Good afternoon Oana. It is great to have you here. You are the principal Spokesperson for NATO, the North Atlantic Alliance. Could you start by outlining in more detail what responsibilities and tasks your job entails?

Thank you, Sarah, for having me. Indeed, I am the spokesperson for NATO. In a nutshell, it is my job to provide strategic advice to the NATO Secretary General (SG) Jens Stoltenberg, the North Atlantic Council, and NATO offices on the press, media, and social media. That means I engage with media, and plan and prepare all the media engagements of the SG and the Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller. They actually have hundreds every year. Moreover, I am also in charge of speeches for the SG and the deputy SG. That is perhaps less usual for my role, but we realized the importance of having a continuum of messaging across all our public engagement regardless of the time and platform they are on. And, of course, I brief the SG and his team on developments in the media and I advise both the SG and the SG deputy as well as the North Atlantic Council i.e. the ambassadors representing the 29 NATO members states. I also coordinate messaging and media operations for NATO summits, ministerials, and other events. And importantly, I coordinate our messaging on a daily basis with our military colleagues, for instance in Afghanistan, as well as with the 29 NATO member states.

You have just outlined many different tasks and responsibilities. What is your strategy to manage all these responsibilities simultaneously, to maintain an overview and set priorities?

The secret to everything we do is teamwork. I have a small team that I work with, about 30 people including press officers, social media officers, assistants, speech writers and a small team of media monitors and analysts. The NATO press office is part of a bigger team which is the public diplomacy division in charge of NATO’s public diplomacy outreach and also includes important digital platforms such as the NATO channel TV and social media.

What is the most challenging part of your work?

The most challenging part is to find time to stop and think because the work that we do is quite relentless. It's quite easy to fall into the trap of just focusing on whatever is next. It is rather important to take a step back and to think about what and how you need to react to all the unpredictable things that often happen, during crises in particular. It also means thinking in the long term, for instance, we plan the communications strategy for the SG and the deputy SG to make sure that they reach the right audiences on the right issues at the right time. We are dealing with a lot of very different audiences because we have 29 member states, 29 majority shareholders, if you will.  There are also other partners around the world that we reach out to, from Australia to Ukraine.

“It's quite easy to fall into the trap of just focusing on whatever is next. It is rather important to take a step back and to think about what and how you need to react.”

After so many years as a journalist, do you still need time to prepare? Do you still actually need to sit down and prepare notes or do you just play things by ear? Do you still feel nervous when you enter the scene?

While you may have a lot of experience, every time you speak to people there will be new questions and new challenges. So, sometimes a little bit of nervousness is normal, actually. I do think it is important to be as well-prepared as possible. However, what I think is most important, is to listen to the question and what your interlocutor says. That is also one of the secrets of a successful interview. It's not about you necessarily speaking all the time. It's about listening to what the other person is saying and what the person is asking. I’m sure you know that very well by now!

“That is also one of the secrets of a successful interview. It's not about you necessarily speaking all the time. It's about listening to what the other person is saying and what the person is asking.”

You were the first journalist to hold your current position. Why do you think you were chosen, as former BBC journalist?

I was appointed in 2010, so it goes back a few years now. I think my background was important because of course every action we take and every policy we adopt has a communication dimension. As journalists, we are trained to ask the simple, fundamental questions, and to translate complex or technical language into clear English.

Why did you want to become a journalist in the first place? What was your source of energy or motivation that encouraged you to take this job, particularly when we think about the time when you became a journalist in London, when your home country Romania was under Communist leadership?

I became a journalist by accident. I grew up in Romania, which at that time was one of the most closed societies in the communist bloc, where it was very hard to do any sort of meaningful journalism. So that never crossed my mind. I studied English and Spanish. However, I was very interested in current affairs. My window on the rest of the world were books and radio. I used to read in various languages as much as I could and whatever I could. Sometimes it would be xeroxed books, the so-called Samizdat, which used to be handed over from person to person with great references. And also radio to listen to Deutsche Welle, to the BBC, to Radio Free Europe. This literally happened under the bed covers because obviously if the neighbors heard that I was listening to foreign radio stations I could be reported to the secret police, the feared Securitate.

“This literally happened under the bed covers because obviously if the neighbors heard that I was listening to foreign radio stations I could be reported to the secret police, the feared Securitate.”

How come you were not afraid? Where did your courage and conviction that this was right come from?

We lived in a sort of internal exile. I think a lot of people in the former communist bloc did that. We were looking for something that was open and free, which reflected much more who we were. It was the right thing to actually look beyond the very narrow world that we were living in.

In the end, the Securitate approached me and tried to get me to inform for them. I said no. And eventually, I was able to leave Romania and join my mother, who was in Germany. I then went on to the BBC, literally by accident. Somebody sent me a job ad, and I got the job because I knew so much about BBC programmes, having listened to them under the bed covers. So, it started from there.

“They listened in on my phone calls, transcribed everything, photocopied all the letters and postcards I had sent or received. It was some sort of bureaucracy of fear, with many people involved.”

You just said you had to deal with the secret police. You also created a documentary about the Romanian secret police and the files that they kept about you. That leads me to the question of whether, as a journalist, you should be fearless and put back yourself and your own privacy.

I decided to look for my secret police files in Romania. I didn't know what I would find but I knew the files existed because of my various encounters with the secret police, and because I was working for a foreign radio station. It was a very difficult experience - because you never know what you might find about your family, your friends, yourself. It still is a quite difficult experience to think about it now, but I felt it was important to shed light on this dark chapter, not just for myself but hopefully also for others.

It was shocking to find out hundreds of pages, some typewritten, some handwritten, clearly by many different people. They listened in on my phone calls, transcribed everything, photocopied all the letters and postcards I had sent or received. It was some sort of bureaucracy of fear, with many people involved.  We knew it existed, but it was still a surprise to see the tens of kilometers of historic secret police files kept in the archives. They are now open to the victims of the Securitate, to researchers. That in itself is important, so people can find out what happened, and avoid this being repeated.