Vicious Keepers of the Faith

By William R. Doerner

"They are like cockroaches -- ugly, numerous, been around a long time and hard to kill," said a U.S. analyst in Washington last week. "They" are the Securitate, the Ceausescu dictatorship's ever present and dreaded security apparatus, whose members fought savagely for several days to keep the tyrant in power. Among the most vicious of such outfits in the history of the communist world, the Securitate was established in 1945, partly as a counterbalance to the regular military, and later, under Ceausescu, competing with it for funds. Its estimated 180,000 troops regarded themselves as being part of an elite unit; they were never saddled with the manual chores -- constructing bridges and the like -- routinely assigned to soldiers, and they were equipped with the latest in weaponry even as the 180,000-member, mainly conscripted armed forces suffered budget cutbacks. Securitate members were indoctrinated to equate Ceausescu's well-being with their own and were rewarded with lavish perks. Even after the revolutionary government last week threatened to execute Securitate members found at large, many remained defiant. The few who surrendered were imprisoned, to await trial by the new government.

According to Ion Pacepa, a Rumanian lieutenant general who defected to the U.S. in 1978, the Securitate under Ceausescu had various functions. One was to serve as a kind of Praetorian Guard for members of the Communist Party's Central Committee and specifically the Ceausescu family. Many of the 75,000 or so troops were recruited from orphanages and raised to regard their job with a loyalty bordering on fanaticism. Other uniformed crack troops, equipped with armored vehicles and helicopter gunships, were assigned to supervise the country's border patrol and guard the political prisons. A particularly brutish department known as Service K specialized in torturing political prisoners. Apart from these overt operations, as many as 3 million informants and collaborators -- in a population of 23 million -- clandestinely monitored mail and telephone conversations, analyzed handwriting samples to track down the sources of dissident material, tailed foreigners and spied on citizens in every apartment block, village and factory. Their ubiquitous presence helps explain the deep vein of distrust and suspicion pervading Rumanian society. The Securitate further functioned as the national intelligence service.

When the revolt erupted, many Securitate members slipped into an elaborate network of tunnels, whose existence was a well-guarded secret. The underground passageways link security headquarters, Communist Party headquarters, the presidential palace in central Bucharest and other key government buildings. The tunnels made it possible for Securitate members to escape the initial onslaught by soldiers and armed civilians and then regroup to attack the revolutionary forces. Securitate assaults in Bucharest and elsewhere in the country were carried out with arms and ammunition stored in caches secretly assembled outside the force's official camps.

One of the Securitate's more unusual duties was to provide down-to-the-skin security for Ceausescu. According to Pacepa, after hearing Cuba's Fidel Castro claim that the CIA had once tried to poison him by treating his shoes with a toxic substance, Ceausescu developed a phobia about becoming the victim of such a scheme and began wearing brand-new garments every day. At one time, says Pacepa, the Securitate kept a year's worth of suits, socks and shoes stored in a special warehouse; one of each, presumably after careful inspection, was delivered daily to Ceausescu's private quarters. Once a set of clothes had been worn by Ceausescu, it was destroyed.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington and John Borrell/Vienna