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Some ended up in Israel and eventually came to the US, others went by way of Italy or Greece and ended up in the US. Scondly, I was shocked by both his and his wife's viciousness on the one hand, and her, Elena, fixation on her sexual appetite. When he attended military schooling for officers, his friend fellow officer was Ceasescu himself. Reading this book makes me ask questions about what happened after Pacepa's defection, both to him and to Romania, and it helps me to understand more about what my family had been through. As a son of a Romanian father with many family members having come from Romania to the United States, I have always known only what I was told by my family.
I realize that the author can omit things or American Intelligence might have censored some of the book, but what I have read has both shocked me and helped me to understand. In this book, the author, Pacepa, mentions that Ceasescu force Jews and Germans to pay for their "freedom" from Romania. Two things, among many, which shocked me were first, I think Ceasescu was in his own way very brilliant to concoct this scheme called operation "Horizon" and other schemes as well. One thing my family told me which always stuck in my mind was that in Romania, in the 60s and 70s, you never saw litter on the streets. They made it a point to mention that because of their shock at seeing filthy streets in Chicago.
This book helps to clear up many things which were unanswered. I can attest to that as being very true. I asked them why the streets were able to be maintained so clean in Romania, and they said you can get into "big trouble" if you are caught littering. My uncle, a Colonel in the Romanian army, was a "food" engineer and worked on food research. They described immaculate streets with no trash to be seen anywhere. My father used to load up on "Kent" cigarettes and other American items including cash with which to buy the freedom of members of my family.
My uncle told me little about him, but he did say that in his early years as an officer, Ceasescu was not so extreme or weird. Also, the author mentions that bribery was a common practice to get people to do things for you.
For this edition, though, the author has included a new preface (1990) and a transcript of the dramatic trial, but the text itself has not been changed to meditate upon their shocking overthrow. The Ceausescus were overthrown and executed in December 1989, but this book was written by a high-level Romanian defector to the West three years previous to that.I thought it was a retrospective on their rule, but actually it was still written while they were in power.
"Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided, showing what he thought of the Romanian people. Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the factory. Oltcit was the name of the new car -- an amalgam made from the words Oltenia, Ceausescu's native province, and the French car maker Citroen, which owned 49% of the shares. In the late 1950s, when I headed Romania's foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I worked closely with the foreign branch of the East German Stasi. In the spring of 1978 Ceausescu appointed me chief of his Presidential House, a new position supposed to be similar to that of the White House chief of staff.
However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial espionage program. It would take decades until Margaret Thatcher's privatization reforms restored Britain's place among the world's top-tier economies.The United States is far more powerful than Great Britain was then, and no American Attlee should be capable of destroying its solid economic and political base. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more proletarian look. He baptized the car Dacia, to commemorate Romania's 2,000-year history going back to Dacia Felix, as the ancient Romans called that part of the world. To reduce production costs, they cut down on the size of the original, already small DKW engine, and they replaced the metal body with one made of plastic- covered cardboard.
To go with it he gave me a big Jaguar car. Its chief, Markus Wolf, rewarded me with a Trabant car -- the pride of East Germany -- when I left to return to Romania.That ugly little car became famous in 1989 when thousands of East Germans used it to cross to the West. Gen. In that government-run economy, symbolism was the most important consideration, especially when it came to things in short supply (such as food)."Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. The car that finally hit the market was a stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12.
The old empire quickly passed into history. The Trabant originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most prestigious cars in the world. That Jaguar, which at the time had been produced in a government-run British factory, was so bad that it spent more time in the garage being repaired than it did on the road."Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguars were the worst," Ford executive Bill Hayden stated when Ford bought the nationalized British car maker in 1988. German scientists are now trying to develop a bacterium to devour the cardboard-and-plastic body.Automobile manufacturing and government do not mix in capitalist countries either. Beware.What I Learned as a Car CzarHistory shows government and automobile manufacturing don't mix.By ION MIHAI PACEPAThey say history repeats itself.
government and United Auto Workers makes me think back to Romania's catastrophic mismanagement of the car factories it built jointly with the French companies Renault and Citroen. "Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. administration, Congress and the American voters will take a closer look at history and prevent our automotive industry from following down the Dacia, Oltcit or Jaguar path.Lt. To the best of my knowledge, no Dacia car was ever sold in the U.S.Ceausescu, undaunted, was determined to see Romanian cars running around in every country in the world. Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official granted political asylum in the U.S., is the author of the memoir "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987). Ceausescu decided on Renault, because it was owned by the French government (all Soviet bloc rulers distrusted private companies). I bought the book because of an opinion article by the author in the Wall Street Journal.
In the hands of the East German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a car. To save the foreign currency he coveted, he decreed that the components for the Oltcit were to be manufactured at 166 existing Romanian factories. The current takeover of General Motors by the U.S. Immediately, the radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped. This is history repeating itself right now with GM and Chrysler.
The Oltcit project lost billions.Ceausescu was an extreme case, but automobile manufacturing and government were never a good mix in any socialist/communist country. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything else needed to produce the car.Three Western companies competed for the honor. It proved impossible for the Romanian bureaucracy, which pretended to work and was paid accordingly. How did the famous Jaguar, one of the most prestigious cars in the world, become a joke.In 1945, the British voters, tired of four years of war, kicked out Winston Churchill and elected a leftist parliament led by Labour's Clement Attlee. If you are like me and have lived two lives, you have a good chance of seeing the re-enactment with your own eyes. Britain was already saddled by crushing war debts.
The Oltcit factory could produce only 1% to 1.5% of its intended capacity owing to the lack of the parts that those 166 companies were supposed to furnish simultaneously. Germany's junkyards are now piled high with Trabants, which cannot be recycled because burning their plastic-covered cardboard bodies would release poisonous dioxins. I hope that the U.S. Attlee nationalized the automobile, trucking and coal industries, as well as communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity and steel. Coordinating 166 plants to have them deliver all the parts on time would be a monumental job even for an experienced car producer. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. He tasked me to buy another Western license, this time to produce a car tailored for export.
Now it was sapped of economic vigor. I was Romania's car czar.When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. What rolled off the assembly line was a kind of horseless carriage that roared like a lawn mower and polluted the air worse than a whole city block full of big Western cars.After German reunification, the plucky little "Trabi" that East Germans used to wait 10 years to buy became an embarrassment, and its production was stopped. Oltcit was projected to produce between 90,000 and 150,000 compact cars designed by Citroen.Ceausescu micromanaged Oltcit, but he didn't even know how to drive a car, much less run a car industry. We ended up with a license for an antiquated and about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the cheapest. Indeed, the Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to cherish the Dacia.For the Western market, however, the Dacia was a nightmare.
So I implore all Americans to read this book as well. Hence his weak move of boycotting the Olympics. Because this book is true. There is pure evil in the world and when left unchecked, we have the slimy Ceausescus'. Place yourself in the shoes of Papeca or an ordinary Romanian trying to make a life in an inhuman enviroment. Good riddance they no longer on this earth.
I was shaking my head in disgust so much from reading this book. Every dictatorship past, present and future follows the same patterns. With their entrenched racism and xenophobia; Jimmy Carter was as inept as they come. 3) Substitute Communism with Islamic terrorism, the United States still has not learned the lessons. This shows how totalitarism can only endure on the back of Western Civilization(free societies that respect individual rights and its technological advances). Any nation that tramples on the rights of its own citizens can only lead to moral and physical destruction. I think I have whiplash. The detailed account of the Communist regime in Romania is almost unbelievable.
But I highly doubt they will even make the effort. 2) The willingness of Americans and other Western citizens to sell out their country for tyranny. His policy of appeasement blew up in his face with the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. We are in a new faze of the War on Terrorism( I mean "overseas contingency operations"). The main themes I got out of this book are: 1) The United States complicity in placing the Ceausescus' on a pedestal.
I wish everyone in Washington would read this book. We now have appeasement of theocratic regimes as the "new" foreign policy. I have to check myself though. In the name of watches and cash; these individuals, who were too dumb to understand the type of system they were working for gave Top Secret materials to Romania.
This includes all Communist nations in general. But it doesn't rest with Communism. Justice has been served.The title of this review serves a purpose.
I still would like to know more about these people, but this is not the book to start with if you want a basic primer into the rise and fall of the Ceausecus. It is not really written for the lay person who is not familiar with the inner workings of Romanian Communism, and so I found myself floundering throughout much of the text.There is some interesting information in the book about how weird Elena Ceausescu was -- she was basically an illiterate peasant who passed herself off as a scientist/intellectual, with the full knowledge and cooperation of her husband. But the book is poorly organized, and is hard to follow. I purchased this book because I have visited Romania several times on business since 1995. I hope someone writes a more reader-friendly, informative text on this fascinating subject. One cannot be in Romania very long without hearing varying accounts of the Ceausecsus and their horrible treatment of the Romanian people, their repressive government, and their awful excesses and posh lifestyle when their country was essentially starving. I love Bucharest, and I am very impressed with post-Communist Romania and its delightful people. So I wanted to learn more about them.Unfortunately this book, written by a government insider who served under Nicolae Ceausescu and who defected, is very difficult to understand.
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