Eugen Cristescu

Eugen Cristescu (3 April 1895 – 12 June 1950) was the second head of the Kingdom of Romania's domestic espionage agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SSI), forerunner of today's SRI, convicted in 1946 as a war criminal. He previously served as head of Siguranța Statului, the secret police.

Biography Early life Cristescu was born in Oituz, Bacău County into a large, poor family. His father Ioan was a schoolteacher there, while his mother's main occupation was raising her six sons and three daughters. His brothers were Ioan, chief of staff at the Ilfov County prefecture; Vasile, lieutenant colonel in the personal guard of Marshal Ion Antonescu; Mihai, commissioner at the Bucharest Prefecture; Mircea, employee of the Foreign Ministry's Protocol Service; and Gheorghe, head of the photo identification service and then a director in the Secret Intelligence Service of the Romanian Army, which on 13 November 1940, a day after Eugen became its head, was renamed the Special Intelligence Service. Nine days later, the Iași pogrom was carried out. According to postwar testimony offered by Traian Borcescu, head of the SSI's counter-intelligence section between 1941 and 1944, “as to the preparation and staging of the Iași massacres, I suspect that they were the handiwork of the First Operative Echelon, since Eugen Cristescu told me when he returned to Bucharest: ‘The great deeds I accomplished in Moldavia, I accomplished in collaboration with Supreme Headquarters, Section II’”. In his own written postwar deposition, Cristescu denied SSI involvement at Iași, claiming it had been organised by the Gestapo and the SD. It is certain that the SSI armed members of the banned Iron Guard instigated and took part in the pogrom; it is unlikely that Cristescu acted on his own initiative, and later testimony from SSI officers indicates that he kept both Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu and Ion Antonescu informed about the massacres’ progress. He died four years later in Văcărești Prison; the official autopsy record indicated his death was due to coronary artery disease.