Policy Coordination (OPC), trained in France, Italy, and Greece and then dropped in the Carpathians. It seems, however, that most of them, not being able to create local contacts imperative for survival, were soon captured. Rebel co-operation with the Central Intelligence Agency The rebels had links with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which conducted parachute missions in Romania in the early post-war years. At the beginning of 1949, the CIA through its Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) began to recruit displaced Romanians from West Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia. Gordon Mason, the CIA station chief in Bucharest from 1949 to 1951, said that the smuggling of weapons, ammunition, radio transmitters, and medicine was organized. Agents smuggled into Romania by the CIA were to help organize the sabotage of factories and transport networks. Among the Romanian volunteers recruited by the CIA at the beginning of 1951 were Constantin Săplăcan, Wilhelm Spindler, Gheorghe Bârsan, Matias Bohm, and Ilie Puiu. They were the first to be parachuted, on the night of October 18 to 19, 1951, in the Făgăraș Mountains, but they were soon caught by the Securitate and executed (except for Bârsan, who committed suicide while in custody). The Securitate discovered that these men had been recruited in Italy by a former Romanian pilot. Following this, the Romanian Government sent a note to the United States protesting interference in the country's internal affairs, and that the captured CIA agents had been "sent to carry out acts of terrorism and espionage against the Romanian Army." Later on, a two-man team was parachuted into Romania by the CIA on 2 October 1952 near Târgu Cărbunești in Oltenia. Three American-trained agents were sent in June 1953 to the Apuseni Mountains; they were later captured, but not executed, as the Romanian authorities intended to use them as double agents. In the Oradea-Satu Mare region, three airdropped agents were killed, one of them in a firefight and two others later executed. Resistance groups Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, a member of the Iron Guard's youth wing who led a resistance group in the Făgăraș Mountains from 1948 to 1956, and remained undetected until 1976, worked out a set of defining traits of the typical Romanian resistance group. According to this author, such a group was rather small but could number up to 200 men, located in a mountainous/forested area which comprised some communities. Ogoranu further stated that