observers observed- an anthropologist under surveillance - verdery

Observers Observed: An Anthropologist under SurveillanceAuthor(s): Katherine VerderyReviewed work(s):Source: Anthropology Now, Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 2012), pp. 14-23Published by: Paradigm PublishersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/anthropologynow.4.2.0014 .

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Observers Observed

An Anthropologist underSurveillance

Katherine Verdery

Imagine yourself the object of the follow-ing surveillance report, found in the file

the Romanian Secret Police (Securitate) kepton me from 1973–1988. I came into posses-sion of this file in 2008, through the provi-sions of a Romanian law that gave peopleaccess to their surveillance files from theCommunist period. I had spent more thanthree years conducting research in Romaniaduring that period.

5 January 1985. Katherine Verdery, 36

years old, Professor . . . of Anthropology

. . . Baltimore, USA, [is] identified as being

an agent of the American espionage ser-

vices. . . . From the surveillance measures

undertaken concerning her, the following

has resulted: her proposed research theme

represents merely a cover for unfolding an

intense espionage activity, materialized in

collecting socio-political information,

studying and inciting certain Romanian

citizens’ antisocial activity by encouraging

their hostile attitudes and manifestations.

In collecting information, Katherine

Verdery focuses especially on the follow-

ing themes [long list], [all of which are be-

yond the scope of her official research

project].

To obtain the data of interest to her, she

makes contact with [various kinds of peo-

ple]. The discussions carried on with them

are written in shorthand or tape recorded.

After she gathers and verifies the informa-

tion, she synthesizes it in numbered daily

reports, typed in three copies, which she

sends periodically to the U.S. Embassy in

Bucharest. . . . With the help of informers,

our organs were able to copy 165 pages of

these reports. . . . We note that she does

not keep a single copy for herself, as

would be normal if she were using them to

write a scientific work. . . .

Analysis of the reports demonstrates

that she has rich experience in intelligence

work. . . . Thus: The people contacted are

called “informers,” [for whom she uses]

conspiratorial names. . . .

Alongside the information collected,

she mentions the place and context of the

discussion, the informer’s “attitude,” the

direct and subsidiary questions she asks in

directing the conversation toward the sub-

ject of interest. [examples. . . .]

Analysis of her reports shows that the

information she gathers is exclusively in

the category of what can be used in devel-

oping hostile propaganda against our

country. Likewise, she interprets all the

data in a tendentious manner. . . .

With a view to finalizing this case, to-

gether with following her via all available

professional means, we will act to investi-

gate her contacts, toward the aim of ob-

taining certain proof necessary to inter-

rupting her activity. . . .1

In response to this report, Romania’sdeputy Securitate chief (General Iulian Vlad)wrote to his two immediate subordinates:

14 anthropology NOW Volume 4 • Number 2 • September 2012

AnthroNow_4-2_AnthroNow 11/9/12 9:47 AM Page 14



Katherine Verdery Observers Observed 15

Cover page of volume 1, Romanian Socialist Republic, Ministry of the Interior Archive, DocumentationFund. Note misspelled name.




Comrade General Alexie, Comrade Lieu-

tenant Colonel Diaconescu, 1) The case is

very important and any negative develop-

ments, any proliferation must be stopped

immediately. 2) It is urgent that you submit

concrete proposals to conclude this case.2

In short, not only was I the object of intensesurveillance, but also among those watch-ing me were the country’s top secret-policegenerals. It’s almost as if you obtained yourFBI file and found documents about yourselfsigned by J. Edgar Hoover.

Coming into possession of one’s surveil-lance file raises both interesting possibilitiesand a host of questions. The possibilities in-clude the chance to conduct ethnographiesof the secret police, using its files as a data-base. My surveillance file consists of offi-cers’ notes and syntheses, informers’ re-ports, surveillance reports when I wastailed, and intercepted phone conversationsand correspondence. Very importantly, italso includes the marginal notes of superiorofficers who read the reports as well as theorders they sent down. Because it was neverintended—never even imagined—that thetargets of surveillance would see the notestaken on them, the notes are unaffected byany concerns about exposure or publicscrutiny. I believe we can read these notesfor the officers’ worldviews, their bureau-cratic communication paths, their practicesand expectations, and how they imaginedthe world of capitalist enemies. This data-base does not tell us much about the offi-cers’ private thoughts (nor are they them-selves likely to tell us even now), and somecontent is inaccurate, as is true of our ownfield notes. But the files do show the dis-

courses and practices that the officers mas-tered for doing surveillance.

Among the questions raised by these filesare: Is the information in them “true” —arethe Securitate good ethnographers? How dothey go about collecting data and construct-ing knowledge? Why do they think I’m aspy? Then there are more speculative ques-tions, such as, what are the consequences offollowing ethnographers and regardingthem as spies? How does this affect ethnog-raphers’ social relationships, the kinds of in-formation they can gather, and the knowl-edge they can produce? What does it meanwhen anthropologists are taken for spies?How do such accusations shift the terrain offieldwork and embed us in particular stateregimes?

Ethnographers as Spies

During the Cold War, Romania was the onlyEastern European country to include anthro-pologists on its list of welcome Fulbrightscholars. As a consequence, more US eth -nographers went there than to any other Soviet bloc country. I was one of about tensuch people to work in Romania betweenthe early 1970s and 1989, when the Com-munist regime fell. From that work, I pub-lished several articles and two books: Tran-sylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries ofPolitical, Economic, and Ethnic Change(California 1983) and National Ideology un-der Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politicsin Ceausescu’s Romania (California 1991).

Despite the Romanian government’s wel-come, virtually every US scholar or lecturerwas under surveillance and has at least a





few notes about him or herself in the Securi-tate files. Most have several hundred pages.In the Securitate archive, I consulted a mas-sive 26-volume dossier covering US lectur-ers, researchers, and PhD students. Thedossier shows that many if not most of themwere suspected of working for US intelli-gence under the cover of their research. Notone of the US anthropologists whom I knowhas been left out of this large dossier. It isclear that Romanian intelligence officers as-sumed there could be no disinterested re-search, that foreigners were there to stir uptrouble, and that we had been trained incounterintelligence.

That assumption was reinforced by thesimilarity of ethnographic research methodsto the Securitate’s. As the excerpt I quotedfrom my surveillance report makes clear, of-ficers thought they recognized in my ethno-graphic practices their own norms of profes-sional conduct. They too used pseudonymsfor “informers,” coded notes, tape re -corders, and a comprehensive data-gather-ing strategy that went beyond the confinesof a single project statement. Like me, theygenerated a wealth of typed data, producingfrom their observations an enormous bodyof field notes (their file on me contains2,780 pages). And like me, they generatedinterpretations and conclusions: that I am a

CIA agent, that I am feeding the US propa-ganda machine against socialism, that I amfomenting discontent among Romania’s mi-nority Hungarians, and that therefore Ishould be sent home.

It’s not as though I hadn’t given them rea-son for suspicion. During my first visit to thecounty I planned to work in, in September1973, I managed to ride my motorbike rightpast a sign that prohibited foreigners fromtraveling on that route (it led to a militarybase). Trying to repair the damage, I askedcounty officials to assign me to a safe areaand then picked one of its villages, AurelVlaicu. But Vlaicu turned out to contain anumber of people who commuted to workin an armaments factory 20 kilometersaway—a “coincidence” the Securitate tookto mean that I was really a spy. The climateof the Cold War made these errors muchmore serious than they might have beenotherwise, feeding the Securitate’s beliefthat I was up to no good.

How did this belief play out in Vlaicu? Anumber of my respondents there told me,both before and after the regime fell in1989, that everyone knew I was a spy, al-though they did not really know what for.They just knew that everyone said I wasone. This was partly the consequence of theCommunist Party’s efforts to spread informa-tion (and disinformation), including throughfilms and literature that, as in western coun-tries, popularized the notion of the spy. ARomanian acquaintance observed to me,

Kids in school and everyone else were so-

cialized into the idea of infiltration by for-

eign bodies as the cause of our problems.

Now here you were, parachuting in. After


... [E]veryone knew I was a spy,

although they did not really know

what for. They just knew that

everyone said I was one.




all this abstract attribution, you were pal-

pable. The police could say, “THIS is what

a spy looks like. Here she is, in flesh and

bone.” You were a godsend for the Securi-

tate.

Whereas before, spies were something onesaw in the movies and could suspect weremade up, now people could point their fin-gers at one.

It is likely that the Securitate planted theidea that I was spying. They did it firstthrough the local police, as I realized oneday in 1985 when a respondent told me thatone of the policeman had been tellingeveryone to be careful what they said to me,since I was a spy and carried a concealedtape recorder. They also did it through theinformers they recruited, who were in-structed about how to recognize a spy.(Even people not recruited as informersmight receive similar instruction. For in-stance, because Vlaicu was near an arma-ments factory, Securitate officers noted thenames of everyone in every nearby villagewho worked in that factory, so as to givethem all instruction regarding how to dealwith me.) These informers, along with thepolice, might also have been told to plantrumors that I was spying.

Did villagers believe it? As I already indi-cated, some of them told me they did, butfurther evidence comes from a Romanianscholar, Cosmin Budeanca, who is explor-ing how foreign researchers were receivedduring the Communist period. He went toVlaicu and asked some people there whatwas said about me and whether theythought I was a spy. One answer he re-ceived was:

Yes, people said she was a spy. But then af-

ter that they got used to her. She stayed a

long time, and they got used to her.

This idea recurs in other interviews. Notethe respondent’s assumption that I could bea spy only if I remained unknown, hidden. IfI kept coming back and talking with every-one all the time, then I couldn’t be a spy.

Another response given to CosminBudeanca was:

People said she was a spy, but if she was

one they wouldn’t have let her into the

country. And she didn’t have anything to

spy on, ’cause we just talked about the

collective farm. So if she’s sent here from

Bucharest, why should she be a spy? . . .

What would she have wanted to do, over-

throw our government? No. (So who said

this kind of thing? . . .) Bad people! I had a

brother-in-law . . . he was in the army, and

he knew she was a spy. People just talked,

because they’re bad.

This respondent sees rumors of my spying aspart of local politics and of people’s charac-ter, not as the truth about me. The respon-dent also has a very narrow understandingof spying: it has to do with military mattersand government overthrow. That differs fromwhat Securitate officers worried about in the1985 report quoted above, which is that Icollected “socio-political information” andcreated hostile propaganda to undermineRomania’s image in the world.

Twenty years after the fall of Commu-nism, these answers came from womenwho had been my long-time friends. Myconstant returns had given them ample op-






Photo of surveillance target “VERA” (Verdery’s pseudonym).




portunity to “get used to” me. In contrast,during my shorter stay in another village,Geoagiu, the fact that the police were fol-lowing me (as I learned after four months ofwork there in 1985) so disrupted my re-search that I had to abort it, once I under-stood why people there seemed so muchmore reticent than those in Vlaicu. Geoagiuvillagers were most likely reticent not fromthinking I was a spy, but from fear of policeinterrogation, which soon came to followmy research visits. So I left Geoagiu for thecity, where I limited my work to reading inlibraries and talking with urban intellectu-als, who were better able to defend them-selves against such police actions.

Effects on Knowledge Production

During my research in the 1970s, I did notrealize the extent of the surveillance I wasunder, but I knew I could get people intotrouble by what I might write. I was con-cerned about how I would keep my publi-cations from jeopardizing innocent villagerswhen I could not anticipate what the gov-ernment would find offensive, sensitive, orproblematic. Even though I gathered ethno-graphic data on a number of contemporarytopics, these dilemmas, combined with thefact that I had always been interested in his-torical big-picture questions, tilted my firstbook in a historical direction, away from theethnography of the socialist period. My in-terpretations dealt with an earlier time andrelied extensively on published and archivalmaterial, compromising my respondentsless. In the 1980s, surveillance forced theresearch for my second book even more to-

ward use of published sources supple-mented by conversations with urban intel-lectuals. I was not the only anthropologist ofsocialism to be caught in such dilemmas.Several other scholars did not publish thebooks from their 1970s fieldwork until after1989, if at all.

Although the regime’s repression alteredmy entire research program, I think theknowledge I produced under surveillancewas perhaps of greater validity than it mighthave been otherwise. This is because itrested less completely on the fragile kinds offace-to-face relationships ethnography nor-mally employs to excellent effect, but thecircumstances of fieldwork in Romaniawere not normal. It is disturbing to have toadmit that the Securitate not only changedmy disciplinary profile away from ethnogra-phy and toward history but also rechan-neled my research and possibly improvedits accuracy. Still, I believe this paradoxicaland unexpected conclusion may be correct.It follows from what the possibility of sur-veillance did to my personal relationships.

Effects of Surveillance on Villagers

What effects might Securitate surveillancehave had on villagers? A man who informedon me in the 1970s is willing to discuss thatnow, unlike many others who were also re-porting on me at the time. The man was re-cruited as a high-school student. His officer,Captain Belgiu, told the young man that Iwas a spy, and it was his patriotic duty to re-port on my actions. Captain Belgiu insinu-ated that my friend wouldn’t get into collegeif he didn’t cooperate. Although a top stu-





dent, he was from a modest family and didnot have the self-confidence to believe inhis own capacities. He agreed to inform onme because he wanted to have a future,which Captain Belgiu was threatening. Be-fore every biweekly meeting, my friend toldme, he was awake all night because he wasso terrified, and when his roommate wouldask what was wrong he couldn’t respond,for informers were ordered never to revealtheir work to anyone.

The captain would begin their sessionsby catching him off guard with some pieceof information he was unlikely to have (suchas an allegation about my sex life) and thenpress him for what else he could add. Be-cause, according to Captain Belgiu, they al-ready knew everything I was doing, he’dbetter tell them the truth: they would knowit if he didn’t. Thus, the officers used theman’s reports as a test of his relationshipwith them. In addition to catching me con-ducting espionage, the officers’ goal was touse me to forge trust with him so he wouldreport on other people as well. My presenceand my “spying” had enabled this recruit-ment.

My files contain reports from around adozen informers from Vlaicu. Of these, sev-eral were probably not recruited just towatch me, as this person was. Given the in-junction to silence, what they learnedthrough spying did not enter village knowl-edge except as intentional disinformation.But the villagers knew that the Securitate re-cruited informers, and they knew there wereinformers in their midst, as did I. Who thesewere was uncertain, but my constant pres-ence kept the possibility more visible than itotherwise would have been. A cloud of un-

ease swirled around me as I made my wayfrom house to house.

Surveillance substantially shifted the ter-rain of fieldwork. Underpinning the work ofethnography is that precious and fragile re-lationship: trust. Although ethnography ispossible in trust’s absence, our best workrests upon it. In a climate of surveillance, itis much more difficult to establish trustingrelations, for there is a constant undercur-rent of mistrust and doubt. Every interactionwas weighted by the presence of a hiddenthird party with whom I could develop norelationship: the Securitate officer. That thirdparty impeded the growth of the ethno-graphic relationships, pulling me and my re-spondent off center, just as an illicit affairdecenters a person’s marriage. Sometimesthat hidden third was actually involved withmy respondents; sometimes he was just ahidden possibility.

By subjecting Romanians to this possibil-ity, we “spies” drew them into a differentfeeling of relating with others, a feelingbased on fear that sometimes isolated themby prohibiting their speech. Although weethnographer-spies were not the only formof “enemies” that the Securitate controlledthis way, we were particularly helpful tothem. Anthropologists enabled the Securi-tate to increase its penetration into rural ar-eas, which had much fewer informers thanurban centers did. Thus, we provided un-precedented access to villagers who mightotherwise have remained outside the systemof relations the police were trying to create.

It is difficult to avoid the question as towhether ethnography is justified in circum-stances like these. One might argue thatprecisely such revelations justify it, in the






Surveillance photographs of “VERA” with friends in brief visit to Cluj, July 17, 1982.




name of a freer world. Knowing how thepolice operate will help people resist the in-stallation of such a system in the future. Per-haps the positive effects of the villagers’ ex-posure to another society (through theirconnection with me) counterbalanced someof the negative effects of Securitate repres-sion. What is certain is that this example ofan anthropologist under surveillance chal-lenges us, once again, to place ethno-graphic practice in a critical light.

Notes

All photos are courtesy of CNSAS (NationalCouncil for Study of the Securitate Archives),Bucharest, Romania.

1. Archive of the National Council for theStudy of the Securitate Archives, Bucharest, Ro-mania (ACNSAS), Fond Documentar, File 12618,vol. 1, pp. 245–246.

2. ACNSAS, Fond Informativ, File 195847,vol. 1, p. 193. Vlad was then deputy head of Ro-mania’s Securitate, soon to become its head(1987).

Suggestions for Further Reading

Garton Ash, Timothy. 1997. The File: A PersonalHistory. New York: Vintage Books.

Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics: TheSecret Police, the Opposition, and the End of EastGerman Socialism. Chicago: University of Chi -cago Press.

Marton, Kati. 2009. Enemies of the People: MyFamily’s Journey to America. New York: Simon &Schuster.

Rubinstein, Joshua, and Alexander Gribanov,eds. 2005. The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. YaleUniversity Press.

Vatulescu, Cristina. 2010. Police Aesthetics: Lit-erature, Film, and the Secret Police in SovietTimes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 1983. Transylvanian Vil-lagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic,and Ethnic Change. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press.

———. 1991. National Ideology under Social-ism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’sRomania. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof California Press.

Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Distin-

guished Professor of Anthropology at the Gradu-

ate Center, City University of New York. She has

conducted fieldwork, primarily in Romania, on

ethnic and national identity, the workings of so-

cialism and the transition from it, the state, and

property transformation. Her books include:

Transylvanian Villagers (California 1983), Na-

tional Ideology Under Socialism (California

1991), What Was Socialism, and What Comes

Next? (Princeton 1996), The Political Lives of

Dead Bodies (Columbia 1999), The Vanishing

Hectare (Cornell 2003), and Peasants under

Siege (Princeton 2011, with Gail Kligman). Cur-

rently she is writing a field memoir, based on her

Romanian Secret Police file.





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