I never had the pleasure of directly meeting Pacepa, given that he was always in hiding, though we emailed frequently for years. He died at the age of 92, a victim of COVID-19. Now, over four decades after the brutal regime began targeting him, Pacepa’s life has ended. Pacepa long outlived the Ceaușescu menace. And ironically, Pacepa’s grisly account of Nicolae and his equally cruel and crazy wife Elena would be used as evidence for their conviction and execution by a firing squad of Romanian citizens on Christmas Day 1989. (The book was reviewed with highest praise by Michael Ledeen in the April 1988 issue of The American Spectator.) Hit squads were dispatched to assassinate him. Communists officials were enraged when Pacepa in 1987 published (via Regnery) his shocking memoir of the Ceausescu era: Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescu’s Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption. Once in the United States, Pacepa lived in undisclosed locations, dodging a $2 million bounty placed on his head by his homeland.

He was a wanted man, hunted by the Romanian government. In the end, all that I asked for was forgiveness for my past, freedom for my daughter and strength for my new life.”įorgiveness and freedom. It was not easy to find the right words to express my great joy and thanks to the good Lord. I was a free man! I was in America! The joy of finally becoming part of this magnanimous land of liberty, where nothing was impossible, was surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive.” He continued, “On that memorable day of July 28, 1978, when I became a free man, I fell to my knees and I prayed out loud for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. I had an overwhelming desire to dance around in a jig all by myself. presidential airport inside Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.,” he later told our mutual friend David Kupelian. military plane bringing me to freedom landed at the U.S.

Dezinformarea by Ion Mihai Pacepa