Ion Pacepa

From the Wall Street Journal, dated 2nd June:

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

They say history repeats itself. If you are like me and
have lived two lives, you have a good chance of seeing the
re-enactment with your own eyes. The current takeover of
General Motors by the U.S. government and United Auto
Workers makes me think back to Romania's catastrophic
mismanagement of the car factories it built jointly with the
French companies Renault and Citroen. I was Romania's car
czar.

When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the
mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me
to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the
one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing
cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men.
However, my father had spent most of his life running the
service department of the General Motors affiliate in
Bucharest.

My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial
espionage program. Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the
purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a
major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything
else needed to produce the car.

Three Western companies competed for the honor. Ceausescu
decided on Renault, because it was owned by the French
government (all Soviet bloc rulers distrusted private
companies). We ended up with a license for an antiquated and
about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the
cheapest. "Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided,
showing what he thought of the Romanian people. He baptized
the car Dacia, to commemorate Romania's 2,000-year history
going back to Dacia Felix, as the ancient Romans called that
part of the world. In that government-run economy, symbolism
was the most important consideration, especially when it
came to things in short supply (such as food).

"Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he
saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. Immediately, the
radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped.
Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the
bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the
factory. The car that finally hit the market was a
stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12.
"Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. Indeed, the
Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to
cherish the Dacia.

For the Western market, however, the Dacia was a nightmare.
To the best of my knowledge, no Dacia car was ever sold in
the U.S.

Ceausescu, undaunted, was determined to see Romanian cars
running around in every country in the world. He tasked me
to buy another Western license, this time to produce a car
tailored for export. Oltcit was the name of the new car --
an amalgam made from the words Oltenia, Ceausescu's native
province, and the French car maker Citroen, which owned 49%
of the shares. Oltcit was projected to produce between
90,000 and 150,000 compact cars designed by Citroen.

Ceausescu micromanaged Oltcit, but he didn't even know how
to drive a car, much less run a car industry. To save the
foreign currency he coveted, he decreed that the components
for the Oltcit were to be manufactured at 166 existing
Romanian factories. Coordinating 166 plants to have them
deliver all the parts on time would be a monumental job even
for an experienced car producer. It proved impossible for
the Romanian bureaucracy, which pretended to work and was
paid accordingly. The Oltcit factory could produce only 1%
to 1.5% of its intended capacity owing to the lack of the
parts that those 166 companies were supposed to furnish
simultaneously. The Oltcit project lost billions.

Ceausescu was an extreme case, but automobile manufacturing
and government were never a good mix in any
socialist/communist country. In the late 1950s, when I
headed Romania's foreign intelligence station in West
Germany, I worked closely with the foreign branch of the
East German Stasi. Its chief, Markus Wolf, rewarded me with
a Trabant car -- the pride of East Germany -- when I left to
return to Romania.

That ugly little car became famous in 1989 when thousands
of East Germans used it to cross to the West. The Trabant
originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the
DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most
prestigious cars in the world. In the hands of the East
German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a
car. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant
factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more
proletarian look. To reduce production costs, they cut down
on the size of the original, already small DKW engine, and
they replaced the metal body with one made of
plastic-covered cardboard. What rolled off the assembly line
was a kind of horseless carriage that roared like a lawn
mower and polluted the air worse than a whole city block
full of big Western cars.

After German reunification, the plucky little "Trabi" that
East Germans used to wait 10 years to buy became an
embarrassment, and its production was stopped. Germany's
junkyards are now piled high with Trabants, which cannot be
recycled because burning their plastic-covered cardboard
bodies would release poisonous dioxins. German scientists
are now trying to develop a bacterium to devour the
cardboard-and-plastic body.

Automobile manufacturing and government do not mix in
capitalist countries either. In the spring of 1978 Ceausescu
appointed me chief of his Presidential House, a new position
supposed to be similar to that of the White House chief of
staff. To go with it he gave me a big Jaguar car. That
Jaguar, which at the time had been produced in a
government-run British factory, was so bad that it spent
more time in the garage being repaired than it did on the
road.

"Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguars were
the worst," Ford executive Bill Hayden stated when Ford
bought the nationalized British car maker in 1988. How did
the famous Jaguar, one of the most prestigious cars in the
world, become a joke?

In 1945, the British voters, tired of four years of war,
kicked out Winston Churchill and elected a leftist
parliament led by Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlee
nationalized the automobile, trucking and coal industries,
as well as communication facilities, civil aviation,
electricity and steel. Britain was already saddled by
crushing war debts. Now it was sapped of economic vigor. The
old empire quickly passed into history. It would take
decades until Margaret Thatcher's privatization reforms
restored Britain's place among the world's top-tier
economies.

The United States is far more powerful than Great Britain
was then, and no American Attlee should be capable of
destroying its solid economic and political base. I hope
that the U.S. administration, Congress and the American
voters will take a closer look at history and prevent our
automotive industry from following down the Dacia, Oltcit or
Jaguar path.

Lt. Gen. Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official
granted political asylum in the U.S., is the author of the
memoir "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987).

Remember this guy, Pacepa? The one who made Ceausescu really, really peed off? Wish I'd been a fly on the wall in Ceausescu's office when he heard Pacepa had walked into the embassy in Bonne and asked for asylum. One of Ceausescu's less than good days, I'd imagine. You don't know who I'm talking about? Oh. Then read on. Extract below from Wikipedia:

"Pacepa studied industrial chemistry at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, but just months before graduation he was drafted by the Securitate, and got his engineering degree only four years later. Between 1957 and 1960 he served as chief of the Romanian intelligence station in West Germany, and, between 1972 and 1978, he was Ceauşescu's adviser for national security and technological development and the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service.

Pacepa defected in July 1978 by walking into the American Embassy in Bonn, where he had been sent by Ceauşescu with a message to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He was secretly flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., in a United States military airplane.

In September 1978, Pacepa received two death sentences from Communist Romania, and Ceauşescu placed a bounty of two million US dollars on his head. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi set one more million dollars reward each. In the 1980s, Romania’s political police tasked Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa in America in exchange for one million dollars. Carlos was unable to find Pacepa, but on February 21, 1980, he blew up a part of Radio Free Europe's headquarters in Munich, which was broadcasting news on Pacepa's defection.

On July 7, 1999, Romania’s Supreme Court Decision No. 41/1999 cancelled Pacepa’s death sentences, restored his military rank and ordered that his properties, confiscated on Ceauşescu's orders, be returned to him. Romania's government refused to comply. This ignited a series of Western articles alleging that Romania was still not a country of laws. In December 2004, the new government of Romania quietly restored Pacepa’s rank of general.

Pacepa occasionally writes articles for The Wall Street Journal and various American conservative publications, such as National Review Online, The Washington Times, and the online newspaper FrontPage Magazine."

For more, and it makes fascinating reading, see Wikipedia as well as some other articles by Pacepa: The Arafat I Knew (WSJ), a review on Raul Castro, Propaganda Redux, Believers in Hate....