Upheaval in Romania : Former Defenders of Ceausescu Now Sing a Different Tune : Communists: Ex-officials say they had no choice but to back the dictator. Now they fear reprisals.

Floria Tuiu pronounced himself a free man. He said he is ecstatic--speechless with joy that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is dead.

“Now we are free like birds,” he said, flapping his arms. “I tell you, no one ever liked this dictator who behaved like a devil.”

But three weeks ago, when a reporter visited here before the fall of Ceausescu, Tuiu, 55, was slavishly devoted to the “dictator-devil.” He quoted reverently from Ceausescu’s speeches. He presented visitors with leatherbound volumes of his leader’s words, illuminated in gold like sacred texts.

Likewise, Romanian diplomat Daniel Damitru, 40, the man charged with Romanian-U.S. relations in the Foreign Ministry, fiercely defended even the most extreme Ceausescu policies when it was his turn during the same visit three weeks ago.

Regarding the defection to the United States last month by Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, the handsome diplomat had sniffed: “Poor Nadia, I think she is all muscle and very little brain. I think most Romanians think of her as a traitor.”

In the wake of Ceausescu’s overthrow and execution by firing squad on Christmas Day, both men are now singing a different tune. Now they said they never really meant those remarks, that they were trapped by fear and professional responsibility into defending the tyrant.

Interviews with the two men and with Gabriel Paslaru, 37, a government interpreter who translated for the reporter on the pre-downfall visit provide a telling before-and-after picture of life inside the totalitarian regime.

All three men are members of the Romanian Communist Party. And all three are now anxious about their fate in the days to come, fearful that a post-revolutionary reign of terror will descend on the dead dictator’s spokesmen.

Tuiu, a senior “reporter” for the Romanian news agency, Agerpres, whose main job for years has been to greet and indoctrinate visiting foreign reporters, said he was kept from telling the truth about Ceausescu by the constant presence of a secret police agent in the office.

The man he accuses of being the secret policeman has not been back at the office since Ceausescu was overthrown, Tuiu said Wednesday.

“I had the worst job in the world,” Tuiu said. “We could not tell you the truth or they would crush us.”

Damitru, on the other hand, said it was his role as a professional diplomat, representing his country right or wrong, that prohibited him from telling the truth.

“There were a lot of things I couldn’t say at the time,” he recounted, sitting uneasily in a Foreign Ministry salon. “All Romanians had their ideas but couldn’t express them. As long as I was sitting in this chair, in this ministry, I couldn’t say anything against the dictator.”

On Wednesday, he confessed that for years he had considered Ceausescu a tyrant and a “madman.”

“He (Ceausescu) thought he was a person who would never die,” Damitru said. He said his worst personal brush with the dictator and his imperious wife, Elena, was in 1985 during a diplomatic posting in Washington.

Fearful of defections in the diplomatic ranks, Elena Ceausescu ordered overseas Romanian foreign service families to send their children, including infants, home. “In essence,” said Damitru, with the same kind of sneering bitterness he had reserved for Nadia Comaneci, “they were holding our children hostage.”

He said he is glad his former boss is dead. But he said the firing-squad execution on Christmas Day was too lenient, adding, “I think it was too easy a death for this man who terrorized the Romanian people.”

Of the three men reinterviewed after Ceausescu’s fall, only Paslaru, a sensitive intellectual who sings tenor in a choir, seemed crushed by the turn of events.

All three men had presented themselves weeks ago as true believers in the Ceausescu regime. But only Paslaru said Wednesday he had harbored no secret hatred for Ceausescu beforehand.

“Any man who instructs soldiers to fire on his own people is a dictator,” he said somberly.

“I did not lie to you three weeks ago,” he said. “I truly believed that the system worked. I could see all the new buildings, and I believed them when they said things would be better. I knew that there was not enough food, but still people were not starving. I knew it was not warm enough inside the apartments, but at least people were not freezing.”

On Wednesday, all three men said they admired the courage of the young students who demonstrated on the streets of Bucharest and the western city of Timisoara, forcing the fall of Ceausescu.

“The students showed us what can be done when you have guts,” Damitru conceded. “We are ashamed of our actions. They were in the streets when we were in our offices. In 24 hours, they brought down a government of 24 years.”