Securitate-Style Manipulation Keeps Romanians on Their Toes

The news of the day was that Romania’s intelligence services proved so inept that the country’s top-most suspected terrorist fled the country.

Yet president Traian Basescu, on July 24, upon exiting the meeting during which the directors of three intelligence services resigned, made an apparently unrelated statement: that he authorized the intelligence files drafted by the Securitate on the Romanian politicians to be declassified.

Lay citizens may have glossed over the statement, but people in the know understood exactly what this was all about: let’s take out from the public agenda and mind set the fight against high-level corruption and incompetent intelligence services and put something else instead.

Let’s turn the public agenda into so murky waters that all political soul will turn into alleged Securitate former informant, except Basescu, of course.

What strikes as strange is Basescu’s timing for taking such a decision. He took office 20 months ago; why did he pick up this moment to declassify those files?

It is obvious he was aware of their damaging contents, and yet he procrastinated the moment the true identities of prominent politicians and their tainted past became available to the public.

Why declassify the files once Omar Hayssam, the fugitive alleged terrorist, had fled the country?

Why keep the files classified for so long, if not for the current intelligence services ability to use them as bargaining chips in their shady deals?

Or was it that people in position of power now exerted all their political influence on the current intelligence services holding the archives to stop the files incriminating them from being declassified?

Either way, Basescu kept us all in the dark and provided no answers to such legitimate questions one might ask.

Many incredible things happening in the past days would not have had if a comprehensive list of names would have been made public, as well as a clear schedule for having the files declassified.

It also would have helped to make clear, from the very beginning, that having a file in the former Securitate archives could have meant two very different things: that a person was an informant, or that he or she was monitored by the intelligence services from the communist era.

Short of the above clarifying actions the conditions are met for a full-range Securitate-style manipulation to occur with the presidency’s blessings.