In the mist-shrouded forests and mountains of Transylvania, home to the castle
of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a more modern myth, dating from the cold war, has
survived down the generations. This, some say, was the location of an
extraordinary “sex school”, one in which the most beautiful and handsome of
cold-war spies were trained in lovemaking before being sent forth to seduce
and inveigle secrets from western diplomats and agents. In the mid-1960s,
one American author claimed he’d been taken to one such school, housed in a
former royal hunting lodge outside Brasov. He alleged that it had a
curriculum of sex studies run by the Romanians and that at least three of
its young students were jaw-droppingly beautiful.
It takes only a cursory examination of the history of Transylvania’s former
royal hunting lodges to establish that the possibility of any of them ever
having housed a college for 15-year-old female sex spies is fanciful in the
extreme. However, four decades on, the myth of an intelligence school for
government whores is still deeply ingrained in the Romanian psyche. So is
there any truth in it?
“Before 1989, everybody hears about this,” says Csendes Ladislau-Antoniu,
president of the CNSAS, the archive of f the Securitate, the secret police
who terrorised Romania for decades, “but in my position I didn’t see any
papers [proving it].” He admits: “About spies as spies we know very little
as an institution. Its [the Securitate’s] job was not to see if James Bond
was blond or not.”
Nicolae Popa, a Romanian MP and senator for Brasov, is also well acquainted
with the rumours but is more sceptical. “It’s exaggerated, like Dracula.
Vlad the Impaler has been built up to be a vampire who drinks blood. It’s
the same thing.”
I was told that one of the few people alive who might be able to confirm if
such a school ever existed was Lt-Gen Pacepa, the former deputy chief of
Romania’s espionage service. Now living in the US, where he is one of the
country’s leading authorities on cold-war spies, he resides under cover so
deep that, despite two Ceausescu-imposed death sentences and a $4m bounty on
his head — $2m from the Romanian state, $1m from Yasser Arafat and $1m from
the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi, who sent Carlos the Jackal after him —
he has never been found, officially. But thanks to the internet I reached
him in days. He dismissed the idea of the “school” as pure fantasy, but in a
letter confirming Romania had, nevertheless, employed prostitutes as spies,
five words stood out: “You are onto something real.”
Lt-Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest- ranking spy ever to defect to the
West, a defection as important to the US and the CIA as that of Oleg
Gordievsky, erstwhile chief of the KGB’s London bureau, was to Britain. A
grainy picture on the cover of his controversial new book, Programmed to
Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB and the Kennedy Assassination, shows
him as a balding man in a brown suit. The head of the DIE (Departamentul de
Informatii Externe), Romania’s foreign intelligence service, he helped
trigger — with his 1987 defection and autobiographical book Red Horizons —
the revolution that destroyed one of the cruellest, most corrupt
dictatorships of modern times; Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were sentenced to
death in 1989 largely on the basis of the evidence it contained.
In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times, Pacepa, who ran the DIE from
1968 to 1978, revealed that, while all communist countries, including Russia
and East Germany, used prostitutes, both male and female, as spies, “my DIE
excelled at it”. But there wasn’t any school. “All training was individual
and was done in special safe houses that were studded with hidden
microphones and video cameras. But these were no ordinary agents. They were,
for the most part, “illegals”, recruited for their very particular skill
sets and attributes, the most important of which was their genitalia. The
highly classified PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye — KGB foreign
intelligence) manual for illegal operations puts it this way: “A regular
foreign-intelligence officer has an official position, a diplomatic passport
and a country behind him; an illegal officer acts under a foreign flag and
has only his penis — that’s his cover, his source of information, his
immunity.”
The “illegals” were originally the invention of Stalin, who in the late 1920s
ordered his foreign-intelligence services to train a new type of spy: one
who could gather information from potentially hostile countries without
compromising his own if caught. The earliest illegal officers were
foreign-born Soviet citizens whose mother tongue was French or German. They
were sent abroad under phoney western identities and all connection with
their country of origin was erased.
The most successful illegal of his generation was Richard Sorge, described by
Frederick Forsyth as the “most formidable spy in history” and by Le Figaro
as “Stalin’s James Bond”. Doc-umented as a German citizen, the
Azerbaijani-born Sorge used his cover as a journalist to run a Soviet
illegals network out of the German embassy in Tokyo. He’d left a German wife
behind in the Soviet Union but he was always surrounded by mistresses ready
to give their lives for him.
In Japan, the German military attaché’s wife, with whom he’d had an affair,
was so in love with him that in 1938, when her husband was named ambassador
to Tokyo, Sorge was given free run of the embassy. From there he forecast
such events as the attack on Pearl Harbor and the launch of Operation
Barbarossa. Years later, after his 1944 capture and execution by the
Japanese, Khrush-chev made Sorge a Hero of the Soviet Union and built a cult
around his memory. His reputation as a womaniser was part and parcel of his
legend. According to the PGU manual, his intelligence career, like that of
many illegal agents, was based “more on his penis than his training”.
Having, as Pacepa calls it, a “king-size penis” was still the rule for male
Soviet-bloc illegal officers from 1972 to 1978, when he ran the ultra-secret
DIE component dealing with this category of spy. “These lady-killers were
supposed to exploit their unusual sexual endowment [and outstanding academic
or technical credentials] to achieve social status, usually by marrying
wealthy or influential women,” he says. Hence the PGU manual’s dictum that
an illegal’s penis is “his cover, his source of information, his immunity”.
It was up to the agent to use his sexual and technical prowess, as well as
his wits, to gain all those things.
To Pacepa (who’d known almost nothing about illegal operations during his
previous four years as deputy chief of Romania’s foreign-intelligence
programme, because the secret headquarters they were run from were known
only to the DIE chief and its personnel director, Ceausescu’s brother), the
clash between the puritanism espoused publicly as part of the communist
ideal and the private reality came as a shock.
