A Cold War card index is Romania’s best hope

Bucharest

In 1950s Romania, as Stalinist terror descended, a mania evolved for hunting down ‘foreign spies’. Early victims included former staff at the British military mission in Bucharest, some of whom were shot for their services between 1944 and 1947. Even doormen at the mission, or secretaries, were sentenced to hard labour. As the terror spread, to have frequented the British Council library in Bucharest was enough to bring charges of ‘espionage’. A minimum sentence might involve two years’ canal-digging near the Black Sea. Half a century on, Romania is set to join the European Union. Stalinist evil is supposed to be long gone, replaced by the improving banalities of life in the modern EU. Romania has not quite made the grade yet, however: on Tuesday Brussels warned that her entry could be delayed.

The Securitate secret police was disbanded 16 years ago. Senior officers at its successor body, the ‘Romanian Intelligence Service’ — or SRI in the local acronym — say that fewer than 10 per cent of their current staff are ex-Securitate. It is all very heartening — until you learn that the modern SRI is blocking access to the files of those supposed ‘British spies’ from the 1950s — and many thousands of other victims of communist rule. To the SRI, their files concern ‘foreign espionage’ and must remain sealed in the name of national security.

Romania has passed repeated laws to open the Securitate files. A special government agency, the ‘National Council for the Search of the Securitate Archives’ (CNSAS), opened in the year 2000 and has lobbied ever since for access to the nearly 2.5 million files believed to be held in the Securitate archives. But in the first five years of its existence, the CNSAS received just 9,000 files from the SRI. With parliament and successive governments crammed with former Communist party bosses and suspected Securitate operatives, there was little political will to open the files more swiftly.