Vasile Patilineț

A worker and native of the industrial Jiu Valley, he joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1945 and steadily rose through its ranks, entering the central committee a decade later.

Together with Ilie Verdeț and Petre Lupu, he was involved in continuous party purges, and the three belonged to a group that helped ensure Ceaușescu's rise to power and its consolidation after the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

[7] When students at the University of Bucharest demonstrated on Christmas Eve 1968, he and Mayor Dumitru Popa initially avoided using force, seeming to defuse the crisis but later taking measures against the ringleaders.

[1] Following the late 1971 arrest of General Ion Șerb on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, Patilineț was removed from supervision of defense and security affairs.

His predecessor, Constantin Băbălău, had shown himself unable to handle the Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977, during which he was taken captive, and it is possible that Ceaușescu recalled Patilineț' superior ability in managing crises.

Thus, the Securitate reported that he was having affairs with numerous women, which included sexual encounters in his ministerial office; that he enjoyed fine alcoholic drinks and expensive gifts; and that he trafficked bear pelts to Germany.

[4] In the late 1970s, as Ceaușescu grew increasingly despotic, Patilineț was the most significant of several important figures who began considering ways to remove the leader, including through assassination.

[10] According to testimony offered by military officer Nicolae Radu in 1995, a plot for Ceaușescu's arrest existed in autumn 1984, and Patilineț handled the procurement of arms for the conspirators, whose plan was foiled by an informer.

[11] The accident was considered suspicious;[7] Gheorghe Apostol claimed that Securitate agents slipped a drug into his whisky glass prior to departure.

However, the son of Paul Niculescu-Mizil, Serghei, has stated that the devotion of Maia's father to Ceaușescu prevented her from accessing Elias, and that her death resulted from a clandestine abortion.

Patilineț was in Cairo at the time of the abortion, and Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, enraged that a close aide would break a cherished law of theirs, ordered Pacepa to send a special airplane to bring him home.