Background
Coste was born in Ciacova, Banat, on 10 February 1910.
Coste was born in Ciacova, Banat, on 10 February 1910.
When United States. government funding and interest in East European émigrés waned, Coste took up an academic position at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. He did not live to see the fall of the Ceaușescu regime. Coste entered the Romanian diplomatic service in 1933 and was secretary and later counsellor for the Romanian legations in Paris and London.
Subsequently he was chargé d"affaires in Washington and Lisbon.
Between 1940 and 1947 he reported regularly to Romania on the position concerning the funds of the Romanian National Bank in the United States and the activities of the Swedish legation in Washington who looked after Romanian interest in the United States. during the Second World War and immediately afterwards. In 1945, when the communists came to power in Romania after the end of the war, Coste did not support the new regime.
Around 1954, he became director of the International League for the Rights of Manitoba, and the representative of that organisation at the United Nations. He worked on a project titled "Democracy in Russsia" for which he received a monthly payment of $300 from the Central Intelligence Agency-funded National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) as part of their policy of supporting anti-communist émigré groups from Eastern Europe in the United States.
From 1954 to 1965, he was secretary general of the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN) where he criticised the policy of United States. president Lyndon Johnson of "building bridges" with Eastern European countries which he saw as delaying the collapse of the communist regimes in those countries.
He claimed that his removal as head of ACEN was engineered by the NCFE, sponsors of ACEN and Radio Free Europe, because of his criticism of the Johnson administration"s policy. By that time, the money to support anti-communist activity by émigrés in the United States. was drying up and there was a general feeling in government circles that those groups had little sway in their home countries. From 1965 to 1967, Coste was a consultant to the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania and a special assistant to the president of the Institute for American Strategy.
From 1967 to 1976, Coste was an associate professor, then professor emeritus, of international relations and world history at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
From its formation in 1973, he headed the Truth About Romania Committee. Coste died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on 3 September 1984.
He did not live to see the fall of the Ceaușescu regime. Relating to Coste"s life are held in 85 boxes at the Hoover Institution.
From 1946 to 1947 he was secretary general of the unofficial delegation of Romanian political parties at the Paris Peace Conference after which he moved to New York and became a political adviser to General Nicolae Radescu, the last pre-communist prime minister of Romania.