Top Soviet bloc spy chief celebrates 2 anniversaries

Today, July 28, 2014, I celebrate 36 years since I became a free man. It is still difficult for me to find adequate words to express my gratitude to the United States government for helping me to start a new life in the U.S. and for giving me the chance to reveal the unseen faces of the Communist war against freedom. There are many government employees I would like to acknowledge, but I have always respected their anonymity.

It has been a long time since I escaped from the evil Soviet empire, but I still vividly remember that day of July 28, 1978, when the U.S. plane that brought me to freedom landed at Andrews Air Force Base. There were a string of cars and a bunch of people waiting for me to get out of the plane. One man was standing in front of everyone else. “Welcome to the United States, General,” he said shaking my hand. "You are a free man!"

Many years after that memorable day, I became friends with a Holocaust survivor whose eyes always misted up whenever he talked about how one of the American soldiers who liberated his concentration camp had told him, “You’re a free man!” So are my eyes whenever I remember those solemn words spoken to me on this day many years ago.

There's yet another anniversary I celebrate today: Ten years to the day after my defection, July 28, 1988, was the most important benchmark of my new life. On that day I became an American citizen, and on that same day I was credited by the U.S. government with being the only person in the Western world who had single-handedly demolished an entire enemy espionage service – the one I had run.

That memorable day was followed by 22 more years of highly productive cooperation with the U.S. government. President Ronald Reagan called my first book, "Red Horizons," "my Bible for dealing with dictators." And a picture in Time magazine of March 13, 1989, showed "Red Horizons" on the desk of President George Herbert Walker Bush. A Romanian translation of "Red Horizons" printed in the U.S. was infiltrated into Romania, and a Mao-style pocketbook of "Red Horizons" was illegally printed in Hungary.

President Ronald Reagan holding Pacepa's "Red Horizons."

"Red Horizons" gracing the desk of President George H.W. Bush.

On Christmas Day 1989, Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of "Red Horizons." On Jan. 1, 1990, the new Romanian newspaper Adevărul ("The Truth"), which on that day replaced the Communist Scînteia ("The Spark"), began serializing "Red Horizons." In its lead, Adevărul explained that the book's serialization by Radio Free Europe had “played an incontestable role” in overthrowing Ceausescu. And more recently, the Washington Post has recommended that "Red Horizons" be included on the list of books that should be read in schools, next to Whittaker Chambers’s "Witness."

I am now 86, and am glad at this advanced age to have produced yet another book preserving for all time some vital truths very few other people alive today know. It's all in "Disinformation" (published in 2013 by WND Books), which I co-authored with historian and law professor Ronald Rychlak.

We are now at war with terrorism. Let's hope that my humble example will inspire other enemy spy chiefs to move to our side and tell us what even spy satellites cannot – what the terrorist tyrants have in mind, and what their most secret plans against us are. “Do what I did! Defend the people, not the tyrant,” I have told them in open letters widely published.

I will continue in this endeavor for as long as the Good Lord keeps life in this body.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Order Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak's blockbuster book, "Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategy for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion and Promoting Terrorism" or the companion film, “Disinformation: The Secret Strategy To Destroy The West.” Better yet, get both the book and DVD together – and save!