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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

Spotlight on America: Ion Mihai Pacepa: 1928–2021- Highest-ranking Soviet-bloc officer ever to defect to the West has died

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Categories: ASCF News Bipartisianship

Comments: 0

In 2017, Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, called Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa the “most influential man of the 20th century and, arguably, the beginning of the 21st.”

He was the man who pulled back the curtain to reveal the disinformation that was being churned out from the Soviet bloc. Unfortunately, most people remained unfamiliar with Pacepa and his work.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 14, COVID-19 accomplished what a $2 million bounty and two separate teams of Romanian-sponsored assassins could not. Ion Mihai Pacepa, “Mike” to those who knew him, was called home to his eternal reward.

Pacepa was born in Bucharest in 1928. He studied industrial chemistry at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, but prior to graduation, he was recruited into the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Securitate. He was initially assigned to the Securitate’s counter-sabotage department. In 1955, he was transferred to Foreign Intelligence.

Pacepa was named head of the Romanian intelligence station in Frankfurt, West Germany, in 1957. Two years later, he was made head of Romania’s new industrial espionage department, and he held that position until he defected to the West. Starting in 1972, he also served as deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence, adviser for industrial and technological development, and right-hand man to communist Romania’s leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

In his new role, Pacepa lived at the top of the communist world order. He traveled the globe. He knew and socialized with Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and of course, Ceausescu. He met Western leaders, including President Jimmy Carter.

Yet, in 1978, he risked his life to leave behind his position at the top of the Soviet/communist world and come to the United States. It became his mission to warn the West about the oppression that necessarily follows socialism and communism. He was and remains the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc officer ever to defect to the West.

Carter didn’t believe Pacepa at first, and he wanted to return the defector to Romania—a certain death sentence. Pacepa’s own disinformation had tricked the U.S. president into believing that Ceausescu was a trustworthy ally, and now Pacepa presented a very different picture.

Eventually the CIA convinced Carter of Pacepa’s bona fides, and Western intelligence agencies tapped the invaluable information he provided. Most important was his explanation of the way Soviet agents planted disinformation to deceive and undermine faith in Western governments, leaders, history, and institutions—especially the churches. When Pacepa later attained U.S. citizenship, the CIA gave him a letter thanking him for his “important and unique contribution to the United States.”

In Romania, Ceausescu created a special Securitate unit charged with the sole task of assassinating Pacepa. The dictator also put two separate $1 million bounties on his head and dispatched the infamous assassin “Carlos the Jackal” to carry out the job, as well as a second team of assassins. They came close. Twice Pacepa’s secret identity was compromised and he had to undergo plastic surgery and rebuild his life with his American wife, a CIA agent whom he met while being debriefed.

Pacepa eventually published his information in the book “Red Horizons,” which exposed the corruption and brutality of the Ceausescu government and the Soviet/communist world. (President Ronald Reagan called that book his “bible for dealing with dictators.”) It was translated, condensed, and smuggled into Romania, where it became a catalyst motivating the people to overthrow their government. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were arrested, given a hearing, sentenced, and executed on evidence, much of which came directly from that book.

After coming to the United States, Pacepa and his wife lived under assumed identities, but he continued to write books and articles under his real name, including the 2013 book “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism,” of which I was co-author. He wanted to correct false stories that he had helped create when he was influential in the Soviet-bloc intelligence world.

Among the most important pieces of disinformation that he wanted to correct were that the CIA was behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, that Pope Pius XII was pro-German in World War II, and that Middle Eastern terrorism was organic (rather than fomented from inside the Kremlin). The Soviet bloc intelligence machinery had cultivated all of these false narratives while Pacepa worked in that world. His final book, “Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America” (co-authored by R. James Woolsey), was just released by Encounter Books.

America’s recent flirtation with socialism had concerned Pacepa greatly. As head of foreign intelligence in communist Romania, he worked with agents, assets, and dupes to plant seeds of distrust in the American mind regarding its government’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He noted that this type of disinformation was going on again today, with “fake news” and all kinds of stories (sometimes later retracted) that painted the United States in the worst possible light.

Pacepa spoke often of the media—more specifically, the money behind the news media, which drives the stories. Pacepa specialized in developing stories in this manner when he was at the top of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community. He helped turn American attitudes on issues in the 1960s and 1970s. He recognized the same techniques being used today so that many people now have a very negative view of their government but a positive view of socialism.

Pacepa leaves behind his wife of more than 40 years and a grown daughter.

Ronald J. Rychlak is the Jamie L. Whitten chair in law and government at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of several books, including “Hitler, the War, and the Pope,” “Disinformation” (co-authored with Ion Mihai Pacepa), and “The Persecution and Genocide of Christians in the Middle East” (co-edited with Jane Adolphe).

Photo: Ion Mihai Pacepa in 1975. He died on February 14, 2021. (Anghel Pasat/Agerpres Arhiva)

Link: https://www.theepochtimes.com/ion-mihai-pacepa-1928-2021_3696496.html

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