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But lack of central control was an obvious problem last week. Under Ceausescu's paranoid purges and the vigilance of his secret police, no significant resistance movement was able to form. The explosion that ended his reign resulted from spontaneous combustion, and the people who powered it were only beginning to get organized. Nobody had a plan for the revolution; the participants only knew what they were against. Said Iliescu: "It was not the movement that led to the overthrow, but the overthrow that created the movement."
That organizing process got haltingly under way last week. Citizens' committees in provincial cities such as Timisoara, where the revolt ignited in mid-December, refused the call to "subordinate" themselves, and demanded a role in the National Salvation Front. Workers who joined students in the streets of Craiova, a southwestern industrial town, for example, had no more coherent a plan than the warning "Beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing."
Nor could the caretaker government be certain of security. It appealed "for an end to acts of revenge," but Securitate gunmen sniped intermittently from Bucharest's rooftops; others were believed to be hiding out in a maze of tunnels and secret passages Ceausescu had constructed under the capital's streets. Fighting around the city's international airport forced the frequent interruption of flights. There were ongoing firefights in Timisoara, Arad and Brasov.
With Securitate agents still at large, an absence of fighting did not necessarily mean that they had gone away. Some were killed or captured, but the organization had begun the struggle with 180,000 well-equipped and highly trained agents, and no one seemed to know where most of them were. The provisional government issued an ultimatum: "If they surrender voluntarily with their weapons, they will be tried and the death penalty will not be applied." If they did not, they would be "tried and condemned" by special tribunals. Few secret policemen accepted the offer. With thousands of them, armed and perhaps defiant, unaccounted for, it remained unclear whether they would vanish in the general confusion or carry on some form of guerrilla warfare against the shaky government.
There were persistent rumors last week that mercenaries from Libya, Iran and the Palestine Liberation Organization had been taken into the Securitate and were conducting urban guerrilla raids around the country. At the Foreign Ministry, Bogdan said he had received "denials to our satisfaction from these Arab governments." But in Washington, Silviu Turcu, a high-level Rumanian intelligence official who defected to the U.S. a year ago, said up to 500 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, could have been involved in the fighting.
When Ceausescu left for Iran on Dec. 18, he believed that Securitate had the uprising in Timisoara in hand. "They tortured everyone, young and old, to frighten the city," a young army officer recounted last week. But Timisoara's young refused to be cowed. "It was a revolt by the kids, a young revolution," said Gabriela Vlad, 24, a doctor in the Timisoara hospital. One of her patients, a 13-year-old girl named Suzana who was shot during a demonstration, explained, "We marched because we had nothing to lose here. We are tired of hearing 'No, no.' "