The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2023 77 Deputy Prime Minister Stefan Andrei for assistance in setting it up. The letter urged Ceausescu to “exclude the possibility of applying the death sentence” in Raceanu’s case. It appeared to take the Romanian dictator completely by surprise—he may have been expecting a response to an earlier letter that he had sent to Bush and other- wise might not have deigned to meet with a “mere” chargé. Though Ceausescu brusquely termi- nated his session with Napper as soon as he learned why he had come, the letter had the desired effect, sinceMircea’s death sentence was commuted shortly thereafter. Mircea himself knew nothing about how these events all had happened until after the revolution, when the interpreter at the Ceausescu-Napper meeting, Gheorghe Petricu, told him the story. Mircea described that meeting in his manuscript, based on what Petricu had related. Nevertheless, like a responsible journalist, he wanted to obtain cor- roboration of the incident, rather than relying on only one source. The only person present at the meeting other than Ceausescu and his interpreter was Larry Napper. As it happened, I was working for Larry at the State Department imme- diately after my 1998 retirement. When Mircea learned of this connection, he asked if I would set up a meeting for him with Larry to discuss the matter of the let- ter. He gave me the relevant text from his draft, about three pages, which I trans- lated into English. Larry readily agreed to see him, and they met on Feb. 9, 1999. After an exchange of pleasantries (the two knew each other from their time together in Bucharest before Mircea’s arrest), Mircea asked Larry if his descrip- tion of the Ceausescu meeting was accu- rate. Larry replied that he could not say anything official about the details of that session. How- ever, he added unofficially that he saw no reason for Mircea to make any changes to the text, as written. And that is the way it appeared in the printed book. Mircea remains intrigued by the origins of the letter that almost cer- tainly saved his life. What led President Bush to send the letter? Who else was involved in the process? Why Mircea, when many others were in similar positions? Although Bush and Mircea had met when the former was CIA director and the latter served as inter- preter for visiting Romanian officials, it would be a stretch to say they knew each other. His extensive efforts to find answers to these and related questions have led nowhere. Mircea has discovered, however, no other case in which a U.S. president has intervened directly and personally with a foreign head of state or government on behalf of a foreign national who had been spying for the U.S. If that is correct, it makes Mircea’s situation unique. There is a curious footnote to this story. Mircea somehow got hold of a copy of the Bush-Ceausescu 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), and included it in the second edition of his book, published in 2009. When I mentioned this to Larry, by then retired and working as professor of the practice at the Bush School of Govern- ment and Public Service at Texas A&M University, he was interested in seeing it. He had tried to gain access to a copy of the letter at the adjacent George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at College Station but had been denied, based on some sort of bureaucratic or security grounds. Consider that for a moment. The American official who had delivered a letter in person to the late Romanian dic- tator was not authorized to see that letter! How ridiculous can classification and security restrictions get? With Mircea’s permission, I mailed Larry copies of the letter. The irony was lost on none of us. Justice finally prevailed, to a degree, in Mircea’s case. In 2000 the Romanian Supreme Court annulled his conviction and sentence, given by the Ceausescu regime. Though friends of Mircea’s had lobbied on his behalf in Bucharest to remove the conviction, he never asked for such interventions, and he himself refused to seek any sort of pardon or clemency, since doing so would be, or could be, construed as an admission of guilt. In 2001, the Romanian government awarded Mircea the National Order for Merit, with the rank of commander, for his efforts to bring democracy to the country. n Mircea remains intrigued by the origins of the letter that almost certainly saved his life. In 2001 Mircea was awarded the National Order for Merit by the Romanian government. WIKIPEDIA