At the beginning of the 1970s, when sporting achievement was barely getting underway in Oneşti, the secret police did not find it necessary to make any intelligence checks on the nucleus of teachers, trainers and gymnasts that was beginning to form. They had little reason to do so. The local authorities didn’t even pay very much attention to the disagreements that arose, given that Béla Károlyi was often at odds with the other technicians. It was thought to be only natural, as Károlyi was known to be both ambitious and difficult to get along with. Moreover, in a small town like Oneşti, it would have quickly come to light if the atmosphere within the squad was ‘unjust’, as they used to say.
Many of those who became informers were also members of the Communist Party. For this reason, they weren’t assigned ‘network’ files, as informers’ files were termed. After 1968, there weren’t any files at all on those Party members who collaborated with the secret police, since Nicolae Ceauşescu wanted the Party to control the Securitate, rather than the other way around. Whenever the Securitate was faced with an operational situation in which they needed the collaboration of a Party member, they had to request the permission of the local Party bosses. Once permission was granted, the person in question would assist the Securitate for a limited time period, but without undergoing the usual recruitment procedure and therefore without having a network file opened on him or her. Nevertheless, the names of informers and Communist Party collaborators were recorded in a separate database, which has yet to be located in the archives, and the Securitate officers were referred to in various ways: ‘official person’, ‘official liaison’, ‘operational liaison’, and sometimes ‘official source’ or simply ‘source’.
It should be said from the outset that the most significant informers, recruited not only to carry out comprehensive surveillance in Oneşti, but also to gather information and engage in operations to influence and control Romanian gymnastics, were leading figures in the sport. Maria Simionescu, for example, ‘the first lady of Romanian gymnastics’, was also held in high esteem by the Securitate, proving to be a valuable collaborator under the code name ‘Lia Muri’. Likewise, Nicolae Vieru, the general secretary of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, in his sober and conscientious style, collaborated with the secret police right up to its final days, in December 1989, hiding behind the code name ‘Vlad’.
In the Securitate documents identified to date there are no details about the period when they became collaborators, how they were recruited, or whether or not they were subjected to pressure or blackmail. But ‘Vlad’ and ‘Lia Muri’ left deep traces. In the voluminous ‘Sport’ dossier their earliest reports and briefing notes date from 1974–75. Incontrovertible proof of their collaboration can be found in their personnel files, in which the officers of Department One record at an unstated date that they are ‘source / 161 NI’, which clearly demonstrates their status.
Nevertheless, thanks to Securitate officer Nicolae Ilie, who for many years was her liaison and sometimes annotated her reports, we know that in November 1974 Mili Simionescu was already a ’trustworthy person’ and had undergone a fresh recruitment process. At the time, Ilie noted, ‘Simionescu Maria is a Party member. She was the informer to our organs and was let go in 1973, when she became a p.m. [Party member] (…) Permission from the Party organs will be requested to use the aforementioned Simionescu Maria as a source to inform the Securitate organs.’ In February 1975, Ilie made a further note, at the end of one of his agent’s reports: ‘permission has been sought from the Party organs to make use of her,’ and by March she was a ‘candidate’. After which, she became a ‘source’.
As far as Nicolae Vieru is concerned, he seems to have broached his collaboration with the Securitate more cautiously, at least in the initial phase. It was only later, in the 1980s, that he agreed to a code name and ‘source’ status, as his first reports are signed in his own name and presented as professional documents. Undoubtedly, his recruitment to the network of informers was a major success, since Vieru, after his appointment as secretary general of the federation, became one of the most influential people in the sport, contributing to every major decision regulating gymnastics and lives of gymnasts and their trainers until the mid-2000s. Those who knew him sustain even today that his achievements were remarkable. The Securitate sometimes noted in their reports that he had ‘ascendency’, by which was meant he enjoyed authority and influence, that he was esteemed or feared by his colleagues, an assessment that was wholly accurate. If we look at Romanian gymnastics as one big family, then it might be said that Vieru was the paterfamilias, even if he was subordinate to a number of people with political backing who served in the management of the federation or on the National Council for Physical Education and Sport up until 1989. He was also influential internationally, not only because he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Gymnastics Federation and deputy chairman of the organisation over the course of a number of mandates, but also, above all, because he managed to develop a significant circle of relations and because he had a good reputation with foreign partners, be they sportsmen, trainers, journalists, or businessmen representing global concerns.
…[UPDATE]
After the team’s glorious homecoming from Montréal, the Securitate intensified its surveillance measures, with Nadia becoming a top priority. The secret police drew up a family tree, identifying her parents’ relatives in order to examine their backgrounds, the family telephone was bugged, and friends of the family were also thoroughly checked. In the archive documents can even be found a diabolical plan on the part of the Bacău Securitate, mooted in November 1977, to monitor the relationship between Nadia Comăneci and Teodora Ungureanu: the Oneşti Securitate was ordered to recruit informers not only among the lycée’s teaching staff, but also among the gymnasts’ classmates, who were minors, aged just sixteen: ‘categorise and study the girls in the class in question, and select from among them those appropriate for inclusion in the network.’ While Béla and Marta Károlyi were under surveillance because they were deemed disloyal to Romania and abusive in their relationship with the gymnasts they trained, Nadia Comăneci and her parents were monitored to protect them from Károlyi’s actions and to prevent any reactions on their part that might have damaged the image of the Communist régime.
In the second half of 1976 Nadia Comăneci and Teodora Ungureanu began to make it more and more obvious that they wished to break off their relationship with their coaches. But Károlyi made no concessions to them as a means of defusing the situation. At the seaside, where he had obtained official permission to take the gymnasts on a short holiday, Károlyi tried to stamp out what ‘Nelu’ claims he viewed as a ‘star-like attitude’ and subjected the girls to the usual spartan schedule: ‘Very little food and limited physical training. (…) Gabor refused to follow this regimen and was kicked out of the team. The source found on the pupil a notebook in which she complained about the highly strict working regimen and in which she described the insulting words that Béla Károlyi addressed to the gymnasts before the Olympics, as well as the unkept promise to give them two weeks off after Montréal.’
Because she had been keeping a diary recording his abuses and encouraged the other girls to insubordination, Károlyi had Georgeta Gabor removed from the squad. He did so in a dishonourable manner, claiming not only that she ‘instigated the girls not to work’ – making Nadia and Teodora give written statements in support of this – but also that ‘she admired those who left the country’ and ‘provided no moral guarantees regarding her behaviour abroad,’ which was hard to imagine in a fifteen-year-old who had spent almost all her life in a gym. For this reason, Gabor was placed in the situation of having to discuss the matter with a Militia officer but the Securitate knew the truth, as is apparent from a report filed by the Bacău County Inspectorate on 22 October 1976: ‘from investigations it transpired that the real reason was the discovery by Béla Károlyi of notebooks in which Gabor wrote down her impressions of daily training sessions and the position of the two trainers.’
Nadia kept a similar diary.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a biographical work so heavily dependent on secret police reports. It makes me wish I could see the Securitate reports about my Fulbright research year in Romania in 1983-84. I wonder what my code name was. I know we were watched very closely. So were my Chinese and East German classmates.
Far Outliers 