this had gone unnoticed in the Soviet Union. Vincze argued that Stalin, made overconfident by his cult of personality, had "imposed Foriș as PCR leader, without having consulted the party base, and without a profound investigation into his political profile." According to Foriș family tradition, General Medrea handled the destruction of Foriș's private archives, though some of them, regarding underground activities up to 1944, were quietly transported into Soviet territory. Into the 1950s, the regime dedicated resources to finding out whether Foriș had in fact ever been recruited by the Siguranța. Teohari Georgescu personally interrogated the former Siguranța boss, Eugen Cristescu, asking him to validate the rumor, but "could not find out". Historian Cristian Troncotă suggests that this failure was not necessarily proof of Foriș's innocence: "[Cristescu knew] that any such disclosure could spell his end. [...] when one exposes even just one name, he's likely to expose all, and some of the ex-informant comrades were still alive, and holding on to important positions in the party hierarchy or in state government." As Câmpeanu notes, official takes were unwittingly debunked in 1960 by Bodnăraș, who recounted that he and "Marius" were discussing details about Gheorghiu-Dej's planned escape from prison. Had he believed that Foriș was a Siguranța man, he could not have made him privy to such schemes. PCR activist Ion Gheorghe Maurer argues that, around the same time, he was working on a samizdat critical of Marxism, and that he had informed Gheorghiu-Dej, otherwise a "close friend", about his intentions. This made him fear "that I'd get hit upside the head, like Foriș"; in one instance, Pintilie reportedly confirmed that the Soviet command was for Maurer to be similarly liquidated. In April 1968, Foriș and Pătrășcanu were rehabilitated by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party which was by then under the leadership of Gheorghiu-Dej's successor, Nicolae Ceaușescu. A special party committee, headed by Foriș's enemy Ion Popescu-Puțuri, found suspicions of treason to have been spurious in Foriș's case. It also concluded that the latter had shown incompetence in handling party matters during his time in office, and that he had allowed the group to be infiltrated by Siguranța agents. In speech to the PCR session in Bucharest, Ceaușescu summarized the commission's findings, as well as his own conclusions from them: "[the commission noted that Foriș] was innocent, that he was executed without any legal grounding, and what