The Stuff 'Legends' Are Made of: The Case of Claus Stephani

• In Event: Days of Our Lives in Secret Police Files

Abstract

A Securitate (Romanian secret police) recruitment manual from 1976 singles out the “informative network” as the principal means of achieving the intelligence officers’ goals in their line of work. The information the Securitate officers received from this network of informers allowed them to learn about what they perceived as potential hostile activities, and to work toward the prevention, uncovering, and, ultimately, liquidation of these activities. Informers were expected to possess aptitudes commensurate with the tasks of the officers, to infiltrate certain hostile groups and get close to the surveilled elements. Working in tandem with their case officers, informers were expected to provide the requested intelligence but also to recognize and analyze potentially new and useful information. The importance of these informers to the Securitate surveillance system cannot be overstated, and thus the recruitment process and its several prescribed steps were dutifully recorded.
The voluminous paper trail the Securitate left behind allows us to trace its elaborate steps in vetting, approaching, and persuading its candidates to agree to collaborate. These steps are all recorded in the various informers’ files and expose the fictional scenarios, called “legends” internally, the recruiting officers concocted to attract their prospective candidates. The officers’ reports expose fascinating scenarios in which they exploited any shred of compromising intel they had gathered about their candidates’ vulnerabilities. This paper will focus on the informer file of the German-language writer Claus Stephani and the “legends” the Securitate officers concocted to recruit him in 1961.

Author

• Valentina Glajar, Texas State U