Then he went on to say, again thoughtfully, "We can ask people to make sacrifices if we can tell them that we are on a definite path. The problem is timing -- that's the main game. What comes first? To do so, we must say we are on the path, that the institutions are established, that they operate, that future development is secured...."
And Poland didn't have that -- that was the problem. There was no assured path as yet, no new institutions. In fact the country was in total chaos. Theories and new terminology abounded. It was a "self-limiting" revolution. There was a dangerous "paralysis of authority." Events were creating "a real socialization of economy, an anarchization of life." In spite of all this it was still a wholly unprecedented attempt to build into a totalitarian society, from within and nonviolently, pluralism and checks and balances and the mechanisms of people's control.
But I soon came to see, too, the all-too-real and new potential danger. The Polish revolution also could become a "zero-sum game," in effect a situation in which all the forces canceled the other ones out. That was the real danger of Poland's winter, which always comes after every August no matter what in life you do, and that was what the Soviets cunningly were watching, were banking on and planning around.
Next to the question of what the romantic, sad-eyed, dramatic, suicidal, wonderful Poles were doing, lay the question of what the Russians were doing with the Poles -- and, most of all, why they hadn't done anything after months and months of the once-unimaginable "Polish revolution."
I finally filed the following column about the Russian policy in Poland. I was and am convinced that it was an entirely different and new policy that we were seeing, and that we were missing it at our own loss:
Warsaw, Poland -- In these last 16 months of the "Polish revolution," not one Western embassy reported from Warsaw that there would ever be a Soviet invasion. Yet almost every one of their home capitals nevertheless insisted there would be. Therein lie some crucial and unanswered questions:
Where are you Russkis? Why haven't you come yet, despite all of Washington's public warnings not to (and many, too many cynical private hopes there that you would)? Are you too busy in Afghanistan and Aden? What the devil are you doing?
The grand and potentially tragic situation in Poland is not something to joke about; but the predictions from Washington, coming almost exactly every three months, that Moscow was about to invade have become a truly bad joke here.
Poles returning from trips to Washington are uniformly angered by American hopes that the Russians will invade and thus "show the world what they really are." One now-out American official, General Bobby Schweitzer, last August even predicted the invasion date: Sept. 22.
This is not only naturally deeply offensive to the Poles, it has also turned out to be a superficial and dangerous misreading of Russian actions and intent in Poland. For the Soviets have used a wholly new tactic in Poland from their all-out invasions of the past. Basically, the new policy is one of tolerating inner reforms in Poland so long as they do not affect the Soviet Union's system of alliances or strategic communications across Poland and -- less certain to observers here--the predominance of the Communist Party.
On its more subtle and sophisticated and cynical level, I call it the Russians' "Wait for winter" policy. For centuries the Russians have been absorbing everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to the Golden Hordes in their vastnesses and in their murderously debilitating winters. Now they are applying that same policy of patient absorption to the Poles' gallant experiment; and if it destroys itself from lack of internal cohesion and degenerates into Civil War, well then nobody in the world will really blame the Russians for invading.
As unknowable as the Kremlin remains, there are a number of indicators to back up this analysis:
--In his recent and unusual interview with the German magazine, Der Stern, Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, asked about the preservation of peace in Europe, very pointedly said, "And I would add, the place of socialist Poland in Europe."
This shows that detente -- the relations between East and West pushed since the early 70s and now abandoned by President Reagan -- was the policy that really opened up Poland and gave it the possibility of changing. But it also shows that the Soviets want Eastern-isolated Poland to play a new role in linking both East and West.
--Well-informed participants here like government spokesman Jerzy Urban stress that in the last 16 months, the Soviets "never expressed any negative attitudes toward the reforms going on here. The Soviet Union never said we were not to have an independent trade union in Poland, but only that we should never attack the system."
Is this a new and different response? "Yes, entirely," Urban went on. "And it might be that the prospectus toward Poland could indicate a crucial change in Soviet attitudes toward all of Eastern Europe. The future of the political experiments going on in these socialist countries depends upon Solidarity's (temperate) responses."
--Solidarity leaders tend to agree with this. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Solidarity national spokesman, pointed out that the Hungarian trade unions actually answered Solidarity's recent letter to them urging cooperation. "Two of three sentences were important," he said, "those in which they indicated we should talk. We were not totally rejected -- and that answer had to be approved by the Soviets."
--On Nov. 21, for the first time, open questions such as "Does Poland lose or win in commercial contacts with the Soviet Union?" have been asked publicly. These were posed, even more extraordinary, in the government paper, Polityka.
While all of this is going on, then, for the United States to talk about the desirability of a Soviet invasion is not only cynical in the extreme, it is completely missing the major new points here. Instead of only a singular policy of obsessively trying to embarrass the Soviets (and condemning the Poles to a new hell), we should be working to help the Poles truly develop the first pluralistic society within the Eastern bloc. Without question, that -- and not the freezing of the bloc that would follow a civil war and an invasion -- is the most effective and even apocalyptic way to change that bloc.
Now, as anyone familiar at all with the Russian policy and inten tions toward Eastern Europe could see, there was a very new and far more sophisticated policy emerging here. Months passed, and yet the Soviets--despite all the dire predictions from Washington -- did not invade.
The problem for me was how, in the midst of all that mystery and alchemy and dissimulation, to get enough information to make this interpretation believable to others. How did I satisfy myself that my analysis was correct? When you are dealing with will-o'-the-wisps and with lightning bugs, where do you as a journalist begin to start catching them?
Fortunately I had a long background of working in and studying of the Soviet Union. My Russian, though rusty, could still be called upon. Without this -- for Russian policies are a little like reading Sanskrit -- I could never have told what had changed; could never have recognized the new signals and realities; could never do what journalists in these situations must do, which is taking all the signals and putting them gradually together.
But I was doing about others only what the Poles were doing about themselves: they were turning inward in the most moving way to discover their own history. It was the history that I had seen in the catacombs of Wawel Castle one Saturday morning in Cracow, where I found the tombs of archbishops and generals all lying together. After World War II the Russians had attempted to wipe out Polish history. It was not taught in the schools; its great heroes were not publicly mentioned. And yet now, thirty years later, after all those years of silence they were rediscovering themselves; or perhaps not so much rediscovering themselves as revealing publicly for the first time in three decades what they had always known inside. And they were doing this in different ways. Small intellectual and university salons studied Polish history, filling in the blanks the Russians had created with their historic lobotomy on the Poles. Solidarity ran history programs. On anniversaries they marched to the formerly unknown graves of nation
al military heroes. Youth groups like the Democratic Youth in Cracow sought out war heroes and graves. I was seeing before me the kind of shining reawakening not only of nationality and of faith but of what I dealt in and lived for -- true information -- that alone keeps people sane in this world.
Just before I left, I had an appointment with Jerzy Urban, a former popular commentator turned government spokesman. He was a small, round man with an almost all-bald pate and he looked very much like the hard line incarnate. But like so much else in Poland then, he wasn't quite what he appeared. Within ten minutes I found myself again deeply involved in one of those Polish paradoxes. For there I was, speaking to the official government spokesman for an hour and a half--rationally, systematically, analytically --about why communism had failed in Poland!
"The reasons were both political and economic," Urban said as we sat in the little room that was colored in the historic Polish colors of dark green and a dark, deep rose. "The Polish economy in the seventies was based on very expensive imports from the Western economy. But we could never produce exports for hard currency. Polish society simply consumed too much of the credits. So the fault with our politicians was that power was exercised in a very arbitrary way and by very few people. There was no control over them, and they got rich at the cost of the people. They became divided from the people. Arrogant. The problem, in one sentence, was that we didn't introduce slow political reforms."
As to the "Why?" of the new Soviet response, Urban gave three other fascinating reasons: "(1) You could really feel the social struggle behind the changes occurring. They were obviously not per formed by small groups. (2) Events in Poland occurred gradually. It was not a sudden uprising endangering the balance of forces in Europe. (3) The Polish character was always different. There was always private property. And the Church. The Soviet Union got used to our differences. It was impossible to change us."
I remember walking out of the big, ponderous, gray government central building that early evening in the rain and suddenly catching myself up and shaking my head. I had been listening for an hour and a half as though it were the most normal thing in the world to have the Polish national spokesman telling me why communism had failed. Suddenly the fact hit me with all its resonances -- it was, simply, extraordinary!
We journalists were, once again, privileged. We were there at the window the moment the curtain opened, and we were the only ones allowed to step inside -- into this wonderland we had suspected, but did not know, existed. Only we were allowed in to seek out the little (in this case, not so little) truths of the great historical saga that had so suddenly revealed itself to the world -- and that could just as suddenly close.
No matter what happened, I knew inside myself that Poland would never again be the same. One of the brightest men at Interpress told me, "We have three crises in Poland--economic, political, and moral. The moral is at the base of the political. And in the moral, we have to first have the clarification in terminology. Until now we have used different terms for the same phenomena. It is the first time that we have different viewpoints but don't feel offended at different viewpoints. We treat it as natural that we differ in viewpoints."
Again -- the importance of "terminology" or of "information." Again - -the purifying aspects of my profession are calling.
Still, as intellectually and morally exciting as it was, Poland was in a dangerous situation of collapse. The forces -- the Communist Party and government, Solidarity, the army and the Church -- could not hammer out the new form of government. And they could not call upon the people to make sacrifices if they could not tell them what the new institutional form that would save them would be. That was the danger. It was not unlike the disintegration I had seen elsewhere, an "ideological Lebanon."
You could often feel and see it collapsing as you made your rainy rounds and observed it. The Polish zloty, at the regular rate, was thirty-three to the dollar. But the black market rate was four hundred to the dollar!
The first night, reacting to the regular rate, I ate carefully in the hotel dining room. After changing the money the second day, I had smoked salmon, creamed mushrooms, chateaubriand, and a good bottle of red wine -- every night. The dinner cost about two dollars.
Did I not feel guilty about sitting there in that relatively nice atmosphere and eating so well, while the Poles were lined up outside every day for hours and hours waiting for the most paltry of food rations? Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. But I did it. I rationalized that I was walking ten miles a day, which was true, and that I needed nourishment. And basically, I knew that whether or not I ate an elaborate dinner didn't matter.
Some nights the dining room reminded me a great deal of the foreign currency bars in Russia; waiters were changing money in every known currency at every table. One night, in a fit of final madness, I attempted even to include in my feast the Russian caviar that was on the menu.
"No caviar," the waiter said impassively. Then he whispered loudly, "You like to buy some in dollars?"
I asked to see it, and he brought it out barely covered with a pink napkin, which he elegantly lifted to display the precious little black cargo. But he was greedy -- he wanted eighty dollars, which after all was what it cost in Washington--and I said, "Absolutely not!"
Another day I was wheeling around Warsaw in the rain with my big, burly cabdriver, who was also my money changer. We would "change" between the seats as we traveled through the city. This day, I said, with rather exaggerated politeness for the situation, "Do you speak English?"
"Nah, nah," he said ebulliently, "Chust money .... Change ....
Changea money .... "
Then, for some reason, I went on to ask him, "Sprechen sie Deutsch?" or, "Do you speak German?"
He started the most eerie singsong. "Nah, nah, chust Geld. ...
Wechseln .... Wechseln Geld .... " Then he proceeded with this strange singsong, in five different languages in which this man of the street and man of our times used only -- only -- words that had to do with "changing money." It became a kind of interchangeable singsong, and as we spun through the streets, I found myself under standing Bertolt Brecht.
Despite these amusing scenes, I knew that what I was seeing was a society falling apart, disintegrating, dying, where some were suffering a greed for freedom and knowledge and others were still indulging their greed for untrammeled power and for "Geld."
***
Exactly two weeks after I left Warsaw that gray, rainy November of 1981, the Polish army declared martial law -- and virtually destroyed the "Polish revolution" -- for the moment. Those of us who had "been there" -- the foreign correspondents, the Western diplomats on the spot, the other analysts -- all said, as had the American embassy, that it would not be a Soviet invasion, that it would be a Polish military takeover. Yet, far away in Washington, ideologues who refused to be governed by "knowing" the intrinsic qualities of a situation again mis-analyzed and mis-predicted what would come. When martial law was declared, they were still predicting a Soviet takeover and therefore were unprepared to respond to the real situation that occurred.
Again the people who "didn't have to be there" but were ... were the ones who were right. They "knew."
XI.
Entering the World of International Terrorism
"The base of the lighthouse is dark."
--Old Japanese proverb
In 1969 I entered the world of international terrorism. I entered as a journalist, which meant an even more intricate balancing act among the dangers than it did for a participant. Journalists are in danger not only for what they might do, but for what they might think, for what they might write, or even for what might be interpreted as their intent or beliefs.
This entire business was full of questions with few answers. How do you analyze guerrilla or terrorist movements? How do you tell the difference between them? What standards do you use; in an area in which no journalistic -- or other -- standards have been hammered out? How do you separate necessity from bruta
lity? How far should you go out of the way to try to balance any imbalance of the general media, such as we certainly had in the Middle East? Finally, how much do you forgive and how do you survive?
I was one of the first journalists thrown into this murderous and maniacal milieu, and one of the very first women, so I was working out guidelines and principles as I went along. The first task, as always and everywhere, was to get to know the people you were writing about, to fathom their cause and problems and correctly to judge their insecurities and insincerities. And this was, of course, made more complicated (to say the very least) when a movement was basically underground and afraid.
Oddly enough, when my foreign editor and friend, Nick Shuman, sent me to the Middle East in the fall of 1969, I had little or no interest in the area, in the Arabs, and particularly in the Palestinians. I had long been extremely pro-Israeli and the "Palestinian question" frankly drew a blank for me. But soon after I was there, I began to realize that this "situation" was not at all what I had been led to believe. I had seen many situations where the reality little resembled what one had been led to expect beforehand -- but never had I seen such a chasm of misunderstanding as this one.
Buying the Night Flight Page 22