Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

It was Jagielski’s turn to address the delegates and the huge crowd gathered outside in the brilliant August sunshine. The deputy prime minister had spent a fretful forty-eight hours, shuttling between Gdańsk and Warsaw for meetings with his Politburo colleagues and the Soviet ambassador. The Kremlin had never responded to the doctrinal query about free trade unions. Polish leaders had taken the Soviet silence as a sign that it was up to them to do whatever was necessary to bring the strikes to an end.

“Esteemed audience,” Jagielski began. “We tried to show the practical limits of what we could undertake and actually implement. I reiterate and confirm what has been said. We talked as Poles should talk to one another, as Pole with Pole.”

As he echoed Wałęsa’s thought, Jagielski was interrupted by a loud burst of applause. By common consent, he had acquitted himself well during the weeklong negotiations. He had represented a corrupt and unpopular regime with dignity.

After the government delegation had departed, members of the strike committee hoisted Wałęsa onto their shoulders and carried him to gate number two one last time. A refrain of Sto lat, sto lat (May he live a hundred years) echoed around the shipyard. As Wałęsa scrambled on top of a forklift truck and punched his fists in the air in celebration of victory, the huge crowd broke out into chants of “Le-szek, Le-szek.” It looked like a scene from a movie: the sea of jubilant, exhausted faces; the white and red Polish flag fluttering in the breeze; the red banner reading “Workers of all Factories, Unite!” Indeed, it soon became a movie. The crowd at the shipyard gate included Andrzej Wajda, who had just come up with an idea for a new film, to be called Man of Iron .

As the cheering died down, Wałęsa told the crowd that he had been unable to achieve anything by himself. “We did this together. Everybody together, that is power. That is strength.” He then reminded his listeners why he kept coming back to gate number two. “My actions are connected to December 1970. Perhaps someone will accuse me of being a dictator, but I say we must always meet here on December 16. Always, always. We must always remember those who were killed.” 100

The chants of “Le-szek, Le-szek” started up again, this time with even greater force. Workers in yellow hard hats flung open the shipyard gates, and the strikers streamed out into the sun-filled streets of Gdańsk. At that moment everything seemed possible. August had been a triumph of memory over forgetting. In fact, the storm clouds were just beginning to gather.

MONITORING THE POLISH DRAMA from his office in the White House, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser was becoming increasingly pessimistic. Like most Polish-Americans, Zbigniew Brzezinski had been exhilarated by the rise of Solidarity and the resurgence of Polish national feeling, but he also found it difficult to believe that the Kremlin would ignore such a serious challenge to its authority. The Soviet Union had shown repeatedly—in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968—that it was willing to use force to defend its East European empire. Polish history was full of brave, but ultimately doomed, insurrections against Russian rule.

Brzezinski knew very well that the United States could not prevent Soviet tanks from rolling into Poland without being prepared to risk a nuclear war. But it could raise the stakes. If Washington had reason to believe that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Poland, it had a duty to say so. In August 1968 the United States had picked up clear evidence of massive Soviet troop movements around Czechoslovakia but had failed to act on the information. American passivity, Brzezinski believed, had unwittingly strengthened the hand of the hard-liners in the Soviet Politburo. Had the Johnson administration warned Brezhnev of the devastating impact that an invasion of Czechoslovakia was likely to have on East-West relations, history might have turned out differently. Brzezinski, the author of the standard university textbook on the Soviet bloc, was determined that Carter would not repeat LBJ’s mistake. His strategy was to make as much noise as possible in order to dissuade the Soviets from military intervention. 101

By the beginning of December American spy satellites had picked up information that seemed to support Brzezinski’s worst fears. Satellite photos showed that civilian traffic along East Germany’s border with Poland had dwindled to a trickle, suggesting that the frontier had been sealed. On Poland’s border with the Soviet Union, soldiers were unfolding hospital tents and stockpiling ammunition. In northern Czechoslovakia long columns of tanks and artillery pieces were moving up to the frontier. The roads were icy and treacherous, making this an unusual time of year to be holding such a huge exercise. Occasionally a tank slithered into a ditch or a telegraph pole. In Poland itself the two Soviet tank divisions stationed near the southwestern town of Legnica were on a state of high alert.

The information gleaned from the spy satellites was confirmed by an exceptionally well-placed Polish agent. Disillusioned with communism and disgusted by the December 1970 massacre of workers in Gdańsk, Colonel Ryszard Kukliński had been cooperating with the CIA for almost a decade. He was an intelligence agent’s dream. A brilliant staff officer completely trusted by the defense minister, General Jaruzelski, he had access to the innermost secrets of the regime. He had already supplied Washington with sensational details about Soviet war plans and the degree to which the Polish army was subject to Kremlin control. In October 1980, just three months after the creation of Solidarity, he had been invited to join a secret working group set up at the Ministry of Defense to lay the groundwork for the introduction of martial law. He was now able to provide the CIA with up-to-the-minute details of the Soviet campaign to intimidate the Polish government. 102

In early December Kukliński reported that the Kremlin had presented Jaruzelski with an ultimatum. A total of eighteen Warsaw Pact divisions—fifteen Soviet, two Czech, and one East German—would enter Poland at midnight on December 8. Polish troops had been ordered to cooperate fully. The operation had been depicted as a routine exercise, code-named Soyuz (Alliance) 80. In reality it was an invasion in disguise. Jaruzelski was so shocked that he shut himself up in his office, refusing to see even his closest associates. He was particularly distressed by the fact that German troops would be participating in the operation. If the ultimatum were carried out, German and Soviet armies would jointly dismember Poland for the second time in half a century. The Polish General Staff was stunned and paralyzed. 103

The threat of a new partition of Poland galvanized Brzezinski into action. Having left Poland at the age of ten, shortly before the Nazi invasion, he had severed most of his ties with his former homeland. But he felt part of a remarkable Polish diaspora that included Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II; Secretary of State Edmund Muskie; Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; and the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, Czesław Miłosz. (Throughout the Solidarity crisis the diaspora acted as a high-powered international think tank on Polish affairs. At one particularly tense moment the pope and the national security adviser conferred by phone in their native language.)

Brzezinski, the son of a prewar Polish diplomat, also had a slight connection with Jaruzelski, the general who was to declare war on Solidarity twelve months later. Brzezinski’s older stepbrother and Jaruzelski both had attended a Catholic boarding school in Warsaw, run on military lines by the Marian friars. 104The two boys spent much of their time reciting mass, parading up and down in dark blue uniforms, and singing songs glorifying Poland’s military dictator, Marshal Piłsudski. When war broke out, the boys were scattered in different directions. The Jaruzelskis were deported to the Soviet Union, and later returned to Poland as standard-bearers for communism. The Brzezinskis ended up in Canada and the United States.