SPECIAL - March 4th 2005 Fifteen years since the demise of Communism had passed and the former Romanian intelligence officers who defected to the West are still regarded by the Romanian judiciary to be traitors. There are a few exceptions: Ion Mihai Pacepa and Liviu Turcu. The rulings which condemned them to death are ignored, of course, [but those regarding the confiscation of their personal wealth are maintained.]

By RAZVAN BELCIUGANU

Starting today Jurnalul National will present the biographies of some of these people, as they were written in the files the military judiciary dealt with during the times of the Romanian Socialist Republic.

Gen. Pacepa had his military rank and honor restored, but so deserves his other colleagues.

Though having death penalties hanging over their heads and being called traitors by their former colleagues, these people worked for the demise of Communism. In the years that followed the 1989 Revolution it was alleged that some of these people "defected" on order from their bosses, [n order to intoxicate the Western intelligence services.]

Aware of this possibility, Jurnalul National still puts forth some hypotheses, while the files of the Foreign Intelligence Service still stay classified.

So, we may assume that these intelligence officers left their families behind, sometimes two or three children, and opted to defect because they understood that they were not serving their country but a dictator. Or maybe not. Maybe they indeed left their families behind on an official mission. The mission could have been for a large number of them to "defect" after Pacepa in order to counter his information with fabricated information that carried equal credibility. Or, it may be that the Foreign Intelligence Service took on a policy of its own: that of sending intelligence officers under the cover