Leszek Gluchowski, "Jewish Issues in the Thinking of the Polish Communist Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961" more

Paper presented to the international scholarly conference on ‘The Jewish Community in Poland before and after the 1967-68 Anti-Semitic Campaign’, organized by the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw, 6-7 Dec. 2007. For details, see: <http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/en/2/237/International_scholarly_conference_The_Jewish_Community_in_Poland_before_and_ aft.html> (last checked 21 April 2011). J’accuse…Je n’ai qu’une passion, celle de la lumière, au nom de l’humanité qui a tant souffert et qui a droit au bonheur. Ma protestation enflammée n’est que le cri de mon âme. Qu’on ose donc me traduire en cour d’assises et que l’enquête ait lieu au grand jour! J’attends. Émile Zola, 1898 If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. George Orwell, 1945 Soldiers are not like the Mafia. They can refuse to obey commanding officers who are disloyal to their country. Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, 1998 Jewish Issues in the Thinking of the Polish Communist Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 LESZEK GLUCHOWSKI* In a favourable review of Benjamin Weiser‟s excellent account of Ryszard Kukliński‟s life as a spy,1 Richard Pipes rhetorically asked why a number of problematic events remained unexplained, most notably the poignant fact that many Poles continue to regard Kukliński as a traitor. Pipes reminded his readers that the reputation of the Polish armed forces among Poles is „second only to the Catholic Church‟.2 On 19 January 2005 Rzeczpospolita reminded its readers that, according to a public opinion survey, the military was rated the second most trusted institution in the country. The Roman Catholic Church fell to third place. The top spot went to Polish television. * A draft of this essay was presented under the title „The Korczyński Report‟ to the international conference „Intelligence in Waging the Cold War: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Neutrals, 1949-1990‟, organized by the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, Oslo, 29 April-1 May 2005. An essay similar to the paper I gave in Warsaw in 2007 was published (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) under the title, also the subtitle of my Oslo paper, „A Critical Analysis of the Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961‟, in L. Gluchowski and A. Polonsky (eds.), Polin, 1968: Forty Years After (Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry), Volume 21 (Oxford, 2008), 93-149. Some of the text, footnotes and hyperlinks have been updated in the present version. 1 B. Weiser, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country (New York, 2004). Kukliński spied for the USA between 1971 and 1981. 2 R. Pipes, „Patriot Games‟, Commentary (May 2004), 65-6. 2 The reference to religion was not at all flippant. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) psychiatrist, Wilhelm Marbes, in a now declassified essay on the „Psychology of Treason‟, rhetorically asked his readers in 1986: „What are defectors unhappy about?‟3 This runs an enormous gamut of feelings and circumstances in life. Contrary to what you might believe, ideology would rank very low on the list of motivations. The reasons are much more likely to be personal, the stuff of soap operas, the ordinary unhappiness of everyday life. It is more likely to be intimate than ideological—marital problems, mistress problems, wrong sexual preference problems, drinking problems, gambling problems, money problems, career problems. Ideology seldom, certainly seldom alone, causes a defection. Almost never Leninism or communist ideology. The ideological exceptions in our experience were much more likely to be those of nationalism or of religion. But even those ideological defections seem to have been historically and geographically limited. The nationalistic defectors for the most part have been Lithuanians, Latvians, and Poles. We are still waiting for Ukrainian nationalist defectors. We have had quite a number of defectors with Ukrainian surnames, but when you talk with these individuals they make it plain that they do not think of themselves as Ukrainians. They think of themselves as Muscovites because that‟s where they were born and raised. Or another fellow thought of himself as a Siberian because that‟s where he was brought up. The religious issue seems to be almost totally confined to the Poles.4 It would be credulous to presume that Marbes is referring to Roman Catholics. His reference of course is to Jews, usually identified as a religious rather than an ethnic or national minority in America. Before the Second World War, before the Jews of Europe were systematically exterminated by the Germans and their collaborators in the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of Poland‟s Jewish population, Antony Polonsky reminds us, was not „transformed on the lines of the emancipationist project into „Poles of the Mosaic faith‟.‟5 It was not just that Polish Jews „regarded themselves and were regarded by the majority population as a national and not a religious group‟.6 The two societies had „few organic ties between them and most Poles did not 3 W. Marbes, „Psychology of Treason‟, in H. Westerfield (ed.), Inside the CIA’s Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency’s Internal Journal, 1955-1992 (New Haven, 1995), 70-82. 4 My emphasis. Ibid., 71-2. 5 Polonsky, „La memoria divisa in polonia: polacchi, ebrei e il dibattito su jedwabne‟, in A. Triulzi (ed.), Dopo la violenza. Costruzioni di memoria nel mondo contemporaneo, L'ancora del mediterraneo (Naples, 2005), 75-88. 6 Ibid. 3 regard the Jews as part of what Helen Fein has described as „the universe of obligation…that circle of persons towards whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply and whose injuries call for expiation by the community‟.‟ 7 This divide between Poles and Jews became enshrined after it was violently enforced by Nazi and Soviet policies in occupied Poland during the war. The imperial policy of „divide and rule‟, cold-bloodedly exercised by the dictators of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), continued after the war in the newly carved out Poland and it was not restricted to provocations directed at the country‟s national minorities. 8 Poland‟s politically heterogeneous Roman Catholics were no less targeted by the Soviets and their Polish Communist allies. Exploiting disputes among Catholics helped to drive another wedge between Poles and Jews. For better or for worse, throughout the latter half of the Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna (Great Patriotic War) and the Cold War, the officer corps of the Ludowe Wojsko Polskie (Polish People‟s Army; LWP)9 helped to sustain national and nationalist consciousness. The case of Communist Poland‟s most influential defence minister, Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski (Konstantin K. Rokossovsky), is most instructive. At key junctures of the war on the Eastern Front, Iosif V. Stalin bestowed the rank Marshal of the Soviet Union on himself (March 1943) and nine real Red Army generals, among whom were his three most celebrated battlefield commanders: Georgi K. Zhukov (January 1943); Ivan S. Konev (February 1944); and Rokossowski (June 1944).10 On Stalin‟s orders Communist Rokossowski was also nominated Marshal of Poland in November 1949.11 propaganda explained that „Rokossowski‟ was a „Polish eagle who has returned to his nest‟. 12 The Generalissimo was keenly aware that only four men had previously worn the epaulets of a Polish marshal, and that one of them, Michał Żymierski (May 1945), Communist Poland‟s inaugural defence minister and Rokossowski‟s predecessor, was a spy in the service of Red Army 7 Ibid. 8 Cf. N. Aleksiun, „The Situation of the Jews in Poland as Seen by the Soviet Security Forces in 1945‟, Jews in Eastern Europe, 3/37 (Winter 1998), 52-68. 9 On the sovietised LWP officer corps, see E. Nalepa, Oficerowie Armii Radzieckiej w Wojsku Polskim 1943-1968 (Warsaw, 1995). 10 In June 1945 Stalin awarded himself a new rank above Marshal: Generalissimo. The Red Army or the Worker‟ and Peasants‟ Red Army was renamed the Soviet Army in Feb. 1946. 11 Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe (Central Military Archives; CAW), 914/5, „Przemówienie tow. W. Gomułki wygłoszone w dniu 27 X 1956 r. na ogólnokrajowej naradzie aktywu partyjnego W.P.‟. 12 Quoted in R. Davies, „The View from Poland‟, in T. Hammond (ed.), Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War (Seattle, 1982), 270. 4 intelligence since 1935. The others were Stalin‟s enemies: Edward Rydz-Śmigły (1936), commander-in-chief of the Polish Army on the eve of the Second World War; Ferdinand Foch (1922), French commander of the Allied forces during the First World War and an influential supporter of Warsaw during the Polish-Soviet War of 1918-20; and Józef Piłsudski (1919), founder of the modern Polish state and architect of the Polish military victory over the Reds in 1920. In fact, in November 1949 Poland‟s Communist-controlled Sejm (parliament) voted to make Rokossowski a citizen, a marshal, a member of the Council of State, and defence minister. 13 The defence portfolio made Rokossowski the Commander-in-Chief.14 In one bold stroke the Soviet Pole became Stalin‟s viceroy in Poland. Rokossowski secretly retained his Soviet citizenship and, more importantly, membership of the Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya Partiya (bol'shevikov) (All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks); VKP(b)). Communist activists began operating openly inside the LWP in February 1949, but it was not until April 1950 that the Central Committee (CC) of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers‟ Party; PZPR) turned to the CC VKP(b) for permission to make the plethora of other Soviet generals and officers, rotating in and out of the LWP since 1943, automatic PZPR members. Still, most of them retained their membership of the VKP(b) or its youth wing, the Kommunisticheskii Soyuz Molodyozhi (Communist Youth League or Komsomol), after approval was given by the Kremlin in mid-1951 for their people to become members of the Polish party. Also in November 1949, Rokossowski joined the Polish Communist elite—the members of the CC PZPR—at their third plenary session, which resolved to expel from its ranks former party boss Władysław Gomułka and his associates, notably Major General (Maj Gen.) Marian Spychalski, the former deputy defence minister responsible for political affairs. The marshal began attending sittings of the ruling Politburo in May 1950, following the fourth plenary session of the CC PZPR. That gathering resounded with the cries of fanatics to liquidate the so-called „rightist-nationalist‟ tendency. 15 13 Ibid., 270-1. 14 The USSR exploded its first atomic bomb in Aug. 1949. That year also witnessed the political trials of top members of the Communist elite arrested during the post-war Stalinist purges in eastern Europe, which began with secret trials in Albania in May and emerged as show trials in Hungary in Sept. and in Bulgaria in Dec. before spreading to the rest of Stalin‟s Bloc. 15 In March 1948 the Soviet ambassador argued that Spychalski was „infected with Polish chauvinism‟. Quoted in R. Spałka, „Światło na Spychalskiego‟, Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej [hereafter Biuletyn IPN], 1-2/48-49 (Jan.Feb. 2005), 83. Also, see B. Szaynok, „Walka z syjonizmem w Polsce (1948-1953)‟, in T. Szarota (ed.), Komunism. 5 At the sixth plenary session, meeting in February 1951 to examine international tensions and to support the Politburo‟s decision to accelerate the militarization of the economy, 16 Stalinism, or the „intensification of the class struggle‟ and the „liquidation of class enemies‟, resumed its consumption of the revolutions‟ vanguard. More to the point, information delivered in May 1951 to Polish party boss Bolesław Bierut by the military counterintelligence (MCI) service, officially called the Główny Zarząd Informacji (Main Directorate of Information; GZI WP or Informacja),17 reported that Rokossowski had set his sights on Jakub Berman, an intellectual and Bierut‟s closest friend and confidant among the members of the Politburo. 18 According to a confidential informer,19 during a break in the deliberations at the sixth plenary session, the defence minister allegedly reminded a small circle of people around him that Berman had a mother in the United States and a brother in Israel. The comrade-marshal apparently added, „they have already passed, the times when all Jews were treated like reliable people‟. 20 Ideologia, system, ludzie (Warsaw, 2001), 252-71; and G. Berendt, „O walce z „Nacjonalizmem Żydowskim‟ w Polsce Ludowej (1950-1955)‟, Midrasz, 97 (5 May 2005). 16 See S. Zhihua, „Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War: Stalin‟s Strategic Goals in the Far East,‟ Journal of Cold War Studies, 2/2 (Spring 2000), 44-68. In Feb. 1950 the USSR signed the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance with the People‟s Republic of China (PRC). 17 See Z. Palski, „Represje polityczne w Wojsku Polskim w latach 1945-1956. Rola i udział organów Informacji Wojskowej‟, Doctoral Thesis (Wojskowy Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw, 1993). 18 The GZI targeted „Trotskyites‟ and „Jewish nationalism‟ in the LWP from Aug. 1950. CAW, 1467/k/30, „Rozkaz nr. 0148 Szefa Głównego Zarządu Informacji MON z dnia 27.IV.1953r.‟; and CAW, 1789/90/29, s. 24-5. 19 Codename ŚNIEŻNICA [SNOW(WO)MAN]; Julia Miller, director of the public library in Warsaw. Her note is dated March 1951. I should like to thank Andrzej Paczkowski for providing me with the details. 20 Quoted in T. Marczak, Granica zachodnia w Polskiej polityce zagranicznej w latach 1944-1950 (Wrocław, 1995), 213; archival source: Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records; AAN), b. Archiwum B. Bieruta 1-122, k. 103. Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossowski in the uniform of a Polish marshal. 6 It should not be discounted that Rokossowski wanted his remarks to get back to Bierut, or that the Soviet Pole was also aware of Gomułka‟s 1948 letter to Stalin accusing Bierut and his associates of being under the influence of „Jewish nationalism‟. Gomułka complained that „in the atmosphere that has developed within the Party, particularly after the August [1948] plenary session, no one has the courage to express criticism of the present personnel policy out loud. Discontent vents itself, therefore, in the corridors‟.21 In November 1952 Rokossowski, whose forces now guaranteed Poland‟s disputed post-war western frontier,22 added a deputy premiership, at Berman‟s expense, to his expanding portfolio.23 It is difficult not to imagine that Rokossowski, falsely accused a decade and a half earlier of being a traitor because of his Polish origin, once heard similar (if more deadly) epithets directed at Poles in the USSR. In July 1937 Stalin had authorized the mass arrests of so-called „anti-Soviet elements‟. A month later security forces unleashed the „Polish Operation‟. 24 According to Barry McLoughlin, as many as 140,000 Poles were arrested on the collective charge of treason, of which up to 110,000 were sentenced to death between November 1937 and November 1938.25 The operation effectively decimating the Polish population in the USSR at the time. Furthermore, a significant number of Poles conspicuously held senior posts inside the Red Army, including its intelligence service, before they were liquidated during the Great Terror. Paweł Wieczorkiewicz argues that in 1937-8 every top commander of Polish origin, with the possible exception of one, since his fate remains unknown, was dismissed from the Red Army. And only three among them, with exceptional contacts inside the Soviet security organs, managed to avoid being arrested. A total of thirty-nine were detained and tortured, thirty of whom were subsequently executed or died in prison. Of the nine survivors, only five were rehabilitated in 1940, also on Stalin‟s orders, and four of them, including Division Commander Rokossowski, were reinstated in the Red Army. The other four languished in the Gulags until after Stalin‟s death in 1953.26 21 Quoted in Gluchowski, „Gomułka Writes to Stalin in 1948‟, Polin, 17 (2004), 377. D. Allen, The Oder-Neisse Line: The United States, Poland, and Germany in the Cold War (Westport, 2003). The antisemitic show trials in Prague began in Nov. 1952 and in Bucharest in April 1954. A. Gurianov (ed.), Repressii protiv polyakov i pol’skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997). 22 23 24 25 B. McLoughlin, „Documenting the Death Toll: Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow, 1937-38‟, AHA Perspectives (May 1999), archived at <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1999/9905/9905arc2.cfm> (last checked 21 April 2011). 26 P. Wieczorkiewicz, Łańcuch śmierci. Czystka w Armii Czerwonej 1937-1939 (Warsaw, 2001), 395-8. 7 Stalin‟s successors also honoured the „governor‟ of their Polish satellite. In May 1955 Rokossowski was designated the deputy commander of the Unified Military Command of the newly created Warsaw Treaty Organization. But the collapse of Stalinist rule in Poland, almost eighteen months later, placed Rokossowski on the defensive. Gomułka‟s single-minded determination to block Rokossowski and his group from rejoining the Politburo, and, paradoxically, the Kremlin‟s ruthlessness at about the same time in Hungary, where Soviet troops found themselves preoccupied killing civilians in the streets of Budapest, compelled Moscow to recall the Soviet Pole and most of his deputies in November 1956. For all of his success at purging, training and modernizing the LWP officer corps, as well as his methodical construction of a comprehensively sovietised military establishment in People‟s Poland, Rokossowski‟s foray into Polish politics turned out to be a dismal personal failure. Shortly before the defence minister departed, Gomułka reminded PZPR activists in the LWP, no doubt aware that his comments would make their way back to the Kremlin: „In a face-to-face conversation, I told Comrade Rokossowski plainly: I think that you‟re a politician in the same way I‟m a military man‟. 27 The marshal was eventually placated in Moscow with the post of Soviet deputy defence minister, which he held until his retirement in April 1962. Years later, „a tiny bit Polish‟ 28 is how a Stalin confidant Viacheslav M. Molotov remembered Rokossowski; enough, at any rate, so that the once illustrious battlefield commander merely became a candidate—junior—member of the CC Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza (Communist Party of the Soviet Union; KPSS).29 Clearly, the nationality of party-state cadres mattered to these people. The remaining LWP generals continued to play a unique role in determining the extremes of Polish nationalism. 30 So it should hardly come as a surprise that the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (Polish People‟s Republic; PRL) officially proclaimed on 22 July 1952, was the first Soviet Bloc state to negotiate its anti-Communist revolution—bloodless and largely successful— in 1988-90. Or that the militarized leadership of the PZPR effectively struck a deal with representatives of the democratic opposition that did not entail de-Communization.31 Ongoing 27 CAW 914/55, k. 234-5. 28 V. Molotov and F. Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago, 1993), 28. 29 The VKP(b) was renamed the KPSS in 1952. 30 On the military‟s place in building a modern state, see R. Ponichtera, „The Role of the Army in the Rebuilding of Polish Statehood, 1918-1921‟, Ph.D. Thesis (Yale University, 1995). 31 A. Dudek, Reglamentowana rewolucja. Rozkład dyktatury komunistycznej w Polsce 1988-1990 (Kraków, 2004), which de-mythologizes the so-called „round-table‟ agreement. 8 revelations about the conduct of the post-Solidarność intelligence and security services, engaged in a plethora of unlawful investigations and operations, illustrates the robust continuity of totalitarian tendencies a decade after the collapse of Communist rule. Whatever anyone thinks about nagging and politically charged complaints that the Third Polish Republic was a continuation of the PRL, „old wine in new bottles‟ is an apt description for the relationship between the post-Communist special services and their primitive Communist prototypes. Moreover, the LWP officer corps had decades of experience avoiding responsibility for past „errors‟ and therefore national disgrace. Among the personnel consistently and legally sheltered from the lustration law, unusually benign, were the functionaries who had loyally served the Communist MCI service as well as the military intelligence (MI) service, the Zarząd II Sztabu Generalnego Wojska Polskiego (2nd Directorate of the General Staff of the Polish Army; Z-II SG WP).32 Approximately 1,600 of them went on to hold positions in the ex-Communist military special services of the Third Republic. 33 It would be foolhardy to deny that the continuity of personnel in Polish MI did not inform or does not continue to inform, even after generational changes are taken into account, the institutional and cultural legacy of the post-Cold War Polish MI service. But the specifics of that question are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that the cliché „old habits die hard‟ is neither temporally, geographically, nor ideologically specific. GRZEGORZ KORCZYŃSKI The need for vigilance regarding archival documents that cover the activities of the Soviet intelligence services applies today no less than it did over a decade ago, when reports prepared in the 1960s for the Kremlin by the First Chief Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti (Committee for State Security; KGB) were examined. 34 Reports prepared for party executives in Warsaw by the chiefs of their intelligence services, covering the 32 Communist Poland‟s MCI and MI services, combined in 1990 and renamed in 1991 the Wojskowe Służby Informacyjne [Military Information Services; WSI] were finally disbanded in 2006 and replaced by the Military Counterintelligence Service (Wojskowe Służby Kontrwywiadu; WSK) and the Military Intelligence Service (Wojskowe Służby Wywiadu; WSW). From among 1,700 personnel from the defunct WSI only 480 have been positively vetted. „A. Macierewicz rozwiązuje “Ubekistqan”‟, Rzeczpospolita, 2 Oct. 2006. 33 A. Rzepliński, „Security Services in Poland and their Oversight‟, in J. Brodeur, P. Gill and D. Töllborg (eds.), Democracy, Law, and Security: Internal Security Services in Contemporary Europe (Burlington, 2003), 115; and L. Watts, „Intelligence Reform in Europe‟s Emerging Democracies‟, Studies in Intelligence, 48/1 (2004), archived at <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no1/article02.html> checked 19 April 2011). 34 (last V. Zubok, „Spy vs. Spy: The KGB vs. the CIA, 1960-1962‟, Cold War International History Project Bulletin [hereafter CWIHP Bulletin], 4 (1994), 22-33. Also, see R. Garthoff, „Foreign Intelligence and the Cold War‟ Journal of Cold War Studies, 6/2 (Spring 2004), 21-56. 9 same period, must also be treated with a great deal of prudence. 35 Assessing their accuracy, gauging their historical significance, verifying references to events and individuals—accepting that some explicit or implicit relationships cannot always be corroborated—is crucial, but so is trying to explain why a certain document was in fact produced, why it accented or emphasized this or that, and why it was preserved in the first place. I have endeavoured to provide historical context and an analytical overview of a revealing document: „Report of the Activities of the 2nd Directorate of the General Staff as of 1 December 1961‟.36 The report was prepared by the chief of Polish MI, Maj Gen. Grzegorz Korczyński, 37 whose military career began with the International Brigades in Spain, where he was decorated for bravery and eventually promoted to the rank of Sergeant, and where he gained a reputation as a Stalinist fanatic.38 Out of approximately 35,000 volunteers who eventually served with the International Brigades, those from Poland ranked second, in the „most accurate…but still uncertain‟ 39 figures, put forward most recently by Antony Beevor, just ahead of the Italians and well behind the French. 40 The volunteers made their own way to the main base at Albacete, as Hugh Thomas describes it, „half-way between Madrid and Valencia, surrounded by the dull wastes of La Mancha, and known for several centuries for the manufacture of knives‟. 41 A little known detail that the less cynical among them later discovered the hard way. Korczyński was with the cavalry squadron of the 13th International Brigade when the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern) reassigned him in the autumn of 1938 to a special unit headed by the commander-in-chief of the International Brigades, André Marty. Korczyński‟s transfer came just after the Spanish government announced in September its decision to withdraw the Internationals, who were quickly moved to the rear away from the 35 A. Paczkowski, „Wywiad (cywilny) PRL w 1955 r.‟, Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), 150 (2004), 129-53. CAW, 525/85, „Sprawozdanie z działalności Zarządu II S.G. według stanu na dzień 1 grudnia 1961 r.‟, k. 456-85. 36 37 Korczyński (1915-71); real name Stefan Kilianowicz. My biographical sketch reflects in part the entry prepared by A. Kochański, in Słownik Biograficzny Działaczy Polskiego Ruchu Robotniczego. Tom 3—K), ed. by F. Tych (Warsaw, 1992), 292-3. I should like to thank Aleksander Kochański for providing me with the „Errata‟ page. 38 J. Rutkowski, Czas walki, klęsk i zwycięstwa. Wspomnienia Dąbrowszczka 1936-1945 (Wrocław, 1980), 159. Rutkowski was the political commissar (co-commander) of Korczyński‟s battalion in Spain. Col. Jan (Szymon) Rutkowski also served as the GZI chief from Dec. 1945-April 1947. 39 A. Beevor, Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (London, 2006), 468n4. 40 France 8,962; Poland 3,113; Italy 3,002; volunteers came from 53 countries and another 5,000 foreigners served in other pro-Republican organizations. 41 H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London, 1977), 456. 10 fighting. By the end of the month the Internationals had crossed the Ebro River on its eastern shores. They set up camp in Catalonia and waited for the special commission established by the League of Nations, which was to supervise their withdrawal. About 6,000 Internationals marched for the last time through the flag-draped streets of Barcelona at the end of October. They were waiting to cross into France when the Nationalists launched an offensive in Catalonia, reaching Barcelona in early January 1939. The French reopened their borders on 3 February. The last unit of Internationals and the rear of about half a million refugees streamed across the border into France two days before the victorious Nationalists forces reached it on 11 February.42 It remains unclear what Korczyński did at the special unit, except that he was with the last group of Internationals to cross the Spanish-French frontier. But we do know that the Comintern was hell-bent on liquidating all Left-wing opposition to the Communists before they could reach France. That campaign, led by Marty, had begun in earnest in the spring of 1937 and continued unabated throughout the autumn of 1938 and into the beginning of 1939. Throughout this period soldiers of the International Brigades, an American volunteer recalled, were „ruthlessly executed‟43 by Soviet agents. Many were simply abducted and assassinated by operatives belonging to mobile Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People‟s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; NKVD) squads.44 In this poisonous atmosphere the revelation by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin that the Soviets in Spain had constructed „a secret crematorium which enabled the NKVD to dispose of its victims without leaving any trace of their remains‟ 45 can hardly come as a surprise. As a virtual mirror image of the Great Terror that destroyed the Bolsheviks in the USSR, but in this case under wartime conditions during a brutal civil war, the terror in Spain was in many ways more vicious than the one that spawned it. The Soviet advisors in Spain rarely bothered to abide even by the most rudimentary legal niceties; the murders were more indiscriminate. When the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party; PCF) recalled Marty to explain his actions, he admitted to executing around 500 hundred Internationals.46 Marty became known as „Le Boucher d’Albacete‟. 42 V. Johnston, Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (University Park, PA, 1967), 141. 43 Quoted in D. Richardson, Comintern Army: The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Lexington, 1982), 174. 44 C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (New York, 1999), 96. Ibid., 97. Richardson, Comintern Army, 175. 45 46 11 It was in this environment of ideological fanaticism and ethnic hatred, suspicion and mass murder, civil war and impending world war, that the Internationals exited Spain. Safely back on French territory, Korczyński was among those who stood in formation and listened as Marty gave his last speech. The French Communist echoed the about-face Soviet policy was about to take: „There is to be no more fist raising, no more singing of the Internationale‟.47 From a makeshift parade square Korczyński and his comrades marched straight into French internment camps. He was initially held at the camp in Argelès-sur-Mer and then transferred to Gurs in late April 1939. For many Communists the Spanish Civil War opened the door to a new future. A former NKVD assassin revealed that Soviet „intelligence initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republicans lost, Stalin‟s men and women won. When the Spanish Civil War ended, there was no room left in the world for [Leon] Trotsky‟.48 An important feature of Korczyński‟s rise inside the secret organs of the world Communist movement was that he was part of that group of Polish Communists who had fought in Spain and continued to retain the trust of Moscow‟s agents after the Comintern officially disbanded the Polska Partia Komunistyczna (Communist Party of Poland; KPP)49 and liquidated most of its functionaries on Stalin‟s orders in 1937-8.50 After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Korczyński escaped from the Gurs camp during a stay at the infirmary with the aid of activists from the PCF and fled to Paris. There he joined the Polish Group of the French party. On 27 August, in Moscow, during a discussion about Polish matters, Stalin advised Comintern boss Georgi Dimitrov: „It would be better to create a workers‟ party of Poland with a Communist program‟. 51 By May 1942 Korczyński started directing the military activities of the foreign groups attached to the PCF in the Parisian sector. In August representatives of the newly created Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers‟ Party; PPR) arrived in the French capital with orders for his immediate return to Nazioccupied Poland. 47 Korczyński was given command of a Communist guerrilla band of the Quoted in Johnston, Legions of Babel, 144. 48 P. Sudoplatov and A. Sudoplatov with J. and L. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (New York, 1994), 31. 49 The KPP had about 10,000 members in 1934 (the largest social group was peasants, at 37%). Activists were predominantly of Belorussian, Ukrainian or Jewish nationality. German Communists in Poland usually joined the German party. 50 W. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939 (New Haven, 2001), passim. 51 Quoted in I. Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949 (New Haven, 2003), entry of 27 Aug. 1941, 191. 12 Gwardia Ludowa (People‟s Guard; GL) in the Lublin province and he began to run insurgency operations in the Kraśnicki region. In November 1942 his unit freed „about 350 Jews‟52 from the Nazi slave labour camp at Janiszów. 53 However, soon afterwards, in the midst of a heated argument between Korczyński‟s men and those still loyal to the former unit commander, four members of the unit‟s headquarters were murdered. Korczyński exacted retribution, putting to death the former commander, his supporters, and twelve Jews who had been seeking their protection.54 Korczyński was promoted to the rank of Major (Maj.) of the People‟s Army in July 1943 and in September became deputy commander of the GL Lublin District. In November he was summoned to Warsaw, where he was appointed chief of the Operations Department of the Chief Headquarters of the GL. When the GL was expanded and renamed the Armia Ludowa in January 1944, Korczyński was named chief of the 1st Department (Operations) of the Chief Headquarters of the AL. Two months later he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel (Lt Col.) and a month later appointed commander of the 2nd (Lublin) District AL. Korczyński headed the AL units that entered Soviet-liberated Lublin on 25 July. On the following day he was promoted to the rank of Colonel (Col.) and appointed the commandant of the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens‟ Militia; MO), a branch of the nascent Communist public security apparatus, for the Lublin province. At the end of August 1944 he was placed in charge of the MO in Warsaw (right bank) and the Warsaw province and appointed to the executive of the Warsaw Provincial Party Committee of the PPR. Korczyński moved his counterinsurgency and security operations in April 1945 to Gdańsk, where he also joined the provincial party executive, and assumed the post of the director of the Provincial Public Security Office. At a meeting of the CC PPR in May 1945 Gomułka complained that „Comrade Korczyński in Gdańsk is preparing a crematorium to burn Germans‟. 55 The next month Korczyński was transferred to the LWP, serving with units tasked to crush the insurgency led by guerrillas in the Lublin province. He returned to Warsaw in December 1945 and took part in the inaugural PPR congress, which selected him to the CC, although information about this extremely important promotion was not released to the press. In March 1946 he was 52 AAN, PZPR 509/29, „Notatka w sprawie Stefana Kilianowicza i innych‟, k. 7. 53 P. Witte and S. Tyas, „A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during „Einsatz Reinhardt‟ 1942‟, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 15/3 (Winter 2001), 471. 54 P. Gotarczyk, „Z genealogii elit PZPR. Przypadek Stefana Kilianowicza vel Grzegorza Korczyńskiego‟, Glaukopis, 1 (2003), 214-29. 55 Quoted in Kochański (ed.), Protokół obrad KC PPR w maju 1945 roku (Warsaw, 1992), 15. 13 appointed assistant for operations to the public security minister, for whom he helped to coordinate counterinsurgency actions against Ukrainian nationalists, and in July 1947 he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General (Brig Gen.). Korczyński‟s luck ran out at the August-September 1948 plenary session of the CC PPR, at which Bierut replaced Gomułka as the party boss. The party elite accused the comrade-general and others of „open indecision and a conciliatory spirit towards the rightist-nationalist deviation‟,56 forcing Korczyński to submit a demeaning self-criticism. A resolution passed by the CC at the end of their gathering demoted him to candidate member. A few days later Korczyński was dismissed from his advisory post at the Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (Ministry of Public Security; MBP). He was finally thrown out of the CC in December 1948, although he was allowed to remain employed with the MBP until June 1949 so that he could be watched. Two months later he was transferred to the military reserves and offered an administrative post in the state lumber industry, but he was out of work at the time of his arrest by the GZI in May 1950. Korczyński was detained on orders from the supreme military prosecutor and charged with espionage. The military turned him over to the Investigative Department of the MBP after he was placed at the heart of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Korczyński was incarcerated at a top secret prison run by the Special Bureau, a super-secret department of the MBP created to defend the party against „enemies‟. Torture was used to extract „confessions‟ there. 57 Korczyński was „severely beaten‟ but he did not break.58 If a solid case against him proved illusive, it did not deter the Communist investigators. Bierut‟s prosecutors shifted their focus to older charges levelled against Korczyński for his wartime activities in the Kraśnicki region, even though the Politburo had secretly reviewed and dismissed those charges in 1945.59 Now accused of „bringing about a weakening of the spirit and defence forces of the partisan units‟,60 the Warsaw Provincial Court sentenced Korczyński at a secret hearing in May 1954 to fifteen-years for collaborating with the Nazis and for the murder of Communists and Jews. The High Court later lowered the sentence to ten-years, although charges concerning his 56 Quoted in Kochański (ed.), Protokoły posiedzeń Biura Politycznego KC PPR 1947-1948 (Warsaw, 2002), 270n2. 57 J. Chodakiewicz, „The Dialectics of Pain: The Interrogation Methods of the Communist Secret Police in Poland, 1944-1955‟, Glaukopis, 2/3 (2005), 99-144. 58 Ibid., 133n10. AAN, PZPR 509/51, „Meldunek kpt. Kaca z 6.VIII.1951r.‟, k. 45-6. 59 60 Quoted in P. Gontarczyk, „Z genealogii elit PZPR‟, 223; archival source: Archiwum Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, AIPN), BUiAD 507/221, k. 7v. 14 responsibility for „Fascist-Hitlerite‟ war crimes and treason were still pending. Even though Gomułka was released in December 1954, following revelations via Radio Free Europe (RFE) of his secret captivity by a top MBP functionary who had defected to the CIA a year earlier, Bierut and Berman continued to press their own vendetta against the Gomułka circle. In the end, Korczyński‟s release was triggered by the general amnesty of April 1956, when his sentence was automatically reduced by half. Earlier that year the Politburo had agreed to hold talks with Gomułka, stubbornly setting the terms under which he would agree to return to the leadership. 61 Among his conditions was a demand that Korczyński be allowed to rejoin the PZPR. None of Gomułka‟s generals matched Korczyński influence, which, considering Gomułka‟s predisposition to keep even his closest advisors at a distance, was no minor feat.62 The purges of 1948 cemented their relationship but it was during the 1956 crisis that „Wiesław‟, Gomułka‟s nom de guerre, signalled to his supporters, as well as to his enemies, that „Grzegorz‟ occupied a special place among them. A day after the May Day parade that year, Korczyński threw a party to celebrate his own release from prison. 63 The party took place at the home of Jerzy Kilianowicz, who joined his older brother „Grzegorz‟ at Z-II. An invited guest later said that the gathering, some „30-40 people‟,64 included Gomułka, who „was late—they greeted him like a commander-in-chief!‟65 Korczyński and Gomułka adjourned to another room for a private chat while the others waited for them to return to the party. Gomułka‟s chief condition was met on 5 May when Berman resigned from the Politburo. A month later the citywide revolt in Poznań effectively terminated any chances for Bierut‟s successor, Edward Ochab, to continue as first secretary and thus block Gomułka‟s moves to return to the top post. Again, Gomułka got his way. The Politburo established a special party 61 J. Andrzejewski [Andrzej Paczkowski] (ed.), Gomułka i inni. Dokumenty z archiwum KC 1948-1982 (London, 1986), 78-96. 62 T. Pióro, Armia ze skazą. W Wojsku Polskim 1945-1968 (Warsaw, 1994), 267. W. Namiotkiewicz (ed.), Działalność Władysława Gomułki. Fakty, wspomnienia, opinie (Warsaw, 1985), 530. 63 64 Interview with Stefan Staszewski (first secretary of the Warsaw Party Committee in 1956), in „Notatka [J. Holzera] z relacji ustnej Stefana Staszewskiego [i innych] o wydarzeniach Październikowych 1956 r.‟ [Typed manuscript, May 1978], 8. I should like to thank Jerzy Holzer for providing me with this document in 1988. The discussion included Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuroń and Władysław Bieńkowski, head of the National Library in 1956. Michnik then asked Bieńkowski: „When did Gomułka begin to gather his team?‟ Bieńkowski: „From March 1956‟. Staszewski said that the celebration was held on Korczyński‟s name day (March 12), which is unlikely since he was still behind bars, but that was the day Bierut died unexpectedly and mysteriously in Moscow. 65 Ibid. 15 commission, which met in July to review the Korczyński problem. They decided that „the repressions Korczyński undertook‟66 in November 1942 „were justified‟.67 Since a PZPR commission could not „legally‟ overturn a ruling made by the PRL courts, and, more to the point, Ochab was still pulling the strings, it was resolved to let the Central Commission of Party Control of the PZPR re-examine the entire matter. But the whole thing was dropped and swept under the carpet after the „October events‟. The files and official court documents related to the case were collected by Korczyński‟s allies in the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs; MSW), which had replaced the discredited MBP, and hidden there. Korczyński was promoted to the rank of Maj Gen. in July 1957 and given command of MI four months later. Gomułka brought his MI chief into the Central Committee as a full— senior—member in 1959. The MI report of 1961, which Korczyński prepared at about the time he graduated from the Lieutenant General (Lt Gen.) Karol Świerczewski General Staff Academy, provides insight into the sources and other methods his service employed at the height of the early Cold War. The chief presented details regarding the organizational structure of Z-II, its operational-intelligence work, its networks of agents from 1945 to 1960, its operational security, its signals intelligence, its cadres, and its military attachés. The main body of the text includes tables and other statistical data as well as six separate attachments: a table detailing the total number of agents recruited in the most important capitalist countries up to 1952; a table detailing the number and types of agents in 1951 and 1961; a table outlining the number and type of intelligence reports issued by Z-II; a table outlining the type of intelligence passed by Z-II to the USSR from 1956 to the end of 1961; a selected list of the forty-four most important pieces of intelligence passed by Z-II to the USSR; and a table of the type of intelligence given to Z-II by the USSR from 1956 to 1961. The Korczyński report, originally distributed to a small group of senior party and military authorities, which I received in Warsaw in 1990, furnishes an extraordinary window into the state of mind of the MI chief. 68 A copy of this report was apparently found in Gomułka‟s personal safe after his second fall from power in 1970. 66 AAN, PZPR 509/29, k. 13. Ibid. A postage stamp was commissioned in 1989 to honour Korczyński but it was never officially circulated. See below. 67 68 16 The most troublesome feature of the report of 1961 is that it reveals Korczyński‟s antisemitism, indelibly stamped on at least two consecutive sections of the report: „OperationalIntelligence Work of the 2nd Directorate‟ and „Treachery and Leaks during the years 19451961‟.69 The narrative insinuates a pattern of treacherous Jewish conspiracy inside his service against People‟s Poland and, by extension, the USSR and the Soviet Bloc. Yet Korczyński never even so much as questioned the activities of the Soviet officers, mostly Russians, cadres of the KGB or the Soviet MI service, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye (Main Intelligence Directorate; GRU) of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, who served as senior Polish MI officers, some of them as chiefs of Polish MI from the outset. Other GRU officers came quickly to Warsaw in 1949 with Rokossowski and departed unceremoniously with him (fortified with hefty PRL pensions) seven years later. An unknown number of undercover GRU officers remained inside the LWP after 1956. Another matter not discussed in the Korczyński report concerned the training of Z-II officer by their Soviet counterparts.70 It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that only the GRU knows exactly how many agents, residents and informers it controlled inside the Polish military and its MI service between, for the purpose of this study, 1945-62.71 Lt Gen. Korczyński memorialized by the PRL. 69 CAW, 525/85, k. 459-63. 70 The liquidated WSI employed about 800 personnel who had received Soviet training. A. Marszałek, „Likwidator kontra generał‟, Rzeczpospolita (3 Oct. 2006). 71 In 1946, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last Polish party boss (1980-81; promoted to the rank of Lt Gen. in 1968 and in 1973 to the rank of General of the Army) became a GZI agent. See Paweł Piotrowski, „Sprawa współpraca Wojciecha 17 In 2005 a former Polish intelligence officer complained that all the cases of betrayal on behalf of the Russian Federation by Polish intelligence officers uncovered in the post-Cold War period concerned officers from the ex-Communist MI service.72 More recently, GRU defector Victor Suvorov, who fled to Britain in 1978, was asked to put into context the rich career of many post-Communist intelligence functionaries: „I‟ll reply with the words of [Russian President Vladimir V.] Putin. Once, when he was already the proprietor of the Kremlin, he was asked if he was a former Chekist.73 He replied: former Chekists do not exist. Its similar with GRU officers. There are no former officers or agents of intelligence. It‟s like joining the Mafia. It‟s impossible to leave‟.74 Korczyński‟s report also avoids any reference to the specific duties of Soviet MI advisors attached to Polish MI before or after 1956. It should not go unnoticed that between 1958 and 1963 the chief of the GRU, and deputy for intelligence affairs to the chief of the Soviet General Staff, was General of the Army Ivan A. Serov, an expert on Polish affairs.75 A powerful, sinister figure Serov became „Senior Advisor‟ to the then fledgling MBP in February 1945, which effectively made him the first Polish security chief. In Soviet-occupied Poland he ran counterinsurgency and security operations until April 25. At the end of May Stalin rewarded Serov for his „actions‟ in Poland by naming him „Hero of the Soviet Union‟ and promoting him to the rank of Colonel General (Col Gen.). A month later he was made a deputy to Zhukov, whom Stalin awarded for taking Berlin with an appointment as the chief of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.76 In 1954, for cooperating with the plot against Lavrenti P. Beria, Stalin‟s long time security chief whom Serov served loyally as his deputy, party boss Nikita S. Khrushchev made Jaruzelskiego z Informacji Wojskową‟, Biuletyn IPN, 1-2/72-72 (Jan.-Feb. 2007), 116-125. Zygmunt Bauman, now professor emeritus at Leeds University, who joined the Internal Security Corps in 1945 and left with the rank of Maj. in 1953. See Gontarczyk, „Towarzysz „Semjon‟. Nieznany zyciorys Zygmunta Baumana‟, Biuletyn IPN, 6/65 (June 2006), 74-83. 72 „Służby trudne do zgryzienia‟, Rzeczpospolita (12 Oct. 2005). 73 Reference to Soviet Russia‟s first security organ, the Vserossiiskaya chrezvychaynaya komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiyey, spekulyatsiyey i sabotazhem (All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Speculation and Sabotage; VChK or Cheka); Chekist denotes former KGB officers. 74 Suvorov perceptively added: „On the other hand, I would not like to generalize that all Polish officers who went through GRU training are Russian agents. However, I think that people who worked in close contact with Soviet special services, including the GRU, should find for themselves work outside the structures connected with state security.‟ S. Popowski, „Agentem GRU jest się do końca życia‟, Rzeczpospolita (3 Oct. 2006). 75 P. Kołakowski, NKWD i GRU na ziemiach Polskich 1939-1945 (Warsaw, 2002), passim. 76 N. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 20 and 278-82. 18 Serov the very first chairman of the KGB. A year later he was promoted to the rank of General of the Army and joined the Soviet party elite as a full member of the CC KPSS. Serov continued to maintain Khrushchev‟s trust when he took charge of the GRU in 1958. His demise came during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Penkovsky Affair. In 1962 GRU officer Oleg V. Penkovsky, who had cultivated his chief as a source, was unmasked in Moscow as a Western spy.77 Andrew and Mitrokhin claim that „Serov—blew his brains out in 1963‟.78 In a review of two Russian books on the history of the KGB, one published in 2001 and the other in 2003, Ben de Jong notes: „Now we learn from [the 2003 book by] [A. I.] Kokurin and [N. V.] Petrov that [Serov] had only died in June 1990‟. 79 Actually, Petrov published an up-to-date biographical portrait of the former KGB-GRU boss, entitled „Serov‟s Shadow‟, in 1992. 80 Serov was forced to leave Moscow in January 1963 and posted to a military garrison in Tashkent. In March he was demoted three pay grades to the rank of Maj Gen. and stripped of the title „Hero of the Soviet Union‟. Serov was finally purged from the KPSS a month later and pensioned off after being found guilty of „allowing himself to violate socialist legality and taking advantage of his official position for personal gain‟. 81 He resided in Moscow when he died, two months shy of his eighty-fifth birthday. I emphasize this primarily to highlight the value of Polish-language sources and to focus attention on Serov‟s long time association with Polish affairs. The essence of those times may have been best portrayed by novelist John le Carré. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963, captures the tension among officers engaged in intelligence and counterintelligence operations.82 With pervasive gloom and betrayal as the backdrop, highlighted by the personal animosity between an East German intelligence officer, an ex-Nazi, who turns out to be a British double agent, and his deputy inside the East German service, a Jew, who becomes the target of the British operation, what is striking today about the novel is not that both sides employed unsavoury methods to accomplish their tasks. Intelligence officers were motivated by bitter hatred, manifested not just between rival services but also between officers within the same service. And ethnic hatred played its part. 77 J. Hart, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, 2003), 97-8. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 30. 78 79 B. de Jong, „January 2005—New Evidence on Soviet Foreign Intelligence‟, CWIHP Bookshelf, archived at <http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=105150> (last checked 21 April 2011). 80 N. Pietrow [Petrov], „Cień Sierowa‟, Karta, 9 (1992). 79-84. Ibid., 84. 81 82 On spy novels and the real world of espionage, see F. Hitz, The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage (New York, 2004). 19 Efforts on the part of some in the Soviet security forces to nurture antisemitism in postwar Poland were especially boosted in November 1944 with the capture of Bolesław Piasecki, leader of the pre-war Polish Fascist movement.83 In response to a death sentence, secretly issued by a so-called military court, Piasecki penned a long letter to Serov and offered to collaborate with Soviet state security. Serov knew Piasecki commanded respect, if not the full support, of most Polish nationalists. He had achieved notoriety in 1934. Piasecki was among those interned by the Polish authorities after the interior minister was assassinated by Ukrainian nationalists, so his credentials as a prominent opponent of the interwar regime was impeccable. Piasecki later split the Right-wing political party he helped to lead, the Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny (NationalRadical Camp), and founded Falanga, a paramilitary organization modelled on the Italian Fascist movement. In spite of Piasecki‟s loathing for the failed regime, he fought bravely in the Polish Army against the German invaders in 1939. Soon after the fall of Warsaw, Piasecki authorized his associates—they called their leader „Szef‟ (Chief)—to make overtures to the German military authorities about the viability of organized Polish collaboration. Polish Fascists called for the formation of Polish forces under German command to fight the Reds, as well as to assist the Nazis in confiscating Jewish property. They asked no more than had been offered by the Germans to the political leaders of other leading European nation-states. Adolf Hitler put a stop to it. The Polish state had ceased to exist. The Germans arrested Piasecki in December 1939 but reluctantly released him five months later on orders from Berlin. The Italian authorities made appeals on his behalf. Piasecki went underground and co-founded the Konfederacji Narodu (Confederation of the Nation), a resistance movement he commanded from 1941. Its military wing—Uderzeniowe Bataliony Kadrowe (Cadre Shock Battalions)—specialized in disarming German troops, robbing banks and attacking prisons. In 1943 Piasecki, who acknowledged the authority of the wartime Polish government-inexile, headquartered in London, subordinated his troops to the commanders of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army; AK), the largest and the primary resistance movement in German and Soviet occupied Poland. Serov personally accepted the offer to collaborate from „Szef‟ (an open secret in influential Catholic circles).84 Piasecki was released from captivity in July 1945. The former Falanga leader set out to help end the Polish counterinsurgency against the Communist forces, ordering his followers to surrender and accept the Communists as Poland‟s legitimate rulers. In 83 Dudek and G. Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki. Próba biografii politycznej (London, 1990). A. Bromke, Poland’s Politics: Idealism vs. Realism (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 275n17. 84 20 addition, Piasecki agreed to lead an organization, loyal to Moscow, with a singular purpose: to subvert the influence of the Roman Catholic Episcopate. He secured financing and permission from the Polish Communist authorities to open a weekly newspaper propagating collaborationist and nationalist ideas. Other business ventures and mass circulation publications quickly followed. But Piasecki‟s primary contribution to Communist power was the creation of PAX, an association of „progressive Catholics‟ endeavouring to link Marxism and Catholicism, openly collaborating with the Communists.85 In the midst of the Polish-Soviet confrontation of 1956, Piasecki wrote an iniquitous article, „Instinct of the State‟, backing the neo-Stalinist faction backed by Moscow inside the PZPR. He warned his readers that opposition to the Kremlin and their PRL supporters would incur a violent Soviet reaction. In January 1957 Piasecki‟s eldest son Bohdan was kidnapped and subsequently murdered. The crime received widespread national attention, but the security organs were singularly incapable of solving this crime. Recent research has concluded that strong evidence exists to suggest that individuals connected to the MSW were complicit in the kidnapping and murder of the sixteen-year old, and that security officials engaged in a cover-up. One „witness‟ tried leaving the country with his family during the „investigation‟ but was stopped at the border after PAX officials were tipped off about the attempted flight. Others who could have shed light on the incident eventually immigrated to Israel. 86 Relations between PAX and the Gomułka regime improved at the start of the new decade and both sides separately sought a rapprochement with the Episcopate. considerable authority in Communist Poland. PAX now boasted The „progressive Catholics‟ had five Sejm deputies, a growing membership, and influence in every social class, not to mention an increasing number of Poles living abroad. The continued willingness of Piasecki and other PAX officials to speak with authority in support of the PRL and the Polish-Soviet alliance was deemed essential and encouraged by the new executives of the Polish security (and intelligence) organs. 87 And while PAX lost its monopoly over Catholic publications and charities, Piasecki‟s business empire had grown so lucrative that he effectively remained the wealthiest man in Communist Poland. Indeed, he also served as a Sejm deputy (1965-79) and as a member of the Council of State (1971-9). 85 Ibid., 213-31. 86 See Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, 253-8; and P. Raina, Mordercy uchodzą bezkarnie. Sprawa Bohdana P. (Warsaw, 2000). 87 H. Dominiczak, Organy bezpieczeństwa PRL w walce z kościołem Katolickim 1944-1990 (Warsaw, 2000), 352-3. 21 The fracture between Poles and Jews grew exponentially as international Communism was displaced by national Communism, 88 which permeated the ranks of the Polish party and military-state apparatus with little effort. Any hope at bridging this divide came to an end—in an ironic twist of fate—when the personal relations between the first secretaries of the KPSS and the PZPR, Khrushchev and Gomułka, started improving. As the 1950s faded away, official party ideologues ceased to be overtly hostile, if not yet openly receptive, to hitherto „enemy‟ perspectives on a variety of taboo subjects. COMMUNISTS AND THE ‘JEWISH QUESTION’ The ease with which the „Jewish question‟ came to the fore in the Soviet Bloc can be explained in large measure by the fact that Vladimir I. Lenin and his successors considered it their duty to express themselves on the subject of nationality. 89 Communists had always staked a historic and therefore „scientific‟ claim on the matter and invariably pronounced their own evolving solutions. 90 In this sense, Communist ideologues and party bosses merely continued the tradition of Karl Marx, who wrote On the Jewish Question, which considered the political emancipation of German Jews, in 1843, five years before he and Friedrich Engels issued The Communist Manifesto. For Marx, the „social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism‟.91 In essence, philosopher Leszek Kołakowski explains, Marx believed that „religious restrictions were not a cause of secular ones, but a manifestation of them. By freeing the state from religious limitations we do not free mankind from them: the state may free itself from religion while leaving the majority of its citizens in religious bondage‟.92 Sondra Rubenstein notes that while Marx and Engels „later distanced themselves from their earlier writings (which were tainted with anti-Semitism)…their views did become the basis for antiZionism among later Communists and the source of antagonism between the Communists and the Zionists not only in Russia but in Palestine as well‟. Her conclusion, reflecting the literature 88 See P. Zwick, National Communism (Boulder, 1983). 89 See, Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (New York, 1974); T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001); and B. Pinkus and J. Frankel (eds.), The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967: A Documentary Study (Cambridge, 1984). 90 See L. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders. The Golden Age. The Breakdown (New York, 2005), 424-30; and R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List (New York, 1988). 91 Quoted in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1978), 52. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 103-4. 92 22 during the Cold War, that Marx and Engels „ultimately did not bequeath to European socialists a legacy of anti-Semitism‟, however, is open to debate.93 The rising significance of the „Jewish question‟ in Communist Poland and in the Soviet Union can also be explained by the passionate determination of Zionists to create a Jewish homeland.94 Just when Jews desperately needed a safe haven from continued European assaults on them, in May 1947 the Kremlin made a „surprising‟ decision, delivered with zeal at the United Nations (U.N.) by a protégé of Molotov, Andrei Gromyko, to support it.95 A month earlier the British had asked the international community to consider the Palestinian question. The new Soviet policy targeted British and French imperial interests. Although London ordered its U.N. delegate to abstain from voting, the partition plan and Jewish statehood were approved by the General Assembly in November 1947. Five days before the partition vote, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall wrote to „Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett to inform him that British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had told him that British intelligence indicated that Jewish groups moving illegally from the Balkan states to Palestine included many Communists‟.96 Bevin biographer Peter Weiler tells us that since „so many Jewish immigrants came from Eastern Europe‟,97 it was obvious to the resolutely anti-Bolshevik trade unionist that „they would more likely be Communists‟.98 There can be little doubt Stalin assumed or was assured by others that a Jewish state in the Middle East, apparently in line with the classical Żydokomuna (Jew-Communism) myth, would join his camp. Among the Anglo-American political establishment, including their diplomats and intelligence officials, there were also those who presumed that the Jewish state would not be a part of the Western bloc. Bevin openly warned „of the political dangers of an all-Jewish state‟, 99 telling Zionist leaders that „it was significant that the only constituency in the United Kingdom which, on a population basis, was in a position to return a Jewish Member of Parliament had, in fact, 93 S. Rubenstein, The Communist Movement in Palestine and Israel, 1919-1984 (Boulder, 1985), 1-3. See Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944-50) (Warsaw, 2002). L. Rucker, „Moscow‟s Surprise: The Soviet-Israeli Alliance of 1947-1949‟, Working Paper no. 46, CWIHP, archived See „24 Nov. 1947‟ in „Chronology‟ of „The Recognition of the State of Israel‟, archived at P. Weiler, Ernest Bevin (Manchester, 1993), 212n 95. Ibid. Weiler, Ernest Bevin, 170. 94 95 at <http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/CWIHP_WP_461.pdf> (last checked 21 April 2011), 17-8. 96 <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/israel.htm> (last checked 22 April 2011). 97 98 99 23 returned a Communist‟.100 Weiler has no doubts that „Bevin held anti-Semitic views‟,101 which were amply recorded in the private diary of Christopher Mayhew, Bevin‟s parliamentary undersecretary. Be that as it may, that the Communists had plans for the Yishuv,102 the Jewish community and its institutions in Palestine, whatever else Bevin, Marshall,103 and others thought about Jews or a Jewish state, was obvious to anyone with interests in the oil rich region. With low-level insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare still plaguing the Balkans,104 and the bloody Civil War in Greece (1946-9)105 as background, the State Department continued to enforce its embargo on the sale of arms to the combatants in the region. Whitehall threw its considerable military resources, stockpiled throughout the Middle East, with Israel‟s enemies, primarily the oil producing Arab states.106 Stalin‟s eastern European agents, including the Polish MI service, continued to conspire to consolidate the Jewish homeland with Jewish immigrants and vital military aid. So the Soviet Union, mainly via Czechoslovakia, did indeed do much more than provide Israel with prompt diplomatic recognition on 17 May 1948.107 This should not suggest that Stalin or his henchmen in the Kremlin actually trusted their independent, geographically distant ally. On further military aid to the Israelis, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei I. Vyshinsky, who had recently replaced Molotov, now told Israeli Labour Minister Golda Meyerson (Meir)—Israel‟s first ambassador in Moscow (September 1946 to March 1949) in April 1949: „Suffice it for us to give you a small pistol and it will be said that we gave you an atom bomb. Moreover, there will be no end of interpretations about the special 100 Quoted in Ibid. Ibid., p. 170-1. 101 102 The term „Yishuv‟ comes from the Hebrew, hayishuv hayehudi be’eretz yisrael („the Jewish Settlement in the Land of Israel‟). 103 On General G. Marshall and Jews, see J. Bendersky, The ‘Jewish Threat’: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York, 2000), 309-10. 104 D. Berger, „The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of Operations Conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1949-1951‟, archived at <http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/berger.htm> (last checked 21 April 2011). 105 V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 126-8; and H. Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York, 1956), 318-38. 106 Observer [Immanuel Velikovsky], „Now is the Hour: President Truman will be judged by his actions toward Israel this week—Not yesterday‟s words‟, New York Post (8 July 1948). 107 When the Israeli state was proclaimed on 14 May the White House, against the advice of the State Department, immediately offered de facto recognition, technically winning the recognition race, but de jure recognition also arrived within the next five days from Guatemala, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), the Ukrainian SSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. 24 dimension of this arrangement: an alliance between the Soviets and the State of Israel, which has one thing in common—Karl Marx, the socialist and the Jew; an alliance to attack and destroy the world‟. 108 Conversely, signals from Tel Aviv, less than a year after the Jewish victory in the Palestinian Civil War, and the defeat of the invading Arab armies in January 1949,109 indicated that most Israelis had already turned their backs on the Soviet Bloc. On the eighth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the second secretary of the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv reported: „The leading role in the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign is played by the newspaper Hador [HaDor (The Generation)], the organ of the main government party Mapai [Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisra‟el—The Party of the Workers of the Land of Israel]…[and] Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion‟.110 The Soviet complained: The appointment of Konstantin Rokossovsky as marshal of Poland was used by Hador (8 November 1949) for new attacks on the policy of the Soviet Union. In its leading article the paper writes: „The plan for the sovietisation of countries forming the USSR‟s „security zone‟ is being carried out at high speed…‟ Mentioning the „purges‟ in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,111 the paper writes that the argument for the appointment of Rokossovsky—the marshal‟s Polish origin—is „almost sentimental‟. Rokossovsky has almost forgotten his Polish,112 the paper goes on, „and although he is now refreshing his memory of his ancestors‟ native language, he will never lose his Moscow accent…113 The Communists expected a return on their investments in the Jewish state. Israel‟s choice to face the future with the West,114 as war raged on the Korean peninsula,115 could not but 108 „Document 239: Excerpts from Diary of M. Namir‟, Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations, 1941-1953. Part I: 1941-May 1949 [hereafter DISR] (London, 2000), 461-2. Vyshinsky acerbically added: „We have already heard some pleasantries about Karl Marx from...Bevin‟. Myerson replied: „It is not certain that Bevin knows very much about the complex subject of Karl Marx‟. 109 A series of armistice agreements signed between Feb. and July 1949 formally ended the war. B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York, 2001), 189-252. France and then the USA recognized Israel on a de jure basis in Jan. 1949 while Britain waited until April 1950. 110 „Document 284: Excerpts from a [7 Dec. 1949] Memorandum by M. [Mikhail P.] Popov‟, DISR. Part II: May 1949-1953, 562. 111 See M. Schmidt, „Noel Field—The American Communist at the Center of Stalin‟s East European Purge: From the Hungarian Archives‟, American Communist History, 3/2 (2004), 216-8. 112 Rokossowski of course spoke fluent Polish upon arriving in Warsaw. It is generally accepted that under torture during the Great Terror Rokossowski refused to renounce his Polish father as a spy. 113 DISR II, 564. 114 The Berlin Airlift ended on 12 May 1949 after 328 days. When Stalin backed down the West received one of its most important victories to date in the Cold War. 25 have fuelled Stalin‟s pathological paranoia. His unremitting sense of having been betrayed by Zionists, but especially those east European Communists who had stuck their necks out to help them, such as the heads of the Polish MI service, left Jews who remained in his camp, particularly the „non-Jewish Jews‟,116 vulnerable to old-fashioned political opportunism, antisemitic demagoguery and revenge. The murder, on Stalin‟s orders, of „the renowned Yiddish actor and theatre director Solomon Mikhoels‟117 in January 1948, Joshua Rubenstein explains, „was not an ordinary operation. As director of Moscow‟s State Jewish Theatre and chairman of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee (JAC), which played a prominent role in Soviet propaganda efforts against Hitler…Mikhoels had earned an international reputation. But with the onset of the Cold War and the impending creation of Israel, Stalin came to suspect Mikhoels‟s loyalties‟. 118 In November the JAC was disbanded. By mid-1952 fifteen leading Jewish figures associated with the defunct wartime Soviet Jewish organization had been arrested. Following the subsequent investigations by the organs of state security, blatantly antisemitic, „to uncover the Jewish nationalistic centre‟, 119 Stalin received a copy of the secret indictment that had been sent to the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court in „the case of the Jewish nationalists and American spies‟. 120 Thirteen of the defendants, who had been systematically tortured and forced to confess to fictitious crimes, were executed in August 1952. But the most persistent reason for the rise of the „Jewish question‟ in much of the Soviet Bloc was the fact that no serious effort was made by the Communists to come to terms with antisemitism, unless a short-lived liberal emigration policy for Jews after 1956 can be construed as a serious effort.121 Communist propaganda was instrumental in heaping the evils of 115 Israel was among the first five countries to recognize the PRC, established 1 Oct. 1949. Britain broke with U.S. policy and recognized the PRC in Jan. 1950. Around 1951, the CIA, aware that „Israeli connections in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe made them a valuable source of information‟ behind the Iron Curtain, began taking greater interest in the Jewish state. E. Kahana, „Mossad-CIA Cooperation‟, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 14/3 (2001), 409-20. 116 Coined by I. Deutscher, „The Non-Jewish Jew‟, in T. Deutscher (ed.), The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York, 1968), 26-7. 117 J. Rubenstein and V. Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, 2001, 1. 118 Ibid. Quoted in Ibid., xv. Quoted in Ibid., xviii. 119 120 121 Responding to Michnik‟s essays on the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 and 10 June 2006; A. Grabski, „Żydzi skazani na komunę‟, Gazeta Wyborcza (17 Sep. 2006), agrees that after the war „the majority of Polish 26 antisemitism exclusively on the „Rightists‟ and „Fascists‟ while claiming a special (and rather dubious) status as the saviours of Jews during the Second World War. In People‟s Poland, indifference to antisemitism was the norm, except when such accusations were directed at loyal comrades, at which time denial was preferred.122 Antisemitism on the part of influential bureaucrats could not but have exacerbated what was already a sad state of affairs for the Jewish comrades still serving inside the party-state apparatus. A notorious example was the PRL‟s deputy defence minister and chief of the Główny Zarząd Polityczny (Main Political Directorate) of the LWP before Gomułka returned to power, Brig Gen. Kazimierz Witaszewski. The top ideologue of the Polish military worshiped Stalin and Rokossowski. 123 Witaszewski told party activists and workers at a factory in Łódź in April 1956 that the party had the right to defend itself against „anti-party elements‟ with „gas-pipes‟124 if it had to. He was admonishing Leftist intellectuals critical of Stalin‟s homicidal legacy, which was exposed in February by Khrushchev during his „secret speech‟ to the Soviet comrades attending the 20th KPSS Congress. The remarks by „General Gas-pipe‟ (Generał Gazrurka in Polish), as the PRL intellectual elite now called Witaszewski, were evidently interpreted as a reference to the gassing of Jews by the Nazis.125 The Secretariat of the CC PZPR warned him in May that he had „inappropriately accented and unjustly formulated‟126 his thoughts. The comrade-general was instructed instead to „stress the significant and constant work for even stronger ties between the intelligentsia and the leading force in society, the working class‟.127 Two month later, a month Jews—among whom Communists constituted an absolute minority—sympathized with People‟s Poland‟. But he calls Michnik‟s lament for the „egoism of the pain of Jews‟, who lacked compassion for AK soldiers persecuted by the Communists, a „mistake‟ and concludes: „Although this is not a popular truth, different versions of Polish patriotism existed among us after the war, and it is hardly surprising that the majority of Polish Jews and Poles of Jewish descent chose the kind of patriotism that for the first time in history brought them equality. And which did not contain in it racist groaning and disgust that a Catholic Pole can be exposed at a bureau to the discomfort of talking to some kind of “insolent Jewess”‟. Michnik and Grabski make strong points if the choice faced by Jews was only between more or less racism, which is also, more or less, how the Communists framed the question. Yet when given the option, most Jews in fact chose liberty over equality. Consider, A. Stankowski, „Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczące emigracji Żydów z Polski po 1944 roku‟, in G. Berendt, A. Grabski and A. Stankowski (eds.), Studia z historii Żydów w Polsce po 1945 r. (Warsaw, 2000). 122 See K. Jeleński, „Od Endeków do Stalinistów‟, Kultura (Paris), 9/107 (1956), 13-20. 123 See Wojskowy Instytut Historyczny (Military History Institute, Warsaw; WIH), Materiały i Dokumenty IV/102/43, „K. Witaszewski, „Trudna droga życiu. Wspomnienia‟ (1988)‟. In 2002 WIH became the Wojskowe Biuro Badań Historycznych (Military Bureau of Historical Research). 124 AAN, PZPR 237/V-303, „Stenogram z przebiegu obradu otwartego zebrania Podstawowej Organizacji Partyjnej przy Związku Literatów Polskich w dn. 20 kwietnia 1956 r.‟, k. 4. 125 Ibid., k. 4-9. AAN, PZPR 1672, „Protokół Nr. 103 posiedzenia Sekretariatu KC w dniu 8 i 9 maja 1956 r.‟, k. 71. Ibid. 126 127 27 after the People‟s Army crushed the revolt in Poznań, Witaszewski was promoted to the rank of Maj Gen.128 However, because he remained loyal to Rokossowski, Gomułka „exiled‟ Witaszewski at the beginning of 1957. The general reportedly wanted to be sent to the People‟s Republic of China (PRC) but ended up in Prague, where he was the military attaché (and therefore a serving Z-II officer) at the PRL embassy. Pressed by the Chinese comrades, Gomułka made great efforts in subsequent meetings with Khrushchev to improve Polish-Soviet relations. relationship early; the Kremlin delayed. The Poles were willing to repair the Despite the rhetoric, Khrushchev refused to give Gomułka what he wanted most: „a relationship based on the principle of the equality of both states‟.129 But Gomułka did not disagree with the PRC premier during their exchange in January 1957, when Zhou Enlai said: „I share Comrade Gomułka‟s opinion about equality and sovereignty, but the leading role of the USSR should not be forgotten. The leading role is the primary matter, equality and errors [by the Soviets]—that‟s a lesser matter‟.130 Zhou Enlai recommended Gomułka settle for Mao Zedong‟s formula: „relations between our countries should be between brothers, and not like those between a father and a son‟.131 In the meantime, Polish comrades had to endure an almost ceaseless barrage of derogatory statements from the Soviet comrades, usually delivered in private settings, over drinks, clearly designed to provoke Gomułka. A review of toasts between Communists, at first glace, may appear absurd, but a quick sample, from among the comments recorded, should put the matter into perspective. At an informal evening meeting at the Kremlin during the bilateral talks of 24-25 May 1957, in the middle of a toast, the following transpired: Khrushchev: (twice) to the success of the talks, to the friendship. [Soviet leader Anastas I.] Mikoyan: to the Politburo CC PZPR. At this moment Khrushchev remarked that I will not drink to all members of the Politburo. At which time comrade Wiesław [Gomułka] asked to whom he [Khrushchev] does not want to drink. He [Khrushchev] answered, to [PZPR Politburo member Roman] Zambrowski. That he does not trust him. Mikoyan explained that the Soviet comrades believe that Zambrowski shares the same [Trotskyist] views as his son 128 AAN, PZPR 237/V-303. 129 AAN, PZPR 2541, „Notatka z rozmów przeprowadzonych w dniach 11 i 12 stycznia 1957r. między delegacjami Komunistycznej Partii Chin i PZPR‟, k. 95. 130 AAN, PZPR 2541, k. 96. Ibid. 131 28 [Antoni],132 who once studied in the USSR, and personally delivers in Poland anti-Soviet lectures at the [Warsaw] university. Our side [the Poles] denied it, that Zambrowski did not agree with his son and that twice he scolded him for those views. Mikoyan and Khrushchev claimed that they did not know this. 133 At the same meeting Khrushchev‟s right-hand man, later described by a Hungarian comrade as the „Armenian wheeler-dealer‟, 134 sparked another round: „Mikoyan: to the health of comrade [Eugeniusz] Szyr [the chief Polish negotiator], who is „our friend and a Pole‟ (someone [from the Soviet side] immediately said: „albeit a Pole‟)‟. 135 Khrushchev remembered Roman Zambrowski, real name Rubin Nussbaum, as someone „accused of having pro-Zionist sympathies‟.136 The Soviet party boss regularly reminded Gomułka of his intense dislike for Zambrowski. But it was more than his Jewish nationality that irritated the Kremlin. Zambrowski had been a loyal Comintern operative during the interwar years.137 Kremlin insiders showed no tolerance for professional revolutionaries, at one time on their payroll, later suspected of harbouring „anti-Soviet‟ views. Zambrowski was the leading socalled „revisionists‟, one of two „factions‟ 138 inside the Polish party that competed to take control of the CC after Bierut died in Moscow in March 1956. That same month, at the 6th plenary session of the CC PZPR, Khrushchev, who had secretly attended the meeting in Warsaw, 139 132 On Antony Zambrowski‟s anti-Communist activities, see A. Friszke, Opozycja Polityczna w PRL 1945-1980 (London, 1994), 161-2 and 251. 133 AAN, PZPR 2627, „Notatka z rozmów delegacji polsko-radzieckiej 24 i 25 maja 1957 r. w Moskwie‟, k. 253. 134 Quoted in the 1998 CNN documentary „The Cold War‟ (Episode 7: „After Stalin‟). Gluchowski, „Commentary: Episode 7, “After Stalin”‟ in H-Diplo (Diplomatic and International History), archived at (19 Nov. 1998) <http://hnet.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9811&week=c&msg=%2bVMLtut46AEqe2lSfC1fHA&user=&pw> (last checked 21 April 2011). 135 AAN, PZPR 2627, k. 253. Szyr is listed as a Jew by M. Sugerman, „Against Fascism: Jews Who Served in the Spanish Civil War‟, archived at <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/spanjews.pdf> (last checked 21 April 2011). Gomułka later advanced Szyr to the PZPR Politburo (1964-8), where he replaced Zambrowski—forced out for an apparent security breach in 1963. For details, see main text below. I would strongly suggest that Gomułka felt betrayed by Zambrowski and his closest associates. 136 N. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, ed. by S. Talbot (Boston, 1974), 280. 137 In 1937 Zambrowski, alias Rafał Waksman, issued an order to assassinate a confidential informer working inside the illegal Communist party apparatus on behalf of the Polish State Police. A. Pepłoński, Kontrwywiad II Rzeczpospolitej (Warsaw, 2002), 168. 138 Revisionists: sometimes called „liberals‟ or the „Puławy‟ (an exclusive residential street in Warsaw where many from this group lived) „faction‟ or „Żydy‟ („Jews‟ or better „Kikes‟; usually behind their backs). Dogmatists: sometimes called „conservatives‟ or „Stalinists‟ or the „Natolin‟ (a Warsaw palace where many from this group enjoyed exclusive dinning rights) „faction‟ or „Chamy‟ („Boors‟; usually behind their backs). 139 Gluchowski, „Khrushchev‟s Second Secret Speech‟, CWIHP Bulletin, 10 (1998), 44-9. 29 effectively vetoed attempts from the floor to make Zambrowski a CC secretary and thus restrict his authority to make appointments to senior posts inside the central party apparatus.140 But Gomułka rewarded Zambrowski for his unwavering support during the Polish-Soviet confrontation in the midst of the 8th plenary session of October 1956. He was appointed to the post of CC Secretary, with responsibilities that included the security apparatus and the military. 141 Gomułka‟s decision angered Khrushchev. Following a private meeting between Khrushchev and Gomułka, who was in the Soviet Union on a short vacation in the late summer of 1957, in his notes of the conversations, Gomułka wrote the following comment by Khrushchev: „Zambrowski, enemy of Sov[iet] Un[ion] and puts forward cadres [read: Jews] with enemy positions towards the Sov[iet] Union‟. 142 At another meeting that summer, Gomułka recorded Khrushchev saying: „You say that the current party and government cadres were supported by Bierut and he‟s responsible for the yidification [zażydzenie] of the apparatus. This is not true. Those cadres were pushed on him by Zambrowski and others [read: Jews in Politburo]. Bierut could not cope with everything‟. 143 About the Jewish cadres serving inside the party-state apparatus, Gomułka also began to receive disturbing information from his own staff. For instance, in 1957 he was asked to review a three-page transcribed copy of a private letter which had been seized during a house search by the secret police. The letter, dated in August 1957 and authored by an employee of the MSW, was addressed to a relative in Brooklyn, N.Y. Attached to the letter was a pithy handwritten note to „Comrade Wiesław‟144 from Walery Namiotkiewicz, Gomułka‟s private secretary. He reminded Gomułka that the seized letter had been written with the presumption that it would „never reach the hands of the authorities‟.145 More significantly, Gomułka was told that the sentiments expressed were „characteristic for the frame of mind prevalent in certain circles‟. 146 140 AAN, PZPR 1190, „Stenogram VI Plenum KC PZPR z 20.III.1956 r.‟; and R. Zambrowski, „Dziennik‟, ed. by A. Zambrowski, Krytyka (London), 6 (1980), 40 and 97-8. 141 Pióro, Armia ze skazą, 365. Quoted in A. Werblan, „Nieznana rozmowa Władysława Gomułki z Nikitą S. Chruszczowem‟, Dziś, 5 (1993), 81. Quoted in Ibid., 83. AAN, PZPR XIA/230, k. 351. Ibid. Ibid. 142 143 144 145 146 30 The author of the letter notes, among other things, that her „husband is an officer in the Polish Army‟ who is about to be released because he is also a „Jew‟.147 Namiotkiewicz (or Gomułka) underlined the following passages: Here in this damned country there is no future…The shabby salaries which we receive barely suffice for a primitive life, and don‟t even talk about clothing for myself or the children…Come to an understanding with the rest of the family…and try to bring first me and the children as tourists to America…I get away here with being a Pole, since it makes my existence easier, should they know how it really is. I would lose my job, that is, I would be condemned to hunger and poverty. 148 On the occasion of the 1958 Moscow conference of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Political Advisory Committee of the Warsaw Pact, a leading Polish Communist journalist recorded: „Khrushchev, announcing a toast to honour the unity of the socialist countries, named different countries, omitting Poland. At a certain moment he began to list who invaded the USSR [after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917]. He named: England, France, and Po... Here, he looked at Gomułka and said: „no, not the Poles, Piłsudski‟.‟149 No wonder Andrzej Paczkowski compares the PRL‟s relationship to the USSR with „that of a vassal‟.150 He explains it this way: The sovereign power, the Soviet Union, deployed the services of the vassal, Poland, and was obliged to take care of the latter‟s security in return. Both sides benefited from the arrangement: the vassal enjoyed security and the sovereign thrived off its power. In the case of the vassal, the crux of the matter concerned not only external security (international relations) but also internal threats (protection against a revolution or a coup).151 In the January 1957 exchange with Zhou Enlai, Gomułka elaborated on the political currents vying for his attention among members of the CC PZPR. He admitted that „revisionism and dogmatism‟,152 although greatly declining attractions, „still pervaded the party‟.153 The Pole 147 Ibid., 352. Ibid., 352-4. M. Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne, 1958-1962 (Warsaw, 1998), entry of 27 May 1958, 22. 148 149 150 Paczkowski, „Polish Soviet Relations 1944-1989: The Limits of Autonomy‟, InterMarium On-Line Journal, 6/1 (2003), archived at <http://ece.columbia.edu/research/intermarium/vol6no1/paczkowski.pdf> (last checked 21 April 2011). 151 Ibid., 4. AAN, PZPR 2541, k. 90. Ibid., k. 91. 152 153 31 made it clear that his patience for revisionism was running out: „Revisionism, in particular cases, went as far as treachery [renegactwo]…Objectively, revisionism acted for the benefit of reaction and counterrevolution…an unhealthy practice emerged of sending to different people unpublished speeches of certain party activists…In this way, individual comrades are accused, sometimes without any basis, of antisemitism‟.154 Two years later Gomułka recalled Witaszewski to Warsaw and, more importantly, asked him to resume party work. In March 1960, after a short stint with the General Staff, Witaszewski was appointed director of the CC Administration Department, responsible „for matters gauging justice; security and public order; social administration; religious matters; national minority matters; health and social welfare‟. 155 Witaszewski belonged to a growing list of neo-Stalinist functionaries reappointed to senior PZPR posts at this time. They were sustained by the Soviet embassy in Warsaw and wielded power with party functionaries in the provinces and united in an unholy alliance determined to reverse the political thaw Stalin‟s death had ignited. To that end, the neo-Stalinists sought ways to get Gomułka to unleash a purge of the party apparatus that targeted their revisionist rivals. The advance of the hardliners was hastened by the actions of two former MI officers and one serving MI officer, all of them of Jewish origin, who defected to the West between August 1958 and June 1959. Each case garnered international media attention into the early 1960s. The first defector, Lt Col. Jerzy Bryn, as the „nielegalny rezydent‟ („illegal resident‟)156 in France from May 1949 to December 1952, ran one of the most productive spy networks controlled by Polish MI.157 Bryn resigned from active military service in 1957, immediately after returning to Warsaw from Vietnam, where he served as the chief military advisor to the Polish delegation with the International Commission for Supervision and Control, 158 and joined the 154 Ibid., k. 91-2. 155 W. Ciempiel, J. Jakubowski and J. Szczeblewski (eds.), PPR, PPS, PZPR, Struktura aparatu centralnego kierownicy i zastępcy kierowników wydziałów (Warsaw, 1980), 73-4. 156 „Rezydentura nielegalna [Illegal residency]—a branch of intelligence on the territory of a target country that does not benefit from the cover of our [PRL] missions abroad and does not generally have any contact with them‟. Paczkowski, „Bardzo krótki słownik wywiadu,‟ Biuletyn IPN, 11/46 (Nov. 2004), 67. 157 I am at work on a book-length manuscript, titled „A Jew lost in the Cold War: The Jerzy Bryn Spy Case‟. It should be noted that the PRL investigators had access to numerous confidential French documents, including a photographic copy of the 68-page decision of 25 November 1960 by the investigating military magistrate, titled Ordonnance de nonlieu & de Transmission de la procédure à M. le Procureur-Général près la Cour d’Appel du Paris. AIPN, BUiAD 0330/282, t. 4, k. 110 (an envelope containing the French-language document). 158 The International Commission for Supervision and Control, also known as the International Control Commission, was established by the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina. ICC members—Canada, India, and Poland—were mandated to supervise the 1956 cease-fire, elections (that did not take place), and the peaceful re-unification of Vietnam. The ICC had no enforcement powers and ideological divisions ensured it remained ineffective, although the 32 diplomatic corps. He held the post of First Secretary at the Polish embassy in Japan when he quietly defected (while visiting Israel) to the CIA in August 1958.159 The second defector, Lt Col. Henryk Adler-Trojan, as the illegal resident in France from October 1947 to November 1949, actually recruited many of the agents his close friend Bryn later controlled and then betrayed. Adler-Trojan had been purged from Polish MI, and military service, in March 1953 by his Soviet superiors because he was a Jew. At the time of his defection, Adler-Trojan was working for Polish Radio, a popular employer of purged MI officers. In July 1957 Adler-Trojan‟s French-born wife Yvette took their children on vacation to France and then refused to return to People‟s Poland. MI refused to give Adler-Trojan permission to visit his family until Zambrowski intervened on his behalf. A passport was issued to Adler-Trojan in Warsaw in September 1958, shortly after Bryn clandestinely contacted American intelligence in Tokyo. The French arrested Adler-Trojan in Paris in September 1959.160 The initial evidence against him and the others named as members of the „Polish spy ring‟ by an investigating judge in Paris came from the Americans.161 More important, two days before the French detained Adler-Trojan, the PRL‟s chief military attaché in Paris personally warned him of Bryn‟s treachery, but he refused to return. Inexplicably, Bryn had re-defected on 2 April 1959 and returned to Poland, where he stubbornly maintained that he had escaped from American custody after the CIA kidnapped him in August 1958. In 1961 a military court in Paris, holding its proceedings in camera, convicted ICC did produce eleven interim reports on violations of the Geneva agreements from 1956-61 for the Geneva Conference. The ICC was dissolved in 1975. 159 Bryn‟s senior CIA handler in Japan was Ted Shackley. See D. Corn, Blind Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (New York, 1994), 56-7. Bryn is not actually named in the Corn book. 160 The French secretly detained Bryn‟s replacement as the illegal of MI in France, Hermann Bertelé and his wife Felicie Alfonso-Bertelé on 29 April 1959. The junior Polish military attaché in Paris, Lieutenant Kazimierz Dopierała, was arrested on May 12 while trying to contact Bertelé. André Cassognol, Freiga Garbarz-Werksztein, Madeleine Delers-Obada and Adalbert Adler were arrested along with Adler-Trojan on Sep. 24. Julienne Brumerhurst-Bryn was arrested on the following day. Abram Rajgrodzki, better known as Adam Rayski, was arrested on Oct. 7. Henri Kricher was arrested on Oct. 12. 161 Including (1) Bryn and (2) Adler-Trojan, the others named by the French in 1960 were: (3) Bertelé, born in Vienna, a naturalized French citizen charged with treason; (4) Alfonso, married name Bertelé, born in Albox, Spain, a naturalized French citizen charged with treason; (5) Delers, widow of Obada (a general who had served with the Republican forces in Spain), born in Lyon, a French citizen charged with treason; (6) Cassognol (his wife and AdlerTrojan‟s wife were sisters), born in Baziers, a French citizen charged with treason; (7) Garbarz, married name Werksztein, born in Berlin, a naturalized French citizen charged with treason; (8) Dopierała, born in Przylisław, a Polish citizen charged with espionage; (9) Adalbert Adler, born in Nyírcgyháza, a Hungarian citizen charged with espionage; (10) Brumerhurst, married name Bryn, born in Dortmund, Germany, a naturalized French citizen charged with treason; (11) Kricher, born in Dortmund, a naturalized French citizen charged with treason; (12) Rajgrodski (Rayski), born in Białystok, a Polish citizen charged with espionage; (13) Armand Marquis, born in Paris, a French citizen charged with treason; (14) Guiseppe Mulas, place of birth unknown, an Italian citizen charged with threatening the security of the state; and (15) Bolesław Zygielman, better known as Lubelski, born in Lublin, a Polish citizen charged with threatening the security of the state. 33 Bryn, in absentia, of threatening the security of the state before sentencing him to twenty years behind bars. That same French court convicted Adler-Trojan of espionage and sentenced him to five-years in prison. 162 The following year Bryn was secretly convicted of treason by a military court in Warsaw and sentenced to death. The third defector was Col. Paweł Monat,163 Z-II‟s chief of Military Attachés. In June 1959 Monat boarded a train in Warsaw bound for Prague with his wife and their teenage son. Ostensibly, he was taking his family on vacation to Bulgaria or Yugoslavia via Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary, where he was going to meet with the PRL‟s military representatives behind the Iron Curtain. The trip was authorized by Korczyński. Monat had his subordinate in Belgrade arrange the visas to Yugoslavia while the Polish foreign ministry arranged transit visas through Austria, a country Monat omitted from his official Z-II itinerary. In Prague, Monat told the Polish military attaché that he planned to purchase a car in Vienna and drive it with his family to Bulgaria. On the following day, 24 June, Monat and his family boarded the train to Vienna and disappeared. 164 Monat‟s wife Maria was the adopted daughter of Aleksander Zawadzki, the PRL‟s head of state. Zawadzki was the Politburo‟s sponsor of the Natolin group inside the party apparatus, and he had been Khrushchev‟s favourite candidate for the post of First Secretary in October 1956. The defection of his Jewish son-in-law touched a raw nerve. Not long after Lt Col. Józef Światło, a senior PRL public security officer, defected to the CIA in December 1953, the antisemites supporting the Natolin faction began questioning the loyalty of the Jewish comrades inside the party-state apparatus.165 The libel was part of a wider 162 Bertelé was sentenced to ten years; released in 1967 and settled in the PRL with his wife. The charges against Alfonso-Bertelé were dropped in 1960. Delers-Obada was sentenced to three years; sentence suspended. Cassognol was sentenced to five years; sentence suspended. Garbarz-Werksztein was sentenced to three years; sentence suspended. Dopierała was sentenced, in absentia, to five years; allowed to leave France on orders from the Elysée Palace. Adelbert Adler was found not guilty. Brumerhurst-Bryn was sentenced to five years; sentence suspended. Kricher was found not guilty. Rajgrodski (Rayski) was sentenced to seven years. Marquis was sentenced, in absentia, to death; he fled to the PRL. Mulas was sentenced, in absentia, to death; he fled to the PRL. Zygielman (Lubelski) was a MI officer who returned to People‟s Poland in the late 1940s. 163 Monat was the naval and air attaché in Beijing (also responsible for North Korea) between June 1952 and July 1955 and the chief military attaché in Washington between Sep. 1955 and May 1958. P. Monat with J. Dille, Spy in the U.S. (New York, 1961). 164 Monat was a friend of Col. František Tišler, the Czechoslovak military attaché in Washington who defected a month after Monat. Tišler had been turned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1957. It should not be precluded that the Americans also turned Monat before he returned to Warsaw. When Tišler was handed over to the CIA, his handler was Shackley (probably Monat‟s handler as well). See T. Shackley with R. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA, 2005), 86-9. 165 See Gluchowski, „The Defection of Józef Światło and the Search for Jewish Scapegoats in the Polish United Workers‟ Party, 1953-1954‟ InterMarium On-Line Journal, 3/2 (April 1999), archived at <http://ece.columbia.edu/research/intermarium/vol3no2/gluchowski.pdf> (last checked 21 April 2011). 34 Natolin campaign to shift the responsibility for the crimes of the Stalin era in People‟s Poland on the Puławy group. The broadcasts by RFE of Światło‟s secrets to listeners in the Soviet Bloc were augmented by „Operation Spotlight‟, 166 an initiative of the National Committee for a Free Europe. Backed by U.S. intelligence and guided by C. D. Jackson, at the time a special assistant for psychological affairs to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the NCFE printed pamphlets with Światło‟s more sensational revelations and then had them air dropped by balloons over Poland. 167 Entitled „Behind the Scenes of Security and the Party, Regime and Security Apparatus‟, the pamphlets openly encouraged would-be defectors such as Światło to „choose freedom‟.168 For the Americans and their allies, defections were an effective way of gathering intelligence about a rival service. And it was no secret that defectors generated a continuous and destructive atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia inside their former services. Creating havoc for the chiefs of the PRL counterintelligence and intelligence services was what the CIA was supposed to do. Korczyński had to contend with five other defections by former or serving MI officers between 1956 and 1961. The first was Maj. Seweryn Wilf, an analyst with MI until August 1953, when he was forced out of the intelligence business by his Soviet superiors for being a Jew. As soon as Wilf was issued a passport he went on a vacation at the end of October 1956 and defected to the CIA. The next defector to the Americans was Captain (Capt.) Marcin Sochaczewski. He served as the deputy of the section responsible for operations against Germany between 1950 and 1952. Sochaczewski was also purged from MI for being a Jew by his Soviet superiors. He fled in December 1956 while on assignment for Polish Radio in West Berlin. Lt Col. Adam Brandel, an analyst with MI until October 1950, also left Poland legally. He was dismissed from MI when the GZI discovered that as a KPP functionary he gave up his comrades in 1932 after he was arrested by Polish MCI. In May 1957, during a stopover in Vienna, Brandel walked into the U.S. embassy and defected. The Poles never found out what actually happened to Capt. Mieczysław Skorupiński. When he was purged in 1951 for being a Jew by his Soviet superiors, Skorupiński served as an operations officer with the section responsible for gathering coastal and naval intelligence. He was the director of Polish Ocean Lines in Gdynia until his demotion in October 1957. A year later Skorupiński fled to an unknown port in western Europe and disappeared, presumably into the arms of the CIA. Lieutenant (Lt.) Włodzimierz Barankiewicz was a serving 166 „Światło‟ means „light‟ in English. 167 Zawadzki preserved one of the pamphlets among his own papers, see AAN, PZPR, „Materiały różne Aleksandra Zawadzkiego‟, 2910. Those papers contain various documents relating to intelligence matters and Jews, including one on emigration to Israel, dated April 1961. 168 Shackley was one of Światło‟s handlers in Berlin. See Shackley with Finney, Spymaster, 79-85. 35 Z-II officer and the first to defect after Monat. From May 1956 he worked under diplomatic cover at the foreign ministry. Barankiewicz defected to the CIA in October 1961 while he was assigned to the PRL embassy in Vienna.169 This period also witnessed three defections counterintelligence and intelligence services. by officers from the civilian The first was Second Lt. Edward Juraszek, a counterintelligence specialist with the section responsible for operations targeting foreign embassies in Warsaw. Juraszek defected to the British at their embassy in Vienna in October 1957. The two other defectors, Capt. Władysław Mróz and Lt Col. Michał Goleniewski, temporarily disabled the operations of the civilian intelligence service. 170 Mróz had served as an aid to its long-time director, Col. Witold Sienkiewicz. And Mróz had had unprecedented access. In early-1959 he was assigned to Paris, where he was to work as an illegal. It would appear Bryn or Goleniewski identified him to the Americans. Mróz was arrested in Paris sometime in mid1959 and agreed to cooperate with the French counterintelligence service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (Directorate of Territorial Security; DST). His information led the DST to Communist moles in their service as well as in Britain and Israel. Mróz was shot in Paris at close range by an assassin in October 1960, in an apparent effort to stop the leaks. The order came from Warsaw.171 Goleniewski had served for two years as the deputy chief of GZI before moving in 1958 to the civilian intelligence service, for whom he directed the department responsible for technical matters. He started spying for the CIA in 1959 and defected in West Germany in 1960. The intelligence he provided to the Americans led to the arrest of several top Soviet agents throughout the world, which made Goleniewski one of the most important defectors of the Cold War.172 Korczyński‟s report naturally downplays the impact of Monat‟s defection, emphasizing instead that „during his 9 years of employment with the 2nd Directorate he did not have contact with matters concerning agents‟. 173 However, in October 1959 Korczyński had advised the PRL‟s Supreme Military Prosecutor that Monat could offer the Americans invaluable intelligence concerning Z-II methods and sources. No one had to be reminded that this defection took place 169 See L. Pawlikowicz, Tajny Front Zimnej Wojny (Warsaw, 2004), passim. Ibid. See Ibid., 176n609. 170 171 172 An assertion that Goleniewski was also a KGB mole inside the Polish civilian service needs to be verified independently by scholars. D. Murphy, S. Kondrashev and G. Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, 1997), 343-8. 173 CAW, 525/85, k. 465. 36 on Korczyński‟s watch, or that Monat was familiar with every officer occupying every staff position at Z-II from 1950 to 1959. A military court convicted Monat, in absentia, of treason and in December 1959 sentenced him to death. Half a year later he emerged as the star witness at a high-profile hearing before the United States Senate on „Soviet Espionage Through Poland‟.174 WACŁAW KOMAR The wartime origin of Z-II goes back to May 1943 when Stalin authorized the formation of Polish combat units in the USSR.175 In 1945 the Polish Army on the Eastern Front constituted a force of some 400,000 soldiers under Red Army command. 176 The „original mission‟ of MI, according to Monat, was „the collection of tactical intelligence behind the lines of the German Army for the Polish and Soviet Armies‟.177 Organizational order 00177 of 18 July 1945, signed by Żymierski, effectively turned the frontline reconnaissance apparatus into a state MI organ. 178 The order established the General Staff (formerly the Chief Headquarters) of the Polish Army and created under its authority, among other departments, the Oddział II (2nd Department; O-II). 179 Its „mission was changed to include the collection of military information from overt and semiovert sources‟, Monat continued, „the establishment in Western countries of long-term, clandestine sources of positive information, and the dispatch of agents from Poland on short observation and collection trips‟.180 The first O-II chief was a Red Army officer, Col. Gieorgij Domeradzki (Gieorgi M. Domaratzky),181 whose Polish military service ended in December 1945.182 The first officer to 174 Soviet Espionage Through Poland: Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee of the Judiciary. United States Senate. EightySixth Congress. Second Session. Testimony of Pawel Monat. June 13, 1960 (Washington, D.C., 1960). 175 W. Tkaczew, Powstanie i działalność organów Informacji Wojska Polskiego w latach 1943-1948. Kontrwywiad wojskowy (Warsaw, 1994), 9-16. 176 See J. Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany. Volume 2 (London, 1985), 604-5. Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 5. 177 178 The Red Army had fifty-four officers in Polish MI until July 1945. P. Piotrowski, „Agenci tajnego zaplecza,‟ Polska Zbrojna 18 (1 May 2005), 22. 179 W. Frazik, B. Kopka and G. Majchrzak, „Dzieje aparatu represji w PRL (1944-1989). Stan badań‟ (Warsaw, 2004), Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 5. archived at <http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/pl/239/3759/> (last checked 21 April 2011), 7. 180 181 Information about the Red Army or Soviet Army personnel who served as advisors or were transferred to the LWP and served directly with Polish MI is murky or at best fragmentary. 37 run 0-II intelligence operations against the West during the Cold War was its second chief, Brig Gen. Wacław Komar.183 He took command on December 19 and it was his five-year tenure at MI that Korczyński subjected to damning criticism in the report of December 1961. Komar was only six years older than Korczyński but his career as a professional revolutionary began a decade before Korczyński became politically engaged. Komar joined the Communist youth league in in Poland in 1925 and the KPP a year later. Following clashes in Warsaw with pro-government activists at the end of 1926, he was reassigned to the so-called „self-defence‟ unit of the KPP. Years later he admitted to assassinating at least three alleged confidential police informers during this period. To avoid capture by the Polish authorities, the KPP ordered Komar in June 1927 to report to the Soviet Union, where he entered the ranks of the VKP(b) and underwent military training by the Red Army. In June 1931 the Comintern ordered Komar to report to Germany, where he took charge of the military apparatus of the CC Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands (Communist Youth League of Germany; KJVD), the youth wing of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany: KPD). At the time of his arrival in Berlin the KPD anticipated having its legal status revoked and KJVD activists were engaged in an urban campaign, with Berlin as the most sought-after prize, against young Nazi paramilitaries. Komar‟s experience in „self-defence‟ was in demand on the streets of Berlin. But as tensions rose in the summer of 1931 the prospect of the KPD having to operate under illegal conditions, as E. H. Carr suggests, „was unwelcome to Comintern and to the more cautious of the KPD leaders‟.184 Stalin‟s primary concern was to prolong the special relationship with Berlin, notably German-Soviet economic and military collaboration, which was under threat and had already, according to Max Beloff, „reached its peak in 1930‟. 185 The continued radicalization of the KPD jeopardized the German-Soviet relationship. A shift in Comintern tactics away from an offensive posture during the final months of 1931, pursued under Heinz Neumann, who enjoyed considerable support inside the CC KPD and the leadership of the 182 For a list of the fort-two Red Army officers assigned to O-II as of Nov. 1945, see Nalepa, Oficerowie Armii Radzieckiej, 232-3. As of Oct. 1946 O-II had a total strength of 295 personnel, but after Red Army personnel departed only 26% of the establishment remained staffed. Piotrowski, „Agenci tajnego zaplecza‟, 22. 183 Komar (1909-72); real name Mendel Kossoj. My biographical sketch partly reflects Kochański, in Słownik Biograficzny (vol. 3-K), 250-2. 184 E. Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 1930-1935 (New York, 1982), 47. M. Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1929-1941. Volume I: 1929-1936 (London, 1947), 57. 185 38 KJVD, 186 forced the leadership of the German party to explain to Stalin that the KPD did not maintain „illegal terror squads‟ [although some activists]…succumbed to the ideology of individual terror, shootings, adventurous operations‟. 187 By the beginning of 1932 Neumann and his supporters had been silenced. In February Komar was ordered to report to Geneva, where he joined the Soviet delegation attending the League of Nations Conference on the Reduction and Limitation of Arms.188 In August he was in Amsterdam, co-organizing the antiwar youth conference hosted by a Comintern-front organization, the Anti-War World Congress. A month later, in Moscow, Neumann and his „faction‟ faced accusations of having „tried to set the youth league against the leadership of the party‟.189 Komar was recalled to Moscow at the end of 1932 to take an active part in the plenary session of the CC of Young Communist International. Accused of supporting the „ultra-leftist‟ Neumann „faction‟ inside the KJVD, he submitted a thorough and public selfcriticism. The German elections of March 1933 and the Nazi victory forced the Comintern to shift tactics once again. In Poland, the KPP sparked a genuine „united front fever‟. 190 In October the Comintern sent Komar to Warsaw with orders to take charge of the Antiwar Department of the youth wing of the KPP. The Polish authorities were informed of his return and set up an ambush at the home of his parents, but he was also tipped off and avoided detection. In June 1934 Komar was placed at the disposition of the Komunistyczna Partia Zachodniej Ukrainy (Communist Party of Western Ukraine; KPZU).191 On orders from the KPZU Politburo, which had been forced to move its headquartered to Prague in early-1934, Komar was sent to the city of Lwów, now Lviv, 186 Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 27n72. Quoted in Ibid., 49. 187 188 The Geneva conference of Feb.-July 1932, a failure, included non-members of the League, notably the USA and the USSR, which continued its collaboration with the Germans. Allen Dulles (a senior American intelligence official in Switzerland during the Second World War and later—Jan. 1953 to Nov. 1961—Director of Central Intelligence) was a senior U.S. delegate, but there is no evidence that Komar met him. 189 Quoted in Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 27n72. While Stalin was trying to help Hitler come to power, Neumann advocated that Communists fight against the Nazis, not the Social Democrats. In 1934 Neumann was arrested in Switzerland while on a Comintern mission. The KPD asked Moscow to give him Soviet citizenship so that he would not be sent to Nazi Germany. A Document fond recently in the Comintern files includes a note by Stalin: „I am for it, if it is of any help to Com. Neumann.‟ He went to the USSR in 1935 and remained there until his arrest in November 1937 and subsequent execution. I should like to thank Herb Romerstein for providing me with these details. 190 Quoted in M. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland: An Outline of History (Cambridge, MA, 1976) , 141. 191 By the mid-1920s the Polish Communist movement absorbed the Jewish Communist Workers‟ Bund of Poland and the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia, which retained a degree of autonomy but was renamed the KPZU in 1923. The KPZU collaborated with the Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian SSR and supported inclusion of Poland‟s Western Ukraine into the Soviet Union. It had about 4,600 members in 1934 and was liquidated with the KPP. 39 in November to establish a base of operation for its National Secretariat, which was preparing to close its base in Kraków. A month later Komar joined the KPZU Secretariat. His responsibilities included the military wing of the party as well as the department that produced and distributed party propaganda.192 Komar also took charge of the KPZU‟s finances and directed its secret radio and courier links. In 1935 he was sent to Lwów with orders to create conditions for a general strike among the workers in the oil fields of Eastern Galicia. At the end of December 1936, two months after the Comintern officially announced the formation of the International Brigades, Komar received orders to go to France. Collectively, whatever their political outlooks or stated intentions, nationality or citizenship, the Internationals constituted „a Soviet Army within Spain‟. 193 The Comintern had established its central recruiting office for the brigades in Paris. The task of organizing the brigades and recruiting and training the volunteers who flocked to France was delegated to the PCF. The volunteers from Poland who took up the call to make Spain „the grave of European fascism‟ 194 were overwhelmingly dominated by KPP activists. The leading Comintern recruiter was Świerczewski, better known to his men in Spain as „Walter‟,195 the PCF‟s „military advisor, at the head of a bureau technique‟.196 Komar arrived in Spain in January 1937 and joined the ranks of the Communist Party of Spain before taking command of the 3rd Company of the „Dąbrowski‟197 Battalion, which had been founded by the KPP. A month later his company merged with the 2nd Company although he retained command of the amalgamated 2nd Company until April. In June Komar was transferred to the headquarters of the 13th „Dąbrowski‟ Brigade and appointed the brigades‟ intelligence officer. He fell ill soon afterwards and was evacuated to Paris. Upon his return in July Komar took command of the „Dąbrowski‟ Battalion, which he led until January 1938, when he became commander of the 192nd „Czech-Balkan‟ Brigade, a reserve unit. That formation was created when the brigades, already devastated on the battlefield and plagued with internal 192 Also, see P. Minc, The History of a False Illusion—Memoirs on the Communist Movement in Poland (1918-1939) (Lewiston, 2002). 193 R. Radosh, M. Habeck and G. Sevostianov (eds.), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, 2001), 105. 194 Quoted in Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 456. 195 E. Hemingway‟s character „General Golz‟ in For Whom the Bells Toll (1940) is based on Świerczewski. Johnston, Legions of Babel, 186n3. 196 Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 456. 197 Named in honour of Jarosław Dąbrowski, a former Tsarist general who became a Polish patriot and revolutionary. He was appointed head of the military forces of the Paris Commune (March-May 1871) in early May 1871 and was killed on the barricades. 40 conflicts and desertions, effectively lost their foreign character to Spanish volunteers. Foreign Communists loyal to Moscow, however, continued to retain command positions even after the International Brigades began disintegrating in 1938. In October Komar was placed in command of the Internationals outside the Catalonian region. The Comintern ordered him to report to Marty in January 1939 for further instructions. Komar avoided the internment camps and instead made his way to Paris. Before the KPP base in Paris was liquidated it had over a dozen professional revolutionaries on its payroll. 198 The liquidation of KPP structures and the subsequent disappearance of KPP functionaries during the Great Terror placed Communists in Paris in an awkward position. The PCF began to shun KPP activists, collectively accused by the Comintern of being „Fascists‟ and „spies‟. 199 But rejection by the PCF was not evenly applied. KPP members of Polish nationality, as well as some Jews for whom Polish was a primary language, resented it when some of their Yiddish-speaking comrades were effectively given a second chance in the PCF. Tensions between Jews and Poles inside the KPP had a longer history. Clashes within the movement were exacerbated by class differences, fierce competition for paid cadre positions, and the inability of the KPP to win over the Polish-speaking peasants or the Polish-speaking working-class—conscious of the pitfalls of the forced collectivization of agriculture and the seizure of private property, aware of Communist opposition to Polish independence as well as to their Roman Catholic religion, and receptive to the Żydokomuna myth and related charges that the KPP was nothing but a cover for Bolshevik agents. Another, much less studied feature of the tensions pervading the KPP was the impact of counterespionage operations, including provocations and other forms of harassment, undertaken by the security services of the interwar Polish state and its European allies. With the KPP in disarray and its bewildered membership seeking answers, in 1938 the Comintern dispatched a Bulgarian agent to France with orders to run „Polish work‟. In Paris the so-called „Initiative Group for Polish Matters of the Communist International‟ was established. The official line was that the this group had the authority to resurrect the Polish party. The „Initiative Group‟ stoked fear and suspicion among Polish Communists unable to disprove that they were secretly loyal to Stalin‟s archrivals, Trotsky and Piłsudski. Former KPP functionaries routinely denounced each other, which provided the „Initiative Group‟ with volumes of 198 Gontarczyk, Polska Partia Robotnicza. Droga do władzy 1941-1944 (Warsaw, 2003), 45-7. 199 F. Firsov, „Komintern i Kommunisticheskaya Partia Pol‟shii‟, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 11 and 12 (1988), 20-35 and 40-55; and J. Maciszewski (ed.), Tragedia Komunistycznej Partii Polski (Warsaw, 1989). 41 information before the files were dispatched to Moscow. Among „the Jewish comrades, for example‟, according to one report from Paris, it‟s a mess, which will no doubt surely come out to the benefit of our enemies. Plainly speaking a Jewish party is organized there…[A] party leadership of Jewish work with [a member of the Jewish section of the PCF] Jacques [Jan] Kamiński at the head, and the leadership of a committee to help Spanish volunteers, which was also opened as a result of dangerous separatist work, with [Bocian] Szlojme at the head, and the leadership of a welfare committee for the [volunteers] imprisoned [interned in France], conducted open persecution of the Polish language among Jews and sowed hatred towards Polish Communists. For instance, there was a vulgar boycott of those Jewish Communists who had absolutely no knowledge of the Jewish language and had to speak to comrades in Polish. 200 There was a pro-Trotsky „undercurrent‟ in the KPP, most pronounced in Warsaw and Łódź, primarily supported by Jewish party members. 201 But when Trotsky established his Fourth International in 1936, delegates from Poland „conspicuously‟ stayed away. 202 The most prominent Polish Communist among the tiny group that attended the 1936 meeting was the infamous agent provocateur Marc Zborowski, who had joined the KPP in Łódź in 1926. The Kremlin‟s top spy inside the Trotskyist movement in Paris came to France from Germany, where he hid from the Polish State Police. 203 Stalin‟s obsessive hunt for mostly imagined „Trotskyite‟ and „Fascist‟ spies inside the international Communist movement at the time of the Great Terror, aptly called „the largest scale peacetime political persecution and blood-letting in European 200 Quoted in Gontarczyk, Polska Partia Robotnicza, 46n4; archival source: ANN, PZPR, mkr. 2799 [5 Feb. 1940], k. 28-9. Following the fall of France in 1940, with Louis Gronowski and Artur London, also veterans of the International Brigades, Kamiński (Kaminsky) ran FTP-MOI (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans—Main d‟Oeuvre Immigrée) on behalf of the PCF. Composed primarily of immigrants (mostly east European Jews), FTP-MOI (Kamiński commanded its clandestine wing) was a major component of the French resistance movement. Kamiński moved to People‟s Poland after the war and joined the public security ministry. From Nov. 1948 he served as a deputy chief of the Polish Communist civilian intelligence service until March 1952, when he was purged although he was not put on trial. London returned to Switzerland after the war and ended up in Czechoslovakia. In 1948 the Communists there appointed him to serve as a deputy foreign minister until his arrest in 1951 during the antisemitic show trials in Prague. The prosecution used London‟s post-war correspondence with Allen Dulles against him. See Gluchowski, „Noel Field and Allen Dulles‟ in H-Diplo, archived at (16 April 2006) <http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=hhoac&month=0604&week=c&msg=4mlKA0cUMnr9J8PIGuEEyw&user=&pw=> (last checked 25 April 2011). Another important figure in FTP-MOI was (see notes 160-2 above) Abram Rajgrodzki (Adam Rayski). On FTP-MOI, see A. Rayski, L’Affiche rouge (Paris, 2009), 13 and 18-23. 201 The antipathy towards Trotsky ran deep in Poland. J. Jacobs, „Communist Questions, Jewish Answers: Polish Jewish Dissident Communists of the Inter-War Era‟, Polin, 18 (2005), 274. 202 Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland, 135-6. J. Haynes and H. Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, 1999), 252-8. 203 42 history‟,204 extinguished the KPP as an organization. Ironically, most of the activists who survived did so because they were serving time in Polish prisons. When they were released, most as a result of the 1939 German-Soviet invasions, the purge had already ended, but that still gave Soviet security and intelligence organs a „hook‟ on all surviving former KPP functionaries, now clamouring to prove their obedience to Stalin. In June 1939 the Comintern disbanded the Paris-based „Initiative Group‟ and replaced it with the so-called „Provisional Managing Centre of the Communist Party of Poland‟. Ostensibly, the centre was to construct an entirely new Polish Communist party. No continuity with the disbanded KPP organizations or personnel was to be tolerated. New members were expected to undergo a thorough verification on an individual basis. Priority for membership in the new KPP was to go to veterans of the International Brigades and anyone repressed in capitalist countries for their Communist activities, but only those among them who had accepted without reservation the 1938 Comintern resolution to disband the old KPP. Special priority was to be given to informers who „helped to unmask the enemies terrorizing the Communist Party of Poland‟.205 The „Temporary Centre‟ continued the work of the original „Initiative Group‟, which included the control and maintenance of a network of informers and agents. It remains unclear what happened to those Polish Communists who functioned primarily as Soviet intelligence operatives but did not return to Moscow. Presumably some were „frozen‟ from 1937 to 1939, when Soviet espionage was largely dormant while its cadres were liquidated as „enemies of the people‟.206 It is no less clear to what extent the defections of various Soviet intelligence officers at the time, such as Ignacy Porecki-Reiss, the Paris-based illegal of Soviet state security, or Walter Krivitsky, the Amsterdam-based illegal of Red Army intelligence, had on KPP operations and agents. 207 While Krivitsky later died in America under mysterious circumstances, Porecki-Reiss was killed 204 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 94. Quoted in Gontarczyk, Polska Partia Robotnicza, 48. 205 206 On the Great Terror and Soviet intelligence, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 89-116; and on Red Army intelligence specifically, see Wieczorkiewicz, Łańcuch śmierci, 722-3. 207 Porecki-Reiss and Krivitsky were born in the same Shtetl in Polish Galicia. Porecki-Reiss joined the Polish Communist movement before he met up with Krivitsky in Vienna, where they became professional revolutionaries. After moving to Moscow, they joined the Bolshevik security apparatus, quickly climbing up and falling off the Soviet intelligence ladder together. See E. Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of ‘Ignace Reiss’ and His Friends (Ann Arbor, 1969); and Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York, 2000). 43 in Switzerland in an „action‟ carried out by the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks, preoccupied with subverting the „Trotskyites‟ throughout the world. 208 When the war broke out in September 1939 the „popular front‟ strategy used by the Comintern to mobilize Communists into anti-Fascist coalitions since the mid-1930s was still in play. Communists who had served in the International Brigades continued to volunteer or actively attempted to volunteer for military service to fight the Nazis. By the end of September, after the Red Army conspired with the Germans and invaded Poland, Moscow had already issued clear orders through the Comintern for Communists to withdraw their support for the Allies during the Second World War. The change in Soviet policy came at a particularly bad time for those Polish Communists still determined to remain loyal to Moscow. At the end of 1939 longstanding arrangements between the governments in Warsaw and Paris to create a Polish Army in France had come into force. A large number of Polish citizens residing in France, of whom there were some 25,000, became legally obliged to enlist or face desertion charges. The Comintern issued strict instructions for Polish Communists to resist forced conscription. Communist propaganda had also shifted. Their new enemy was the anti-Soviet „imperialism‟ of the Anglo-French alliance. Only a small number of Polish Communists actually made it into the Polish Army in France, and most of them signed up to avoid punitive legal measures. Others, however, joined on the direct orders of their new controllers in the Soviet intelligence services. In September 1939 Komar „volunteered‟ for service with the Polish forces in France, which enabled him to receive a work permit that allowed him to take a position in January 1940 with the Farman Aircraft Company. In March he saw action with the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the 1st Grenadier Division. He was captured by the Germans in June 1940. Komar was held in various German prisoner-of-war camps in France until January 1941, when he was moved to the camp at Alexisdorf in Germany. Before the war ended, he was held captive at the camp in Gross Essup, near the Dutch border, and Stalag 17 B in Krems, near Linz, including a stint at a cable factory in Vienna. His first escape was in December 1942. After nine days on the run, he was sent to Stalag 17 A in Kaisersteinbruch. The second escape came in January 1943 while he was working at a cement factory. Komar was eventually captured in Hungary and sent to a camp in Blumen, near Wiener Neustadt. After a third escape in June he was returned to Stalag 17 B, but Komar escaped again. Following his capture he was sentenced to forced labour in Vienna but escaped for a fifth time. Captured again in Hungary, Komar fled 208 By 1938 Special Tasks grew to be the largest section of Soviet intelligence, claiming 212 deep-cover illegals who controlled a secret network of agents and operations from the USA and fifteen European countries, including Poland. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 100. 44 from his transport to German. He was recaptured by the Hungarians in December 1944 and returned to the Germans. Komar was locked up in a special camp near Nuremberg when it was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. Immediately upon his release, Komar returned to Paris, where he was immediately appointed deputy chief of the Military Department at the Mission of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity. As soon as the French recognized Poland‟s Communist- controlled government in June 1945, the Mission of the Provisional Government became the Polish Embassy in Paris and Komar was named deputy chief of the Military Mission in France. 209 In July he joined the ranks of the PPR. In a declaration Komar submitted to the party, he noted that he had been secretly recruited by Soviet intelligence in Paris.210 Following a trip to France at the end of August by Lt Col. Gustaw Alef-Bolkowiak, 211 at the time delegated with the responsibility for reintegrating Polish military units in the West with the LWP and recruiting personnel who could be trusted by the Communists, 212 the chief of the military‟s Foreign Branch recommended to his superiors—Spychalski and Żymierski—that Komar be appointed MI chief.213 Komar arrived in Warsaw at the beginning of November 1945, ostensibly to attend a congress organized by veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Following a series of meetings and interviews with Spychalski and Żymierski, 214 on 19 December the defence minister sent the official order to the chief of the Cadres Department at the defence ministry to promote Komar to the rank of Col. and appointed him O-II chief.215 Moscow approved Komar‟s subsequent promotion to the rank of Brig Gen. one year later on 17 December 1946.216 209 The Mission chief was Col. Marian Naszkowski. 210 Discussed in „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. [Witoldem] Lederem, zastępca szefa Z II S.G.‟ [Transcript of a taped interview conducted by Poksiński], 11. This document is held in a private collection. 211 Alef-Bolkowiak, real name Alef Gutman, headed the Foreign Department of the Chief Headquarters of the LWP from Aug. 1945 until he moved to O-II in early-1946, when he was appointed the deputy military attaché in Washington until 1949. 212 AIPN, BU 0298/24 t. 2, „Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanego [Żymierskiego] z 30.IV.1953r.‟. Alef-Bolkowiak also travelled to Britain and Palestine for the same purpose at the end of 1945. 213 Ibid. The Foreign Branch was initially under the authority of Spychalski until the General Staff was established in July 1945 and its operations moved to O-II. 214 AIPN, BU 0298/24 t. 2, „Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanego [Żymierskiego] z 19.V.1953r.‟. AIPN, BU 0298/24 t. 3, „Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanego [Żymierskiego] z 16.IV.1953r.‟. Until 1989 promotions to the rank of Brig Gen. and above in the LWP required approval from Moscow. 215 216 45 In April 1947 the PPR Politburo authorized the creation of the Coordination Commission for Intelligence and Counterintelligence Affairs.217 Members included Komar; Brig Gen. Roman Romkowski, at the time assistant to the minister at the MBP; Szyr, then a deputy minister at the Ministry of Industry and Trade; Józef Olszewski, director of the Political Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and Berman, who was appointed chairman of the commission. Berman in fact had always kept watch over intelligence matters. From the very beginning, he was the Politburo member Komar reported to directly, and on a regular basis, on „every fundamental matter,‟218 Witold Leder,219 one of Komar‟s top deputies at O-II, later explained. The creation of Berman‟s commission in 1947 mirrored changes taking place in Moscow during this period, when Stalin ordered the consolidation of his spy services in order to centralize the collection of intelligence flowing to the Kremlin. In mid-1947 the Soviets combined their foreign intelligence service at state security with their MI service at the GRU and established the Komitet Informatsii (Committee of Information; KI). 220 The new Soviet spy service was formally attached to the Council of Ministers. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, a leading supporter of national minorities inside the ruling Communist parties in the Bloc, and a supporter of Berman, 221 formally chaired the KI.222 The consolidated spy service gave Soviet ambassadors a greater role in directing espionage operations abroad. 223 The Soviet restructuring of intelligence, however, did not last long. In mid-1948 the MI cadres at the KI began returning to the GRU, and at the end 217 „Protokół nr. 4. Posiedzenia Biura Politycznego z dnia 2 kwietnia 1947 r.‟, in Kochański (ed.), Protokoły posiedzeń Biura Politycznego, 41. 218 „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. Lederem,‟ 21. 219 Leder, born in Paris, joined the Red Army in 1934 and completed the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. He served with the Polish forces in the USSR from 1943 and was recruited to O-II in 1946. Leder was the deputy chief for analytical affairs when he was purged in 1951. He was arrested a year later on the false charge of being a British spy and a Trotskyist. Leder‟s father was Władysław (Feinstein) Fajnsztajn, alias Zdzisław Leder, a prominent Polish Communist from 1918 and a Soviet diplomat between 1924 and 1937. Fajnsztajn-Leder was accused of being a Trotskyist and executed in 1938. 220 See J. Haynes, „Gorsky Symposium: Gorsky Memo‟, in H-HOAC (History of American Communism), archived at <http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/> (16 March 2005); S. Chervonnaya, „Gorsky Memo & KI‟ (17 March 2005); Gluchowski, „Gorsky Memo & KI‟ (17 March 2005); and M. Kramer, „CPUSA, Espionage and Sabotage‟ (22 March 2005) (last checked 21 April 20111). 221 Interview with Berman in T. Torańska, Oni (Warsaw, 2004), 319-20. 222 Molotov served as Soviet foreign minister from May 1939 to March 1949. His wife, Polina S. Zhemchuzhina, formerly Pearl Karpovskaya, was arrested on Stalin‟s orders in Jan. 1949 and falsely accused of being a Zionist spy. Her sister lived in America. J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 19481953 (New York, 2003), 69-71 and 349n41. 223 Hints that PRL ambassadors were also engaged in espionage operations at this time are emerging. Consider PRL envoy to Canada Eugeniusz Milnikiel (Feb. 1948-May 1950) and the case of former University of Toronto physicist Leopold Infeld, who settled in People‟s Poland. See J. Wróbel, „Powrót profesora Infelda‟, Biuletyn IPN, 44 (Nov. 2004), 37-47. 46 of that year the KI department responsible for the eastern European satellites returned to state security. When the KI officially disbanded in 1951, 224 the MI service had already regained its autonomy and the foreign intelligence service was also fully restored. In People‟s Poland, O-II and the civilian intelligence service, better know to its Western adversaries at the time as the UB—Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (Security Bureau) more formally Wydział II—Samorządny (Branch 2—Independent) of the MBP, retained their separate identities throughout the Soviet KI phase. Nevertheless, both services were united under the command of Komar. Poland‟s civilian intelligence service, when it was created in January 1945, was initially called the Intelligence Branch. It became Branch 2—Independent of the MBP in April. Col. Stefan Antosiewicz225 served as the acting chief from January-April. He was later appointed chief of the civilian counterintelligence service. 226 His deputy at Intelligence Branch, Col. Julian Konar,227 served as acting chief of Branch 2—Independent until June 1945. Yet the primary organizer of the civilian intelligence service was Col. Juliusz Burgin,228 chief from 21 June 1945 to 19 June 1947. Komar retained his post as O-II chief when he replaced Burgin as director of Branch 2— Independent on 20 June. That same month Komar joined the party elite when he was also appointed to the Central Commission of Party Control, responsible for, among other things, the verification of party members. Komar remained the chief of the civilian intelligence service, upgraded and renamed Departament VII (Department 7) of the MBP on 17 July 1947, until mid1950. Based on a preliminary review of the documentary evidence, Paczkowski has come to the conclusion that while „certain sections‟229 of MI and the civilian service, such as the recruitment of agents, files, analysis and operations were combined, and responsibilities among their legal and 224 See Zubok, „Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The „Small‟ Committee of Information, 1952-53‟, Diplomatic History, 19/3 (Summer 1995), 453-72. 225 Antosiewicz was chief of the civilian counterintelligence service from Sep. 1948 to Dec. 1954 and deputy internal affairs minister from Dec. 1954 to Nov. 1959. 226 Civilian counterintelligence was Counterintelligence of Public Security (Aug. 1944-Dec. 1944); Department 1 of MBP (Jan. 1945-Dec. 1954); Department 2 of Public Security Committee (Jan. 1955-Nov. 1956); and Department 2 of MSW (Nov. 1956-July 1990). 227 Konar was deputy chief of the civilian counterintelligence service from Feb. 1950 to April 1957. Burgin also served as the inaugural PRL ambassador to the PRC and North Korea from 1950-1. 228 229 Paczkowski, „Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland, 1945-1989: An Attempt at a General Outline‟ (Typed manuscript, 2005), 6. I should like to extend my appreciation to Andrzej Paczkowski for providing me with many of the IPN documents he cites in his paper. 47 illegal residencies abroad were divided rather than shared, the most important change was the expansion of the civilian service. 230 In 1949 the staff commanded by Komar at the Headquarters of Department 7 numbered 259 functionaries and contract employees.231 His staff at O-II at about the same time had 186 operational officers.232 The growth of the civilian wing of the intelligence apparatus under Komar included a sizable increase in the number of agents recruited, most of them European Communists and „frequently of Jewish decent‟,233 so that in early-1949 Komar directed a spy network that consisted of, at the very least, 139 agents and 5 informants 234 in „the western occupation zones of Germany and Berlin—47, the United Kingdom—29, France—26, Italy—21, and Austria—7‟.235 Other agents were in „Israel, with as many as 16 agents‟, 236 but „only two agents (and two informants) working in the USA, and one each in Mexico and Argentina‟.237 According to Monat: In June 1959 Z-II was seriously considering using the so-called third country technique in order to improve its intelligence collection activities in various parts of the world. The discussion centred primarily on the utilization of this technique in the United States, Canada, and Mexico…For example, a Z-II Mexican agent would be utilized against the United States and Canada…A MA [military attaché] office in Argentina would act as a springboard for intelligence activities directed not only against Latin America but also against the United States.238 Some of the capital required for the expansion of the agent networks came from an export-import venture that sold Polish agricultural produce and bought embargoed products and raw materials from the West, which included the illegal trade in hard currency. 239 The operation 230 Ibid. Ibid., 7. 231 232 „Notatki przewodniczącego KC PZPR, prezydenta RP B. Bieruta z posiedzenia Komisji Wojskowej B.P. KC PZPR 6 września 1949 r. w sprawach pracy II Oddziału Sztabu Generalnego WP‟, in J. Poksiński, A. Kochański and K. Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR wobec wojska 1944-1956 (Warsaw, 2003), 140. 233 Paczkowski, „Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland‟, 7. Based on the Korczyński document, I also made this case in a letter I faxed to Abraham Brumberg on 6 April 1997 in response to an inquiry by him. 234 Paczkowski, Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland‟, 7. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 8-9. Paczkowski, „Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland‟, 8. 235 236 237 238 239 48 was initiated by Burgin. A resolution of the PPR Secretariat dated 1 December 1948 stated that for the purpose of „increasing income‟240 it was necessary to „expand the network of trading establishments like Dimex‟, 241 which had been setup in Berlin. A parent company in Warsaw, owned by the CC PZPR, added Welthandel in Frankfurt and Polcomerce in Vienna to its list of subsidiaries.242 USA. 243 The trading concern also had purchase representatives in Belgium and the From 1947 to 1949 the parent company reported profits of $2.7 million U.S. and 7.6 million zlotys.244 Before the operation was ended in early-1950245 the Secretariat resolved that effective 1 January 1949 the following formula would be used to divide the profits from this venture: „80% to the party fund‟246 and „20%—for the needs of Comrade Komar‟.247 Komar later explained that from 1947 he had authority over two separate financial cells, one at O-II and the other at Department 7. The primary function of each cell was to raise hard currency for their respective intelligence service. 248 There was a third financial cell at the PPR CC, tasked with raising funds for the party elite, which, according to Komar,249 was run by Politburo member Franciszek Mazur. Along with Bierut, Mazur was the only other party boss to 240 „Uchwał Sekretariatu KC PPR z dnia 1 grudnia 1948 r.‟, in Kochański (ed.), Protokoły posiedzeń Biura Politycznego, 330. 241 Ibid. Paczkowski, „Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland‟, 8. Ibid. Ibid. Control over the Viennese firm Polcomerce passed on to the Communist Party of Austria. „Uchwał Sekretariatu KC PPR‟, in Kochański (ed.), Protokoły posiedzeń Biura Politycznego, 330. Ibid. That is, for the needs of Department 7 and O-II. 242 243 244 245 246 247 Brig Gen. Komar after his rehabilitation by the PRL. 248 AIPN, BU 0298/356, [Komar, zeznanie własne z 1953r.], k. 122. Ibid. 249 49 hold membership in all five ruling institutions of the PZPR during the Stalin years. The operations of the three financial cells were eventually combined. Komar took charge of the illegal companies set up abroad and Mazur ran the firms inside Poland, although overall control of the scheme was in Mazur‟s hands. 250 The commercial enterprises run by Komar were further tasked with gathering economic intelligence. Komar also used the firms they established abroad to fill various orders from Szyr for materials and other commodities only available in the West.251 Other creative sources of income for the Polish intelligence services came from elaborate counterintelligence stings, targeting Western intelligence operations and services, that moved cash and supplies to purported Polish anti-Communist insurgents. The most tarnished was the WIN operation, as it is popularly known in the USA and Great Britain, or the Berg Affair, as the Poles call it.252 This Polish counterintelligence operation was reminiscent of the classic Bolshevik stings—SINDIKAT and TREST, „both of which made imaginative use of [émigrés and] agents provocateurs’.253 The large-scale and more consequential operations run by Komar included TRANSPORT—arming and supplying Yugoslav Communists forces—which ended in March 1948;254 the DRAWA operation, which moved over $2,200,000 U.S. dollars from London to Warsaw,255 and the Greek operations—arming and supplying Greek Communists partisans, which began in 1948, ended in 1950, and included resettling several thousand Greeks in Poland. It was Komar‟s longest running operation.256 Naturally, Komar‟s O-II collaborated closely with Communist agents in the Balkans and Greece. The relationship Polish MI had with their Jewish counterparts in the Yishuv, and later with agents of the Israeli special services, was no less professional and intimate. 257 Czechoslovak 250 AIPN, BU 0298/356, k. 122. Ibid., k. 123. 251 252 See Berger, „The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool‟; S. Cenckiewicz, Oczami Bezpieki. Szkice i materiały z dziejów aparatu bezpieczeństwa PRL (Kraków, 2004), 17-28; and „Sprawa Bergu‟, Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), 79 (1987), 3-87. 253 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 43. Piotrowski, „Agenci tajnego zaplecza,‟ 22. Ibid. 254 255 256 See S. Courtois, N. Werth, J. Panné, A. Paczkowski, K. Bartošek and J. Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 326-31. 257 Piotrowski, „Od Konfrontacji do Współpracy. Polskie i Izraelskie służby specjalne‟, Biuletyn IPN, 11/58 (Nov. 2005), 51-7; and Stankowski, „Poland and Israel: Bilateral Relations 1947-1953 (based on the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs)‟, Jews in Eastern Europe, 3/37 (Winter 1998), 5-23. 50 and Yugoslav aid to Israel, authorized by Moscow,258 is well documented. 259 The Polish Communist contribution to the Zionist struggle for a Jewish homeland was primarily political and it included recruiting, training, arming and supplying Jewish fighters. Furthermore, Komar‟s people ran covert operations that assisted Zionist organizations resettling thousands of unwanted surviving European Jews in British-mandated Palestine. In January 1948 the Polish Communist authorities gave the go-ahead for the Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich (Central Committee of Polish Jews; CKŻP), 260 especially its powerful PPR Fraction, to establish operation GIUS—„mobilization‟ in Hebrew. The CKŻP eventually collected a sum of „113 million zlotys and recruited, as of 1 October,‟ according to August Grabski, „3,200 volunteers (their ultimate number later rose to 7 thousand)‟, 261 although only a tiny minority of the fighters from Poland came from the ranks of the PPR. Moreover, contacts with the Haganah (The Defence), the largest underground army of the Yishuv, 262 were placed under the authority of the top functionary at the Foreign Branch of the CC PPR, Ostap Dłuski, 263 a former Comintern operative and a skilled Communist propagandist. He conducted operations in liaison with Komar and a senior official representing the PPR Fraction inside the CKŻP, Hersz Smolar.264 For meetings with the Haganah, Dłuski was assisted by another Fraction member, 258 See Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York, 2005), 222-45 („Israel and Zionism‟). 259 See Rucker, „Moscow‟s Surprise‟, 26-7. 260 From 1947 to 1949 the chairman of the CKŻP was Jakub Berman‟s brother Adolf Berman, secretary of the wartime Polish Council for Jewish Aid „Żegota‟. In 1950 Adolf emigrated to Israel, adopted the name Avraham, and was elected to the central institutions of Israel‟s second largest and leading pro-Soviet political party, Mapam, an acronym derived from the party‟s official name, mifleget hapo’alim hame’uhedet (United Workers‟ Party). He was a member of the Knesset from 1951-5. 261 A. Grabski, Działalność komunistów wśród Żydów w Polsce (1944-1949) (Warsaw, 2004), 261. 262 Polish Communists also dealt with Moshe Sneh, among Israel‟s most prominent Communists and chief of the National Staff of Haganah 1941-46. Sneh headed the Illegal Immigration Department of the Jewish Agency until 1947 and his primary responsibility was arms procurement. Sneh joined Mapam in 1948 and was elected to the Knesset in 1949 (serving until 1965 and again from 1969 to 1972). He headed the Left Faction of Mapam and in 1953 adopted an anti-Zionist position, outlined in his Hebrew-language booklet Sikamim hashe’elah hale’umit le’or marksism-leninism [On the National Question. Conclusions in Light of Marxism-Leninism] (Tel Aviv, 1954). 263 Dłuski, real name Adolf Langer, was sent by the KPP to Paris in 1936. In 1941 Dłuski joined the PCF and became a leading anti-Fascist propagandist. He co-founded the Centre d‟Action et de Défense des Immigrés. Dłuski returned to Poland and joined the PPR in 1945, serving as director of the CC Foreign Department until 1954 and as a member of the CC PPR/PZPR until 1964. From 1958 he headed the Polish section of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (serving as a Sejm deputy from 1952 to 1964). In 1959 he became the director of the Institute of International Affairs. 264 Smolar joined the PPR in 1946. He served on the Presidium of the CKŻP, directed its Culture and Propaganda Department, and was the chief of the Jewish Press Agency until he became chairman of the CKŻP in 1949. A year later Smolar was editing a Yiddish paper in Poland. He was also the chairman of the Jewish Social-Cultural Society from 1950 to 1962. Smolar emigrated to France in 1970 and Israel in 1971. 51 fluent in Hebrew, Leon Lew, 265 who had lived in Palestine for fourteen years and was also a veteran of the International Brigades. SOVIET CONTROLL OF POLISH MI A resolution drafted during a July 1949 meeting of the Politburo Commission for Military Affairs,266 „regarding the work of the 2nd Department of the General Staff‟,267 placed the location of the spy networks controlled from military attaché posts in „Italy, France, England, [and] the Near East, as well as the seeds of spy networks in the USA, Belgium, and Sweden‟. 268 The resolution also noted that those networks included „several agents possessing serious intelligence opportunities and access to serious sources of information‟.269 But the Military Commission cautioned that „only the weak seeds of a spy network‟ existed in America, describing „the concentration of efforts and resources on the territory of the USA‟ as „[t]otally inadequate‟.270 Leder recalled that the deputy military attaché in Washington, 271 Alef-Bolkowiak, did not have much opportunity, let‟s say, to build some kind of [spy] network in the United States…Now, I‟m not talking about the Polish emigration in the United States, as you well know…Above all, it must be remembered that Jews in the United States are… it doesn‟t apply to all of them, but an anti-Polish bias is dominant. There really are 265 Lew emigrated from Poland to Palestine and joined the Communist Party of Palestine in 1922. He had served with the 11th and 13th International Brigades before being interned in France and Algeria. Lew was among those repatriated to the USSR in 1943 after the Allies landed in North Africa. He joined the PPR in 1945 and served on the communal court of the CKŻP. Lew emigrated to Israel in 1957. 266 The military commission was chaired by Bierut and functioned from May 1949 until the end of 1951. Members included Red Army officers posted to the LWP: Lt Gen. Władysław Korczyc (Vladislav V. Korchits), at the time chief of the General Staff; Lt Gen. Stanisław Popławski (Stanislav G. Poplavsky), also a Soviet Pole and the commander of Land Forces as well as a deputy defence minister; and Col. Grigory V. Bogdanovsky, a Soviet Russian who was the assistant to Korchits for matters concerning Soviet officers serving in the LWP and the representative of the CC VKP(b) for party matters among the Soviets with the LWP. Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 19-20. 267 „Materiały z obrady Komisji Wojskowej B.P. KC PZPR z 5 lipca 1949 r.‟, in Ibid., 128. Ibid. Ibid., 129. Ibid. 268 269 270 271 It should be noted that Brig Gen. Izydor Modelski, chief military attaché in Washington since 1945, defected to the USA in Nov. 1948 rather than return to Warsaw. Modelski had served as the deputy defence minister of the Polish government-in-exile in 1940-5. Although he returned to Poland after the war, the Communists never trusted him. Nearly fifty years later Leder called Modelski a „complete cretin‟. „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. Lederem,‟ 5. Considering what happened to MI officers during the east European purges, the remark reveals more about Leder than about Modelski. 52 people who…maybe lived through different things, maybe in Poland as Jews and in general are anti-Polish. So that [in the USA] it also wasn‟t a group [środowisko] on whom it was possible to base intelligence work. 272 The Military Commission acknowledged further that their networks run by illegal residents in western Europe were undergoing „intensive expansion‟, 273 yet the scathingly critical resolution also concluded that the service had yet to take full advantage of its personnel and opportunities abroad, adding that among its leadership were people who were „political and class strangers‟.274 In August 1949 Komar‟s deputy at Department 7 since May, Col. Zygmunt Okręt, 275 submitted a pejorative „Information Note‟276 on the intelligence services to Berman, which he had prepared behind the back of his chief.277 On the note, Berman wrote: „intelligence is unmasked [rozkonspirowany]—it is necessary to build it anew‟.278 Okręt, also a Communist activist from a young age and a Polish Jew,279 had served as a political officer in the Polish Army on the Eastern Front. He was transferred to the post of deputy chief of the MCI branch of the 1st Polish Army in January 1945 and moved to Department 7 in March 1948. As the deputy chief of Department 7, Okręt warned that the intelligence services included people in top positions at headquarters and in the residencies who came from the ranks of the „Dąbrowszczaków [Polish Communists who served with the International Brigades], the French resistance movement or PCF members‟280 and „emigration groups in Belgium, Switzerland, and the like‟.281 Okręt complained that a „gigantic majority of these people had been 272 „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. Lederem,‟ 21. 273 „Materiały z obrady Komisji Wojskowej‟, in Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 130. 274 Ibid., 129. Okręt was director of the MBP and later the MSW archives from Feb. 1951 toAug. 1960. AIPN, BU 0290/900, „Notatka Informacyjna [z 15.VIII.1949r.]‟, k. 1-3. 275 276 277 See Poksiński, „TUN’ Tatar-Utnik-Nowicki. Represje wobec oficerów Wojska Polskiego w latach 1949-1956 (Warsaw, 1992), 186. 278 AIPN, BU 0299/900, „Sprawa II Oddzału Sztabu Generalnego W.P. [z 1953 r.]‟, k. 58. 279 The data compiled by the MSW on its personnel included a clear reference to their nationality. See M. Piotrowski (ed.), Ludzie Bezpieki w walce z narodem i kościołem. Służba bezpieczeństwa w Polskiej Rzeczpospolitej Ludowej w latach 1944-1979—Centrala (Lublin, 2000). 280 AIPN, BU 0290/900, „Notatka Informacyjna‟, k. 1. Ibid. 281 53 active [in the Communist movement] before the Second World War and during the last war beyond the borders of Poland and the USSR. Consequently, this category of people is not thoroughly known to us‟.282 Comrade Okręt naturally concluded: It‟s not an exaggeration if we said that next to the dense group of prewar professional officers, tied to each other by various cast-like, political knots, and the like, indicates in our intelligence apparatus, and rather clearly, the existence of a second group— „Dąbrowszczaków‟, whose members remain on good terms with each other.283 This camaraderie all too often calls to mind the previous socalled Legionnaires clique. 284 In the notes taken by Bierut during a meeting of the Military Commission in September 1949, where Komar apparently presented a report on the work of O-II, Bierut wrote the following about the intelligence union: „Structure—competition between Department 7 and the 2nd Department disappeared but favouritism [kumoterstwo]285 has taken control‟.286 Poland‟s Stalinist party boss then scribbled: „Proposal: separate Department 7 from the 2nd Department. In [Department] 7, separate intelligence from counterintelligence. 287 must be illegal work‟.288 For most of Komar‟s tenure as MI chief and director of Department 7 there were three Soviet advisors attached to the Polish intelligence services. Komar‟s advisor was Maj Gen. 289 Don‟t burden the 2nd Directorate with other matters. The foundation for the preparation of 2nd Department cadres Konstantin V. Kashnikov (Brig Gen. Konstantin Kasznikow), who was transferred from Soviet 282 Ibid. 283 Another document, with a note by Berman, „received by diplomatic post‟ from Prague on 21 Nov. 1951, asserted that leading Czechoslovak Communists arrested (and later tried and executed) during the purges there had served with the International Brigades and that they had developed very close associations with Polish veterans in Spain, including Komar. Berman was informed that the Czechoslovaks named their Polish colleagues „as Trotskyites‟. AIPN, BU 0299/900, „Sprawa II Oddzału Sztabu Generalnego W.P. [z 1953 r.]‟, k. 58. 284 Ibid., k. 3. The „Legionnaires clique‟ is a derogatory reference to members of the officer corps of the Polish Legions, a military formation loyal to its founder Piłsudski, notably those among them who emerged as leading military and political figures after Polish independence was declared on 11 Nov. 1918, and especially those who took power following the military coup of May 1926. 285 Literally translates to „log-rolling‟; usually connotes an „old boy‟ relationship in a group or organization. „Notatki przewodniczącego KC PZPR‟, in Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 142. Department 7 included a section for functionary affairs, responsible for counterintelligence or internal affairs. 286 287 288 „Notatki przewodniczącego KC PZPR‟, in Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 142. It appears that in 1948 Komar initiated an illegal network (codenamed „N‟) in Berlin run by residents outside the Polish military mission although that experiment failed. See Paczkowski, „Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland‟, 7-8. 289 The first Soviet general rank was Maj Gen. 54 intelligence to the LWP in early-1950. In December 1949, a month after Rokossowski arrived in Warsaw, Bierut and Stalin conspired to tip the balance in favour of the Soviet officers.290 The Polish party boss officially asked Stalin to send four more military intelligence advisors with explicit orders to overhaul O-II. 291 Komar was dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the deal with General of the Army Matvei V. Zakharov, chief of the GRU at the time. 292 The new advisors were supposed to stay for two to three months. According to a section of the Korczyński report on the Agentura or spy ring, the period between December 1945 and November 1950, when Komar ran O-II operations, „was marked by chaos in [western European] state administrations, meagre performance of the counterintelligence services of the capitalist states, and the mass movement of people, which favoured the organizing of intelligence networks‟.293 Moreover, „this period was not fully utilized for the formation of suitably placed, widely developed, and properly concealed intelligence networks in the states of the West‟.294 Of the „402 agents…recruited during this period‟, 295 too many of them, Gomułka‟s chief complained, were not in the right place, „for example, 36 agents in Israel‟.296 And the „costs connected with maintaining this [Israeli] spy ring in 1952 amounted to $303,238 [U.S.] and 397,397 zlotys‟.297 Korczyński never bothered to mention that this was a little more than a year after Moscow took direct control of Komar‟s agents.298 Leder, obviously reluctant to reveal his secrets, explained that from 1946 to 1953 Polish MI was not concerned with „strictly military matters‟,299 such as the „stationing of American armed forces or other allies in Germany‟. 300 This „was not Komar‟s idea…It arose from the 290 Nalepa, Oficerowie Armii Radzieckiej, 69-70. 291 „Pismo Bolesława Bieruta do Józefa Stalina (23. XII. 1949) z prośbą o oddelegowanie radzieckich specialistów wojskowych do Wojska Polskiego [in Russian]‟, in Ibid, 255. 292 Zakharov was GRU chief from 1949 to 1951; succeeded by Mikhail A. Shalin, chief from 1951 to 1958. CAW, 525/85, k. 461. Ibid. 293 294 295 Ibid., k. 462. Ibid. Ibid. 296 297 298 From mid-Nov. 1950, when Kashnikov took command of O-II, to the end of 1951, or „up to 1952‟, as noted in the first attachment to the Korczyński report. Ibid., 478. 299 „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. Lederem,‟ 1. Ibid. 300 55 situation. Purely military-armaments, let‟s say, or troop locations, or operational matters…I don‟t know, capturing [western] operational plans—this, as a matter of fact, didn‟t enter into the range of interests of Polish commanders…This was Moscow‟s domain‟.301 Furthermore, in March 1950 the Soviet intelligence advisors attached to O-II, officially on the staff of the chief of the General Staff, such as Kashnikov and Lt Col. Andrei Beliaev (Andreij Bełajew), began shadowing Komar‟s top MI deputies: Col. Leder; Col. Stanisław Flato,302 a highly experienced Comintern operative; and Col. Stanisław Bielski,303 a former Red Army intelligence officer. In any case, the Polish experiment at unifying the military and the civilian intelligence services ended as soon as Komar lost control of Department 7 on 5 June 1950. As of July 1950 the number of operations officers at O-II had increased to 129. 304 Organizationally, MI had the following structure in 1950:305    Headquarters: chief, deputy chief, two Soviet advisors, a Secretariat, the General Chancellery, and the Archive and Library 1st Branch: short-range military reconnaissance 2nd Branch: operations against capitalist countries (Section 1—West Germany and Austria; Section 2—USA; Section 3—UK and its Near East colonies; Section 4—France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland; Section 5—Italy, and Yugoslavia)   301 3rd Branch: naval intelligence from the Polish coast and from Polish merchant vessels, focusing on Sweden and Denmark 4th Branch: analysis, and the preparation of intelligence reports Ibid., 1-2. 302 Flato, born in Warsaw, completed his medical studies in Paris. He served as a senior medical officer and military commander with the International Brigades and in 1939 was sent to China by the Comintern. In 1946 he was appointed deputy chief of O-II for operational and technical affairs. Flato was posted to the Ottawa residency of O-II in 1952, but he was recalled a year later and falsely accused of being a French spy and a Trotskyist. Rehabilitated in 1955, Flato was appointed minister-advisor to the ambassador in Beijing in 1957, serving there until 1963, when he became deputy director of Department 2 (Asia) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Flato was removed during the antisemitic purges of 1967-8. He died in East Germany. 303 Bielski, born in Vienna, completed the Vasilevskii Air Defence Military Academy in 1935, and was serving with Red Army intelligence when he was arrested in 1937. He was severely tortured, lost most of his teeth, and became deaf in one ear. In 1947 Komar arranged to have him brought to Poland, where he spent several months recovering from his injuries before joining O-II in 1948. He served as chief of the Operations Branch until he shot himself in his office on the same day Flato was arrested in Feb. 1953. His father, Maksymilian Horowitz, alias Henryk Walecki, had been a very prominent Polish Communist and a top Comintern official. Bielski‟s mother, Stefania Horowitz, maiden name Heryng, alias Bielska, was also a prominent Polish Communist and VKP(b) functionary. Bielski‟s parents (and also his maternal uncle) were falsely accused of being Polish spies and shot in 1937. 304 Pawlikowicz, Tajny Front, 49. Ibid., 48-9. 305 56           5th Branch: manufactured, installed, and maintained technical equipment for operations 6th Branch: responsible for the Polish military attachés in the socialist camp and maintaining official contact with the military attachés accredited to Poland 7th Branch: administrative-housekeeping matters 8th Branch: financial matters 9th Branch: personnel matters Cipher Bureau Files: card index of personnel, records of secret O-II collaborators, and biographies of VIPs in particular capitalist countries Reserve Personnel: responsible for officers not allocated to a specific branch Special Section: counterintelligence306 Special Course307 In November 1950, with the pretext that O-II had been penetrated by enemy intelligence services,308 the Kremlin and its agents in Warsaw engineered an extremely hostile takeover, replacing Komar and his people with intelligence cadres brought in directly from the Soviet Union. Komar‟s successors were Kashnikov, who served as acting chief until 15 March 1951; Col. Igor Y. Sukhatzky (Igor Suchacki), 309 who served as chief until 10 April 1953; and Col. Fiodor T. Ved‟med (Fiodor Wiedmied), 310 who served as chief until 26 November 1956. Moscow thus regained direct control of O-II, upgraded and renamed Z-II on 15 November 1951 under Sukhatzky, from the end of 1950 until Korczyński took command on 27 November 1956.311 Initially, O-II was formally under the authority of a deputy defence minister from October 1945 to March 1950. For most of Komar‟s tenure, therefore, inside the military, he 306 The Special Section of O-II was simultaneously the GZIs Branch 1 of Department 2 (upgraded and renamed in Dec. 1950 the 1st Directorate), responsible for counterintelligence and the security of the General Staff. The overlap effectively placed the GZI inside the counterintelligence unit of the Polish MI service, and eased the way for GZI officers to monitor O-II officers and operations as well as to conduct its own operations against O-II, including the recruitment of agents, residents and informers from among O-II officers by GZI officers. To complicate matters, counterintelligence services of the Soviet KGB and the GRU secretly recruited officers from both O-II and the GZI. 307 The Special Course of O-II trained MI officers and was located in Sulejówek, about 18 km from centre of Warsaw. „25.01.1995, rozmowa z płk. Lederem,‟ 20. Sukhatzky is Aleksander Suchacki in Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 10. Ved‟med is Wiedzmiedz in Ibid., 11. 308 309 310 311 Korczyński‟s deputy from Dec. 1955 to Nov. 1965 was Col. Tadeusz Jedynak, promoted to Brig Gen. in 1961. One source suggests Jedynak took charge of Z-II as acting chief in Dec. 1955, which would mean that Ved‟med lost command one year earlier, but this still has to be documented. 57 reported directly to Spychalski, at least until March 1949, and then Brig Gen. Ochab, who surrendered responsibility for MI in March 1950. After that, Komar and his successors reported to the chief of the General Staff, all of whom, until early-1965, were Soviet generals: Lt Gen. Władysław Korczyc (Maj Gen. Vladislav V. Korchits), 312 a Soviet Pole who served as the chief of staff from March 1950 to December 1952; Lt Gen. Borys Pigarewicz (Col Gen. Boris A. Pigarevich),313 a Belorussian who served as the acting chief of staff until January 1954; and Lt Gen. Jerzy Bordziłowski (Col Gen. Yury V. Bordzilovsky), 314 a Ukrainian who served as the acting chief of staff until March 1954, and then as the chief of staff until February 1965. Even though Gomułka returned to power and Rokossowski was back in the USSR, and notwithstanding the fact that Korczyński took the reigns at MI, Moscow continued to maintain a tight grip on its Z-II subsidiary.315 Z-II „was officially a part of the General Staff of the Polish Army,‟ Suvorov explains, „but it was completely controlled by Moscow. Soviet commanders only aspired to support competition between intelligence services of individual countries, so as to assure for itself information from different sources. Formally, therefore, all of these [Soviet Bloc intelligence] structures operated independently of each other, but all the threads led to Moscow anyway. This is where the actual centre commanding all these [Soviet Bloc MI] services was located‟.316 312 Korchits (Korczyc) was posted from the Red Army to the LWP in 1944. He was also a member of the CC PZPR from Dec. 1948 to Mar. 1954 and in 1949 was appointed a deputy defence minister. In 1952 he was sent to study Higher Academic Courses at the Voroshilov Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR. In 1954 he retired from the LWP and the Polish party and returned to the Soviet Union. 313 Pigarevich (Pigarewicz) was posted from the Soviet Army to the LWP in 1950 and he returned to the USSR in 1957. 314 Bordzilovsky (Bordziłowski) was a Red Army engineering officer posted to the LWP in 1944. He was also a member of the CC PZPR and deputy defence minister from 1954 to 1968. In 1965 he was appointed the chief inspector of military schooling and played a leading role in the antisemitic purges in 1967-8. Bordzilovsky retired from the LWP in March 1968 and returned to the USSR, where he became a consultant to the Kuybyshev Military Academy of Engineering Troops. 315 Korczyński was chief until 2 Aug. 1965, when he became chief inspector of territorial defence and the deputy defence minister. He was promoted to the rank of Lt Gen. in 1968 and was among those responsible for the antisemitic campaign of that year as well as the violent military response to the strike by workers on the Baltic Coast in 1970. Recalled from his military posts in March 1971, a month later he was appointed ambassador to Algeria, where he committed suicide on 22 Oct. 1971. Korczyński‟s successors at Z-II were: Brig Gen. Włodzimierz Oliwa (1965-71); Col. Bolesław Szczepaniak (1971-2); Brig Gen. Czesław Kiszczak (1972-9); Brig Gen. Edward Poradko (1979-81); Brig Gen. Roman Misztal (1981-90); and Brig Gen. Stanisław Żak (1990-1), who became chief of the 2nd Directorate Intelligence and Counterintelligence of the General Staff of the Polish Army (Zarząd II Wywiadu i Kontrwywiadu SG WP), which combined MI and MCI in Aug. 1990 and became the WSI in Aug. 1991 until Sep. 2006. 316 Quoted in Popowski, „Agentem GRU jest się do końca życia‟. 58 Bordziłowski was the most senior Soviet military officer to remain in the LWP after 1956. He became the longest serving chief of staff in the history of the LWP, 317 as well as the second longest serving deputy defence minister in the history of the PRL.318 When asked to describe „the mechanics of Soviet guidance and exploitation of Z-II‟,319 Monat replied: The method the Soviets use always varies from time to time, and is dependent on the relationship between the chief of Z-II and the [G]RU. This relationship with the present chief of Z-II, General Grzegorz KORCZYNSKI, is not a good one so far as the Soviets are concerned. As a result, the [G]RU exerts much of its influence through General Jerzy BORDZILOWSKI, the Polish Chief of Staff who still holds his Soviet citizenship. The Soviets are also assisted in maintaining their influence over Z-II by the presence within Z-II of many pro-Soviet Polish staff officers.320 SOVIET DIRECTED PURGES IN POLISH MI Komar had been forced to relinquish command of O-II effective 14 November 1950, ostensibly to become the new chief quartermaster of the Polish Army. Jerzy Poksiński points out that „political aspects‟321 dictated Komar‟s removal, which means he was purged for reasons that had nothing to do with his performance, much less for whatever failures MI or the civilian service accumulated during his tenure. Poksiński compared the evaluation reports on the O-II chief prepared by the General Staff chief. About five weeks before Komar was relieved, Korczyc declared that the „occupied position suits him‟.322 He changed his mind, as a member of a threeman evaluation commission, following the reassignment of the O-II chief: „General Komar has a reckless relationship to the selection of cadres; he is unable to properly assess people‟. 323 317 Subsequent chiefs of staff include the following General officers: Wojciech Jaruzelski (1965-8), who has never taken any personal responsibility for the antisemitic purges of 1967-8; Bolesław Chocha (1968-73); Florian Siwicki (1973-83); and Józef Użycki (1983-90). 318 There were 29 deputy defence ministers from 1944 to 1990. The question was asked by the subcommittee‟s chief counsel J. G. Sourwine. Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 319 12. 320 Ibid. Quoted in Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 142n22. Quoted in Ibid. Komar‟s first evaluation was in Oct. 1950. 321 322 323 Quoted in Ibid. The three evaluators were Korczyc; Brig Gen. Marian Naszkowski, deputy defence minister from Nov. 1950 to Sep. 1952; and Col. Dmitri Voznesensky (Dmitrij Wozniesienski), the GZI chief. Voznesensky had joined the organs of Soviet state security in 1921 and served as a counterintelligence officer when he was posted to the LWP in 1944. He was appointed the GZI deputy chief in Sept. 1946, and chief in May 1950. Voznesensky was recalled to the USSR in Dec. 1953 in the aftermath of Stalin‟s death, Beria‟s arrest (and subsequent execution) and Światło‟s defection. 59 Rokossowski confirmed Korczyc‟s second evaluation of November 1950 in July 1951, 324 after the chief ideologue (and antisemite) of the KPSS, Mikhail A. Suslov, and Bierut began an exchange on Komar‟s past in the spring of that year.325 The fact that in 1932 Komar had supported the Neumann faction in the KJVD, even though he had recanted soon afterwards in Moscow, came back to haunt him. Questions were also raised about Komar‟s wartime exploits. Summarily judged to be a security risk, Komar was arrested like a „top gangster‟326 on 11 November 1952 at the offices of the chief of the General Staff by Col. Anton Skulbashevsky (Antoni Skulbaszewski), 327 deputy chief of the GZI,328 and charged with treason. Komar was „deprived of sleep‟329 and eventually „confessed‟ to being a French spy. He also told his Soviet interrogators that among the co-conspirators in his anti-party plot were Bierut and Berman. 330 The purges at O-II during the Stalin years, when Soviet officers ran MI, appear to have come in two phases. The first, in the years 1950-1, hit almost everyone at once. During this period 157 MI employees were not just dismissed from the service, most were drummed out of the military, quite a few of them were arrested and accused of spying on behalf of a foreign power, and most of those arrested were tortured and forced to confess to fictitious crimes.331 In 1950 the purge directly impacted 122 MI personnel and in 1951 thirty-five. Veterans of the interwar Polish military and veterans of the Polish forces in France or Britain during the war, along with loyal Communists who had belonged to the KPP or its affiliated organizations, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and those who had lived abroad in Belgium, France, Palestine, 324 Korczyc had also authorizing Komar‟s 1945 appointment to MI chief. AIPN, BU 0298/24 t. 3, „Protokół przesłuchania podejrzanego z 16.IV.1953r.‟. 325 Poksiński, ‘TUN’, 187. Komar quoted in Poksiński, „TUN’, 190. 326 327 Skulbashevsky (Skulbaszewski), born near Kiev, joined the Red Army in 1935 and the NKVD in 1937. He was dismissed in 1938 after his Polish father was arrested as an „enemy of the people‟. Released in 1939, he was mobilized to fight in the Soviet-Finnish War (Nov. 1939-March 1940). After being wounded while fighting the Germans in 1941, he studied hydro-electric engineering in Tashkent. Skulbashevsky was posted to the LWP in June 1943 and held a series of senior posts as a military prosecutor. He served as the supreme military prosecutor from 1948 to 1950 and became deputy chief of GZI in Aug. 1950 until he too was recalled to the USSR, departing the PRL in July 1954 (shortly before Światło‟s RFE revelations began in Sept. 1954). 328 Skulbashevsky was also Świerczewski‟s son-in-law. Chodakiewicz, „The Dialectic of Pain‟, 133n10. 329 330 Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), „Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR‟, 44n108. It should be noted that at about the same time investigators in Moscow, according to Naumov, „attempted to link the JAC to [Lazar M.] Kaganovich, Molotov, and other leading figures in the [Soviet] government‟. Rubenstein and Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, xvi. 331 See Poksiński, „TUN’, 186-208. 60 or Switzerland were all targeted and given the same GZI treatment. The second phase, in the years 1952-3, was a purely antisemitic affair that affected „about twenty officers‟.332 To supplement the Soviet officers and the remaining Poles, the PZPR leadership transferred „several hundred graduates of military schools, as well as about thirty-five to forty permanently employed members of the party apparatus‟.333 In the meantime, O-II became Z-II in November 1951. The 2nd Directorate, which now had 254 officers and 105 contract employees, moved its Special Course to Śródborów. 334 Furthermore, Leszek Pawlikowicz recently discovered that it was at this time that Z-II expanded its operations to include „Norway, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Israel‟.335 Monat observed that between 1951 and 1966, the Soviets adopted a policy of strengthening the O-II organization by the replacement of various military personnel in important positions and by the application of strict security regulations. In November 1951 about fifteen Soviet staff officers from the [G]RU were assigned to OII…These officers were highly qualified in military intelligence and wore Polish uniforms and assumed Polish military ranks. They were placed in every responsible position in the O-II organization. The Soviets improved upon the O-II organization and introduced Soviet intelligence techniques into O-II operations. O-II was under the complete control of the [G]RU. Polish officers assigned to O-II were used in minor positions and were advised to take advantage of the Soviets presence and learn from their superior training and experience in the military intelligence field. During this period the Soviets were in a position to take over any O-II agents they wanted…During SUCHACKI‟s tenure as chief, he continued to guide O-II from a relatively ineffective intelligence organization to a highly efficient military intelligence service. 336 In 1955 Z-II had a staff of 1,700 officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers, of which 500 were operations officers.337 By the end of that year the new leadership in Moscow had already recalled most of their officers from the LWP to the Soviet Union. „Between 1955 and 1956 the majority of Soviet officers assigned to Z-II were [also] recalled to the Soviet Union‟, 332 Pawlikowicz, Tajny Front, 50-1; and AIPN, BU 509-54, „Zeznanie FLATO z dnia 24.III.1953 r.‟, k. 126-144. Flato, for instance, was forced to admit that he began spying on the Soviets in 1935. 333 Ibid; and Poksiński, Kochański and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 143-4 and 151. Śródborów, near Otwock, is about 25 km from Warsaw. Pawlikowicz, Tajny Front, 51. Quoted in Soviet Espionage through Poland, 10-11. Ibid., 5-6 and 37. On the organizational structure in 1955, see Pawlikowicz, Tajny Front, 51-2. 334 335 336 337 61 Monat testified, „only three or four Soviet officers remained, and they were reassigned as advisors‟.338 The three advisors were Col. Sevastian Poliashenko, Col. Vasili Konstantinov and Col. Grigori Golovochenko.339 Col. Lew Sergiejew (Lev Sergeev) remained in Z-II and in a Polish uniform as deputy chief of the analysis department until December 1957.340 From 1956, Monat acknowledged, „Soviet control over Z-II has been indirect rather than direct. There is now only a Soviet [GRU] Liaison officer assigned to Z-II, Commander Igor AMOSOW [Amosov]‟.341 CONCLUSIONS Considering the global success of „The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‟, the false and malicious claim of a Jewish conspiracy to gain political control of the world, John Klier posits that the actual details of most stories about some kind of Jewish plot are of marginal importance since the narrative can be twisted to fit whatever purpose is required.342 „As for their allure,‟ Klier adds, „if it is true that all interpretations of history can be divided into “cock-up” or “conspiracy” theories, many readers clearly prefer the latter. The perverse charm of conspiracy theories is that they offer a measure of control: if malevolent manipulation underlines world crises, rather than a random succession of events, then one can uncover the plot and resist it‟. 343 Andrew and Mitrokhin argue that while the level of antisemitic and anti-Zionist „paranoia‟ inside the headquarters of Soviet intelligence „dropped off sharply after Stalin‟s death in March 1953, it did not disappear‟.344 The Kremlin never reinstated Jews purged during the late 1940s and early 1950s from their intelligence services. In 1989 „Jews were still excluded (along with a number of other minorities) from the KGB‟.345 Jacek Kuroń‟s explanation for the prevalence of Jewish 338 Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 11. Nalepa, Oficerowie Armii Radzieckiej, 324. Ibid., 112. 339 340 341 Soviet Espionage Through Poland, 11-12. Sourwine asked Monat: „Excuse me, Colonel, but is this the same AMOSOW who was assigned to the Soviet Military Office in Washington, D.C., as Assistant Naval Attaché and declared persona non grata by our Government in 1954?‟ Monat: „Yes, sir‟. During the Cold War it was standard operating procedure for a military attaché from a Warsaw Pact country to serve a tour of duty at his embassy in one of the other „People‟s Democracies‟ after a tour in a capitalist country. 342 Klier, „Underneath the Lot,‟ The Times Literary Supplement (24 Feb. 2006), 7. Ibid. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, 224. Ibid. 343 344 345 62 conspiracy theories among the ruling elite of the PZPR was more direct (and facetious). He told me in 1988: „You have to remember that they [Polish Communists] were educated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion School of History‟. 346 The Korczyński report is a perfect example of both conspiracy theory and paranoia. Following a reference to the „tense situation regarding the Berlin matter, and the signing of peace treaties with the GDR 347 [German Democratic Republic]‟,348 the MI chief observed first that there was „definite weaknesses in the current “peacetime” organizational structure of the Directorate‟. 349 He followed with a revelation of long-held Stalinist suspicions, that party cadres, in this case MI officers, of Jewish origin, were holding back information or were a security risk, responsible for practically every failure suffered by his service. 350 Korczyński made no explicit mention of a Jewish „fifth column‟351 conspiring against the PRL, but the seed of that „Jewish plot‟ was planted in his report.352 The inference in Korczyński‟s report of a Jewish conspiracy inside Z-II would have been especially vivid to any party-state official authorized to read it at the time. That generation was acutely aware that among the first Polish officers to hold command positions in MI were veterans of the International Brigades, among whom were Jews, such as Bryn and Adler-Trojan, recruited into the MI service directly from Palestine. To reverse the negative trends in his service, most notably a series of high profile defections to the West, Korczyński naturally recommended recruiting and training better officers (of Polish origin, of course) to increase the quantity and quality of (non-Jewish spies and therefore) the information his service gathered from the enemy at home and abroad.353 346 My interview with Kuroń in April 1988 during the „unofficial‟ commemorations of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, organized by supporters of the banned Solidarność trade union. Also, see M. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, 1997), 108-9. 347 CAW, 525/85, k. 459. 348 See H. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961 (Princeton, 2003); W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 396-441; D. Selvage, „Khrushchev‟s November 1958 Ultimatum‟, CWIHP Bulletin, 11 (1998), 200-3; and Id., „The End of the Berlin Crisis, 1961-1962‟, Ibid., 218-29. 349 CAW, 525/85, k. 459. The prelude to this leitmotif is reviewed in Gluchowski, „Gomułka Writes to Stalin in 1948‟. 350 351 „Fifth column‟ was coined in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general. As four armed columns he commanded moved to take Madrid, Mola said in a radio broadcast that a fifth column of supporters inside the city would help him defeat the pro-government Republican forces. 352 At the Trade Union Congress of 19 June 1967, Gomułka said „fifth column‟ when he questioned the loyalty to the PRL of „Polish citizens of Jewish nationality‟ who supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli War that same month. D. Stola, Kampania anytsyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 274. The image resonated throughout Poland, still haunted by the actions of a significant pro-Nazi German national minority during the Second World War. 353 Consider, P. Machcewicz, „Sprawa Wiktora Trościanki‟ Rzeczpospolita (18 Sep. 2004). 63 Treason was of great concern to Korczyński. After all, in the PRL and in the USSR, as in much of the Soviet Bloc, treason was also a collective crime. The Polish comrades had been collectively accused by the Kremlin of being „Fascist‟ spies, on and off from roughly 1925 to 1958, and purged accordingly. Their Jewish comrades were collectively accused by the Kremlin—and in time by their Polish Communist allies—of being „Trotskyite‟, later „Zionist‟, but always „Jewish‟ spies, on and off from roughly 1928 to 1968, and purged accordingly. In the collective memory of post-war Polish Communists, two perspectives about the legacy of Trotsky (and in the context of the Polish Communist movement the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg) 354 remained. The first quietly recalled romantic visions of the international proletariat revolution, and alluded to the lese-majesty of labyrinthine disputes with Lenin. The second recalled without reservation the miserable failure of post-revolution revolutionaries, and pointed out the ease with which Stalin physically liquidated Trotsky (and marginalized the ideas of Luxemburg). Polish Communists did not need to be reminded of the Jewish origin of Trotsky (or Luxemburg). The approach taken on the matter of treason in the Soviet Bloc was revealed in 1969 with remarkable clarity by Władysław Bieńkowski, an intellectual, a revolutionary, a former party functionary, later a „lesser‟ Marxist revisionist and „erstwhile friend‟355 of party boss Gomułka. Although Bieńkowski was expelled from the PZPR in 1970, he continued to publish abroad. Characterizing his contribution to the Main Currents of Marxism, Kołakowski356 emphasizes that „in works published outside Poland he analyses the causes of social and economic deterioration under the bureaucratic governments‟ while still appealing „to the Marxist tradition, but goes beyond it in examining the autonomized [spontaneous re-emergence of a sub-group such as Jews or Poles threatened by extinction] mechanisms of political power independent of the class system (in Marx‟s sense of „class‟)‟,357 premised on the theory that „the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles‟. In the midst of the antisemitic purges that first gripped the basic party organizations of every unit of the the LWP following the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, and in the aftermath of the street clashes between Polish state security forces and students in March 1968, as well as the 354 Luxemburg (Róża Luksemburg), a leading Marxist theoretician of Polish, German and Russian social democracy, co-founded the revolutionary Spartacus League in 1916 and the KPD before taking part in an ill-fated Communist uprising in Berlin. In 1919 she was executed by Right-wing paramilitaries. 355 M. Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York, 1982), 152. See Gontarczyk, „Filozof pod lupą‟, Rzeczpospolita (4 Nov. 2006). Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 468. 356 357 64 invasion of Communist Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968, the leading Polish-émigré publishing house released Motors and Brakes of Socialism.358 Bieńkowski, a former PRL education minister, made the following observation about the mechanics of secret policing at the centre of the Soviet camp: The blueprint for action is always the same: it starts with an alert of a threat to the state, the regime, socialism. A real event may be used as an alert—duly stage-managed—or, in the absence, a faked and fabricated one. The alert sets in motion all measures of coercion, some sort of state of emergency is proclaimed, an atmosphere of physical and moral terror is introduced to block any expression not only of dissent but even of doubt...The atmosphere of terror paves the way for new people ready to reform every domain of life—literature, art, science, even the most specialized disciplines. Under a state of emergency, mass expulsions are carried out against people whose dismissal could otherwise prove inconvenient or even give rise to some kind of collective opposition. 359 Calls for alerts (and actions) to counter threats, simultaneously external and internal, real or imagined, to the unity of the Warsaw Pact never had a single source. Such matters were not monopolized by Soviet Bloc internal security and counterintelligence services. Party bosses in the Soviet camp demanded input from their civilian and military intelligence services, too. MI chiefs were no less adamant in supplying their own perspectives. Warsaw Pact MI services were integral parts of the state apparatus of terror and repression. Lenin‟s transmission belt theory of decision-making, which „connects the big wheel‟ revolving „energetically down below with the little wheel up above‟, obliged Communist intelligence services to play a leading role in all efforts to mobilize and discipline the party and society. Feliks Dzierżyński, a humourless fanatic with boundless energy and „a man subsequently elevated to the stature of a Communist saint‟, 360 Adam Ulam reminds us, surely had this in mind when he organized Soviet Russia‟s first intelligence service—the Foreign Department—within the Vserossiiskaya chrezvychaynaya komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiyey, spekulyatsiyey i sabotazhem (All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation, and Sabotage; VChK or Cheka), the prototype for the KGB-GRU and their predecessors, not to mention the special services of the PRL. After noting that KGB officers 358 W. Bieńkowski, Motory i hamulce socjalizmu (Paris, 1969). Quoted in Checinski, Poland, 152. A. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 420. 359 360 65 were always paid on „Chekist Day‟, the twentieth rather than the first of each month, Andrew and Mitrokhin add: The KGB also adopted the Cheka symbols of the sword and the shield: the shield to defend the revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Outside the Lubyanka, the KGB‟s Moscow headquarters, stood a huge statue of the Polish-born head of the VChk,361 Feliks Dzerzhinsky, venerated in countless official hagiographies as the selfless, incorruptible „Knight of the Revolution‟ who slew the dragon of counter-revolution which threatened the young Soviet state.362 A careful reading of the Korczyński report will no doubt convince any reader that the chief of Polish MI had more in mind than just a call for vigilance. Furthermore, I understand the intellectual and practical needs to consider foreign intelligence on its own terms, as well as the desire to exclude domestic or internal security from discussions concerning intelligence. But it is necessary to rethink the dichotomy when discussing Soviet Bloc foreign intelligence during the Cold War. Soviet-east European intelligence officers and their agents were „hacks‟—loyal party workers who served unquestionably—part of the same service as the „thugs‟ from security and their secret collaborators. Any attempt to divorce Soviet Bloc intelligence from security will lead to bad history. These attempts insult the memory of the victims of Communist repression. The differences between the Second World War and the Cold War are obvious. Yet any effort to provide institutions such as the foreign intelligence services of the Soviet Bloc with a special or „honourable‟ status will fail as miserably as did the attempts to portray the members of the Nazi SS as the sole perpetrators of war crimes. The author can be contacted at lwg735@bell.net. Comments, criticisms, corrections and suggestions are welcome, particularly as this essay is part of an ongoing book project. 361 Until 1989, a similar statue stood outside the MSW in Warsaw, on what was then called Dzierżyński Square. Also, see R. Blobaum, Feliks Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism (Boulder, 1984). 362 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 30. Dzierżyński has also been called „a knight without fear or blemish, as almost every Communist writing about him feels compelled to repeat‟. Ulam, The Bolsheviks, 420.