the Romanian ghost by Fabrice Arfi

Are ghosts born in a gray town in Romania where spies were once taught the art and way of life in the West before infiltrating them into the “free world”? In 1969, when a Romanian industrial designer named Vincenzo Benedetto arrived with his wife in the Lyon region, it was, officially, to join his family of Italian origin, whom he did not know. His visa obtained, after many difficulties, in a country governed with an iron fist by the evil Ceausescu couple, he no longer leaves France, where he leads a peaceful existence. But, eleven years later, five French counter-espionage police officers knocked on his door, convinced that the quiet Mr. Benedetto was an agent of the Romanian secret services, an undercover “ghost”. Incarcerated for a few months, then released upon the intervention of Maurice Faure, short-lived Keeper of the Seals of the first government of François Mitterrand, newly elected President of the Republic, in May 1981, this enigmatic man will never be talked about again.

Fifteen years, between two investigations into the Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign or the Bettencourt affair, the journalist Fabrice Arfi, pillar of the information site Mediapartwill attempt to reconstruct the thread of Benedetto's existence. An inevitably red thread, tied around this question: is it possible that the former socialist defense minister Charles Hernu, convicted of espionage for the benefit of the Eastern bloc until 1963, continued his occult activities well longer? What if Benedetto had been his treating officer?

A past in shades of gray

To get to the bottom of it, the journalist “blackened entire notebooks (…)visited archive centers in Paris, Vincennes, Lyon, Villeurbanne, traveled to Romania ». The Internet is of no help in this quest where the clues must be deciphered between the lines of the “blanks”, these anonymous notes established by the intelligence services. The sheets of pulp paper buried in dusty archive boxes reveal a past in shades of gray, populated by silhouettes in wide-lapeled jackets, with half-closed eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. There we meet former minister Charles Fiterman and high-ranking Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, Securitate spies trafficking in foie gras and plump socialist leaders snorting beneath the waterline of the “black waters of reason of state”.

You have 29.49% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.