President Ronald Reagan emerged from his cottage at first light for his morning walk. The temperature had dropped below freezing during the night and there was still a little frost. He liked to walk around Camp David, away from the drudgery of work and visitors in Washington. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had this in mind when, in 1942, he turned the area, originally intended for administration employees and their families, into a presidential resting place. Aspen Lodge was a modest hunting lodge. It had a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room, and Reagan and his wife liked to watch the latest films there.
After the walk, he returned to the hut and breathed a sigh of relief, hoping it would be a peaceful day. It was 12 December 1981.
An hour and a half’s drive to the south-east, CIA leaders had been watching what was happening in Poland all day, speculating whether the Polish government, with Soviet support, would decide to declare a state of emergency. If so, it would send tanks into the streets, seize radio and television stations and arrest Solidarity leaders. CIA Director William Casey knew that this meant the destruction of Solidarity. An opposition trade union was a potential disaster for the Soviets, and for some time Soviet troops had been seen massing along the Polish border for a possible intervention like the one needed in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
On the evening of 12 December, the CIA learned that the Poles had cut all telephone lines to the West and closed the Polish border. William Casey, arguably the most influential CIA Director in its history, immediately called a crisis meeting of his staff to find an answer to the question of what to recommend to the White House. Then word came from the CIA section of the Warsaw embassy that General Jaruzelski had declared a state of emergency in the country on television.
Jaruzelski, in his olive-green military uniform, appeared stiff and formal on television. “Our homeland is on the verge of collapse,” he said, glancing nervously at the prepared speech sheet. “Strikes and protests have become the most common means of action. Terror, threats and direct violence are on the increase. Looting, crimes and burglaries are spreading like a wave across the country. Today, the Military Council of National Salvation has been set up and the Council of State has declared a state of emergency throughout the country, in accordance with the Constitution.”
This decision triggered a series of actions – from arrests of prominent Solidarity members to mass protests and riots in the streets – and has significantly shaped Poland’s recent history. The declaration of a state of emergency was almost expected in Poland. It was rumoured that it had been on the minds of the Poles and the Soviets for some time. During secret negotiations with the Soviets, General Florian Siwicki, head of the Polish General Staff, told his Soviet counterparts: “The enemy has had his say. Both sides have outlined their positions. The moment has come when we must begin to fight decisively against the counter-revolution.”
So Poles woke up on a December morning to the sound of tanks rumbling in the streets and Solidarity members being arrested and taken to one of 52 temporary concentration camps around the country. Many of these camps were located in holiday villages. By January 1982, 6000 Solidarity members had been arrested. That night the regime brought 1750 tanks, 1900 armoured vehicles and 9000 other vehicles onto the streets of Polish cities. All trade unions and student organisations were banned, mail was censored and telephone conversations were tapped. Curfews were imposed and all persons over the age of thirteen were required to carry an identity card at all times. Poland was cut off from the rest of the world.
For Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity trade union, who was one of the first to be arrested, it was the beginning of a long and torturous period. He was a shipyard worker who proudly said that he was an anti-intellectual and had never read a serious book in his life. But he had a gift for public speaking. For him, Solidarity was as much an ideological struggle as a struggle for workers’ rights. In August 1980, this electrician from the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk climbed onto an excavator and began to speak to his comrades. The many individual strikes that broke out across the country during the summer months were not responded to by the employees of Poland’s largest shipyard. Even now, it looked as if the shipyard management’s promise of a pay rise would prevent a strike.
But the electrician on the excavator rejected all the proposals made by the management. He demanded the right to form a free and independent trade union and, to the horror of the management, the workers joined him. That was the birth hour of Solidarity, when delegates from 36 regional trade unions gathered in Gdansk and united under the name Solidarity, and soon the membership grew to ten million. They became a serious legitimate opposition to the government.
The Pope was pleased to read that the striking workers were attending church services and even making confessions. But for the Polish regime, this meant only one thing: the workers are under the protection of the Church. But the Church in Poland was not united at that time. Cardinal Wyszinski distanced himself from the workers’ uprising. As a diplomat, he had no understanding of events “on the street” and in his mass on 26 August in Częstochowa he warned the workers not to “demand everything at once.”
But the Polish government relented, and at the end of August a deal was signed that created a global sensation. For the first time in the history of the Communist regime, a free trade union was allowed to be set up and Wales was hailed as a national hero. A deceptive calm prevailed, the strikes were over, but everyone suspected that the struggle was not yet decided.
On 15 January 1981, when no one had even thought of a state of emergency, the Pope received Wales for a private visit at the Vatican. “The son has visited the father,” Wales said at the time. Both the Pope and Walesa were aware that Solidarity is a delicate flower that can be blown away by the wind at any moment, as happened with the uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.
In February, at Moscow’s request, Defence Minister Jaruzelski was appointed Prime Minister. Only a general, such was Moscow’s logic, could satisfactorily resolve the Solidarity issue. But how? Soviet party ideologue Mikhail Suslov said, “I don’t think it will be possible to prevent bloodshed.” And the old men in the Kremlin reacted as they always do. Where there is a “counter-revolution”, only naked force helps.
Helping Solidarity
President Ronald Reagan was beside himself. Only a week ago, the CIA was telling him that a state of emergency in Poland was unlikely. They were wrong. “We have to do something,” he said theatrically, “We have to save Solidarity.”
Weeks ago, the administration discussed allowing the CII to secretly support Solidarity. Most of its advisers were against it, as it would be a direct challenge to Moscow. Now the imposition of a state of emergency was grist for his mill. The very next year, by presidential order, he allowed the CIA to support Solidarity financially “and otherwise”.
This secret programme, called QRHELPFUL, was one of the biggest challenges for the CIA during the Cold War, as it had to build a new secret network and help the resistance behind the Iron Curtain. This meant organising demonstrations, printing propaganda material, engaging in radio propaganda and morally undermining Soviet authority. This CIA covert operation was carried out discreetly and has not been overly discussed by historians even in later years, as a large number of documents are still classified today.
The events in Poland have been followed with particular attention in the Vatican for a long time. Pope John Paul II was not only the Pope of all Catholics, he was above all the “Polish Pope”. The Vatican had a perfectly organised intelligence service for centuries, and so Cardinal Casaroli told the Pope about the letter of protest sent by the Soviet party leader Brezhnev to General Jaruzelski. The contents of the letter were leaked to the Vatican’s confidant, Colonel Kuklinski, who was Jaruzelski’s aide. The letter ended threateningly: “I warn that if Solidarity and the Church play an important role in the exercise of power, this will result in the destruction of socialism.”
On the morning of 30 November 1981, President Reagan’s special envoy, Vernon Walters, visited the Holy Father and showed him the photographs taken by spy satellites. The black and white images clearly showed a column of Soviet tanks slowly approaching the Gdansk shipyard. The Pope knew very well what this meant. Kuklinski knew it too, because he noticed that he was being followed: someone had obviously warned Jaruzelski that there was a spy among his staff.
But the Vatican had a plan for such cases. As usual, when Kuklinski was on his way to a picnic with his car and family, and he drove his car past the Canadian embassy, he took a sharp right turn, the gate to the embassy courtyard opened and Kuklinski drove his car into the embassy courtyard. He and his family were rescued.
General Jaruzelski accepted his aide’s betrayal calmly, but thought bitterly that without the help of the Communist Party, the current Pope would be a marginal figure in the Polish Church. In 1963, the Party had played a decisive role in the election of the new Archbishop of Krakow. It was understood that once the government agreed on a candidate for the new archbishop, his name would be sent to the Vatican for confirmation.
For so long, the government rejected the Polish Church’s proposals, until finally Wojtyla’s name came up. The Party saw him as a man of dialogue with whom many things could be agreed. This hope was still cherished in 1979, when the Pope’s plane landed at Warsaw airport on 2 June. The Pope was visiting his homeland. It was his first visit behind the Iron Curtain.
He was welcomed by a million people and his ride through the city streets was a triumph. The Pope made sure his sermons inspired courage, but he did not call for revolution. Nevertheless, every evening the authorities came to his secretary and the architect of the Vatican’s Eastern policy, Cardinal Casaroli, and complained that the Pope was saying too much, that he was too critical. But on the whole the visit passed off peacefully and both sides were satisfied.
In Moscow, of course, the Pope’s visit had already been opposed. When Leonid Brezhnev learned of the planned visit, he called the Polish party leader Edward Gierek and started arguing with him on the phone. Finally he relented and said, “Do as you like, but make sure you don’t end up regretting it.”
Walesa, who lived in the Zaspa district of Gdansk, was from the outset Jaruzelski’s main target. His flat was not as small as the others. In fact, the Housing Committee allowed him to combine three small apartments into one for his growing family. But the state of emergency changed everything. His wife Danuta initially argued with the police and refused to let her into the flat, but at half past six in the morning, Welsh was taken to Gdansk airport and flown to Warsaw. There he was placed under house arrest in the Warsaw suburb of Chylice, in a villa that had once belonged to a high-ranking party official.
The Bepieczenstwa Sluzba (SB), the Polish security service, has long wanted to discredit him. When he was still working as an electrician in a shipyard, it was in contact with him, and after the fall of the communist regime, someone with the pseudonym Bolek was discovered in the SB archives. The documents suggested that in the early 1970s, long before Solidarity was founded, Walesa was a paid informant.
Soon after the imposition of the state of emergency, the regime took control of important companies and placed them under the control of the military. There were also some political trials, conducted by military courts. The public was excluded from these trials and the accused were not allowed to contact their lawyers. Three-year prison sentences were usually handed down without the possibility of appeal.
Wales was later moved to the aristocratic Otwock Grand Palece villa. Here he was able to receive visits from his interrogators, church and family. In any case, Jaruzelski did not want to make a martyr out of Walesa. The regime also made him tempting offers, promising to restore Solidarity, but without this, that, the other or the third important leader. Walesa refused to do so, even though he was persuaded by several Church dignitaries to reconcile with the regime, as this would be to the benefit of the Polish people.
Soon after, he was moved again, this time to a hunting lodge near the Soviet border. While he was imprisoned, Solidarity set up a temporary coordination commission to coordinate the activities of the union. Solidarity thus survived, though not easily. It published its messages through the illegal press, which proliferated in the country like mushrooms after rain. The first illegal leaflets appeared in the first days after the declaration of the state of emergency. Wales soon realised that strikes and protests would not solve Solidarity’s problem. “I have no intention of causing disorder and organising strikes. I want to find a way out of a complex situation that is only weakening society as a whole. The time has come to reach some kind of agreement.” This conciliatory letter to Jaruzelski, which was also published in the newspapers, was instrumental in getting him released a week later.
After President Reagan approved the funds, Dick Malzahn and other CIA operations officers started organising Solidarity support. Cecilia Larkin, who had previously worked on Polish radio programmes and in the Radio Information Centre abroad, joined the group. The operational centre for Solidarity support was located in the CIE’s Paris office. The CIA Warsaw office had no role in this, as it was under constant surveillance by Polish intelligence. But Dick Malzahn now had a problem, as he had virtually not a single all-round operative at his disposal. Some had excellent knowledge of the situation in Poland and command of the language, but knew nothing about covert operational work; others were excellent operatives, but knew nothing about Poland.
Only slowly was Dick Malzahn getting suitable operatives. One of the first was a Polish émigré, Stanislaw Broda, who had long been involved in the Polish underground press, printing and distributing thousands of books, copies of books, newspapers and magazines in Poland. He had a wide network of printers and underground publishers. When a state of emergency was declared in his homeland, he simply stayed in Paris.
Slowly, the CIA’s team of external operatives grew to almost 30 people, and now they were able to divide up the work. Some of them were in charge of delivering materials (publications, printing machines and other communication equipment) to Solidarity, others were in charge of media liaison, and still others sent money to the families of imprisoned trade union leaders through channels in various countries.
Although President Reagan imposed economic sanctions against Poland, the American public was convinced that this was not the right response to the imposition of a state of emergency and that he should have done more. But the CIA’s programme to help Solidarity was secret and has remained secret throughout. Reagan correctly concluded that Solidarity’s legitimacy would be undermined if it became known that it was supported by the CIA.
Are the Russians behind the assassination?
The Vatican must have been worried about the imposition of a state of emergency in Poland. The Pope of all Catholics, John Paul II, was, after all, a Pole, and it was well known with what reluctance Moscow greeted his appointment as Pope, since it could expect him to lash out with fierce criticism against the communist regime in his own country. This is why, even before the imposition of the state of emergency in Poland, an event occurred which is still not fully explained. Did Moscow have a hand in the middle, because without its consent, such a thing could not have happened?
On 13 May 1981, the Pope rode in an open popemobile among the faithful in St Peter’s Square. There was nothing to suggest that anything unusual was about to happen. The Pope stopped several times to talk to the faithful and to caress small children. At 17.17, however, shots rang out between the colonnades of the cathedral. The Pope was hit by two shots and collapsed, bloodied. He was seriously wounded and the car skidded towards the hospital. The Pope was not feeling well and his private secretary Dziwisz was already administering the Last Sacrament on the way to the hospital. At the Gemelli clinic, surgeons fought for his life for five hours. One bullet hit him in the arm and another, much more dangerous, in the abdomen, missing a major blood vessel by a few millimetres and causing massive bleeding.
The police immediately arrested the assassin, who was shouting “I am!”. His name was Ali Mehmet Agca and he was no stranger to the Pope’s security guards. Already in 1979, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Istanbul, he had written to the Milliyet newspaper that he was going to kill the “leader of the crusaders”. Just a few days before the assassination, Agca escaped from a high-security military prison where he had been held for the murder of a journalist, under circumstances that were never explained. He has now been sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian court in a summary trial.
There were immediate doubts that he was acting alone. He made completely different statements in his interrogations, accusing the Bulgarian secret service, then the KGB and finally the Turkish radical group Grey Wolves of being his employers. He told reporters: “I am Jesus Christ and the Pope knows it.”
Five Bulgarians, members of the Bulgarian secret service, were accused by Italian police of involvement in the assassination, but were acquitted for lack of evidence. Suspicions remained, however. Could the order to assassinate the Pope have come from Moscow, which has often used the services of the Bulgarian secret service for similar acts? Did Moscow want to remove the Pope before he intervened in Poland?
That is why the Vatican was immediately publicly active when the state of emergency was imposed. On the very first day of the state of emergency, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in St Peter’s Square, addressing his fellow countrymen. He knew that millions of Poles would listen to Vatican Radio to hear his voice. “Too much Polish blood has already flowed”, he warned, “Polish blood must not flow again”. While he called on the army to respect human rights, his message was unequivocal. He firmly rejected armed resistance against the regime.
The months began to pass during which John Paul II became one of the key figures in Polish domestic politics. On 18 December, the Pope wrote a letter to General Jaruzelski: “General, go back to the methods of peaceful dialogue by which we have been trying to achieve social reconstruction since August 1980. This may involve difficulties, but it is not impossible.”
His words showed a visible pain for the sacrifices already demanded by the obsessive state, but also an understanding of Jaruzelski’s situation. Both men were tacitly agreed that the imposition of a state of emergency was “the least evil”. The threat of a Soviet invasion, which would undoubtedly have resulted in many deaths, was thus postponed. Later, when he was just a Polish pensioner, Jaruzelski said: “I regret many of the things I ordered and did at that time, but that was my assessment of the situation in Poland at that time.” He firmly rejected rumours that the Soviet leadership was not at all serious about its military intervention.
The Pope’s letter to Jaruzelski began a dialogue of easing tensions between Church and State. At the same time, the Pope tried to support the activities of Solidarity, which was now operating underground, with the sacristies of the churches often serving as warehouses for material smuggled in from abroad. Parish priest Jankowski often recalled such actions: “I was amazed how these things could be so easily smuggled across the border. But I knew that there were Poles in the border authorities and that, in addition to those who supported Solidarity openly, there were also many who supported it secretly.”
On 7 June 1982, the two most important supporters of Solidarity met at the Vatican. Ronald Reagan and the Pope talked for a good quarter of an hour in the Pope’s study without an interpreter. The two men had much in common. Both had been victims of assassination just six weeks apart in 1981, both had acting experience – the Pope as a student in Krakow, Reagan as an actor in Hollywood – and both were convinced that communism’s days were numbered. Both Reagan and Pope Wojtyla believed that the Soviet empire would collapse because of its intrinsic moral nullity. The Pope later spoke of a tree that was internally cracked: “We have only to shake it hard and the rotten apples will fall off by themselves.” The American President was confident that he could make the Pope his ally. But he was only partially successful in this.
The Pope’s attitude towards America has been double-edged. He regarded the social reforms of the West, with all its materialism, as evil and even more dangerous than the atheism of the East. But to bring freedom to the Poles and other peoples of Eastern Europe, he thought that controlled co-operation with the most powerful country in the world was the best way. That Reagan wanted to achieve this through more armaments was contrary to his convictions.
Smuggling
Although the Poles were surprised at the ease with which he got the secret material to Poland, the CIA and Malzahn had to make a real effort to ensure that everything went smoothly. Moscow and the Warsaw Pact countries knew that the West, the trade unions and Solidarity NGOs were sending money and equipment. The Polish authorities therefore tried very hard to prevent this and to confiscate the shipments. The CIA knew that the KGB and the Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies were just waiting for it to slip up, but it also knew that the years of the Cold War had taught it well.
Smuggling money across the border was already dangerous, but smuggling typewriters, photocopiers and printing equipment required trucks and could not be easily transported across the border. It was also important that neither Solidarity nor the Soviets were allowed to know that all these things were being sent and paid for by the CIA. Therefore, the CIA did not do it directly, but used professional smugglers, philanthropists, publishers and sometimes even tourists to do the job. Things thus changed hands through a complex network of people, companies, foundations and geographical locations, so that often even the CIA did not know the route by which things arrived in Poland, nor how the money and things were spent, let alone who got it all and whether Solidarity benefited at all.
So Broda arranged with Cecilia Larkin what had to be sent to Poland, and he also had to provide receipts for the items purchased, as the money came from CIA funds. But she never knew who else Broda was working with, what channels he was using and where the money and equipment ended up. Broda was protecting his smuggling network.
It should be remembered that the distribution of things in Poland was also a long process, taking months at a time. One of the routes used by Broda was an arrangement with a Turkish émigré who had a small coat factory near Warsaw. The Turk bought sheepskins in Italy. When his truck arrived in West Germany, they added Solidarity stuff. In Poland, he handed them over to local smugglers who distributed them to Solidarity. And on the Polish north coast, local sailors received Solidarity shipments from ships coming from Germany, which were dry-docked here.
Sweden was one of the main countries sending aid to Solidarity, accounting for half of the aid. Germany was next with 15% of the aid. In 1983, CIA Director William Casey himself came to Stockholm and asked Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme for cooperation. He agreed, despite Sweden’s strict adherence to neutrality, and so the CIA was able to use its ports and ships unhindered, while Solidarity representatives bribed the Polish port authorities to look the other way when crates were written on with spare parts for tractors, tools and fishing tackle, and contained fire extinguishers filled with propaganda material. And the Solidarity material was never bought in Sweden, but came from various European cities, from Brussel, Rotterdam, Brest and other cities.
The Polish emigration was also active. Marian Kaleta had already settled in Malmö, Sweden, and opened a medical measuring instruments business there. He founded the Kultura association, which collected donations for Solidarity from the strong Polish emigration in southern Sweden. Kaleta paid professional smugglers to ship printing machines, copiers and books by boat to Polish ports along the Baltic coast.
Stanislaw Broda made sure that Solidarity’s cash flow never dried up. He used legal travellers, from academics and mountaineers to skiers and sports teams, as carriers of small sums of money. He often used the Solidarity office in Mainz for smuggling, which was in contact with Polish barges carrying coal to West Germany and returning home full of iron ore and other bulk materials. He often asked for help from the Polish company whose trucks were operating under the TIR arrangement.
The TIR system was created after the end of World War II to make it easier for its members to transport goods across national borders. TIR allowed members to transport items between several countries in sealed trucks, thus avoiding constant customs checks. The CIA agent in Bonn also sent money to Poland via Polish priests, as they were not investigated at the borders.
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Illegal press
In 1983, Lech Walesa returned to his native Gdansk. But the management of the shipyard, probably at Jaruzelski’s request, refused to take him back to his former post. Jaruzelski wanted to make him a “non-existent person”, hoping that Solidarity would not function without its charismatic leader. Walesa, however, still maintained: “We don’t want to throw the government out, we don’t want to push the Party aside and we don’t want to undermine its international commitments. We just want to improve living conditions within the framework of pluralism.”
These were difficult times for Wales and his family. The regime was pressing, and in the spring, if he looked out of his window, he could see young demonstrators clashing with the police in the housing estate where he lived. He was also constantly vilified by the regime and it was hard for him that his family had to watch this too. “Week after week, I had to watch government representatives spitting on me, repeating lies and distorting the truth. I have been called a bourgeois worker, an ignorant butch with too many children, a religious zealot led by the nose by priests, a CIA agent and a tax evader.”
This was a tactic often used in similar cases in Moscow. Walesa was never in contact with the CIA, and the CIA was careful to ensure that he was not aware of its assistance to Solidarity.
Of course, Solidarity needed money to operate. And it was sent by European workers’ unions, philanthropists and emigration. The activists who illegally published the four-page weekly Tygodnik Mazowsze were very frank: “Money, that’s not a sensitive issue. We publish the weekly with individual contributions, also from abroad. Culture from Sweden sends us 1000 dollars every month, we earn 200,000 zlotys from the sale of the newspaper. This more or less covers our expenses, which are around one million zlotys a month.”
Many publishers who printed for Solidarity were arrested or fled abroad. The coordination of the press was therefore taken over by the Interim Coordination Commission, which set up a number of Solidarity-related institutions. These constituted the underground infrastructure of Solidarity. Its first leader was Zbigniew Bujak, a former electrician at the Ursus tractor factory near Warsaw, who managed to avoid arrest and now wrote manifestos and organised press conferences for foreign journalists.
Solidarity sympathisers set up illegal printing presses all over the country. One of the most important was the Oliva printing house in the suburbs of Gdańsk. The entrance was on the ground floor and led through a hidden door, in front of which was a large refrigerated cupboard. Although the police searched the house several times, they did not find the printing house. Some of the printers were larger, others smaller, and these generally used photocopiers, which were sometimes so small that they could be hidden in kitchens or bathrooms.
The distribution of the illegal press to factory workers or university students required a special secret network. The distributors of this press moved through the side streets, dimly lit, carrying the material in rucksacks, sacks or suitcases. The distributor in Bydgoszcz simply tied the newspapers around his torso and put on a winter coat, while other distributors often left a certain number of copies in secret places, in various openings, drains and under church pews.
Radio was also a powerful weapon for Solidarity. Radio programmes such as Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Vatican and Solidarity’s own transmitters were full of messages from the underground. CIA funds were also used to buy portable radios. On 18 April 1982, four months after the imposition of the state of emergency, Radio Solidarity, broadcasting from the roof of a building on Grojecka Street, was heard for the first time. On 9 May it called for a general strike. The station subsequently broadcast from a number of other locations.
However, not all US allies were happy with this kind of propaganda. The West German government refused to allow the CII to operate secret radio stations from its territory. The clandestine radio stations were also used for intelligence gathering. Zygmunt Blazek, for example, had his radio converted so that he could listen in on the conversations of the motorised units of the ZOMO (Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej) police. The operation of illegal radio stations was one of the CIA’s greatest successes. It was therefore not unusual for the Polish authorities and Moscow to decide that this had to stop.
In early 1983, Poland was rocked by a wave of arrests of Solidarity members. The authorities seized Solidarity printing houses in Warsaw, Krakow, Wrocław, Lublin, Katowice and other cities. Above all, they tried to prove that Western intelligence services were behind all the illegal activity. Every time an illegal printing press was discovered, they stressed that it was operating with modern Western equipment.
One of the most dramatic and high-profile attacks took place in the summer cottage of Mariusz Dmochowski, a well-known actor who has starred in almost 50 films, served in the Polish Parliament and was a director of the Warsaw theatre. When the state of emergency was imposed, he returned his party card and resigned from all political posts. He used his cottage in Popowo, south of Warsaw, to print illegal material. The police, of course, had been watching him and the discovery of the printing press in Popowo was broadcast on television with great pomp and publicity.
The Polish secret service, the SB (Security Service), also tried to prevent the smuggling of Solidarity material with the help of agents provocateurs. An SB informant known as Boro infiltrated a supply chain that shipped equipment from Sweden to illegal printing houses. He secretly recorded the crew’s conversations, gathered information about the smugglers, their routes and methods of operation, filmed on film tape how the illegal material was unloaded in Polish ports, and then the SB arrested the participants. The Polish and Soviet secret services were convinced that the CIA was behind such events, but were unable to prove it. “We know the money is coming from somewhere,” said a senior KGB official.
These tensions surfaced when the Polish government expelled two US diplomats, John Zerolis and Daniel Howard, accusing them of interfering in Poland’s internal affairs. Polish-speaking KGB operatives also began to arrive in the country as tourists and tried to make contact with Solidarity members. They also spread anti-Semitic propaganda, said that the Solidarity leadership was homosexual and tried in many ways to undermine its influence.
During this time, the SB identified 701 illegal opposition groups, 430 of which were linked to Solidarity, arrested 10,131 individuals and dispersed around 400 demonstrations. Those imprisoned Solidarity members who were subsequently released by the SB were not left in peace, as they were forced to leave Poland. The CIA knew that the actions of the other side were successful and that Solidarity was considerably weakened as a result.
CIA Director William Casey saw a weakened Solidarity as only part of a bigger problem. As a close confidant of President Reagan, he recognised Moscow’s desire to weaken America’s position around the world. And while Casey was persuading Reagan that this had to be resisted vigorously, not least in Poland, Moscow had a problem, and it was called Wojciech Jaruzelski.
The General and the Pope
Moscow demanded that Jaruzelski be more active, wondering whether he was strong enough to break Solidarity and keep communism pure in the country. Jaruzelski knew that imposing a state of emergency was not the solution and that the Poles would never accept the type of communism that was in place in the Soviet Union. But this dilemma of his did not convince Moscow and the KGB grew increasingly nervous.
“He is a descendant of the landlords and surrounds himself with generals who are also descendants of the landlords and anti-Soviet”, a KGB agent warned Jaruzelski. Vadim Pavlov, head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, and Soviet Ambassador Aristov demanded more arrests and convictions of opposition leaders, especially Lech Walesa.
But Jaruzelski knew that this would cause even more problems and that he had to be especially considerate towards the Catholic Church. Even individuals like Archbishop Jozef Glemp of Warsaw were willing to cooperate with the regime to avoid bloodshed. The KGB mission in Warsaw therefore reported to Moscow that Jaruzelski had said: ‘The Soviet comrades are mistaken if they think that the CK will run Polish politics as in the days of Secretary Gierek. This will not happen. Those days are gone.”
Despite this, the Poles kept Wales under close surveillance and filmed what she was doing. The footage was made into a propaganda film, Money, in which Walesa allegedly smuggled $1 million abroad and asked the Pope to deposit it in the Vatican Bank. SB also edited the dialogue in the film, which consisted of various statements made by Walesa, and falsified his voice.
It was in this spirit that Pope John Paul II visited Poland on 16 June 1983, for the second time since becoming Pope. General Jaruzelski awaited the visit with trepidation. Before agreeing to it, he set some conditions. The visit was to be purely religious, Solidarity was not to be mentioned and the Pope was not to visit Gdańsk, the cradle of the independent trade union movement.
But when the Pope stepped on home ground and kissed them, he made no secret of his concern about what had happened. “I ask those who are suffering to be close to me,” he said. The very next day he met Jaruzelski, who was pale, stiff, thin-skinned and expressionless, in contrast to the affable Pope. He later admitted that his legs and hands were shaking. For any Pole brought up in Catholicism, the Pope was a magical figure.
Finally, the atmosphere has become more relaxed. The Pope: “General, for me the dissolution of the union is a greater pain than the imposition of the state of emergency in December 1981.” Jaruzelski disagreed: “It was a difficult and painful measure for me, but we were in a dramatic situation that really threatened Poland.”
The Pope then visited Warsaw, Czestochowa, Poznan, Wroclaw, Katowice and Krakow. Everywhere, he was greeted by large crowds. Jaruzelski later admitted that the Pope was in a difficult situation: “He was under pressure from the crowds who expected him to lead them to the barricades.” Despite all the contradictions, the Pope and Jaruzelski managed to establish personal contact and a certain degree of trust. As part of this visit, they met for the second time on 22 June in Krakow at Wawel Castle. “It was a very important conversation”, Jaruzelski later admitted.
Even if they were quite close on some issues, they were light years apart on the question of whether the Pope should receive Wales for a visit. Nevertheless, Jaruzelski was forced to give in here, otherwise the Pope would not have come to Poland. He could not allow himself to suffer this fiasco. But this visit was to take place away from the public eye and without photographers.
The Polish regime chose a village near the resort town of Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, where the Pope loved to ski as a young man. The visit lasted less than half an hour and was attended by Jaruzelski. After the visit, Walesa was euphoric and claimed that it helped Solidarity a lot. During the Pope’s visit there were some non-violent demonstrations which were peacefully dispersed by the police. As agreed, the Pope never mentioned Solidarity.
But the apostle’s visit had consequences. A month later, on 22 July 1983, the state of emergency was lifted in Poland, but Jaruzelski made it clear that he would crush any opposition movement: ‘There will be no return to anarchy’. The Polish Catholic Church immediately proposed to the US administration to lift the economic sanctions imposed after the imposition of the state of emergency.
While America was pleased with the Church’s performance in Poland, Moscow was irritated. Yuri Andropov, who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, wrote angrily to Jaruzelski that “the Church is reviving the cult of Walesa, giving it inspiration and encouragement. This means that the Church is confronting the Party in a new way. Today the Church is a strong opposition to socialism and presents itself as the patron and protector of the ideas of Solidarity.”
The Soviet leadership demanded that Jaruzelski tame Solidarity. In April 1984, two months after Yuri Andropov’s death, he was therefore summoned to a meeting in a railway carriage in Brest-Litovsk, attended by Foreign Minister Gromyko and Defence Minister Ustinov from the Soviet side. Gromiko then excitedly reported to the Politburo that Jaruzelski had described the Church as an ally without which there could be no progress.
Mikhail Gorbachev cautiously added: “It seems that Jaruzelski undoubtedly wanted to show the situation in Poland in a better light than it really is. It seems to me that we do not understand his real intentions. Maybe he wants a pluralist way of governing Poland.”
Murder of a Priest
As if Moscow’s pressure was not enough, the Jaruzelski regime now had to face an event that showed how far power is from the heart of the Poles. In October 1984, Father Jerzy Popieluszko did not turn up for morning mass in Zoliborz. Popieluszko was a 37-year-old priest without a hair on his tongue. He was hated by the regime because he opposed it and was a strong supporter of Solidarity. His churches were always full, his sermons were fierce and Radio Free Europe broadcast them throughout the country and also in the Eastern Bloc. This was clearly too much for some structures in the SB.
On 1 October, Popieluszko’s driver Chrostowski took refuge in a church in Toruń. He was barefoot and bloody and told the surprised congregation that Popieluszko and he had been kidnapped by SB agents. They were tied up and pushed into a lorry, but he managed to escape. The scandal was too big to be swept under the carpet and four SB agents were arrested. The youngest of them broke down during the interrogation and took them to a water reservoir by the Vistula River, where they pulled the priest’s body out of the water. The murderers tied large stones to it so that it would sink.
The regime’s response was a shrug of the shoulders, because they cannot follow every priest in the country. But that didn’t help much. At the trial, four SB members were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to 14 years. They did not punish any of the SB leaders, although one of the accused said that the kidnapping was ordered from the top of the Ministry of the Interior. More than a quarter of a million people attended the Mass of Atonement for Popieluszko, led by Archbishop Jozef Glemp of Warsaw. US Senator Edward Kennedy also wanted to attend the service, but the authorities refused to grant him an entry visa.
Time and technology were no longer on the side of Warsaw and Moscow. Reagan’s re-election as President of America coincided with the telecommunications revolution, which tipped the balance from print to electronic media, and the CIA saw a new opportunity.
In 1985, New York Times journalist Michael Kaufman visited Solidarity members in the Warsaw suburb of Legionowo. He was seated in front of a TV set and waited until the 7pm news started. As soon as the announcer began to speak, the slogan Solidarity Alive appeared across the screen and a few minutes later the slogan Listen again to Radio Solidarity.
The Poles have managed to hijack the official TV channel and occasionally send messages like this. Soon the sirens of police cars were heard wailing. “They won’t find us”, the Poles smiled at the American journalist. Only a few thousand families within a two-kilometre radius could read the Solidarity message at the time. But soon similar messages began to appear in different places all over Poland. Much of the credit for this goes to the CIA, which helped Solidarity to leap into the information age. In 1985, it spent a large part of its resources on the purchase of video machines, which began to replace the written word.
For Jaruzelski, television was one of the decisive propaganda tools. The regime therefore tightened border controls considerably and managed to intercept several large shipments of video equipment in the following year. 300 Solidarity activists were also arrested during the year. Among them were Solidarity leaders Bogdan Borusewicz and Zbigniew Bujak.
But the changes in the Soviet Union worked against Jaruzelski and for Reagan. He was woken up one day at 4am and told that Mikhail Gorbachev had become the new General Secretary of the Soviet Party. After Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko was also taken by illness. Chernenko – a wheezing old man who was losing his memory and could not stand up without help, dragging his legs behind him as he walked – passed on, giving way to the comparatively young Gorbachev.
The CIA hoped that Gorbachev would be able to calm things down, and Gorbachev knew that change was needed, including in Poland, including greater freedom of the press and democratisation. Moscow’s pressure on Warsaw eased and Jaruzelski expelled some of his biggest hawks and political prisoners were released from jails. The Cold War was coming to an end and Poland was at the centre of these developments.
At that moment, Pope John Paul II made a dramatic return to his homeland and changed the course of history. On 12 June 1987, he celebrated a public Mass in front of a million faithful in Gdansk. His visit, which lasted until 24 June, marked the resurrection of Solidarity and Poland’s own perestroika. When the Pope received Walesa, Walesa put on his best clothes, knelt before the Pope and kissed his hand. Nevertheless, the authorities were still in place and the police cracked down on all demonstrations in Gdańsk at the time.
Solidarity was still illegal and Wales was strictly controlled, but he could meet journalists and politicians. However, the union’s membership has fallen from what was once ten million to just one million. The enthusiasm of the past was gone, but discontent over worsening living conditions grew, and soon a series of strikes broke out, crippling the economy.
Mikhail Gorbachev visited Poland in July 1988 and made it clear to Jaruzelski that Moscow could no longer maintain the Eastern European empire, as it had neither the means nor the power. Soon afterwards, the Polish authorities announced that they were ready to talk to Solidarity and, once the agonising talks were over, Solidarity became a legal organisation. The agreement also allowed for partially free elections, the first in Eastern Europe for 50 years.
On 4 June 1989, the actress Joanna Szczepkowska announced on TV: “Ladies and gentlemen, on 4 June, communism ended in Poland. “
Jaruzelski resigned as President of the country in 1991 after only one year of his six-year term and lived the rest of his life in isolation, defending himself against accusations and trying to justify his actions. He also wrote several books and gave several interviews. He died in May 2014, aged 90.
Lech Walesa’s fate is different. In December 1990, he won the presidential election and became the first freely elected President of Poland. Despite all this, he is considered a controversial figure. He founded a party, but it performed badly in the 1993 elections. He communicated badly with the media and was often harsh. He also had to defend himself against accusations that he had been an informer for the SB in his youth. Only in his hometown of Gdansk is he still a hero, and Gdansk airport was named after him Lech Walesa Airport.
