Ex-Bible Smuggler Visits New Romania, Finding It Better but Still Troublesome

Daniel Inversin is an Orange County advertising man with a mission in life that transcends selling his clients’ products or making money for himself.

For a dozen years, Inversin has also smuggled Bibles to the people of Eastern Europe. And he has just returned from a trip to Romania that made it clear that the rules have changed dramatically. On the surface, they’ve changed decidedly for the better. But below the surface--well, Inversin says, that’s another and a much more complex and troublesome story.

Three weeks ago, Inversin and two companions--a West Covina police officer and an escaped Romanian who didn’t think he would ever be able to return to his homeland--pulled up at a border checkpoint in northern Romania. They were driving a 7 1/2-ton truck filled with clothes, food, medicine and Christian literature, all open and aboveboard. They also carried a letter from a Western European mission saying that they were transporting humanitarian goods for Romanian citizens.

Over breakfast the other morning, Inversin told me: “I was extremely nervous. My heart was racing. The last time I had crossed this border, I had a hidden load of what the Ceausescu government considered ‘subversive literature,’ and my van was searched for four hours. This time, it was all out in the open, and I didn’t know what to expect.”

What happened was unprecedented in Inversin’s travels throughout Eastern Europe. He was waved across the border almost perfunctorily.

“As we passed the checkpoint,” Inversin recalled, “I saw another sign of the changing times: a Romanian flag with the center cut out. That center was a symbol of loyalty to the Ceausescu regime.

“For a few minutes, I kept asking myself: ‘Is this just a trick? Are they going to get me on the other side, then arrest me?’ When that didn’t happen, I began to cry--both from relief and from joy--that this incredible change had actually taken place.”

The relief was certainly understandable.

Inversin’s first contraband trip 11 years earlier had also been to Romania. And it played quite differently. Inversin was carrying a thousand Bibles, printed in Romanian, in a secret compartment under his car.

He’s still reluctant to describe exactly how it was done except to say that the compartment had to be reached through the engine and couldn’t be detected by mirrors, which the police always held under the cars.

Inversin and his companions, a West German couple, were ordered out of their Toyota camper and required to wait four hours while the police searched the car and played every cassette the travelers were carrying. “One officer,” says Inversin, “watched me the whole time to see if my expression would change as the car was searched.”

The police didn’t find the Bibles and issued visas to the visitors. But once inside the country, they were followed constantly. The Bibles were to be delivered to half a dozen Romanian contacts whose names and addresses had to be memorized so there would be no record of them, “which isn’t easy for an American who doesn’t know the language.”

Inversin says they had to make all their deliveries at night and learned rather quickly how to give the police who were following them the slip. They made the deliveries successfully without compromising the recipients but, Inversin says, “I learned for the first time what a police state is really like. We have no idea here.”

Inversin, a wiry, light-bearded, genial, outspoken man of 45, got into the Bible-smuggling business after a tour of duty with the U.S. Marine Corps that included 13 months in combat in Vietnam.

Inversin is the son of a Swiss banker who represented his bank’s interests throughout the western hemisphere from an office in New York and raised his family there, although he maintained homes in both countries. He went to high school in New York and had finished 1 1/2 years of college before he threw it in and joined the Marines. “I was unmotivated and aimless,” he recalls.

He was neither when he got out of the Marines four years later and enrolled at San Diego State University. “But I was searching for some kind of personal peace,” he says. “I started searching when I was being shot at in Vietnam, and the need didn’t go away when I got home.”

He graduated with distinction in graphics communications, got into the advertising business, and in 1978 opened his own agency in Orange County. It has prospered steadily. So has his spiritual search that led him to the Christian faith he now embraces as an elder of the Orange Covenant Church.

But his own peace of mind wasn’t complete. Inversin thought constantly about the millions of East Europeans who were denied access to that same peace of mind by Communist governments that outlawed the practice of religion. And so he determined to bring Bibles to those who sought and couldn’t get them.

He started a movement called Bibles for Russia that he quickly affiliated with an organization in Holland called Eastern European Outreach. Raising his own funds and spending his own earnings, Inversin used Outreach to supply him with the Bibles and other materials he carried and with vehicles to transport them.

His first trip was in 1979, and he has gone at least once a year since. He has never been detained or arrested on any of those trips, although twice associates of his have, and once, the Czechs held a young married couple in jail for five months trying--unsuccessfully--to get the names of their contacts in Czechoslovakia.

Inversin’s wife, Anna, while sharing this religious conviction, has been less than enthusiastic about the dangers to which her husband has exposed himself. Especially after a trip a few years ago when a Romanian called to tell her to get in touch with her husband--who was then in Romania--to warn him that the secret police were laying for him. She couldn’t reach him and didn’t hear from him for three weeks--when he emerged safely.

“These missions,” Inversin says, “aren’t her style, but we’re all burdened differently. She doesn’t resist because she knows I see it as my calling.”

So now the danger is gone, and everything has changed for the better in Eastern Europe--or has it? Inversin, just back from Romania where he avoided Bucharest and spent most of his time in the towns and villages of western Romania, says, well, yes and no.

“The East Germans have the West Germans, and Czechoslovakia has unity and a charismatic leader in Havel. But it’s very different in Poland and Romania. The things I heard and saw in Romania a few weeks ago were disquieting. They really do have freedom, but they are holding it up and looking at it like a child--and asking, ‘What are we going to do with it?’ ”

On the plus side, Inversin says, for the first time he could stay openly with his Romanian friends and contacts. People are flocking back to churches and new churches are popping up everywhere. Women are no longer forced to bear children, and the people are free to move about as they like.

But on the negative side, Inversin describes people living in tents and unfinished buildings with terribly shoddy construction (“the plumbing is universally and unbelievably bad”), growing unemployment and poverty, food lines in the cities and hungry people gathering the remnants of vegetables in the fields, lines three days long to get into Yugoslavia to buy goods that can be resold in Romania, smog “that makes Los Angeles look clean” and the virtual disappearance of police--who, Inversin says, “are afraid of being attacked by the citizenry”--leading to chaotic traffic and civil confusion.

“And,” Inversin told me, “western TV coming in hasn’t helped any. The people want what they see and can’t get it, and that just leads to more frustration. One senior citizen told me, ‘Maybe we were better off under Ceausescu! At least we always had a job and food.’ And that wasn’t the only time I heard this.

“Romania and some of the other Eastern European countries are now at a crossroads. More and more people are asking, ‘Is freedom really worth it?’

“I don’t know the answer to this problem, but I do know we should be aware of it. We still have a very long way to go.”