THE DOSSIER WARS: LUSTRATION ROMANIAN-STYLE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 BUCHAREST 001328

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

STATE FOR EUR/NCE

E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/24/2016
TAGS: PGOV PREL PINR SOCI RO
SUBJECT: THE DOSSIER WARS: LUSTRATION ROMANIAN-STYLE

REF: BUCHAREST 1202

Classified By: Charge d' Affairs Mark A. Taplin for Reasons 1.4 (b) and
(d).


1. (C) Summary. After languishing on the political
backburner, the exposure and lustration of Ceausescu-era
secret police agents and collaborators has become a white-hot

SIPDIS
political issue this summer. Some observers speculate that
the Liberal party (PNL) could benefit most from the
lustration flap, and that President Basescu,s Democratic
Party (PD) is most vulnerable, in part since other parties
may have already selectively cleansed or altered files
relating to their members. The issue will likely continue to
snowball as politicians, media, and well-connected
bureaucrats with access to secret files pile on. It has
already claimed two high-profile targets and now threatens to
engulf many in the generation of politicians with roots
dating back to the Ceausescu era. The focus of the scandal
has moved in recent days to President Basescu, who has hung
tough by denying direct collaboration with the Securitate and
by declaring that he had only done "what he had to do" during
communist rule. End Summary.


2. (C) Lustration has finally reached front-page news in
Romania -- sixteen years late. A process to bring to light
the files of Romania's secret police, the Securitate, in
order to identify the collaborators and agents of the
communist government, has long been anticipated. However,
unlike several other Eastern European countries where
lustration commenced soon after the revolutions of 1989, key
Romanian political figures and the intelligence services
themselves have long delayed lustration and have actively
meddled in its implementation ever since a 1999 law mandated
it. (The center-right Constantinescu government established
the National College for the Study of Securitate Archives
(CNSAS) to grant Romanian citizens access to their own files
and to determine and make public the identities of the
Securitate's agents and collaborators.)

Tale of Two Lustrations -- Voiculescu, Musca
--------------


3. (C) The lustration issue has already claimed two
high-profile targets, Conservative Party President Dan
Voiculescu and Liberal Party MP (and outspoken critic of PM
Tariceanu) Mona Musca, along with a host of second-rung
political figures and officials whose names have been linked
to the Securitate in recent weeks. The difference in the
background to the two cases underlines the perils for
Romanian political life in the chaotic unmasking process that
is now unfolding. On the one hand, Voiculescu's past
collaboration with the Securitate was well enough established
in the public mind before the latest revelations that
confirmation of his Securitate role under the codename
"Felix" hardly came as a surprise. When the Romanian
Intelligence Service (SRI) sent two papers from his file to
CNSAS for study, they were immediately leaked to the press.
Based on the additional information, the CNSAS ruled
Voiculescu had been involved in "political policing." The
CNSAS also confirmed Voiculescu's communist-era foreign
trading firm was indeed a Securitate front company.
Voiculescu's ambition to assume one of the then vacant
Vice-Premier jobs was thus stymied. In light of Voiculescu's
unsavory reputation, the result was at least arguably all for
the best.


4. (C) On the other hand, the news that widely admired PNL
parliamentarian Mona Musca, one of the country's most popular
political figures and Basescu ally, had signed an agreement
with the Securitate to inform on foreign students to whom she
was teaching Romanian in the nineteen-seventies, did set off
shock waves. Musca, ironically, had been one of the most
vocal proponents of the lustration law. Musca subsequently
claimed she had signed only for the "protection" of her
students. Her files include the 1977 letter where she
committed herself to the "patriotic job of supporting the
Securitate organs with data and information regarding the
problems of foreign students' studies and their eventual
enemy attitudes towards our State." The mauling that she
received in the Romanian press, and at the hands of her
political rivals, has underscored the fact that this summer's
lustration, Romanian-style, remains highly politicized,
sometimes akin to outright character assassination. The fact
that Musca's opponents within the PNL moved quickly to
condemn her and call for her resignation from the party
undoubtedly had as much to do with her past criticisms of
Prime Minister and PNL president Tariceanu as with any sense
of moral outrage about her past Securitate associations.


5. (C) In a meeting with PolChief August 15, Musca maintained

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that the CNSAS would ultimately clear her of the charge of
"collaboration," as she did not report on the private lives
of her students and did not gain any advantage from her
actions. Musca, an outspoken parliamentary proponent of
civil society and human rights for the past decade, said she
"did not harm human rights." Under the Ceausescu regime,
Musca asserted, all teachers working with foreign students
had to sign similar pledges. She added that she had, in
fact, turned down invitations to become a Communist Party
member on three separate occasions.


6. (C) Musca expressed the hope that this political
"maneuver" would not affect the proper implementation of the
lustration law. It was important for Romania, she said, to
open up the files of its communist past, adding that Romania
lacked a transparent and predictable process for lustration.
She lamented that to date, instead, only certain people's
pasts had been revealed and that the media appeared eager to
weigh in prior to the judgment of the CNSAS. Musca argued
the lustration process needed to be simplified, time-limited,
and aimed at uncovering who were the decision makers of the
police state. She also argued that lustration needed to be
coupled to disclosure of the financial interests of all
individuals in public life. Musca described Romanian
politics as composed of many "nodes of interests" with
political or economic power that were impossible to break.
Only individuals outside those "nodes" were being lustrated.


7. (C) In fact, the lustration process does not appear to be
under the control of any single political actor or party, and
the snowball effect the Securitate file revelations has
engendered is transforming the political landscape of the
country in unpredictable ways as politicians, media, and
well-connected bureaucrats with access to secret files pile
on. PM Tariceanu August 18 dismissed State Secretary Dan
Petrescu on grounds that he used to be a Securitate officer,
and over the past weekend, Ioan Talpes, the former National
Security Advisor under former President Iliescu, warned that
the Romanian political scene would be rocked by a new wave of
revelations when a new archive of 71 recently-discovered
Securitate dossiers are made public in the coming weeks.

Storm Over Cotreceni Palace
--------------


8. (C) The lustration storm moved over Cotreceni Palace last
week, when the head of the CNSAS, Claudiu Secasiu, commented
on the status of the CNSAS's investigation into President
Basescu's ties to the Securitate, based on a request from
former President Emil Constantinescu, a bitter Basescu
critic. Secasiu said that only the Romanian Intelligence
Service (SRI) had responded thus far, with a report denying
that it had any such files. Secasiu said he now awaited
replies from the other two repositories for Securitate files,
the External Intelligence Service (SIE) and the Defense
Ministry (MOD). Basescu dismissed the accusations, saying he
had only done "what he had to do" during communist rule.
While Basescu denied collaborating with the Securitate, he
acknowledged that he, like all other ship captains, wrote
regular reports regarding activities on board the ship that
he commanded, and that these reports "might have been of
interest to the Securitate."


9. (C) Even prior to the recent media frenzy, Presidential
Counselor for Political Affairs Claudiu Saftoiu warned
EmbOffs that the lustration process was "out of control." He
argued that Basescu's Democrats were most vulnerable because
the Securitate files of rival parties such as the Social
Democratic Party had already been selectively cleansed to
remove incriminating evidence. Saftoiu opined that it was
the Prime Minister's PNL that would benefit most from the
campaign to open the files. Saftoiu asserted that, in
contrast to former President Iliescu, who would exercise
political control through the intelligence services whenever
he wanted, Basescu was attempting to get the services to work
for "principles," rather than "for him personally." Saftoiu
commented that Basescu,s interest in the twists and turns of
Ukraine's political scene stemmed in part from the conviction
that Romania faced a similar internal dynamic, with many of
Romania's richest and most influential figures (he cited Dan
Voiculescu, George Copos, Dinu Patriciu, and Ovidiu Vantu)
pursuing their agendas in tandem with Russian interests.
Chamber of Deputies President Bogdan Olteanu, a PNL member,
gave us a slightly different take, noting to DCM and PolChief
that selectively cleansing or tampering with Securitate files
was unlikely given the penchant of the agency to keep
multiple copies of files. Olteanu (born in 1971) evinced
confidence that the lustration process would accelerate a
generational change in Romanian politics. As the lustration
issue unfolded, there would be pressure on all political
parties to clean house. He said the only possible exception

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was the PSD, where the new leadership of Mircea Geoana (and
the depth of resistance from old-line party leaders) was
still an open question.


10. (C) Still others suspect the trail of the Securitate
files leads back to the Presidential palace, or point their
finger at Basescu as a prime offender himself. And while PM
Tariceanu publicly offered the President the benefit of the
doubt, many of Basescu,s political enemies from the Social
Democrats to the extreme nationalists continued to attack his
claim that he had never collaborated with the Securitate.
The recently exposed Voiculescu and his Conservative Party
(PC),for one, have laid the blame for what is now being
widely called the "Dosariada" squarely on Basescu and
announced loudly that they will no longer cooperate with him
and the PC's erstwhile coalition partner, the Democratic
Party (PD). A political cartoon in a top daily (perhaps not
coincidentally one owned by Voiculescu) shows an impatient
Basescu first complaining about being bored by a summer
without political scandal, then setting off to inspect the
Securitate archives. Facing a wall full of files, he asks:
"What are these?" "Pandora's box, Mr. President," comes the
reply. "Then let's open it!" he cries.

CNSAS - License to Lustrate
--------------


11. (C) Although the center-right government's 1999 law
created CNSAS, it began functioning only after the Social
Democratic Party, made up of many former Communists, won the
2000 elections. The PSD obstructed the functioning of CNSAS,
often using as a pretext the intelligence services' refusal
to release Securitate archives. Then-PM Nastase stated on
many occasions that he did not see the necessity for the
CNSAS and that Romanians should look to their future rather
than their past. Apart from revealing the collaboration of a
handful of relative unknowns, the CNSAS largely focused on
allowing average Romanians to see their personal files. It
also took some controversial decisions, such as clearing
ultra-nationalist PRM president Corneliu Vadim Tudor of
collaboration with the Securitate, despite acknowledging the
Council lacked access to all relevant documents.


12. (C) A few months after being elected President, Basescu
forced the intelligence agencies and the MOD to hand over to
CNSAS the entire Securitate archive, apart from about 100,000
files of continuing concern to "national security." In March
2006, following PM Tariceanu's amending of the law
establishing CNSAS, a new CNSAS board was elected. The
ensuing political battle between the Democrats and Liberals
prevented the initiator of the CNSAS law, Ticu Dumitrescu,
from leading the institution he long advocated. Instead,
Corneliu Turianu was elected according to the Democratic
Party's proposal, causing the Liberals to claim the Democrats
had not stuck to their "shared decisions." The following
day, the vice president of CNSAS resigned after reportedly
receiving death threats aimed at his children. President
Basescu then proposed that the elections be repeated and, in
mid August, the two parties agreed on a compromise candidate,
Claudiu Secasiu, a member of the outgoing CNSAS board.
Basescu opened up the archives further during a July meeting
of the Supreme Council for National Defense, when he led the
decision to declassify all the files of "national interest"
regarding all politicians. SRI began handing over these
files to CNSAS in early August, starting with 29 files,
mainly revealing surveillance targets but also including some
files concerning individuals who collaborated with the
Securitate.


13. (C) Comment: Romania has yet to come to terms with its
past, in part because practically every major political
figure since the 1989 revolution was tainted to some degree
with links to the ubiquitous Securitate. It would be
surprising if past Romanian political leaders -- some like
Iliescu and Nastase men of the Communist apparatus itself --
have not already done their level best to expunge their
Securitate records. Like a crime scene left open to the
elements and passersby, the documentary record represented by
the Securitate archives are already of questionable
"forensic" value, whatever their historic significance.
There are contemporary ironies, too. While lustration has
ostensibly been a joint PNL-PD project, the institutional
heavy lifting for the release of Securitate files was done by
President Basescu. The political benefits, however, are for
the moment being reaped more by the PNL, including PM
Tariceanu. While Basescu clearly recognizes the worst
offenders from the Ceausescu era may never be brought to
light under the ongoing lustration process, he appears to be
still committed to the process, if that is not too coherent a
word for what increasingly resembles one of last summer's
devastating flash floods rather than a cleansing summer

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shower. Some of our contacts, including PSD leader Geoana
are of the cynical view that the outcome of the lustration
issue will be less about coming to terms with Romania,s past
than with settling political scores, and that the issue will
become more complicated as a multiplicity of "invisible
hands" work out their various agendas. The lustration issue
not only lays bare the different interests of competing
parties and personalities, but also reveals the generational
cleavage between political figures with roots in the
Ceaucescu era and a successor generation untainted by links
to the Securitate. As more and more political figures trudge
uncomfortably to the CSNAS headquarters, in full view of the
cameras, the potential for the landscape of Romanian politics
to be transformed in fundamental ways grows more likely.
End comment.
Taplin