Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

According to self-congratulatory SB statistics supplied to the KGB, during the year after the declaration of martial law, 701 underground opposition groups were identified, 430 of them associated with the now-illegal Solidarity; 10,131 individuals were interned; over 400 demonstrations dispersed; 370 illegal printing presses and 1,200 items of printing equipment confiscated; the distribution of over 1.2 million leaflets prevented; and 12 underground Solidarity radio stations closed down. A total of 250,000 members of the security forces were allegedly deployed on these operations, among them 90,000 members of police reserve units, over 30,000 soldiers and 10,000 members of the volunteer police reserve. 82The figures for the deployment of security forces, however, are suspiciously high and may well have been substantially inflated in order to impress Moscow. Jaruzelski commended all those who had taken part in the enforcement of martial law as intrepid defenders of Polish Socialism.

The SB’s biggest problem was Wałęsa, whose worldwide celebrity made it impossible either to subject him to a show trial or to treat him with the casual brutality meted out to less well-known Solidarity activists. (Even Wałęsa’s wife Danuta and their small daughters were subjected to humiliating strip searches.) As the initial shock of internment wore off, however, Wałęsa’s old combative spirit returned and he refused to negotiate with the authorities. The SB’s first tactic was to try to persuade Wałęsa to follow the more accommodating policy of Cardinal Glemp by giving the Primate’s spokesman, Father Alojsy Orszulik, regular access to him. 83Orszulik was initially accompanied by an interior ministry official later identified as Colonel Adam Pietruszka, deputy head of the SB church department, who three years later was to be implicated in the murder of the Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. Wałęsa did not take to Orszulik. When urged to give up his resistance to negotiating with the Military Council for National Salvation, Wałęsa shouted, “They’ll come to me on their knees!” Polish Catholics did not normally shout at their priests and Orszulik seems to have been shocked. According to Wałęsa, he “disapproved of my lack of Christian humility, and it too us some time to get used to each other.” 84

Wałęsa’s clashes with Orszulik had the advantage, so far as the SB was concerned, of alienating Glemp. In January 1982 Kiszczak reported to the KGB, with evident satisfaction and possibly some exaggeration, that Glemp was “completely disenchanted with Wałęsa,” and believed that the leaders of Solidarity “have learned nothing from events and refuse to budge from their previous positions.” 85The SB also informed the KGB that Orszulik’s visits eventually had a “favorable effect” on Wałęsa. 86As Wałęsa later acknowledged, he dropped one by one all his conditions for negotiating with the authorities, “finally aligning himself with the church’s position.” 87

The SB also tried less subtle methods of influencing and discrediting Wałęsa. While working as a shipyard electrician in the early 1970s, Wałęsa had been in contact with the SB. Among the SB files discovered in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Communist regime was one codenamed BOLEK, whose full contents have yet to be revealed and whose authenticity remains to be established, but which is known to contain alleged details of Wałęsa’s role as an SB informer. According to some reports, after seeing a copy of the file in 1992, Wałęsa, by then President of the Polish Republic, began to draft a public statement in which he acknowledged that he had put his signature to “three or four” SB interrogation protocols, but asked for understanding of the difficult position of those pressured by the SB to act as informers in the 1970s. In the end, it is claimed, Wałęsa had second thoughts and scrapped the statement. 88

The KGB files noted by Mitrokhin do not disclose the exact extent of Wałęsa’s cooperation with the SB in the 1970s. But they do reveal that the SB sought to intimidate Wałęsa after his internment by “reminding him that they had paid him money and received information from him.” If Wałęsa did indeed act at one stage of his career as a paid informant of the SB, it is easy to imagine the pressure exerted on him to do so, as on the millions of other informers to Soviet Bloc security services. Kiszczak told the KGB that Wałęsa had been confronted by one of his alleged former SB case officers and a conversation between them tape-recorded. 89

Since the SB did not wish to advertise its vast network of willing and unwilling informers, it made only limited use of Wałęsa’s past contact with it in active measures intended to discredit him. Instead, it resorted to a series of fabrications designed to portray Wałęsa as a greedy, foul-mouthed embezzler. 90To add authentic detail to its forgeries, it stole a tape-recording made by his brother Stanisław during Wałęsa’s birthday celebrations on September 29. 91On November 11, the anniversary of Polish independence, Wałęsa was freed from internment. Moscow was outraged that the news was broadcast in Poland at the same time as the announcement of Brezhnev’s death the previous day. 92Kiszczak sought to reassure Pavlov that, despite Wałęsa’s release, active measures were still in hand to compromise Wałęsa. 93Jaruzelski told Aristov that the material being assembled to discredit Wałęsa included pornographic photographs (presumably of Wałęsa with a mistress) and would expose him as “a scheming, grubby individual with gigantic ambitions.” Wałęsa, Jaruzelski claimed, had already lost half the popular authority he had possessed before his internment. Though he remained a potential threat, he no longer had his Solidarity base and would be unable to rebuild his previous alliance with the church. 94

Moscow was far from reassured. Since the unexpectedly successful introduction of martial law, many of its previous doubts about Jaruzelski had resurfaced. A KGB agent in Jaruzelski’s entourage described him as “the offspring of rich Polish landowners” with little sympathy for working people: “His tendency is pro-Western and he surrounds himself with generals who are descendants of Polish landowners and are anti-Soviet in inclination.” The agent (presumably something of an anti-Semite) also reported that Jaruzelski was in contact with “a representative of Polish Zionism”: “One should examine whether he himself is not a Zionist.” By contrast, Jaruzelski “virtually ignored” the advice of the Soviet ambassador. 95

The reports of both the KGB mission and the Soviet embassy during 1982 repeatedly condemned Jaruzelski’s tolerance of men with revisionist tendencies in the Polish leadership, chief among them Mieczysław Rakowski, whose allegedly defeatist attitude to anti-Socialist forces aroused deep suspicion in Moscow. Rakowski was reported to have told the Council of Ministers in June, “The PUWP is sick. Martial law made it possible to overcome the peak of the opposition, but there is no noticeable change for the better in the attitude of broad layers of the population.” The strength of the Catholic Church meant that a policy of confrontation would be mere “adventurism.” 96A report by Rakowski on June 22 concluded that there were “100,000 hostile teachers” in Polish schools, but that it was impossible to sack them all. 97Jaruzelski was alleged to have told Milewski, “I know that Rakowski is a swine, but I still need him.” In a telegram to Brezhnev on June 29, however, Aristov argued that keeping Rakowski and other like-minded individuals in the Polish leadership was “not simply a tactical move, but a strategic line for Jaruzelski, who shares their position on a number of problems”: “It is therefore very important at the present stage to continue to exert influence on Comrade W. Jaruzelski.” 98