towns of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Upon his return, he formed the PCR's secretariat for legal work, on which he co-opted Pătrășcanu, Goldstein, and Ilie Pintilie. From May 1937, Breiner reduced this section to a two-man body, comprising Foriș and Pintilie. Around that time, Foriș was in permanent contact with the young communist Silviu Brucan, who had infiltrated the PNȚ press and was given free hand to run the weekly Dacia Nouă. As Brucan reports: "Although the party platform dictated collaboration with the democratic parties, Foriș could not wrap his head around how I could work so well with the Liberals and the Peasantists". Together, Foriș and Pintilie were responsible for tying the PCR to the PNȚ ahead of the December 1937 elections, which, as Foriș acknowledged, proved to be a debacle—once the National Peasantists had signed a non-aggression pact with the fascist Iron Guard. On 8 January 1938, Scînteia lamented the party's "fundamental defect", namely its inability to coalesce a "front of all democratic organizations and parties [against] the openly fascist and governmental lists." During the next few weeks, Breiner was in the Soviet Union and Pintilie was being isolated as a potential Siguranța asset, leaving Foriș as the one-person secretariat. In the meantime, Foriș embraced a tactic of reaching out to more moderate leftist groups. He was again in contact with Cocea, and through the PCR connection Mircea Bălănescu, sponsored Cocea's string of "legal/semi-legal gazettes". This partnership took form even as Cocea was building a personal rapport with the Siguranțas Director, Mihail Moruzov. A later dossier compiled on Cocea by the Siguranța places Foriș among the staff writers for Cocea's Reporter magazine, alongside Pătrășcanu, Emil Husar, Dolfi Trost, and Ilie Zaharia. Reporter was banned by a new government, formed around Octavian Goga and his National Christian Party. A similar list of its collaborators appeared in Goga's magazine Țara Noastră, which exposed Reporter as a "communist mouthpiece [...] with only communists as authors." By February 1938, the Romanian Kingdom had slid into authoritarianism and corporate statism, replacing all parties with the National Renaissance Front (FRN). Nedelcu writes that, by then, Foriș was fully committed to the anti-fascist platform embraced by the PCR, which defined a "defensive war against fascist imperialism" as being in Romania's best interest. In order to understand more about Romanian society and economic trends, he broke party protocol and asked a covert communist, Ștefan Voicu, to write