Tudor Postelnicu

Tudor Postelnicu (13 November 1931 – 12 August 2017) was a Romanian Communist politician, who served as Director of the Securitate from March 1978 to October 1987, and then as Interior Minister until the 1989 Revolution.

Biography Born in Provița de Sus, Prahova County, he left school after the sixth grade in 1943. Until 1947, he was an apprentice at a foundry in Moreni, subsequently working there as an iron lathe operator until 1951. He joined the Romanian Communist Party's (PCR; later PMR and then PCR again) Union of Communist Youth (UTC; later UTM) in 1945, a year after the August 1944 coup d'état brought the party out of illegality. From 1950 to 1951, he was secretary of his factory UTM committee; from 1954 to 1956, he was first secretary of the Câmpina raion UTM committee; and from 1956 to 1959, he was secretary of the Ploiești regional UTM committee. From 1956 to 1960, he belonged to the UTM's central committee for revision. In 1959, he became an adjunct member of the bureau of the UTM's central committee, also serving as head of its organisational section; he became a full member of the bureau in 1962. Additionally, he sat on the UTM's central committee from 1960 to 1964.

Postelnicu furthered his education at the cadre school of the UTM's central committee, finishing in 1954; at the Ștefan Gheorghiu Academy, which he graduated in 1967; and at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, where he took equivalence examinations and entered the doctoral programme in 1977.

From March 1978 to October 1987, Postelnicu headed the country's secret police, the Securitate, holding ministerial rank as a secretary of state. In this capacity, he orchestrated a campaign against the dissident writer Paul Goma, who had left the country in 1977, with the goal of discrediting him in Romania and abroad. The aim was to depict Goma as an agent of foreign powers and Hungarian irredentists, while among Iron Guard circles in Western Europe and the United States, Goma would be presented as being under Mossad influence obtained through his Jewish father-in-law.

Postelnicu was arrested during the 1989 Revolution, on the night of 22–23 December. Tried at the Bucharest Military Tribunal, he was sentenced in February 1990 to life imprisonment and confiscation of all his personal property, for complicity in genocide. The phrase he used to explain his actions became famous: "Am fost un dobitoc!" ("I was an idiot"). In April 1993, upon a request by the state prosecutor, the Supreme Court of Justice annulled the earlier sentence, instead convicting him of complicity in aggravated manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, and reducing his sentence to seven years' imprisonment and eight years' deprivation of civic rights. In 1994, the court accepted his personal request for conditional release on grounds of health. He was again incarcerated from January 1998 to October 1999, when he was granted conditional release a second time. Postelnicu died at the Carol Davila Military Hospital in Bucharest in 2017, following a long illness that left him attached to a ventilator near the end of his life. He was buried at Ghencea Cemetery.