The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023

76 MARCH 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer Jonathan B. Rickert spent the majority of his 35-year career in or dealing with Central and Eastern Europe. His final two overseas posts were as deputy chief of mission in Sofia and then Bucharest. He is a frequent contributor to the FSJ. I first met Romanian diplomat and expert on U.S. relations Mircea Raceanu sometime around 1982, while I was the State Department desk officer for Romania. With his extensive service in the United States and in the North America Division of the Foreign Ministry, Mircea was well known to many of us who had dealt with his country. He and I got on well from the onset and have been friends ever since. What I never knew, however, until after his arrest in Bucharest by the Romanian authorities early in 1989, was that he had been providing informa- tion to the CIA for many years. In other words, in an attempt to bring democracy to Romania, he was spying against his own govern- ment, led by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. After his arrest, Mircea was charged with treason, interrogated at length, tried by a military tribunal, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He has described this whole experi- ence vividly in his Romanian-lan- guage book, Infern ’89: Povestea unui condemnat la moarte ( Inferno ’89: The Story of One Condemned to Death ), originally published in 2000. The Letter That Saved a Romanian Diplomat-Spy BY JONATHAN B. RICKERT One of the book’s most interest- ing parts explains how his death sentence was commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment. (Mircea was freed from prison in connection with the December 1989 revolution but was forced by the new Romanian authorities to leave the country— he settled in the United States with his family not long thereafter.) Here’s how it happened. On Sept. 10, 1989, the U.S. chargé d’affaires ad interim in Bucharest, Larry Napper, met with President Ceausescu to deliver a short letter from President George H.W. Bush. Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger had prepared the way for the meeting by reaching out to REFLECTIONS This pivotal letter, in the original English and as translated into Romanian (the Romanian-language copy bears a stamp from the archives of the Political Executive Committee of the Communist Party’s Central Committee), was included in the second edition of Mircea Raceanu’s book, published in 2009. COURTESYOFJONATHANRICKERT