population
of 23 million -- clandestinely monitored mail and telephone
conversations, analyzed handwriting samples to track down the
sources of dissident material, tailed foreigners and spied on
citizens in every apartment block, village and factory. Their
ubiquitous presence helps explain the deep vein of distrust and
suspicion pervading Rumanian society. The Securitate further
functioned as the national intelligence service.

    When the revolt erupted, many Securitate members slipped
into an elaborate network of tunnels, whose existence was a
well-guarded secret. The underground passageways link security
headquarters, Communist Party headquarters, the presidential
palace in central Bucharest and other key government buildings.
The tunnels made it possible for Securitate members to escape
the initial onslaught by soldiers and armed civilians and then
regroup to attack the revolutionary forces. Securitate assaults
in Bucharest and elsewhere in the country were carried out with
arms and ammunition stored in caches secretly assembled outside
the force's official camps.

    One of the Securitate's more unusual duties was to provide
down- to-the-skin security for Ceausescu. According to Pacepa,
after hearing Cuba's Fidel Castro claim that the CIA had once
tried to poison him by treating his shoes with a toxic
substance, Ceausescu developed a phobia about becoming the
victim of such a scheme and began wearing brand-new garments
every day. At one time, says Pacepa, the Securitate kept a
year's worth of suits, socks and shoes stored in a special
warehouse; one of each, presumably after careful inspection, was
delivered daily to Ceausescu's private quarters. Once a set
of clothes had been worn by Ceausescu, it was destroyed.


By William R. Doerner. Reported by David Aikman/Washington and
John Borrell/Vienna.