In 1978, Ion Mihai Pacepa walked into the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, Germany, and defected to the United States.

At the time, Pacepa was an intelligence chief and three-star general in the Securitate, Romania’s secret police during the days of the Soviet Union.

Before defecting, Pacepa rolled in crowds that included Fidel Castro, Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

With all the news surrounding Trump and Russia, Independent Journal Review wanted to know what Pacepa thought about the hot-button issue.

Pacepa said:

“The current anti-Trump campaign — including the completely unsubstantiated allegations about his Russian connection — is the result of eight years of a socialist/progressivist government of the United States.

History usually repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance to see that re-enactment with your own eyes.”

Pacepa provided some examples of what he meant by “history repeating itself”:

“In 1978, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people to stop thinking of government as a boon bestowed from on high, and to rid themselves of their Socialist ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, who preached that ‘a man like me is born only once in five hundred years.’”

“Thirty years later, I saw the virus of Marxism, disguised as socialism/progressivism, and its nauseating Stalinesque cult of personality infecting the shores of my adoptive country, the United States,” he continued. “’I am the One the world is waiting for,’ proclaimed Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party nominee for the White House, during his 2008 electoral campaign.”

The 88-year-old intelligence chief continued:

“On Feb 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: ‘We Are All Socialists Now.’ That was also what Romania’s newspaper Scînteia proclaimed when Marxism transformed that country into a monument to Ceausescu.

Two years after seizing power, the U.S. nomenklatura produced the same results as Romania’s nomenklatura did — on a U.S. scale. Over 14 million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on government food stamps. The GDP dipped from 3.4% to 1.6%, and the national debt rose to an unprecedented $13 trillion.”

IJR asked Pacepa if he sees any merit in the accusations against Trump. He fired back, “Making the country‘s new leader a scapegoat for the country’s inherited problems might be a new phenomenon in the United States, but it is an old Russian/Soviet/ tactic known as political necrophagy in the inner circle of the KGB community to which I once belonged. From the lips of Nikita Khrushchev, I used to hear over and over: ‘Change the public image of the leader, and you change history.’”

Pacepa provided personal examples of his use of political necrophagy: “Khrushchev’s political necrophagy was launched into the world on February 26, 1956, when he exposed ‘Stalin’s crimes’ at the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in a four-hour ‘super secret speech’ that was secretly released to The New York Times. Sound familiar?”

“Although Marxism publicly proclaimed the deciding role in history was played by ‘the people,’ the Marxists firmly believed that only the leader counted,” Pacepa said. “A fish starts smelling from the head, KGB chief Yuri Andropov used to preach, and one of the main tasks of the KGB community was to make America’s head stink.”

He continued:

“His KGB — and my Romanian DIE — produced thousands of fake ‘documentary’ materials portraying President Harry Truman as the ‘butcher of Hiroshima,’ painting President Dwight Eisenhower as a “shark” of the war-mongering military-industrial complex, describing President John F. Kennedy as an arrogant millionaire who thought he owned the world, and insinuating that President Lyndon Johnson was a Mafioso who had bumped off his predecessor.”

Pacepa told us that he sees Trump as a strong leader.

We asked him to provide some reasons for his view:

“After eight years of Obama’s efforts to transform the U.S. into a monument to himself, I see President Trump as manna from heaven for the United States. In my view, he is a contemporary version of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom played a large part in making the American dream a reality for millions.

“President Trump also understood that all socialism and progressivism had left behind was countries that ended up looking like trailer camps hit by a hurricane, and I have strong reason to believe that this is a lot more important for the U.S. than the fact that he is still learning the bureaucratic and political skills one also needs to be president.”

Pacepa addressed the Russia issue further. But instead of talking about Trump, he brought up former CIA Director John Brennan, who voted for the Communist candidate in the U.S. in 1980, when the U.S. was still heavily engaged in the Cold War. “In March 2013, President Obama appointed a new CIA director, John O. Brennan, who had voted the Communist ticket. In my experience, communism is a malignant tumor on the body of any country or organization.”

“This is another thing I learned during my years at the top of Socialist Romania,” he said. “Marxism, like any cancer, works silently — you can feel it only after it has spread throughout the body, and then it is usually too late. The sudden, almost overnight collapse of the powerful Soviet empire is incontestable proof to that.”

Pacepa went on to call the U.S. the greatest country in the world because of its successful “capitalist system.” But he didn’t paint a rosy picture of Russia, either.

“During the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within the state. Now the KGB is the state. Over 6,000 former KGB officers are running Russia’s federal and local governments. Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s current Minister of Foreign Affairs, a graduate of the KGB-sponsored Institute of International Relations, is just one of them,” said Pacepa.

According to Pacepa’s co-author of the book “Disinformation,” Professor Ronald Rychlak, Pacepa believes Russian President Vladimir Putin would have also preferred a Democrat president to Trump.

With all the continued talk of Trump and the Russia conspiracy, Pacepa’s incredibly unique voice on the issue is one that shouldn’t go unnoticed.