Operation Autonomous was a clandestine operation carried out on the territory of Romania by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up by Winston Churchill for the duration of World War II to assist local Resistance movements.
In 1943, three British secret agents were parachuted into Romanian territory:
The aim of the operation was primarily political:
On the night of 22 December 1943 the three agents were parachuted into thick fog and some distance away from the target. They were captured by Romanian gendarmerie almost immediately near the locality of Plosca, Teleorman County. They were held as well-treated prisoners of war at the Gendarmerie headquarters in Bucharest under the care of General Constantin Tobescu, Major Constantin C. Roșescu and of Major Eugen Dobrogeanu. Churchill promptly sent a message to Marshal Ion Antonescu warning him that should the British prisoners fall into German hands he would be held personally responsible. The Romanian leader had been told that de Chastelain had information which in German hands could change the outcome of the war.
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On 23 August 1944, the young King Michael of Romania, at considerable personal risk, carried out his well prepared coup d'état which took Hitler completely by surprise and so Romania entered the war against the Axis. The British prisoners were released and that evening the King arranged for de Chastelain to fly to Istanbul from where he could go to Cairo and London to report. Mețianu stayed on for a time and then returned to England. Porter remained to maintain a radio link with SOE Headquarters until the British mission arrived. He later worked at the Legation and in 1948 returned to London to the Foreign Office.
After the start of the Cold War, Soviet authorities alleged that de Chastelain was keeping contacts with Maniu, the leader of the National Peasants' Party; the latter had opposed both Antonescu's regime and the Soviet occupation of Romania. During Maniu's trial for treason in 1947, the Minister of the Interior, Teohari Georgescu, was handed a report which indicated Maniu's alleged contacts with de Chastelain as proof that the politician was a British spy.
Reportedly, Cpt. Meţianu visited Romania at least once during the Cold War and visited major Roșescu at home.
In 1989, Porter's book Operation Autonomous: With SOE In Wartime Romania was published by Chatto and Windus. The translation of this book in Romanian was published by Humanitas in 1991.
In 2011, Porter attended the festivities of the Royal Jubilee, held in Bucharest, on the occasion of King Michael's 90th anniversary.
Ion Antonescu was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Having been responsible for facilitating the Holocaust in Romania, he was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946.
The National Peasants' Party was an agrarian political party in the Kingdom of Romania. It was formed in 1926 through the fusion of the Romanian National Party (PNR), a conservative-regionalist group centred on Transylvania, and the Peasants' Party (PȚ), which had coalesced the left-leaning agrarian movement in the Old Kingdom and Bessarabia. The definitive PNR–PȚ merger came after a decade-long rapprochement, producing a credible contender to the dominant National Liberal Party (PNL). National Peasantists agreed on the concept of a "peasant state", which defended smallholding against state capitalism or state socialism, proposing voluntary cooperative farming as the basis for economic policy. Peasants were seen as the first defence of Romanian nationalism and of the country's monarchic regime, sometimes within a system of social corporatism. Regionally, the party expressed sympathy for Balkan federalism and rallied with the International Agrarian Bureau; internally, it championed administrative decentralization and respect for minority rights, as well as, briefly, republicanism. It remained factionalized on mainly ideological grounds, leading to a series of defections.
Peter Morland Churchill, was a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer in France during the Second World War. His wartime operations, which resulted in his capture and imprisonment in German concentration camps, and his subsequent marriage to fellow SOE officer, Odette Sansom, received considerable attention during the war and after, including a 1950 film.
Iuliu Maniu was an Austro-Hungarian-born lawyer and Romanian politician. He was a leader of the National Party of Transylvania and Banat before and after World War I, playing an important role in the Union of Transylvania with Romania.
Petru Groza was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian politician, best known as the first Prime Minister of the Communist Party-dominated government under Soviet occupation during the early stages of the Communist regime in Romania, and later as the President of the Presidium of the Great National Assembly from 1952 until his death in 1958.
Prince Barbu Alexandru Știrbey was 30th Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Romania in 1927.
Alfred George Gardyne de Chastelain, DSO, OBE (1906–1974) was a British-Canadian businessman, soldier, and secret agent, noted for his actions during World War II. He was the father of Canadian General John de Chastelain.
Ion Mihalache was a Romanian agrarian politician, the founder and leader of the Peasants' Party (PȚ) and a main figure of its successor, the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ).
The Sighet Prison, located in the city of Sighetu Marmației, Maramureș County, Romania, was used by Romania to hold criminals, prisoners of war, and political prisoners. It is now the site of the Sighet Memorial Museum, part of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism.
The Tămădău affair was an incident that took place in Romania in July 1947. It was the source of a political scandal and show trial.
Constantin Tobescu was a Romanian general of the Romanian Gendarmerie (Jandarmeria) during World War II, deserter during the King Michael's Coup of August 23, 1944, one of the principal executors of Ion Antonescu's racial purity policies.
Ivor Forsyth Porter CMG, OBE was a British Ambassador and author.
The 1944 Romanian coup d'état, better known in Romanian historiography as the Act of 23 August, was a coup d'état led by King Michael I of Romania during World War II on 23 August 1944. With the support of several political parties, the king removed the government of Ion Antonescu, which had aligned Romania with Nazi Germany, after the Axis front in northeastern Romania collapsed in the face of a successful Soviet offensive. The Romanian Army declared a unilateral ceasefire with the Soviet Red Army on the Moldavian front, an event viewed as decisive in the Allied advances against the Axis powers in the European theatre of World War II. The coup was supported by the Romanian Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party, and the National Peasants' Party who had coalesced into the National Democratic Bloc in June 1944.
The Jilava massacre took place during the night of November 26, 1940, at Jilava Prison, near Bucharest, Romania. Sixty-four political detainees were killed by the Iron Guard (Legion), with further high-profile assassinations in the immediate aftermath. It came about halfway through the fascist National Legionary State and led to the first open clash between the Guard and conducător Ion Antonescu, who ousted the Legion from power in January 1941.
Eugen Cristescu was the second head of the Kingdom of Romania's domestic espionage agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SSI), forerunner of today's SRI, convicted in 1946 as a war criminal. He previously served as head of Siguranța Statului, the secret police.
Constantin Vișoianu was a Romanian jurist, diplomat, and politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs at the end of World War II. He later emigrated to the United States, where he served as President of the Romanian National Committee.
Mihail Fărcășanu was a Romanian journalist, diplomat and writer. He was president of the National Liberal Youth from 1937 to 1946. Pursued by the authorities due to his anti-communist actions, he managed to flee the country in 1946, and was later sentenced to death.
Eugen Dobrogeanu was a Romanian officer, the first bibliographer of the Romanian criminology and active participant in Operation Autonomous.
Mihai Popovici was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian politician.
The Romanian resistance movement during World War II was manifested in five ways: