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Romania Ministry of Interior and Security Forces
The Ministry of Interior was the primary government
organization responsible for maintaining order in Romania
(see
fig. 12). It was one of only three ministries represented in
the Defense
Council, the highest governmental forum for considering
national
security issues. It controlled the Securitate, special
security
troops, and police throughout the country. The ministry's
functions
ranged widely from identifying and neutralizing foreign
espionage
and domestic political threats to the Ceausescu regime to
supervising routine police work and local fire
departments. The
Ministry of Interior was organized into a number of
directorates at
the national level, and it controlled similar activities
at the
judet and municipal levels. There was a ministry
inspectorate general in each judet as well as in
Bucharest.
The inspectorates general in the judete had
subordinate
offices in fifty major cities. They were accountable only
to the
first secretaries of the judet PCR committees and
local
people's councils as well as the ministry chain of
command.
In prewar Romania, the Ministry of Internal Affairs
(the
precursor of the Ministry of Interior) closely supervised
the
activities of local governments and courts. The PCR gained
control
of the ministry in 1946 and filled its ranks with party
activists,
enabling the party to seize power the next year and
consolidate
communist rule during the following decade. One of the
PCR's first
actions was to increase the strength of the police from
2,000 to
20,000 officers who were loyal to the party. Little is
known
about the activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
after the
late 1940s except that it was tightly controlled by the
PCR general
secretary and directly served his interests. In 1972 a
deputy
minister of internal affairs, General Ion Serb, was
arrested and
executed for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Serb
was
allegedly recruited by the Soviet Committee for State
Security
(Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti--KGB) early in his
career
during his training in Moscow. The Serb affair led to a
purge
within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was renamed
the
Ministry of Interior, and helped Ceausescu establish
control over
an important lever of power. In a bizarre 1982 affair,
Ceausescu
again purged the ministry, dismissing scores of officials
who
allegedly practiced transcendental meditation. Among those
who lost
their positions was a deputy minister of the interior,
Major
General Vasile Moise.
In 1989 the directorates of the Securitate were the
largest
component of the Ministry of Interior. They also comprised
Eastern
Europe's largest secret police establishment in proportion
to total
population. The Directorate for Investigations had agents
and
informants placed in virtually every echelon of the party
and
government, as well as among the public, to report on the
antiregime activities and opinions of ordinary citizens.
It
perpetrated illegal entries into public offices and
private homes
and interrogated and arrested people opposed to
Ceausescu's rule.
Its agents frequently used force to make dissidents
provide
information on their compatriots and their activities.
According to
some prominent dissidents, because of the directorate's
influence
over judges and prosecutors, no dissident arrested by it
had ever
been acquitted in court. It worked closely with the
Directorate for
Surveillance and the Directorate for Mail Censorship. The
latter
monitored the correspondence of dissidents and ethnic
Hungarians in
Transylvania. Toward this end, it collected handwriting
samples
from the population and supervised the official
registration of all
typewriters and copying machines by the police.
The General Directorate for Technical Operations
(Directia
Generala de Tehnica Operativa--DGTO) was an integral part
of the
Securitate's activities. Established with the assistance
of the KGB
in the mid-1950s, the DGTO monitored all voice and
electronic
communications in the country. The DGTO intercepted all
telephone,
telegraph, and telex communications coming into and going
out of
the country. It secretly implanted microphones in public
buildings
and private residences to record ordinary conversations
among
citizens.
The Directorate for Counterespionage conducted
surveillance
against foreigners--Soviet nationals in particular--to
monitor or
impede their contacts with Romanians. It enforced a
variety of
restrictions preventing foreigners from residing with
ordinary
citizens, keeping them from gaining access to foreign
embassy
compounds and requesting asylum, and requiring them to
report any
contact with foreigners to the Securitate within
twenty-four hours.
Directorate IV was responsible for similar
counterespionage
functions within the armed forces, and its primary mission
was
identifying and neutralizing Soviet penetrations.
Directorate V and the Directorate for Internal Security
focused
mainly on party and government leadership cadres.
Directorate V
provided protective services and physical security for
Romanian
officials. With more than 1,000 agents, the Directorate
for
Internal Security concentrated on rooting out disloyalty
to
Ceausescu within the PCR hierarchy, the Council of
Ministers, and
the Securitate itself. It was a small-version Securitate
in itself,
with independent surveillance, mail censorship, and
telephonemonitoring capabilities. An additional source of
information on
attitudes toward the regime within the Securitate was one
of
Ceausescu's relatives, who was a lieutenant general in the
Ministry of Interior.
The Directorate for Penitentiaries operated Romania's
prison
system. In 1989 the prisons had a notorious reputation for
mistreating inmates. Major prisons were located in Aiud in
Alba
judet, Jilava near Bucharest, Gherla in Cluj
judet,
Rahova, and Drobeta-Turnu Severin, and political prisoners
were
known to be confined in each of these institutions. Others
may have
been held in psychiatric hospitals. The Ministry of
Interior's
Service K exercised wide countersubversion authority in
the prison
system, beating dissidents, denying them medical
attention,
implanting microphones, censoring their mail to obtain
incriminating evidence against them and their associates,
and
reportedly even administering lethal doses of toxic
substances to
political prisoners.
The Directorate for Militia and the Directorate for
Security
Troops controlled the routine police and paramilitary
forces of the
Ministry of Interior respectively. The police and security
troops
selected new recruits from the same annual pool of
conscripts that
the armed services used. The police performed routine law
enforcement functions including traffic control and
issuance of
internal identification cards to citizens. Organized in
the late
1940s to defend the new regime, in 1989 the security
troops had
20,000 soldiers. They were an elite, specially trained
paramilitary
force organized like motorized rifle (infantry) units
equipped with
small arms, artillery, and armored personnel carriers, but
their
mission was considerably different.
The security troops were directly responsible through
the
Minister of the Interior to PCR General Secretary
Ceausescu. They
guarded important installations including PCR judet
and
central office buildings and radio and television
stations. The
Ceausescu regime presumably could call the security troops
into
action as a private army to defend itself against a
military coup
d'etat or other domestic challenges and to suppress
antiregime
riots, demonstrations, or strikes. To ensure their
loyalty,
security troops were subject to intense political
indoctrination
and had five times as many political officers in their
ranks as in
the armed services. They adhered to stricter discipline
than in the
regular military, but they were rewarded with a better
standard of
living.
The National Commission for Visas and Passports
controlled
travel abroad and emigration. In 1989 travel and
emigration were
privileges granted by the regime, not civil rights of
citizens. As
a rule, only trusted party or government officials could
travel
abroad and were required to report to the Securitate for
debriefing
upon their return. Prospective emigrants faced many
bureaucratic
obstacles and harassment at the hands of the Securitate.
Even the Securitate was unable to deter all Romanians
from
fleeing the country to escape its political repression and
economic
hardships. An estimated 40,000 Romanians entered Hungary
as
refugees during 1988 alone
(see Ethnic Structure
, ch. 2).
Romanians
who applied to emigrate legally were dismissed from their
jobs and
were unable to find work other than manual labor. They
were
questioned and had their residences searched and personal
belongings seized or were called up for military duty or
service in
special labor brigades. There were no time deadlines for
the
government to make decisions on emigration applications
and no
right of appeal for negative decisions. Even with an exit
visa,
would-be emigrants confronted corrupt passport and customs
officials demanding bribes amounting to US$3,000 to
process
necessary paperwork. The government received payment from
West
Germany and Israel in return for allowing ethnic German
and Jewish
Romanians to leave the country. Emigrants in these
categories
represented the vast majority of the 14,000 allowed to
emigrate
annually during the 1980s.
Data as of July 1989
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