Who protected Georgescu and Potra? The thread that leads to the secret services

Alex Florenţa, the Prosecutor General of Romania, announced on Tuesday, September 16, that the Prosecutor General's Office has sent Călin Georgescu to court for allegedly plotting with Horaţiu Potra and 20 other people to overthrow the constitutional order in our country. The indictment that appeared, through judicial sources, in the media and which has over 350 pages, provides statements and facts of the indicted, which would outline the idea of a conspiracy to violently overthrow political power.

However, at the center of the file concerning Călin Georgescu and Horaţiu Potra is a question that no honest person with regard to the realities of Romania can avoid. How would such a deployment of people, resources, mobilizations, border crossings, training camps, flows of money and weapons, meetings "under cover", plans to disrupt the constitutional order and amplify social tensions precisely in the country's most fragile days, without a degree of support, cover or complicity from within structures that should, through their mission, prevent precisely such slippages? The idea is not an accusation against the secret services, but results as a logical axis from the very pieces put on the table by the prosecutors of the General Prosecutor's Office: changes in legal classification, maintaining judicial control for Călin Georgescu, although these are serious acts provided for and severely punished by the Criminal Code, a paramilitary network of 21 people, coordinated trips to the Capital with seven cars loaded with edged weapons, firearms and pyrotechnic materials, a calendar of meetings and communications that show intention, organization and trust in protection, Horaţiu Potra's flight from Romania.

In a country where the security infrastructure works, such wheels do not turn silently for years, unless they are helped for this purpose from within. Here the thread of naivety breaks: when the investigators describe how, after the CCR decision of December 6, 2024, on the morning of December 7, a discreet meeting takes place in Ciolpani between the then candidate and the mercenary with a network and command discipline, we are not talking about an impulsive gesture, but about the implementation of a scenario thought out over time, fueled by logistics that exceed the power of enthusiastic civilians.

When, on the night of December 7 to 8, the filters stop columns in Ilfov, Dâmboviţa and Bucharest and bring to light the inventory of knives, pistols and pyrotechnic items of category F4, you cannot ignore that all that arsenal had to pass through, be stored, be transported, be guarded. Typically, such trails leave traces in the systems that the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Border Police or the intelligence services administer. If the traces do not trigger timely reactions, there are only two explanations: systemic incompetence or human links that choose to turn a blind eye. And when the depositions, public reports and editorials of journalists close to those conducting the criminal investigation talk about former or current employees of structures that worked in Africa under the coordination of Potra's network or about training camps that have been ignored for years, the hypothesis of support from within ceases to be a rumor and becomes a mandatory line of investigation.

The criminal file presents Horaţiu Potra as a coagulator of forces with a military profile, discipline, cash, recruitment capacity and access to logistics. As for Călin Georgescu, prosecutors state that he is the political vector of a strategy that went as far as fueling a "criminal resolution" through public messages, alarmist communications and key meetings. In relation to the other defendants, they are, according to the indictment, nothing more than conscious cogs in a machine prepared to divert peaceful protests into violence.

But such a heavy machine does not start without electricity, and the electricity, in Romania, almost invariably passes through the transformer stations of the SRI, SIE, DGIA, DIA, MAI, Border Police, structures with access to databases, to alerts, to sensitive colors in airports, to human networks around "special" transports, to operational reports on people entering and leaving, about weapons that appear and disappear. The fact that, according to reports, night flights with mercenaries were made "like through cheese", that training camps with a legionary scent "breathed" for years, that assets and sensitive objects circulated without waking up the system in time, builds a picture in which the major risk is not only the "Potra network", but the breach in the institutions paid to detect it.

When we say this, we are not blaming the intelligence services as a whole, but we are trying to create a boundary between their mission and those employees who, out of interest, ideology, or simple greed, can turn the shield into a breach. Otherwise, it is not explains why, in the proximity of moments of maximum tension - the cancellation of the presidential elections, polarization, televised calls with conspiracy theories about war and "globalist oligarchs" - it was possible to attempt social detonation through a mix of disinformation and physical force.

Here, the common thread returns to the same central hypothesis: any plan that relies on emotional contagion, crowd manipulation and "subversive" violence needs "guarantees" that it will not be blocked at the first filter, guarantees that only people on the inside can provide, through a calculated omission, a "friendly" phone call, a "close your eyes" check, a "lost" flow of information at the registry, a warning that reaches exactly where it should not.

When prosecutors describe meetings in central hotels, intermediaries to embassies, financing through third parties, limousines provided, cash transfers, group message networks in which "indications" from the top were expected, what is taking shape is not only a radical political project, but also a protective ecosystem without which each of these pieces would have cracked much earlier under the pressure of verification. Therefore, the stakes of the present are not only proving the guilt or innocence of the defendants - that is the job of the courts, whose decisions must be respected - but the real dismantling of the tentacles in the institutions that made it possible for this story to get this far.

A country goes into a skid not when adventurers appear with money, ambitions and microphones, but when democratic guardians forget why they wear their uniforms or ID cards. The true strength of this case, beyond the names and titles, is the radiography of an internal vulnerability: if reports were blocked, if filters were "permeable", if airports offered special flight lanes, if paramilitary camps operated under the radar of the secret services, then the problem is not just with a few people sent to trial, but with those employees of the services and force structures who betrayed the contract with the state. Without them, there would have been no confidence to convene clandestine meetings, no audacity to push a city towards scenarios of violence, no absurd hope that you can rewrite the constitutional order on emotion and telescopic batons. With them, any democracy becomes a house with the alarm cut off from the inside. That is why the cleaning must go all the way: integrity audits, verification of information flows, control of assets, the path of decisions, reconstruction of the chain of command, not as a vendetta, but as institutional shock therapy.

Otherwise, we will remain trapped in a toxic alternation between spectacular files and the same breaches that, unhealed, prepare the next episode. Romania has the right to secret services that protect the state, not to employees who negotiate for it under the table. In this case, this is exactly the key: without their support, the Georgescu-Potra story would not have had the density, the duration, or the audacity to test the nerves of the constitutional order.