Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) - at the crossroads. The time has come for its delousing from waiters and school failures

Yesterday, the Virgil Măgureanu, the first director of the SRI, has been officially indicted. He was the first official founder of the institution and the one who left the deepest mark on its practices. Indicted on charges on extremely serious crimes against humanity, he is facing 25 years in prison.

Over the last few years, several other lower ranked directors in the SRI have been indicted as well, for instance first deputy Ion Marin, - who was with the Ministry of National Defense prior to the Revolution, and he was investigated for his participation in the repression of civilians, or general Ovidiu Soare, who was handcuffed in prime-time. But the indictment of the very founder of the SRI himself, the number one boss, it really is a symbolic moment, especially if we take into consideration the forced retirement of Florian Coldea.

But I don't the time is right yet to do a wrap-up of the SRI. That thing will probably come after Dragnea's return from America and most likely that is when Sebastian Ghiţă will show up. We should not forget that in fact, all of the strings of this sulphurous story about the SRI and the DNA lead to president Iohannis, who has ties to Coldea, because the latter had a significant contribution in the former getting elected. And the Ghiţă - Maior - Dragnea faction is now king of the hill, as demonstrated by Dragnea being invited to the inauguration of president Donald Trump.

For now, SRI is facing the worst crisis in its history, as the delegitimization and decredibilization of the service has reached alarming levels.

The collapse has been going on for a long time. It is clearly confirmed by the revelations made Ghiţă and Elena Udrea, as well as by her protector, Traian Băsescu. A number of SRI officers have come out over the last few years with memoirs and revelations about the corruption within the system, and all of their claims have now been confirmed. Adrian Radu, for instance, of SRI Prahova, has waged for years a real battle with corrupt top bosses of the SRI, and the courts have ruled in his favor. I have personally met the aforementioned SRI officer, who was the source of some shocking revelations about the oil mafia in Prahova, coordinated from the shadows by former SRI bosses - colonel Corneliu Păltânea, who led SRI Prahova and his first deputy, colonel Daniel Bucur, arrested and charged by the DNA prosecutors with accepting bribes, aiding and abetting embezzlement, as well as creating a faction in order to commit crimes - but the strings led to a big shot, Ovidiu Soare, a general at the top of the SRI. Adrian Radu, as well as other officers from the Prahova county have submitted reports to president Iohannis, about Sebastian Ghiţă and Florian Coldea, but he not only ignored them, he even sent them for review ... to the SRI itself, making a mockery of the resolution process for those reports by delivering them to very ones they were about.

The life of Adrian Radu and other brave officers was and still is hell, as the system has used all the available tools of power in order to destroy them.

There is another Ghiţă holding a key SRI position, a general who started off as a waiter, and his wife became a subordinate officer, promoted by Coldea. And that "other" Ghiţă, of the E division, internal protection, is precisely the one who ran the pretend-investigation of Coldea. And it was that same waiter who had as his mission to silence those officers who dared invoke the law of the integrity warnings and to turn to the SRI Commission in the Parliament or the Presidency in order to shed light on the serious illegalities inside the SRI. The commission for the Audit of the SRI was actually audited by the SRI, making a mockery of the whole process.

Coldea didn't just come out of nowhere, he was planted in the path of president Băsescu, who promoted him from major to general knowing full well that he was the only one in the history of the SRI to flunk the SRI Academy, and that he had visible psychological and character issues. Educated abroad, tall and slim, with a defensive body language, even though he was in the Anti-terrorism Brigade, but on the information side, if we're being honest, Coldea was a "representative of the new generation" of political police, under general Bidireci. Being close to Bidireci (a sly old fox, from the "old guard" of the DSS, who ended up in counterespionnage) seems to have been very useful to Coldea, as was the backing of general Zamfir, head of wiretapping, who used to work for Tonola, the special unit for communications wiretapping, the one who set the buses on fire in the University Square, on June 13th, "90, currently retired and growing cucumbers in Moara Vlăsiei. But the SRI retirees don't just grow cucumbers, they do other things as well, what they've been taught to do, using the puppets they have created.

The team of new officers - the youngsters raised and trained by Soare, Bidireci, Zamfir, ended up in key positions and control Romania's most important intelligence service, which can only show once again the professionalism of the old wolves of the "Securitate" (the former communist intelligence agency and political police) who were clever enough to preserve their access and influence in their fiefs, even after retirement. And the young ones served the interests of those who put them in those positions, in fact they've gone cocky and have ended up controlling more businesses than their predecessors - as evidence, a moron like Ghiţă, created by "Popescu Televizor", from Logistics, "Gioni Popescu", a basic sergeant major, who Măgureanu made general and good friend to Păltânea and Soare, due to shared business interests. Ghiţă was taken over by Gioni in high school, when he was 16-17 year old, a teen who was unlucky with girls, uncharismatic, dull - but who became a multimillionaire at a dizzying speed, to now become the pawn of some huge fights that are being waged within the SRI. As has been clearly seen, Maior's name, for example, is never mentioned in Ghiţă's leaks.

Maior was practically removed by Coldea from his position of Director of the SRI, via Băsescu and now has every reason to be out for vengeance. The problem is that the SRI is being hurt heavily in these power struggles, which of course have to do with the new paradigm shift of the power in the US. President Trump has heavily criticized the CIA, and the CIA agents in Bucharest were publicly compromised by Ghiţă, not unjustifiably so.

The problem is that when it comes to recruitment, for many years, from its creation essentially, the SRI has been beholden to the old network of the Political Police (Securitate), who were trained first of all in stealing and plundering, behind their badges.

For years on end, the major dysfunctions of the SRI completely hidden under the rug - all because of the "dinosaurs" plugged into the central structures of the PSD, actually with Ion Iliescu and with the group of KGB agents that he brought with him. Since 1990, the intelligence apparatus has worked almost exclusively to the benefit of Ion Iliescu's faction - in other words for Moscow. The story with the renovation of the SRI was just a PR stunt. In reality, the core that coordinated and moved from within all the important machines of the institution came from the same source. The changes that were made during the Constantinescu regime were carefully filtered, so carefully, in fact, that Constantinescu was forced to leave Cotroceni - defeated by his own political police, like he said himself. The political officers of the Communist party - that is what the former members of the Securitate were, they have penetrated all the major institutions of the country, on one hand, and then the economy and politics. The SRI was the bastion of this faction. Only the naïve will believe the dazzling statistics that talk about the "draining" of the SRI, presented by those "in the know", who are in fact veritable influencers.

High-ranking officers of the SRI have been involved in very serious offences and some have even been convicted - Radu Timofte, former head of the SRI for example and obedient servant to Sorin Ovidiu Vântu escaped his prison time through his death.

It wasn't just SOV that had his way with the SRI, but another notorious criminal as well, the man of the Syrian intelligence services, Omar Hayssam, close friend to Ion Iliescu and Adrian Năstase. Omar Hayssam's ties to members of the terrorist factions were deliberately concealed by the directors of the Prahova division of the SRI, because SRI officers, through various proxies, did business with Syrians Omar Hayssam and Mahmoud Akeel, called "Mihai", Palestinians Yousef Toumar, Al Bittar, as well as other Arabs and Iraqis, all of them involved in timber businesses in the Valea Doftanei region. SRI officers have exploited the information obtained by the institution and profited from the timber mafia.

Top ranking staff of the SRI have abused their positions within the service and have gotten involved in protecting some groups that were involved in the illegal trafficking of oil products. More specifically, the directors of the SRI would conceal any information concerning illegal fuel dealings. But even more than that, SRI officers from the cities of Ploieşti, Sibiu, Arad, Timişoara got involved directly in the oil mafia - oil which was taken from the Vega refinery of Ploieşti and sold along the route through companies owned by the acolytes. The processed oil products were then sold to the warehouses that supplied the gas stations owned by OMV, MOL, PETROM etc.

For many years, employees of the SRI, backed by politicians and prosecutors from the General Prosecutor's Office, have set up criminal factions that were active not just in Prahova, but all over the country with the protection granted to this mob by former General Major Ovidiu Soare, chief of the inspectorate for the Defense of the Constitution and Economic Security of the SRI.

The general left, the connections remained in place.

General Soare was one of the most important people in the SRI, who also ran a division - A - which was in charge of monitoring political parties, the civil society, mass-media and politicians. The information was delivered by Soare directly to Adrian Năstase and was used by the former governing party in the electoral campaigns. A significant number of SRI officers have created a veritable bastion of the FSN-PDSR-PSD within the institution. Some of them were even paid by the party, unofficially of course. Others were kept in office, promoted and rewarded through various means by the Party and they control - actually from outside the institution - what happens within it.

The former SMB, the Security of the Bucharest City, was the breeding ground for the first service- political police- created after 1990, the notorious service nicknamed "Two fifteen", created by Voican Voiculescu, in January 1990. I have a photocopy of the creation document, which has been submitted with the Military Prosecutors' Office. Its investigations, after 27 years, have led to the indictment of some of the heads of the System, but their brood are still running around the institutions' hallways , and the cleanup has to come first from within the SRI. The time hasn't come yet, but as the criminal probes progress, the time of the small Ghiţă clones will come to.

Unless important mutations occur within the SRI, Romania's national safety deficit will deepen, and the risk level will reach alarming levels, especially in a period that is murky for Eastern Europe and for other regions as well. The operatives who warned about the integrity problems of the SRI, the officers who took on risks in the name of military honor, trying to clean up the image of the institution should actually be awarded medals and brought in directly to the Internal Protection Department of the SRI, to begin the big disinfection...starting precisely with Ghiţă Vasile, the waiter turned general, going through Coldea and Soare, the current head of the department. Oprea also made general after being a waiter, but in the end he was dealt with - so it can be done ...