If these Stasi documents, which reflect the analyses of one of the communist world’s most professionally accomplished intelligence services, may be taken as reflecting at least something of a consensus among communist leadership, it would seem that, while the comrades knew that John Paul II posed a grave threat to their interests, they were unsure, half a year into his papacy, as to the strategy he would follow and the tactics he would deploy. Answers to those questions would not be long in coming.
THE NINE DAYS OF JOHN PAUL II
Edward Gierek’s economics may not have made much sense, but the Polish Communist Party leader was not a fool when it came to reading the sentiments of his countrymen. Thus, advised by Leonid Brezhnev in early 1979 to refuse permission for the Pope to return to his homeland, Gierek explained that it was simply impossible, “for political reasons.” “Well,” Brezhnev responded, “do as you wish. But be careful you don’t regret it later.”31
John Paul’s original idea was to return to Poland in May 1979 so that he could celebrate the annual day in honor of St. Stanisław, his predecessor, in Kraków, while simultaneously presiding at the solemn conclusion of the Synod of Kraków he had convened to implement Vatican II. The communists, sensitive to the symbolic power of the feast day (Stanisław had been martyred while defending the Church’s liberty), dug in their heels and said no to a May pilgrimage. But they agreed to a papal visit the following month. After some serious and effective negotiating, John Paul II happily accepted nine days in June in place of two days in May, and a program that included Gniezno and Częstochowa as well as Warsaw and Kraków. (The Church, for its part, simply shifted the celebration of St. Stanisław to June.)
Despite this strategic error, the Polish communist regime did everything it could to impede the Pope’s visit and diminish its impact, in what the SB and its party masters regarded as a “gigantic ‘damage limitation’ operation” code-named LATA ’79 [SUMMER ’79]. Informants in the Catholic clergy and laity were mobilized and divided into eight categories. The first group, an elite that had had access to Cardinal Wojtyła in the past, included seven moles: DELTA, KAROL, MAREK, JUREK, TUKAN, TRYBUN, and LESZEK; JUREK, a clergyman, was a member of the Church’s organizing committee for the papal pilgrimage. These informants and those in other categories were not simply to provide information to the SB on plans for the papal visit. They were also ordered to infiltrate various Catholic groups and organizing committees to influence their decisions on how to participate in the papal pilgrimage (e.g., to limit the number of participants by raising concerns about safety). This massive anti-papal operation continued during the papal events themselves; 480 SB agents were assigned to monitor events and cause what difficulties they could while the Pope was in Kraków (June 6–10).32
The SB coordinated its anti-papal activities in this period with the Stasi, which deployed several hundred agents to monitor foreign visitors during the papal visit.33 A special Stasi working group was established in Frankfurt an der Oder; the SB arranged for dedicated telephone numbers in Warsaw and Kraków so that Stasi agents could be connected directly to Stasi headquarters in East Berlin; and it was agreed that the two services would share information on the papal visit, especially any that came from circles close to John Paul II. One Stasi agent with access to the Pope, JUNGE, was a Polish priest who worked for East German rather than Polish intelligence. The entire operation was coordinated by Joachim Wiegand, the head of Stasi Department XX/4, which was charged with counter-Catholic activities. Meanwhile, the Stasi chieftain, Markus Wolf, had his own personal source in the Vatican, of whose identity Wiegand was unaware: LICHTBLICK, the German Benedictine Eugen Brammertz, who was registered by the Stasi in 1960 but had Stasi connections long anteceding that date. Brammertz worked in Rome for the German edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily, did occasional work in the Secretariat of State, and would have had access to at least some of its files.34
John Paul II and his closest associates were unaware of the details of LATA ’79 and parallel activities by other communist intelligence services, although they certainly assumed that their old enemies would be at work. Years later the Pope’s secretary would recall their concerns:
The authorities in Warsaw were not acting like Poles; that much is certain. Their determination to give the papal visit the lowest possible profile, their manipulation of the television coverage, their effort to throw up a bunch of ridiculous obstacles in the way of the people, especially by making it hard for the buses to shuttle the pilgrims around—all of that … had nothing to do with Poland or its traditions of hospitality.… I’ve no doubt that the authorities were bowing to pressures from Moscow as well as Prague. They were terrified of how Big Brother might react.35
In the event, none of it made any real difference. June 2–10, 1979, became the dramatic pivot of Karol Wojtyła’s thirty-year-long struggle with communism—nine days during which the history of the twentieth century turned in a fundamental way, thanks to the largest religious gatherings ever seen in the communist-controlled world.36 As a nervous Edward Gierek watched from a hotel window high above Warsaw’s Victory Square, John Paul II celebrated Mass before an enormous crowd and invoked the power of the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the earth—of this land!” From that moment until he wiped a tear from his eye and left for Rome from Kraków’s Balice airport on June 10, Karol Wojtyła showed himself the true master of Polish hearts and minds, by giving back to his people their authentic history and culture—their true identity. He never mentioned politics or economics; beyond the necessary courtesies during the arrival and departure ceremonies, he went about his business as if the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic simply did not exist, at least not in any meaningful sense.37 But by restoring their authentic identity to a people who had been oppressed for forty years—by giving Poland back to the Poles, and giving the Poles back to themselves—he created new tools of resistance that communism simply could not match. Igniting a moral revolution between June 2 and June 10, 1979, John Paul II gave his people the key to their own liberation: the key of aroused consciences.
He could do this because he had grasped the essence of Poland’s modern drama, which he knew from the inside. Thus in his Victory Square homily he reminded his fellow countrymen of the epic heroism and the unshakable faith that had sustained the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when Poland was abandoned by its Western allies and the Red Army sat across the river, doing nothing. Yet beneath the rubble that was Warsaw after the Uprising, Poles found the figure of Christ carrying the cross, fallen from the shattered Holy Cross Church. And that figure reminded Poland of what John Paul called the “one criterion”—Jesus Christ, the true measure of man, of freedom, and of history.
During his Nine Days, John Paul could give one of the greatest performances by a public figure in the twentieth century because of his unique personal gifts, including his uncanny ability to make it seem, in the largest crowds imaginable, that he was talking to each one present personally. In Częstochowa, he addressed a crowd that may have numbered a million, including tens of thousands of Silesian coal miners who had made the trek to Jasna Góra because Edward Gierek wasn’t about to have a pope, even (or perhaps especially) a Polish pope, in his political backyard.38 At one point during John Paul’s sermon, one miner began to make a remark to another, only to be cut off: “Pieronię [Damn it, or Thunderation], don’t talk when the Pope’s speaking to me!” It was an experience replicated all over the country.
What struck observers was not simply the size of the crowds—estimates were that one-third of the country, some eleven million people, saw John Paul II in person—but their orderliness. The Church organized cadres of “papal guards” to help with crowd control (and to assert the Church’s right to conduct its own events). The crowds needed very little control, though, for the Pope’s call to conscience created a new atmosphere, unlike the normal rhythms of life under totalitarianism. As the secular dissident Adam Michnik would put it afterward, “those v
ery people who are ordinarily frustrated and aggressive in shop lines were metamorphosed into a cheerful and happy collectivity, a people filled with dignity.”39 In a country where trust had broken down because of SB provocations and manipulations, Poles could look at one another, see how many “we” were and how many “they” were, and begin to trust one another again. Civil society was on the mend, breathed back into existence by the pope who had called out to God “from the depths of this millennium” to renew the face of Poland and give it a new birth of freedom.
As the people of Poland “saw others who believed the same things and were now willing to say them publicly,” they “rediscovered their own strength”—and, at the same time, “discovered the regime’s weakness.”40 The regime, whose “entire propaganda machine was precisely calibrated to downplay the significance of the visit and, above all, to conceal the size of the enthusiastic crowds,” was hardly unaware of this. Every evening during the papal visit, Stanisław Kania, then a member of the Polish Communist Party Politburo, complained to Archbishop Casaroli, who was accompanying the Pope in his new role as pro-secretary of state, about what the Pope had said that day or might say the next day. Casaroli, for his part, was at least mildly sympathetic to Kania’s complaints, believing as he did that the Polish leadership was constantly looking over its shoulder at Moscow; and he conveyed their concerns to John Paul, who received the information politely and continued on the path he had chosen.41 According to the Stasi’s reports and analysis, Casaroli himself believed that the papal pilgrimage was “the crowning of the Vatican Ostpolitik.” But it is not easy to see how that could have been the case, as getting the Pope into Poland was the personal accomplishment of a Polish pontiff and the terms in which he spoke during those nine days were not the terms of the papal diplomats.42
Whatever its causal relationship to the prior Vatican Ostpolitik, the June 1979 papal pilgrimage to Poland was a turning point, the ramifications of which soon began to make themselves clear. What historian Andrzej Paczkowski once called, in reference to artists, “the exodus from the censored world” now began in earnest, all over Poland.43 Links between the Church and the dissidents of the secular Left accelerated. The Workers’ Defense Committee [KOR] reconstituted itself as the Committee for Social Self-Defense [KSS KOR] and focused its energies on building an “alternative society” while “living in the truth” and preparing the way for evolutionary change in Poland.44
None of this was lost on Moscow Center. The KGB, reporting that the visit had confirmed its worst expectations, charged the Pope with “ideological subversion”; evidently, during the papal visit, the KGB even feared a political uprising by Polish dissidents and made plans to evacuate the Soviet trade mission (which was led by a KGB officer) from Katowice to Czechoslovakia. The Moscow spymasters were also upset because John Paul had called himself, not just a Polish pope, but a “Slav pope”—which led the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party to conclude that the Pope and the Church had begun “an ideological struggle against the Socialist countries.”45
That analysis could only have been confirmed (if not in the precise terms the KGB understood by “ideological subversion”) by John Paul II’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on October 2, 1979, four months after his Victory Square homily. Cardinal Casaroli tried to edit out of the Pope’s speaking text the lines he thought might be offensive to Soviet and other communist ears; John Paul II restored them, and gave a speech in defense of basic human rights that left the delegates from communist countries worried, and not a little angry.46 The Pope began by reminding the world of power that any politics, including world politics, had to begin from a proper understanding of the dignity of the human person; that was why the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was both a “milestone on the long and difficult path of the human race” and the “fundamental document” of the United Nations. Respect for human rights, the Pope continued, was the prerequisite to true peace, for those who committed “injustices in the realm of the human spirit” made peace within and among nations impossible. Then, as if to underscore precisely who the perpetrators of those particular injustices were, John Paul II borrowed from Karol Wojtyła’s sermons at Kraków’s Corpus Christi processions and at Piekary śląskie and chided those countries in which believers were treated as second-or third-class citizens, their professional careers impeded, their right to educate their children denied. The search for truth was essential to man, the Pope concluded. Believers and nonbelievers ought to be able to agree on this as a common matter of humanistic conviction.
The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party might not agree on that. It did agree, however, that something had to be done about John Paul II. Six weeks after the Pope spoke at the UN, the Central Committee Secretariat issued an “absolutely secret” decree, entitled “On Measures of Opposition to the Politics of the Vatican in Relation to Socialist Countries.” This was a political document, assigning tasks to different organs of Soviet state power: the various propaganda, radio, television, and press organs; the Soviet Communist Party’s international department; the Soviet foreign ministry; the KGB; the Soviet Academy of Sciences; the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs; and the Central Committee’s Academy of Social Sciences. Each of these instruments of the Soviet state was to do its own distinct work in combating the “perilous tendencies in the teaching of Pope John Paul II,” which were to be “condemned in proper form.” The decree was signed by the party’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, and was accompanied by several analyses of the situation, including a memorandum, “On the Socio-Political and Ideological Activities of the Vatican on the Contemporary Stage,” that was prepared by the KGB, although nominally authored under the auspices of the Council on Religious Affairs.47 There is no mention in this Central Committee decree of “active measures” against John Paul II; but according to Vasili Mitrokhin’s archive, at the same time as the decree was issued, the “KGB was instructed … to embark on active measures in the West” aimed at frustrating the designs of John Paul II and demonstrating that his efforts were a danger to the Catholic Church. “Active measures” in this context would have included propaganda, disinformation campaigns, blackmail, and other tactics as required, with special focus on persuading the world media that John Paul II was a threat to peace. Contrary to some reports, the Central Committee decree did not order the assassination of John Paul II, for the Central Committee Secretariat was an administrative body that lacked the competence to order such measures. But, according to historian Andrzej Grajewski, the very existence of the decree, as well as what seems to have been a parallel set of secret operational instructions to the KGB on active measures, strongly suggests that, within a year after John Paul II’s election, the Soviet political leadership and the Soviet intelligence considered the Pope the single greatest threat to their position.48
Four months later, in March 1980, John Paul II met in the Vatican with Jan Szczepański, a distinguished sociologist, a member of the Polish Council of State, and a Protestant from the western “recovered territories” While Szczepański made clear that his was an unofficial visit, in that he was not officially representing the Polish government, his report to the Polish ministry of foreign affairs sheds some light on John Paul’s thinking, and Cardinal Casaroli’s, nine months after the Pope’s triumphant visit to his homeland. John Paul, Szczepański reported to the foreign ministry, was “very aware” of the “contradictions” between Marxism and Catholicism, and rejected any form of dialogue aimed at the creation of a hybrid combining “elements from both worldviews,” which, the Pope was convinced, was impossible and would result in something “artificial.” So if the communist side of the equation wished the Church’s assistance in addressing the very real social, political, and economic problems that both sides recognized, it would have to do so on the basis of the Church being allowed to be the Church. At the same time, John Paul II was quite aware that his primary task lay not in being a “player” in solving these problems,
but in strengthening Catholic identity and maintaining the continuity of Catholic doctrine and tradition, which he believed had been seriously eroded in western Europe. In that respect, the Pope’s position “regarding the conflict between atheism and religion” was similar to his concerns about the attenuated religious sensibility in affluent societies: both denied, albeit in very different ways, the instinct toward religious belief that was an integral part of human personhood.
John Paul suggested that Professor Szczepański meet with Cardinal Casaroli, and their discussions were joined by Kazimierz Szablewski, the Polish cochairman of the Polish-Vatican permanent working contacts group. Casaroli’s conversation, as reported by Szczepański, was on a different plane than that of John Paul II, focusing on the sociology of the Christian communities behind the Iron Curtain and the dynamics of politics, stressing the “importance of realism” and the Church’s long history of riding out waves of anticlericalism. There would always be a kind of Thermidor in any revolutionary situation, the cardinal suggested, after which “relations between the Church and socialist countries will become more normalized—and for that, the Church is prepared to wait indefinitely.”49
Some in the Vatican may have indeed been prepared to wait indefinitely. As events would soon demonstrate, however, the wait would not be indefinite nor would the breakthrough come from some Polish communist Thermidor.
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