Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption [Paperback]

Ion Mihai Pacepa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1990

A former chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service reveals the extraordinary corruption of the Nicolae Ceausescu government of Romania, its brutal machinery of oppression, and its Machiavellian relationship with the West. An in side story of how Communist Party leaders really live.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (April 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895267462
• ISBN-13: 978-0895267467
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #29 in Books > History > Europe > Romania

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars titillating but take it with a block of salt, August 1, 2001

By 

Frank Sellin "political scientist" (Charlottesville, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption (Paperback)

Pacepa's well-known and smoothly written _Red Horizons_ does make for a titillating view of the role of Romania's foreign intelligence during his tenure as DIE chief, Romania's relationship to East and West, and eye-popping eyewitness details of the smarmy occurrences and attitudes in Ceausescu's inner circle. However, as a postcommunist analyst of Romania reading some of the reviews below, I need to inject some notes of caution.

Readers should be careful of taking everything Pacepa says as the gospel truth for at least four reasons:

1) When the director of a foreign intelligence service defects to the US, you can pretty much bet any publicly available memoirs have been vetted by the CIA and its ghostwriters before publishing. I.e., what was left out? And how the hell do we fact-check what's left, to be sure there wasn't some disinformation or exaggeration going on (as someone pointed out, the book was launched in 1987, two years before Ceausescu's fall)?

2) Pacepa defected in 1978, right as things were really starting to spiral down the tubes internally in Romania. Anything after that, you won't find in this book or else it's not eyewitness stuff. He had not yet attained the higher reaches of power when *hundreds* of thousands endured the physical as well as psychological terror of Ceausescu's predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dej, as opposed to the *tens* of thousands enduring somewhat more psychological pressure (i.e., much fewer executions) under Ceausescu. Still, Pacepa had to have known a great deal about the repressive system under both leaders, which leads to the next point:

3) Never, ever forget that Pacepa rose to the pinnacle of power and says next to nothing about how he got there (why was *he* approved?) or his ethics in defending the regime from the highest levels. Don't buy his "foreign intelligence had nothing to do with the internal secret police" nonsense--there was a great deal of organizational separation, but you cannot divorce what DIE was doing from what the domestic police were doing--perpetuating a brutal one-party regime. It's rather silly to suggest, as one reviewer did, that Pacepa should've killed himself, but his own morals are in considerable doubt, Christian or otherwise; his was not a case of somebody joining the party just to keep a job. Read Dennis Deletant's _Ceausescu and the Securitate_ to get an idea of what kind of regime he was defending, as well as the introduction which points to some of Pacepa's factual lapses. To Pacepa's credit, he does admit to organizing brutal operations against dissident emigres as ordered, but you see the problem.

4) Throughout the '90s, Pacepa has been and still is very, very active in sending frequent, sensationalist letters and articles on the Ceausescu and post-Ceausescu period, most notably to the Bucharest daily _Ziua_ (whose director, Sorin Rosca Stanescu, is an admitted former collaborator with the former Securitate, that is, the internal communist-era secret police). Both men have enormous political axes to grind (mostly against Ion Iliescu and company). Sometimes they're on target, but Stanescu in particular has at times played fast and loose with principles and facts underpinning journalist ethics (e.g., the whole alleged Iliescu-KGB affair and its sub-scandals), such that it's hard to trust him or the information from his sources even if you want to. For his part, Pacepa has had a major bone to pick with parts of Romania's multiple intelligence agencies for most of the last decade--quite possibly for good reason, as many of them have a lot to answer for, but until he stops being incredibly oblique and conspiratorial, and comes clean about the specific targets, evidence, and motivations of his agenda, you are advised to retain some skepticism, as many informed Romanians do back in Romania proper.

All that said, you will get in this book an excellent expose of how Ceausescu was using the West and feeding the Soviets a steady stream of intelligence information, despite the rather "maverick" rhetoric that distanced him from the rest of the Warsaw Pact. (Realize also that this Western support was enabling Ceausescu to put the screws to the population.) It's also probably not far off when describing the paranoia and other bizarre behavior of the ruling couple (especially Elena) and their family. The difficulty is in determining exactly how accurate vs. selective it all is.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SECURITATE'S PEOPLE STILL ACTIVE - READ THE NEGATIVE REVIEWS, November 5, 2004

By 

N. Ionescu "Incitatus" (right behind you) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption (Paperback)

As a Romanian who lived in the Ceausescu's workers paradise for 26 years I know too well the tactics of the shady people who work for today's romanian secret police.

Why?
Because they are THE SAME PEOPLE who worked for Ceausescu's Securitate.
They only changed their organization name and their master,the president of Romania Ion Iliescu -the man who was elected 3 times even if the constitution of Romania allows only 2 mandates.

Comrade Ion Iliescu is an old KGB agent infiltrated by russians in Ceausescu's communist party (yes it's true, the russians didn't trusted nobody)

So if you read negative comments about Pacepa's book, keep in mind Securitate's people are alive and well. They hold high positions of power and privilege in today's Romania, running big companies, banks, holding senatorial seats in the parliament or running branches of the executive.

And sometimes they take a couple of minutes to write a bad review to Pacepa's book on Amazon.com trying to accuse Pacepa,
the man who was a consel to president Reagan in being a traitor and bleaching the miserable image of their ex-commander in chief the murderous dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lurid eyewitness account of the Communist ruling class, July 11, 1999

By 

Thomas M. Sipos (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption (Paperback)

The author was a spy boss in Communist Romania. He saw the Ceausescus on a daily basis, and relates all their shocking--but true--dirt. From their dealings with drug lords to their rapist son's wild partying. Aside from its historical value, the book provide insight into the workings of foreign/Communist intelligence operations.