Deep Throat, Romanian Stylarah

A common rule in espionage says that you should not write a report that has original conclusions and talks about new things. You risk not being believed by anyone. Instead, if you discuss things that most everyone knows, you have every chance of being believed.

There is, however, a limit. Even if, officially, you are an Embassy official and not a spy, you are supposed to communicate more substance than a press release. However, from all the cablegrams intercepted by WikiLeaks in Romania, it becomes apparent that the US Embassy staff did not try in any way to find anything of substance, and instead limited themselves to reading only newspapers and sending on what they found out. Other cables showed, however, that there was no need for the American diplomat’s best endeavors.

Romanian politicians were happily giving any report that the Americans wanted. Vasile Blaga casually discussed the electoral strategy of PDL with the Americans. Then he would inveigh against the liberals, as if they were talking with friends over beer. Mircea Geoana did not talk as much with the ambassadors as much as he listened to them. Criticized for allegedly plotting the suspension of the “pro-american Basescu from CSAT,” Geoana was hurrying to appease the President of Romania without the party’s knowledge and then bragged about it to the embassy. The most talkative Romanian politician appears to be Georgian Pop, a self-described “Deep Throat” in reference to the Watergate scandal informant.

Correctly classified by the Americans as a “rising star,” Pop didn’t even have the common sense to gossip about power. He would chop up his own. He would cry on the ambassador’s shoulders that he shares the party with the corrupt Adrian Nastase, assuring the Americans that all that Geoana says is a joke, deploring the fact that the only intelligent people in PSD (the political party from Cluj) did not get votes, and in reference to one of the other “rising stars” of the party, Victor Ponta, he reckoned with disgust that “he barks needlessly, no one is paying attention.” Other reports prepared by the papers and sent out by Wikileaks show that the Americans watched with condemning eyes the lack of transparency in Romanian politics. However, the voters feel this lack of transparency. In front of American diplomats, it appears that our politicians do not know how to keep their mouths shut.