Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Among the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Poland after Wojtyła’s election was Oleg Petrovich Buryen (codenamed DEREVLYOV), who posed as the representative of a firm of Canadian publishers. DEREVLYOV claimed to be collecting material about Polish missionaries in the Far East and used this as a pretext for contacting a number of prominent Church figures, most of whom recommended him to others. If arrested by the police or SB, he was told to stick firmly to his cover story and insist that he was a Canadian citizen. In case of real emergency, however, he was instructed to ask to see Colonel Jan Slovikowski of the SB, who appears to have acted as a point of contact for KGB agents who found themselves in difficulty with the Polish authorities. Among DEREVLYOV’s most prized contacts was one of the Pope’s closest friends, Father Józef Tischner, a fellow philosopher who had helped him found the Papal Theological Academy in Kraków. 27Tischner was a frequent visitor to Rome and one of those chosen by John Paul II to revive his spirits when he felt trapped in the Vatican. 28

One of John Paul II’s chief ambitions during the first year of his pontificate was to return to Poland. Early in 1979, horrified that the PUWP Politburo was prepared to contemplate a papal visit, Brezhnev rang Gierek to try to dissuade him. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek replied, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Absurdly, Brezhnev urged him to persuade the Pope to have a diplomatic illness: “Tell the Pope—he is a wise man—that he could announce publicly that he cannot come because he has been taken ill.” When Gierek failed to see the merit of this odd suggestion, Brezhnev told him angrily, “Gomułka was a better Communist [than you] because he wouldn’t receive [Pope] Paul VI in Poland, and nothing awful happened!” The conversation ended with Brezhnev saying, “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your Party don’t regret it later”—at which point Brezhnev put the phone down. 29

On June 2, 1979 more than a million Poles converged on the airport road, on Warsaw’s Victory Square and in the Old City, rebuilt from the rubble after the Second World War, to welcome John Paul II on his emotional return to his homeland. Over the next nine days at least ten million people came to see and hear him; most of the remaining twenty-five million witnessed his triumphal progress through Poland on television. At the end of his visit, as the Pope bade farewell to his home city of Kraków, where, he said, “every stone and brick is dear to me,” men and women wept uncontrollably in the streets. The contrast between the political bankruptcy of the Communist regime and the moral authority of the Catholic Church was plain for all to see.

The papal visit, the Centre reported to the Politburo, had lived up to its worst expectations. 30Many Polish Party members, faced with the Pope’s “ideological subversion” of the Communist regime, felt that the ideological battle had been lost. During the visit the KGB mission in Warsaw had even thought it possible that KOR militants and anti-Communist workers in Kraków might try to seize power from the Party. Emergency preparations were also made to evacuate the Soviet trade mission in Katowice, which was headed by a KGB officer, to Czechoslovakia. 31The Centre believed that John Paul II had set out to challenge the foundations of the whole Soviet Bloc. One KGB report emphasized that he had repeatedly called himself not just the “Polish Pope” but, even more frequently, the “Slav Pope.” 32In his homilies he had recalled one by one the baptism of the peoples of eastern Europe: Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgarians, Moravians, Slovaks, Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Lithuanians:

Pope John Paul II, a Slav, a son of the Polish nation, feels how deeply rooted he is in the soil of history… He comes here to speak before the whole Church, before Europe and the world, about those oft-forgotten nations and peoples. 33

A Politburo document concluded that the Vatican had embarked on an “ideological struggle against Socialist countries.” Since the election of John Paul II, papal policy towards Catholic regions of the Soviet Union—especially in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Byelorussia—had become “more aggressive,” aiding and abetting “disloyal priests.” On November 13 the Central Committee secretariat approved a six-point “Decision to Work Against the Policies of the Vatican in Relation with Socialist States,” prepared by a subcommittee which included Andropov and the deputy chairman of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. The KGB was instructed to organize propaganda campaigns in the Soviet Bloc “to show that Vatican policies go against the life of the Catholic Church” and to embark on active measures in the West “to demonstrate that the leadership of the new Pope, John Paul II, is dangerous to the Catholic Church.” 34

One of the chief priorities of SB foreign operations was to build up an agent network among the Poles in Rome and the Vatican. On June 16, 1980 the KGB mission in Warsaw reported to the Centre:

Our friends [the SB] have serious operational positions [i.e. agents] at their disposal in the Vatican, and these enable them to have direct access to the Pope and to the Roman congregation. Apart from experienced agents, towards whom John Paul II is personally well disposed and who can obtain an audience with him at any time, our friends have agent assets among the leaders of Catholic students who are in constant contact with Vatican circles and have possibilities in Radio Vatican and the Pope’s secretariat.

The Centre responded by proposing a series of KGB/SB “joint long-term operations” with the following aims:

• To influence the Pope towards active support for the idea of international détente [as defined by Moscow], peaceful co-existence and cooperation between states, and to exert a favorable influence on Vatican policy on particular international problems;

• To intensify disagreements between the Vatican and the USA, Israel and other countries;

• To intensify internal disagreements within the Vatican;

• To study, devise and carry out operations to disrupt the Vatican’s plans to strengthen the Churches and religious teaching in Socialist countries;

• To exploit KGB assets in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian and the Armenian-Gregorian Churches; to devise and carry out active measures to counteract the expansion of contacts between these Churches and the Vatican;

• To identify the channels through which the Polish Church increases its influence and invigorates the work of the Church in the Soviet Union.

Because of the Polish Politburo’s anxiety to avoid confrontation with the Catholic Church, however, the Centre had low expectations of what joint KGB/SB operations were likely to achieve:

In our view, so long as our friends [the SB] remain fearful of damaging the development of relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Vatican and between state and Church, they will not display great initiative in implementing the measures which we propose. Officers in our Centre and in the [Warsaw KGB] mission will need to display some tact and flexibility in order to find ways of solving the task before them. 35

Moscow’s fears that the Polish Politburo lacked the nerve to confront the challenge to its authority were heightened by its apparent capitulation to working-class discontent. Sudden rises in food prices in the summer of 1980 sparked off a strike wave which gave birth to the Solidarity trade union movement under the charismatic leadership of a hitherto unknown 37-year-old electrician from Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa. The interior ministry informed the KGB mission in Warsaw that it had established an operations center, headed by Stachura, the deputy minister, to direct police and SB operations against the strikers, monitor the situation and produce daily reports. To judge from a report forwarded to Moscow, the Center was remarkably pleased with its own performance: “The operational staff displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and discipline, and an understanding of their duties; combat-readiness was introduced; leave was canceled; and round-the-clock work was introduced.” While not claiming “complete success,” the operations center claimed to have limited the scale of the strike movement by “eliminating” their printing presses and breaking links between protesters in different parts of the country. In addition, “Attempts by anti-Socialist forces to establish contacts with the artistic, scientific and cultural intelligentsia, in order to enlist their support for the demands of the strikers, were cut short.” 36