Valerian Trifa - Legacy

Legacy

Beginning in the late 1980s, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in the communist secret police (the Securitate) who defected to the United States, claimed that Trifa had been the victim of a frameup engineered by his former colleagues. Pacepa linked this to an alleged trip by Romanian bishop Bartolomeu Anania to the United States, of which he claimed was a common attempt of the regime and the main Orthodox Church to quell the dissidence of Romanian-American Orthodox believers.

In a 2003 article for Revista 22, Noël Bernard's wife, Ioana Măgură Bernard, noted that her husband was being targeted by the Securitate, and argued that, especially after the Trifa interview, the communist institution attempted to stir up animosity inside Radio Free Europe in order to have Bernard stripped of his position. Based on evidence from her husband's Securitate file, she also described Bernard's mysterious 1981 death as an assassination, arguing that it formed the culmination of various failed attempts to silence him.

Elements of the Trifa case have been the topic of an episode in the documentary series Forensic Files, aired by the United States television station Court TV in January 2001. The piece, titled Unholy Vows, discussed the forensic evidence gathered from Trifa's correspondence. In its press release of the time, Court TV stated: " 40 year-old-print is the oldest latent print ever detected by any law enforcement agency." The station also argued that the identification had played a major part in Trifa's decision to surrender his American citizenship.

In 2007, journalists at L'Espresso cited Trifa among the suspected war criminals who, it claimed, may have been actively aided by the Roman Catholic Church in avoiding investigation. The magazine suggested that the frequency of such cases could help explain why Italy had been resisting the ratification needed for opening the International Tracing Service archives managed by the International Committee of the Red Cross and kept in Bad Arolsen.