EditCeaușescu’s ghost at the Palace Gate
The man who commanded a platoon at that site where Securitate forces opened fire on unarmed crowds is still in charge of protecting the President of Romania
On the night of 21 December 1989, in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in central Bucharest, Ceaușescu’s security forces opened fire on unarmed crowds. Forty-eight people were killed there. Hundreds more were beaten, arrested or wounded. The barricade at University Square became one of the Revolution’s founding graves.
Thirty-six years later, Lucian-Silvan Pahonțu, the man who commanded a Securitate platoon at that site is still in charge of protecting the President of Romania.
The revelation, published this week by Recorder, is not a rumour from the margins. It is built from the Revolution file itself: deployment orders, reports by superior officers, and Pahonțu’s own statement that he was there from the evening of the 21st until after 2 a.m. He wrote that neither he nor his men had “contact with the demonstrators.” The commander of the device, Lieutenant-Colonel Ion Alecu, reported something else: that the units “had a hard time resisting the demonstrators.” Other documents place Pahonțu’s platoon in the replacement of troops at the Intercontinental blockade – the exact stretch of pavement where the shooting was heaviest.
Lucian-Silvan Pahonțu, now 61, has run the Protection and Guard Service since December 2005. He has outlasted Traian Băsescu, Klaus Iohannis and the first year of Nicușor Dan. He was passed into the reserve in November 2024 and kept the job anyway, on a new contract. For 21 years he has been the man who decides who stands next to the head of state.
That is the episode. It has the quality of a ghost story because the ghost never left. The Securitate was not dissolved. It was renamed, rehoused and, in thousands of individual careers, simply continued. Pahonțu is one of those careers made visible.
The president who could not see it
Nicușor Dan was supposed to be the man who would see it.
He came to office as the anti-system mathematician, the civic activist who had spent years fighting the capture of Bucharest and who spoke, during the campaign, about the services’ long interference in politics. In interviews after his election he said he wanted intelligence chiefs from outside both the parties and the services. He admitted that “there was interference, in the political game, over the years.” The promise was a break.
Then, in Chișinău, after a meeting with Maia Sandu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he was asked about Pahonțu.
“I don’t know what the scandal is,” he said. “I saw a press article with a title that is not justified by the content.” He added that “Mr Pahonțu is not in the situation of having participated in the repression of the 1989 Revolution or the Mineriad.” He had evaluated the SPP “with his own senses.” It seemed professional. He would not fire him.
The phrasing was worse than a defence. It treated a documented presence at a massacre site as a problem of headline writing. Recorder answered the next day: “Facts remain facts even when a president of the country refuses to see them.” Pahonțu, given the chance to answer before publication, had offered no denial of being there – only that his activity had always been “in accordance with legal norms.”
The embarrassment is compounded by the rest of Dan’s year. Romania has been without a full-powered government since 5 May, when the Social Democrats pulled out of the coalition and helped bring down Ilie Bolojan. Dan’s first two prime-ministerial nominations failed in Parliament. By late August the country had gone more than a hundred days without a proper cabinet, and more than two months without a new nomination. Consultations for a third attempt were being promised for 1 September – the same week protests over Pahonțu were being called in cities across the country.
A president already accused of drift now looks, to a large part of the public, like a man standing in front of the one file he cannot afford to misread. The split the original reporting described is no longer rhetorical: a part of society thinks he is simply unequal to the office; another thinks he is already inside the system he ran against.
How the ghost was allowed to stay
None of this required a conspiracy in 2026. It required only the decisions taken, and not taken, after 1989.
The first demand for a clean break came quickly. On 11 March 1990, the Timișoara Proclamation asked that former party activists, nomenklatura members and Securitate officers be barred from the next three elections. The National Salvation Front, assembled around Ion Iliescu and other second-rank communists, rejected it. In June the miners were brought to University Square. The Securitate was reorganised as the SRI and kept most of its archive.
For a decade the only serious parliamentary champion of file access and exclusion was Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, a former political prisoner. What finally passed in 1999 – Law 187, “Ticu’s Law” – was not lustration. It created the CNSAS (the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives), allowed citizens to request their files, and hoped that public shame would keep former officers out of office. It imposed no automatic ban. The files themselves stayed, for years, with the successor services. Dumitrescu called the amended text a disappointment.
No senior official was ever removed from office by a lustration statute
Even that weak instrument was struck down. In 2008 the Constitutional Court voided Law 187 in its entirety. Later drafts, in 2010 and 2012, were emptied again on the argument that guilt must be proven individually and that too much time had passed. No senior official was ever removed from office by a lustration statute. The SRI delayed transfers. Whole categories of files – including those of the Securitate Troops, later parked with the Gendarmerie – never reached the CNSAS in usable form. Pahonțu, already SPP director, was supposed to be checked as a priority from 2008. The declaration that would have started that check never arrived. Eighteen years later, CNSAS still had no completed verdict.
This is why a man who was a Securitate lieutenant at the Intercontinental in 1989 could be appointed by Băsescu in 2005, retained by Iohannis, and defended by Dan in 2026. Each president found a reason. Băsescu, after the Recorder story broke, said it was “a great surprise” and that Pahonțu “should lose his function” — a remark that sits poorly with his own twenty-year appointment. Iohannis took the general’s rank and left him the job. Dan looked at the same file and saw no scandal.
Other countries in the region did the thing Romania would not do. Czechoslovakia screened the services early. East Germany opened the Stasi archive and used it. Poland and the Baltic states passed versions of lustration that, however contested, at least named the problem as a personnel problem. Romania chose a different settlement: condemn Ceaușescu the person, keep the apparatus, and treat every later revelation as an unfortunate exception.
The Revolution file was never closed. The trials for December 1989 have been opened, shut and reopened for a generation. Former officers retired on comfortable pensions. Former political prisoners kept communist-era criminal records. The political class discovered that “looking forward” was an excellent way of not looking at who was still in the room.
Pahonțu is that room, made specific. He is not the Securitate’s mastermind. He is something more awkward for a democracy that tells itself it finished with 1989: a mid-ranking officer who was present when the shooting started, who rose without a completed vetting, and who now stands at the president’s shoulder while the president explains that the title of the article is the real issue.
Ceaușescu is dead. The system that shot people for him was allowed to change its letterhead. This week it became impossible, again, to pretend that the change of letterhead was enough.
P.S. The author made his university studies in Bucharest, in Ceaușescu’s Romania, from 1974 to 1978.
Caption: Revolution Square of Bucharest during the Romanian Revolution: photographed from a broken window of the Athénée Palace Hotel, Romanian Army Tanks were in the square as hundreds of protesters flooded the streets in Romania, c. December 16th – 25th, 1989 [Public domain]
Updated: August 29, 2026 - 12:22
