Communist-era police archives haunt Eastern Bloc

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Even his best friend betrayed him. Stelian Tanase found out when he asked to see the thick file that Romania's communist-era secret police had kept on him.

The revelation nearly knocked the wind out of him: His closest pal was an informer who regularly told agents what Tanase was up to.

"In a way, I haven't even recovered today," said Tanase, a novelist who was placed under surveillance and had his home bugged during the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's regime.

Twenty years ago this autumn, communism collapsed across Eastern Europe. But its dark legacy endures in the unanswered question of the files -- whether letting the victims read them cleanses old wounds or rips open new ones.

Most former Eastern Bloc countries have enacted legislation that opens at least some of their millions of pages of secret police archives to the public, revealing how armies of informers were bribed or coerced into snooping on friends, colleagues and neighbors.

Germany has launched an ambitious effort to piece together millions of documents shredded as the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. But the Czech Republic and Poland are bitterly divided over how much access to grant. And at least two other countries -- Hungary and Romania -- are holding back hundreds of thousands of files implicating key figures, including some still powerful in business, media and politics.

In Hungary, which still has no legislation that would fully open the files, the intelligence services have kept 27 percent of the dossiers closed because they are still considered top-secret, said Janos Kenedi, an investigator who recently oversaw an official evaluation.

"There is no other former Soviet satellite where there is such a lack of regulation about the files as in Hungary," he said. That hasn't stopped the names of alleged former snoops from trickling out every few weeks or months, implicating personalities ranging from actors and athletes to priests and intellectuals.

In Romania, where 700,000 informers kept tabs for the "Securitate" on a population of 22 million, the more than 2 million files remain tightly controlled, yet dirty secrets keep slipping out to damage careers, friendships and family ties.

This summer, a newspaper cited soccer star Gheorghe "Gica" Popescu, the former captain of Romania's national team. At first he angrily denied it, then acknowledged he wrote notes informing on teammates and others in the 1980s.

Yet a cloak of secrecy still shields Securitate generals who ran the surveillance and now hold key posts in politics and business.

"They'll never open the files of the big players," said Cornel Nistorescu, a prominent Romanian political analyst. "It can't be done because the state is still run by these people. . . . Romanian society is contaminated. In the last 10 governments, I couldn't find three people who weren't dirty."

It wasn't difficult to turn people into informers. Some were blackmailed. Others sought career advancement or permission to travel abroad. Better food or free cartons of cigarettes were popular inducements.

Poland has been especially obsessed with how to handle its legacy of duplicity.

Four years ago, the Law and Justice Party swept to power on a pledge to purge anyone with proven ties to the former secret police. It pushed through a law that would have subjected up to 700,000 public officials to screening.

The legislation was struck down as unconstitutional.

One common complaint about secret police files is that they often are packed with gossip, conjecture and outright lies.

That, in part, is why Eugen Georgescu says he hasn't asked to see his file. "Why should I? I already lived it," said Georgescu, a spry 75-year-old who endured Securitate threats and round-the-clock surveillance after he challenged Ceausescu's regime.

The retired architect isn't alone in his lack of interest in his file. Authorities say they have received only about 10,000 dossier requests since 2005.

Novelist Tanase, who read his file in 2001, eventually sat down with the friend who betrayed him. But Tanase said the man never apologized, and they're no longer friends.

"He said he offered his services to the Securitate to protect me, but I don't believe that explanation," he said. So traumatized is Tanase that even today, he says, "I meet friends in the streets and in parks" where there are no eavesdroppers.

Tanase, who was under 24-hour watch by a regime that considered his works subversive, has another gripe about the old files: They're banal.

His 2007 book, "At Home We Whisper," juxtaposes his diary entries with cryptic Securitate reports from the same days -- exposing the sometimes laughable gap between what the agents presumed Tanase was up to and what he was actually doing.

"It's all very Kafkaesque," he said. "Can you imagine the Securitate interested in something as banal as the color of your shirt? They were so stupid."

And even though the process is painful, Tanase wants all the files thrown open.

"We can't build a normal and healthy society if we keep this dirt under the rug," he said.