If we had paid more attention to Ion Mihai Pacepa when he defected from the Rumanian Intelligence Service as the highest ranking communist intelligence defector we have ever had, we wouldn’t be asking dumb questions about Russian manipulation or disruption of Western Nation politics.  Pacepa is now 89 and defected to the US in 1978. When he defected, he was an intimate of the dictator Ceausescu and had multiple high positions in the Romanian government. We all know the Romanians did what the Russians told them to do, just like all the Eastern Bloc Countries, and in particular in matters of black ops, Bulgaria. 

Pacepa on Raul Castro's yacht off Cuba, 1974

Since Pacepa was the highest ranking Eastern Bloc defector, his knowledge and insights were and are superior to what we have from other sources.

The story of Romanian efforts to kill Pacepa after his defection and his effective efforts to destroy Romanian intelligence assets and the regime of the dictator Ceausescu by his cooperation with US intel assets are not the story for today.  His expose book on the Romanian tyranny, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (1990) covered that topic, including Romania’s effort to hire assassins to kill him. Instead, I will focus on Pacepa’s warning to the Western world in his book Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, with  Ronald J. Rychlak.  429 pp 8.69 kindle 15. 29 hardcover   ISBN 978-1936488988, Washington DC WND Books, Inc. 2013.

Pacepa worked with the CIA on multiple projects to blunt the efforts of the Communist Eastern Bloc during the 80s, but after a period of time he was no longer utilized by intelligence services, I would suspect because he has strongly held conservative anti-communist views.  He warns that Muslim terrorists are tools of Russia.

Pacepa, since he was discarded by the Intel community, has been a prolific and aggressive writer of essays and books.  He has devoted his efforts to the education of America and the Western Powers on the nature of Communist subversive propaganda and disinformation practices.

Disinformation is Pacepa’s warning to America and the Western World about the reach and influence of communist propaganda and disinformation and its ability to compromise Western culture, traditions, institutions and influence movements in target societies.  He warns us: do not underestimate the magnitude of effort and the effectiveness of the communist intelligence, propaganda and espionage operations, or their ability to sow seeds of destruction in western societies.   For example, all foreign representatives of Russia (the USSR) are agents—physicians, nurses, engineers—they are all saboteurs or at least provocateurs for the movement, and they are agents for the regime or they would not be out of the country.

The book challenges the false histories and slanders, the effort to tear down Christianity, even Popes and of course bishops and cardinals in the Eastern European countries.  He tells about how the Kremlin, even after the collapse of communism, is working the disinformation (dezinformatsiya) project against Jews to energize the Islamic threat against the West and how it actively supports terrorism around the world.

Learn in this book how the commies made Pope Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” in spite of his efforts to help the Jews and his wide acclaim among the Jews.  Instead, he was thought to be anti-Semite by a whole generation influenced by the propaganda.  The fake story play “The Deputy” was the tool used to discredit Pius XII, and it was very effective.

The book describes a long list of multifarious operations by the Russian intelligence community that were intended to weaken Western institutions and society.

Infiltrations of supposedly legitimate organizations in the United States by communists for purposes of subversion—for example the National Council of Churches and the Enterprise for Democratic Renewal.  A Disinformation project.

Do you believe the decline of Christianity and the serial efforts to discredit religious leaders are just the natural development of things or possibly the infiltration of main line churches and propaganda aimed at character assassination? A Disinformation project.

Do you consider the leftward socialist drift of the academy just a natural thing or the result of disinformation?

Do you consider the well-developed anti-American attitudes of the Democrat Party going back to McGovern, a communist as a young lawyer, to be just a natural thing or a product of disinformation?

Do you consider the development of liberation theology, the thinly veiled Marxist socialist pseudo religious activism that started in South American Catholicism and spread to Catholic clergy and an active element of the laity around the world now all the way to the socialist papacy to be a natural thing in an organization that was, a short time ago a bastion of anticommunism a  natural development or due to disinformation?

If the left in the United States considers the United States to be the source of evil and oppression and guilty of heinous sins against the human race, would that be a natural development or due to disinformation?

Ion Pacepa was the most important intelligence acquisitions of the United States in the past 30 years.  He has insights only available from a well-trained communist intelligence officer.  Read his book so you might evaluate the nonsense coming out of DC and realize there is plenty of disinformation that is repeated to us by our side and certainly our media.   We are a more open society and certainly vulnerable to propaganda and disinformation.

John Dale Dunn MD JD is an emergency physician and inactive member of the Texas Bar who lives in Brownwood, Texas