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

~ (Author) "IT was a cold, gray afternoon in March 1978, typical for that time of year in Bucharest..." (more)
Key Phrases: illegal officers, technological intelligence, technological espionage, United States, New York, Comrade Elena (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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, Inc. (April 25, 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 (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #126,411 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 67 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)

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.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!!!!, December 8, 2004

By	Eric Kent (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief is a fascinating book. Pacepa has insights that you will fine nowhere else.

One very interesting piece is where Pacepa relates a conversation in 1978 with Constantin Munteaunu, a general assigned to teach Arafat and the PLO techniques to deceive the West into granting the organization recognition.

From this book, one finds out that Arafat was indeed a homosexual. He cause of death was likely AIDS.

Here is an excerpt:

"I just called the microphone monitoring center to ask about the 'Fedayee,'" Arafat's code name, explained Munteaunu. "After the meeting with the Comrade, he went directly to the guest house and had dinner. At this very moment, the 'Fedayee' is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He's playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena."

Munteaunu continued: "I've never before seen so much cleverness, blood and filth all together in one man." Munteaunu, wrote Pacepa, spent months pulling together secret reports from Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian intelligence agencies as well as Romanian files.

"I used to think I knew just about everything there was to know about Rahman al-Qudwa," Arafat's real name, "about the construction engineer who made a fortune in Kuwait, about the passionate collector of racing cars, about Abu Amman," Arafat's nom de guerre, "and about my friend Yasser, with all his hysterics," explained Munteaunu, handing Pacepa his final report on the PLO leader. "But I've got to admit that I didn't really know anything about him."

Pacepa wrote: "The report was indeed an incredible account of fanaticism, of devotion to his cause, of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teen-ager and ending with his current bodyguards. After reading the report, I felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever I had been kissed by Arafat, or even just shaken his hand."

"If true, Arafat would have a great deal to conceal from his people and his murderously anti-homosexual supporters in the Islamic world," writes Frum, suggesting that Arafat was airlifted to France for medical treatment because he "could trust the French to protect his intimate secret.

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 (REAL NAME)

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.