President Basescu Has Balls, Gen. Pacepa Says

American online publication National Review published yesterday an article full of praise for the new administration in Bucharest, signed by Ion Mihai Pacepa.

Jurnalul National recently published an exclusive interview with Pacepa himself. In the article he signs in the National Review, Pacepa says the visit President Traian Basescu pays to Washington is extremely important.

Basescu will address with President Bush the now famous "Bucharest-London-Washington" axis announced by Basescu to be part of Romania’s foreign policy.

Quoting Jurnalul National, Pacepa says that the daily published a list of 25 names of Western citizens of Romanian origin who are still under death penalty back home for defecting to the West and collaborating with the Western intelligence services during the Cold War. They are still regarded as "traitors" and "guilty to have betrayed their country." Pacepa writes that [former PM] Adrian Nastase, "a former post-communist prime-minister explained one time that some 6,000 intelligence officers suffered because of these acts of treason."

Basescu "is not a professional politician and he never was a president before; he is though a former sea-captain who navigated in international waters and knows how to steer his ship into troubled waters. He engaged in a crusade against the crypto-communists who plundered and impoverished Romania, so now he could use any helping hand that might be extended to him," writes Pacepa.

The former intelligence officer makes a few suggestions too.

Pacepa says that the Romanian president needs first and foremost "help for eradicating corruption which perverted for many Romanians the very meaning of the word capitalism. A poorly conceived privatization process allowed a predatory insiders group, most of them my former subordinates in the communist intelligence service, to plunder most of Romania’s wealth."

The United States government is ready to help Romania, writes Pacepa, who lived under the protection of the Americans for the past 25 years. This willingness was made known by the last two American ambassadors to Bucharest, Michael Guest and Jack Dyer Crouch.

"It is time for America to give the support it promised," writes Gen. Pacepa, while admitting that "Romania changed a lot during the past 15 years," and stating that "Basescu has still a few hurdles to bring down, of the kind Romania put up during the Communist regime, between itself and the rest of the world."

Pacepa is not worried though. He says that "Madeleine Albright used to say that only people with "cojones" may change history. It seems Basescu is such a person … My native land desperately needs a breath of fresh air," Pacepa says.

Pacepa also reminds that "while [former Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu claimed to be helping Washington in its fight against terrorism, it paid the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal one million dollars to blow-up the headquarters of the Radio Free Europe in Munchen, in 1981, and to assassinate the Romanian immigrants on American soil."

The duplicity lasted till last year, when Romania changed its leadership, Pacepa writes.

"While Ion Iliescu, who held the first, the second and the fourth presidential mandates, loudly claimed his loyalty to NATO, he also signed a Treaty with Moscow, in April 1991, in which he pledged that Romania will never take part in a military alliance which would be detrimental to the Soviet Union." Eight years later, in 1999, Iliescu published in Washington Post a pro-American article titled "Keep Russia Away From the Danube," but at the same time appointed as councilor on foreign policy issues Ristea Priboi, one of my former subordinates and a sworn anti-American," Pacepa concludes.