Old Regime Was Suspicious of New Leader’s Soviet Ties : Secret police: Concern about Ion Iliescu indicated fears that a campaign against Ceausescu was afoot.

Secret police serving fallen dictator Nicolae Ceausescu were deeply suspicious of new Romanian leader Ion Iliescu and his connections with the Soviet Union months before the popular uprising that toppled the regime, according to interviews with former political prisoners here.

According to four members of a secret underground opposition group, the “R-Alliance,” who were jailed by the Ceausescu government for attempting to publish an anti-regime newspaper, secret police interrogators pressed them continuously with questions about Iliescu beginning last February.

R-Alliance leader Petre Bacanu, 48, said the questioning about Iliescu started when secret police agents discovered a relationship between R-Alliance members and a Soviet journalist based in Bucharest. After that, Bacanu asserted during an interview Thursday, at least one-fourth of all the questions asked during hours and days of interrogation, sometimes accompanied by torture, focused on Iliescu.

“They were looking for connections,” Bacanu said. “Iliescu came into the discussion when they discovered that we had communications with a Soviet journalist for Izvestia (the Soviet government newspaper). Then they began to ask if Iliescu had contact with the R-Alliance.”

In fact, he said, Iliescu did not have contact with the group, although he worked in the same building with several of its members.

Contacted Thursday, Izvestia correspondent Victor Volodin said he knew several of the R-Alliance members but said he was not aware of the group until after the recent uprising.

“I knew them only as friends,” Volodin said. “They visited me in Moscow.”

Feared Opposition

The strong secret police interest in Iliescu, 59, a former senior Romanian Communist Party official who had fallen from grace with the Ceausescu regime, indicates that police agents may have feared a campaign against the dictator was afoot long before opposition surfaced openly.

The fact that the questions about Iliescu were sparked by a Soviet connection also suggests that Ceausescu, like several Western political analysts here, had identified Iliescu as someone with pro-Soviet sympathies. Some Western diplomats have described Iliescu as “Gorbachev’s man in Romania.”

According to reports, Iliescu befriended Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev when they were both students in Moscow more than 3 1/2 decades ago.

Rumors about a Soviet role in the remarkable events that led to the downfall and subsequent execution of Ceausescu circulated wildly here in the first days after the regime fell.

In response to the rumors, Iliescu delivered a televised speech Tuesday that denied foreign intervention. He said the revolution was a “spontaneous action, an expression of discontent accumulated over the years.”

“The idea is completely false,” Iliescu said, “that it could have been a coup d’etat performed by some organized forces supported from abroad.”

At the time of the interrogations of the R-Alliance group, Iliescu was a mid-level Communist Party leader serving in the Ceausescu government as director of technical publications.

Emerged as Leader

But when demonstrators seized control of Romanian national television a week ago, after a bloody fight with Ceausescu loyalists, Iliescu quickly emerged as the leader of the new National Salvation Front government.

On Tuesday, Iliescu was named provisional president and for the past several days has served as Romania’s head of state.

His leadership is marked by a clear Soviet tilt that contrasts sharply with the hostile, anti-Soviet stances taken by Ceausescu, particularly on issues of foreign policy. Under Ceausescu, Romania opposed the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. It was the only East Bloc country to participate in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Before his fall, Ceausescu showed disdain for recent Soviet policies, saying they compromised the true path of socialism represented by his totalitarian regime.

Three weeks ago, during a meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders in Moscow, he was given a cool reception by Gorbachev.

Iliescu and the new provisional prime minister, Petre Roman, both having studied in the Soviet Union, speak Russian. On Wednesday, Iliescu also named Russian-speaker Sergiu Celac as the country’s new minister of foreign affairs.

In an interview, conducted in Russian with Soviet national television Tuesday, Iliescu thanked the Soviet government for its diplomatic recognition of the provisional government and said he had “warm” feelings for his Soviet neighbors.

But he said the Romanian Communist Party had “compromised itself” during the Ceausescu years and that “its continued existence is under great question.” Iliescu told Soviet reporters he hopes to move the country toward political pluralism starting with free elections next spring.

At a news conference Wednesday, provisional government spokesman Corneliu Bogdan praised recent reforms in other Eastern European countries.

“The revolutionary process in Eastern Europe was started by the people,” Bogdan said. “But without Gorbachev’s perestroika (political and economic restructuring), these revolutions could not have taken place.”

Chose ‘R’ as Symbol

R-Alliance was founded a year ago by several journalists, printers and intellectuals as a group publishing a one-page newsletter critical of the Ceausescu regime. They chose the letter “R” as their symbol because of several words in the Romanian language that begin with the same letter, including words meaning “reconstruction” and “awareness.”

The group, which included three journalists working for a state-controlled newspaper, Romania Libera, stole metal-printing type from the newspaper to publish their newsletter. They enlisted an engineer to design a balloon that would lift copies of the newsletter high above Bucharest and explode, scattering copies on the streets of the capital. Newsletter articles were signed with the letter “R.”

“We knew the risk was supreme,” said Anton Uncu, 51, a journalist who was one of the members of the alliance. “We knew there would probably never be a second edition.”

But before they could even complete printing the newsletter, secret police descended on their homes and arrested the seven main organizers. Uncu said he was beaten with a leather switch on his legs and slugged in the face during numerous interrogations.

After 95 days in jail, six of the organizers were exiled to remote cities in the Romanian countryside.

The main organizer, Petre Bacanu, was kept in jail for nearly a year, until Dec. 22, the eve of the uprising in Bucharest. When he was released, he said, he could hear the sounds of the demonstrators in the capital’s squares and the retort from the guns of the secret police agents who opposed the revolt.

Today Bacanu, Uncu and another associate, Mikai Creanja, 48, have been voted by fellow workers as editors in charge of their old newspaper, Romania Libera.

Although they insist that provisional President Iliescu had nothing to do with their organization, they are all now his fervent supporters.

“We were extensively interrogated about Mr. Iliescu,” Bacanu recalled. “. . . Without our even knowing him, he became our leader.”