Author(s): Ioan Codruț LUCINESCU
Publication name: Romanian Intelligence Studies Review
Publisher name: Mihai Viteazul National Intelligence Academy
Publication type: Journal article
Publication date: June 30, 2020
Pagination:
Issue/ Volume: 23/2020
DOI:
Abstract
World War I led to changes both on a European and a global level. Romania is a
significant case/example considering the fact that in 1918, after the fall of the
multinational empires, it achieved the goal of national unity. In the following years, the
Romanian state promoted the peace established then, in order to strengthen its
territorial integrity and alliances. The institutions of the national security system
worked, since the end of the military actions, to fulfil this strategic objective.
Both the army and the national intelligence services were confronted with
complex threats. “Great Romania” had, at the time, three neighbouring countries with an
obvious revisionist foreign policy and territorial claims – Hungary, Bulgaria and Soviet
Russia. By far the most dangerous enemy (both in terms of force and means) was the
Soviet Union which never accepted the territorial losses of the Tsarist Empire and the
loss of Bessarabia.
Lenin’s Russia and then Stalin’s Soviet Union attempted, in the two decades that
separated WW I and WW II, to destabilize the Romanian state through means and
methods that echo the modern “hybrid warfare” – from propaganda performed by the
communist movement aimed at changing the constitutional order, to various attempts
to ignite peasant revolutions (as a pretext for the Red Army intervention), and factory
strikes, to an intensive espionage activity.
The paper aims to analyse on the one hand the ample subversive actions of the
soviet secret services and, on the other, to look at the countermeasures that the
Romanian intelligence structures adopted for their annihilation.
Keywords: Romanian Army, the General Staff, First World War, Soviet Russia,
Romanian intelligence services, interwar period, the Department for General State
Security, hybrid warfare, Romanian Communist Party.
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