Ion Mihai Pacepa is a former three-star general in the Securitate, the secret police of communist Romania, and was a trusted advisor to the Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. He defected to the United States in July 1978 after receiving a grant of political asylum by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He subsequently worked with the American CIA in operations against the former Eastern Bloc of Cold War communist nations. His book RED HORIZONS details his role as a top aide to Ceausescu in the 1970s and his fateful decision to defect from Romania, knowing he would become a target for assassination by paid undercover agents of the Ceausescu regime. He now lives somewhere in the United States under an assumed identity. Pacepa's book has been published in 27 countries and was made into a documentary film for Hungarian television. It has been said that most of the accusations made against Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu at their 1989 trial, at the end of which they were executed by firing squad, came word-for-word from Pacepa's book.
