A Rumanian Defects

Was Ion Pacepa a "mole"?

The slim, bespectacled Rumanian trade official's visit to Cologne seemed routine. After checking into the Inter-Continental Hotel one day last July, he spent the week negotiating an agreement for his country to produce a West German transport plane. Then, on the eve of his scheduled return to Bucharest, Ion Pacepa, 50, disappeared. Mystified Rumanian diplomats asked the Cologne police to investigate, but the search turned up no clues. Pacepa had vanished without a trace.

In fact, Pacepa was no ordinary economic envoy. He was a lieutenant general in the Rumanian security police and a close confidant of President Nicolae Ceausescu. He may have also been a longtime spy for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which probably spirited him out of West Germany. For the past three weeks, Pacepa has been tucked away in a CIA "safe" house near Washington, where he is presumably spilling information about Rumanian intelligence operations.

Instead of trumpeting the defection, U.S. officials have shrouded it in uncharacteristic secrecy. But in West Germany, newspapers are speculating that Pacepa was a CIA "mole" who had patiently burrowed into Rumania's inner circle some years ago. That notion has been firmly, but not convincingly, denied by CIA officials in West Germany, who insist that they had no hand in arranging Pacepa's flight to the West. "This was not a deep penetration operation in the traditional sense," remarked an intelligence source in Washington last week, without further elaboration.

If Pacepa was not a mole, his defection remains a riddle. He was in no known trouble with Ceausescu, although a clandestine source insinuated that he may have run afoul of the Rumanian President's short-tempered but influential wife. Mole or not, Pacepa may be something less than an outstanding prize for the CIA. "A major defection from Bucharest is almost a contradiction in terms," says a U.S. intelligence expert. Because of its resolute independence from Soviet influence, Rumania is not privy to the most sensitive intelligence traffic between Moscow and its more compliant satellites. Nor is Pacepa apt to be well informed about the Soviet army, because his country has not permitted the Warsaw Pact to deploy troops on its soil since the mid-'60s. Nonetheless, the defector can shed some light on subjects of interest to U.S. analysts --among them the question of how Rumania's counterespionage service guards against infiltration by the Soviet KGB. The Rumanians are probably asking themselves a similar question about the CIA.

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