The Long Arm of the Securitate

The University Bathroom Assassination of Ioan Culianu

In the Divinity School at the University of Chicago I saw, and used, the third floor men's room in which, in 1991, Ioan Petru Culianu, a dissident Romanian religious historian specializing in Gnosticism, Renaissance mysticism, and the occult was assassinated by, apparently, lingering elements of the Ceauşescu era Securitate or secret police, despite Ceauşescu having been lethally overthrown in 1989, abandoned to a howling mob by his helicopter pilot, then executed on Christmas day.

Romania, the Iron Guard, Ceauşescu, and the Securitate

Romania is called Romania because it was a Roman colony. The Romanian language is based on Latin, along with the four that everyone remembers — French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese — plus the Sardinian language and various Romance dialects.

Romanian history includes being conquered by and absorbed into a long series of empires after the Romans — Byzantine, Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian.

Romania, or parts of it, had strong local rulers at times. One was Vlad Ţepeş, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Bram Stoker used him as a model for Dracula.

The United Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia formed in 1856, and adopted the name Romania in 1862. Borders continued to shift, especially in 1918–1920 after the end of World War One.

The Iron Guard was founded in 1927 as Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail or the Legion of the Archangel Michael. It was a ultra-nationalist fascist movement and political party with unusually broad goals. It was strongly anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, and anti-communist, incorporating a great deal of Romanian Orthodox Christian mysticism.

In November 1938, leaders of the Iron Guard were killed by government troops. Many surviving members fled to Nazi Germany. One month after the fall of France in May 1940, King Carol of Romania transformed his regime's single party in a more overtly totalitarian one and invited several Iron Guard members into roles in his government.

The king named General Ion Antonescu as Prime Minister, partly because of his ties to the Iron Guard. Then the king was forced to abdicate to his son, who gave Antonescu dictatorial power as Conducător.

The Iron Guard, now known as the Legion in a political context, supported Antonescu's ultra-nationalist dictatorship. He proclaimed that Romania was a "National Legionary State" and the Legion was its only legal political party.

The pogroms, harsh anti-Semitic laws and regulations, and political assassinations somehow intensified even further.

Soon the fascist dictatorship and the violent fascist political party began fighting. Factions of Nazi Germany's government backed different sides — the German Foreign Ministry backed the dictator Antonescu, while the SS backed the Iron Guard.

Antonescu met with Hitler and got his support to destroy the Legion. Starting on 14 January 1941, Antonescu's government forces struck against the Legion. For three days the Iron Guard attempted a coup, but Romanian army prevailed with support from the German army. The Iron Guard spent those last three days in a frenzy of anti-Semitic violence.

Antonescu was as obsessively anti-Semitic as the Iron Guard, so in June 1941 he had surviving Iron Guard members released from prison and armed to take part in the Iaşi pogrom. It was one of the worst during World War Two. Over a third of the Jewish population of Iaşi were massacred and many of the survivors were deported.

In 1944 the young King Michael cut Romania's ties to Nazi Germany and joined the anti-fascist Allies. This enraged the Iron Guard.

In 1944, King Michael, still just 20, participated in a coup that removed the military dictator Ion Antonescu from power. Romania had a coalition government in 1944–1947 with Communists in a leading but not dominant role. Stories persist that further exiled Legion members were invited back into government roles in Romania. Other Legion leaders remained in exile and politically active. Politically active cultural and purportedly religious organizations formed in western Europe and the Americas.

Romania became more purely communist in 1947, forcing King Michael to abdicate and go into exile. The Soviet Union imposed some direct military and economic control of Romania. Many Iron Guard members and sympathizers in government fled to the U.S., many of them to Chicago.

Then Nicolae Ceauşescu took control of Romania in 1965. He took Romania out of the Warsaw Pact and eased press censorship. Romania remained influenced by the Soviet Union but became the most independent of the European communist countries.

Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Nicolae Ceauşescu meeting in Bucharest at some point during Ford's Vice-Presidency of 1973–1974.

Ceauşescu not only refused to contribute Romanian forces to the Soviet Union's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, but he openly condemned it. Romania became the first European Communist country to join the International Monetary Fund and to welcome a visit by a U.S. President, Richard Nixon in 1973. It was the only country which maintained normal diplomatic relations with both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Romania was unusual, and potentially promising.

Ceauşescu suddenly fell from power in December 1989, in a revolution provoked by his insistence on a cult of personality, his endless oppression and tinkering with Romanian society, and widespread shortages caused by a national austerity program intended to eliminate national debt while continuing demolition and construction of his pet projects. Ceauşescu had also allowed the Securitate or secret police to become at least as overwhelmingly powerful and controlling as the Stasi in East Germany. And, the Securitate largely overlapped the Iron Guard in terms of the people involved, their goals, and tactics.

Ceauşescu had worried that his denunciation of the Soviet Union's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia might lead to its invasion of Romania. So, he formed the Garda, a sort of National Guard that provided military training for all university students and thorough arming of the Garda forces with indigenously built weapons. He eventually discovered that if you arm a large block of the population, exhort them to resist oppression, and then heavily oppress them, things might go horribly wrong.

The revolution began with demonstrations in Timişoara in early December, 1989. That became a general movement against the government, and the military, police, and internal security forces responded with lethal force.

Ceauşescu gave a televised speech on 20 December claiming that the events in Timişoara were external interference. The government organized a mass rally on 21 December, announcing in advance that it was "a spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu". Announcing in advance that tomorrow there will be a spontaneous event was typical of his government's nonsensical behavior.

The rally was carried on state television, and an estimated 76% of the population was watching. Ceauşescu began his usual style of wooden speech filled with pro-party rhetoric, reciting lists of achievements of the Romanian "multi-laterally developed socialist society" and claiming again that the Timişoara uprising was the work of a few foreign "fascist agitators".

People began booing and chanting, and Ceauşescu suddenly had an obviously confused and powerless expression. Ceauşescu was visibly losing power as three-quarters of the population watched on live TV. In this instance the Revolution was televised. State censors attempted to cut the video feed and replace the broadcast with recorded songs and videos praising the "Genius of the Carpathians". However, 76% of the population had watched him losing power while he didn't understand what was happening.

The next day, 22 December, the Minister of Defense died under suspicious circumstances. Ceauşescu claimed that he had been sacked for treason and then committed suicide. Everyone understood "treason" to mean that he had hesitated to pass along Ceauşescu's orders for troops to open fire on the demonstrators, and the "suicide" probably had state assistance.

Ceauşescu tried again to address the public with a early-morning speech. It didn't go well. He and his wife Elena fled to the roof of the government palace as the mob broke into the building and started making its way upstairs.

Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu and four entourage members escaped to Snagov in a helicopter flown by the chief pilot of the Romanian presidential helicopter unit. Ceauşescu commanded him to round up an additional VIP transport helicopter plus two more helicopters filled with armed soldiers to serve as a guard. The pilot called his unit commander, who replied "There has been a revolution ... You are on your own ... Good luck!"

They were down to the one helicopter and the increasingly unwilling pilot. They ditched two entourage members to get the load down to its rating of four passengers: the dictator, his wife, and two Securitate bodyguards.

Ceauşescu ordered that they fly to Titu. As they neared that city, the pilot began rapidly varying altitude "to avoid anti-aircraft fire" as he explained it. It also had the effect of sending Ceauşescu into a panic, demanding that they land in a field next to a small road to Piteşti. Once on the ground, the pilot just happened to notice a severe technical problem. He reported that the helicopter was unable to fly any further.

Completely out of helicopter pilots, the Securitate men walked to the nearby road to flag down cars. They stopped a forestry official and a local doctor. The doctor wanted no part of this, and his car quickly developed the very sort of sudden and unsurmountable engine problem that the presidential helicopter had just suffered.

The Securitate men went back to trying to flag down cars. They stopped a local bicycle repair man, who convinced them that he could safely hide the whole group in an agricultural technical institute on the edge of Târgovişte. He took them there and the institute's director locked them all into a room. The local police soon arrived and arrested the Ceauşescus.

European royalty immediately went into crisis management mode, again proving their importance in the modern world. On the next day, the 23rd, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark revoked Ceauşescu's Danish Order of the Elephant. On the 24th, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom announced that she was revoking Ceauşescu's honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and what's more, she would be returning the Romanian Order that Ceauşescu had bestowed upon her.

A trial was held on Christmas morning, the 25th. Within about two hours, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were both found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was immediately carried out by three paratroopers using their service rifles. The cameraman who had been recording the trial only reached the courtyard as the shooting was ending.

Having visited Romania, I already knew that much of the strange history of 20th century Romania. Reading about the assassination of Ioan Culianu introduced me to the extent to which the Iron Guard lived on beyond the fall of Ceauşescu. It became a strange combination of far-left and far-right, an ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist movement that remained behind the scenes in Romania and overseas.

One analysis of the fall of Ceauşescu concludes that while it began as a popular revolution by an oppressed population, what actually went down was an Iron Guard coup d'état that eliminated Ceauŝescu while keeping the old figures in power along with their extremely fascist, ultra-nationalist, and anti-semitic beliefs.

And, the Iron Guard and other extremists are actively recruiting and influencing overseas. The Traditionalist Worker Party was founded in the U.S. as an explicitly neo-Nazi group modeled on the early years of the Iron Guard. It ended up as a white-supremacist neo-Nazi compound in a trailer park in Paoli, Indiana, about five hours' drive south of Chicago. It was nationally prominent through the 2010s, involved in several violent far-right riots. Its founder, Matthew Heimbach, had married the stepdaughter of the leader of another neo-Nazi group which had merged with the TWP. Then Heimbach began a two-month affair with his mother-in-law, leading to hillbilly brawls in the trailer park, a brief arrest, divorce proceedings, and lawsuits.

The Academic Career of Ioan Petru Culianu

Ioan Petru Culianu was born in 1950 in Iaşi, in northeastern Romania in the region of Moldavia and near Bukovina, where today's Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova meet.

Culianu graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1972 with a major in Italian language and literature. Two months later, while studying in Italy, he was granted political asylum.

Three years later he completed a Ph.D. on the history of religion at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

He taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands from 1976 to 1985.

In 1987 he finished another Ph.D. at the University of Paris.

Culianu was a historian of religion, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. With multiple doctorates and proficiency in six languages, he specialized in Gnosticism and Renaissance era mysticism. He published significant works on the connections between those, the occult, the ancient Greek philosophical concept of έρως or eros, and history. He also published fantasy and detective stories in avant-garde literary magazines.

Mircea Eliade was also an exiled Romanian religious historian, 43 years older than Culianu. Eliade had arrived at the University of Chicago in 1957, where he became a co-founder of a major movement in the study of religions. He was one of the 20th century's most influential religious scholars.

Eliade encouraged Culianu's study of mysticism and urged him to come to the University of Chicago. Culianu arrived in 1986, becoming a visiting professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. The university promised to grant him tenure status when his immigration proceedings concluded.

Eliade died within a few months of Culianu's arrival. Eliade's history of support for the Iron Guard and involvement with other fascist and far-right organizations from the 1930s onward became increasingly exposed. Culianu denounced the Iron Guard and its influence. Meanwhile, the Romanian Securitate or secret police were attempting to become an agent of influence in Eliade's Chicago circle.

The Divinity School

The Divinity School at the University of Chicago is dedicated to training academics and clergy across religious boundaries. It grants Doctorates and Master's degrees, Ph.D., M.Div, and M.A. The U.S. National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, has ranked it as the top school in terms of faculty quality across all doctoral-granting programs in religious studies.

Much of the university campus is constructed of limestone in what's sometimes called the collegiate Gothic style, part of the Gothic revival period of architecture.

While it was established by a member of the Baptist clergy, the Divinity School today is unaffiliated with any specific sect, studying Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and other faiths in addition to Christianity.

The Divinity School is housed in Swift Hall, which was built in 1926.

The Divinity School publishes two quarterly journals, History of Religions and The Journal of Religion.

Swift Hall contains lecture halls, seminar rooms, and faculty offices. There is also a student-run coffee shop and administrative offices of the Divinity School.

Here's the main entrance on the north side of Swift Hall.

An elaborate lecture hall is the former home of the Divinity Library, which has more recently been incorporated into the university's central research library.

I managed to get away from this table of free books being given away by a retiring professor without selecting any.

And, speaking of book giveaways and book sales...

The Assassination

Some of Culianu's fantasy and detective stories in avant-garde literary magazines featured secret sects and organizations, describing political events and murders similar to his own eventual assassination.

After the Romanian revolution of December, 1989, Culianu became more outspoken. During the last fifteen months of his life, he wrote more than thirty articles criticizing Romania's new rulers in Lumeo Libera, a New-York-based emigé newspaper, and Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper. He spoke on broadcasts of the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Both the far left and the far right of Romania hated him.

Culianu described the Securitate, Romania's secret police, as "a force of epochal stupidity and yet unseen profundity", and as "the most secret, the most bombastic, the most mystical and bungling fascist organization of pre-war Europe."

Culianu was an early proponent of the analysis that the 1989 revolution was co-opted by fascist forces — what began as a popular revolution suddenly became a coup d'état by people with ties to the Iron Guard and its successors. Old leaders remained in power, and old communists found allies in the successors to the old extreme right.

Culianu hosted the exiled King Michael for his visit to the University of Chicago in April 1991. He had concluded that the elderly king was the best hope for stability in Romania.

By this time, Culianu was receiving threats from Vatra Romaneasca or Romanian Hearth, described by a retired Securitate officer as "for all practical purposes an organ of the Romanian Information Service", the new name for the Securitate after Ceauşescu's death.

Some of the threats and the comments published in Romanian media used the archaic language of the Iron Guard's mysticism and nationalism, including outdated spelling and orthography unused since a series of spelling reforms through the 20th century. This ruse had been used through the years by the Securitate to place blame on aging Iron Guard factions from the past.

On 21 May 1991 the Divinity School's annual book fair had brought a crowd of people into Swift Hall. Culianu went into the third-floor men's room and entered a stall. In the adjacent stall, someone stood on the toilet and shot Culianu in the head with a .25 caliber pistol.

Here is the entrance and the memorial on the nearby wall.

After over a century of organized crime, Chicago's police are familiar with assassination-style shootings. But the Chicago Police Department was initially mystified, assuming it was the usual case of a disgruntled student or fellow academic, or a jilted lover, or even a practitioner of the occult arts in which Culianu specialized.

However, the Cook County Chief Medical Examiner said, "These people knew what they were doing. To kill with one shot from a gun as small as a .25 — that's not easy." So, probably not the typical jilted lover or deranged cultist. A former Romanian intelligence chief who defected in 1978 and now lives in hiding in the U.S. said, "It's a typical KGB-style type of execution, one shot to the back of the head."

Suspicion eventually shifted to it being a political assassination, especially after right-wing factions of Romanian politics openly celebrated the murder. The far-right România Mare published an article about the "seething, fermented vision of Culianu's fecal brain," calling him "a piece of excrement over whom not enough water was flushed" and describing the location as "a lethal toilet prepared for him as if by destiny."

A fellow Divinity School professor offered his interpretation of the setting within a public restroom. "It's ritually significant. It conveys symbolic and physical humiliation, stain, impurity, a most profane site to end a life. In fact, I've wondered if this was a cult killing." Culianu had written and spoken of the mythic cultic aspects of Romania's far right.

As Umberto Eco wrote about the murder, "Culianu could have been killed by a member of some fanatical sect with which he as in contact, or by surviving agents of Romania's notorious secret service, the Securitate." As Culianu would have observed, there's no reason his killers weren't both of those.