Rumanian Sting

Plenty of cloak, but no dagger

One morning last May, exiled Rumanian Writer Virgil Tanase, 36, left his Paris apartment for a rendezvous in the Luxembourg Gardens. He never got there. As startled passers-by looked on, Tanase was shoved into a car and spirited away. Since the missing writer had been an outspoken critic of Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, human rights groups immediately blamed the Rumanian secret police. French President Franc,ois Mitterrand warned that Tanase's disappearance could "seriously affect" relations between the two countries, and he postponed a visit to Rumania.

In a plot worthy of Spy Novelist John Le Carre, Tanase turned up last week, alive and well after hiding out in Brittany, a key player in a French counterespionage scheme that reportedly involved the Elysee Palace. It all began last April when a Rumanian intelligence colonel, who had spent eight years in France gathering sensitive industrial data, turned himself in to French authorities. The agent, Matei Haiducu, 45, told officials of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (the French secret service) that he had been ordered by Ceausescu to kill Tanase and a second dissident writer, Paul Goma, 45. If the DST would protect his cover long enough for him to bring family members out of Rumania, Haiducu promised, he would tell all about his checkered past.

With the help of his intended victims, the Rumanian double agent set out to deceive Bucharest with a bit of cloak, if not dagger. For the benefit of secret-police comrades who had been sent to watch him, Haiducu followed through on an elaborate plan to kill Goma. During a cocktail party he used a specially made fountain pen to squirt a toxic chemical into the writer's drink. But a French agent " accidentally" jostled Goma's arm, spilling the poison. Since Haiducu could not fail on his second mission, the attack on Tanase had to be even more convincing. This time French operatives played the part of hired thugs and faked a kidnaping. Mitterrand's press-conference plea added the crowning touch.

The charade worked brilliantly. Haiducu was able to return to Rumania and arrange for the departure of all but one of his family. Indeed, days before the spy-sting story broke in the Parisian press, newspapers in Bucharest reported that he had officially been commended for "out standing public service."

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