With its teacher gone, the Polish team found the impetus it needed and in the 1959 world championships finally upended the Hungarians. For the next five years it dominated world saber. It narrowly lost the team gold to Hungary at the Rome Olympics, but retained its world title in 1961, 1962, and 1963. Pawłowski failed in Tokyo in 1964 (although he was a member of Poland’s épée team as well, which placed fifth!) but took a second world title in 1965 and a third in 1966. In 1967 he came second to a Russian, Mark Rakita. In Mexico in 1968, the whole fencing community waited to see if he could at last triumph at an Olympics. He was thirty-six; time was running out.
János Kevey playacts with his young charges during an outdoor training session. Soon the rebellion would be all too real. (illustration credit 18.1)
There was a six-man final: two Russians, Rakita and Vladimir Nazlimov; the defending Olympic champion, Tibor Pésza of Hungary; one Italian, Rigoli; and two Poles, Pawłowski and the rising star Josef Nowara. Pawłowski lost 5–2 to Pesza, an old nemesis, but won his other bouts, leaving him to fight a barrage with Rakita for the gold. Rakita was one of the great stylists of Russian saber; the son of a prizewinning nuclear scientist, he was not as fast as some rivals but would destroy them on tactics and technique. But that day he could not stop Pawłowski from taking a 3–1 lead. Slightly against character, Rakita then attacked twice, each time Pawłowski counterattacking too late. Next the Russian executed a sharp parry-riposte to take the lead 4–3—a single hit from the gold. Probably expecting a third badly timed counter, he made a third direct attack, but this time Pawłowski took a parry and made a fast riposte: 4–4.
It was a given in the saber community that one did not try to hit Rakita at his head: his quint parry was rock-solid, and he always seemed to know when an attack or riposte was coming there. Now Pawłowski feinted, as if to attack again. Rakita launched into his own attack, but the Pole was ready for him, parried—and hit Rakita in the center of his mask. Poland had its first individual gold, in one of the most popular victories of all time.
THE TEAM KEVEY HAD CREATED WAS REMARKABLE IN A NUMBER OF ways. It was not a cadre of professional athletes, sportsmen with little in mind except the precepts of the fencing hall. Pawłowski, who had taken up the sport late (at sixteen, in 1948), was a qualified lawyer (whose dissertation subject had been “A Critique of Hayek’s Neo-Liberal Conception of Liberty and Law”) and a major in the army, and a protégé of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, later the Polish head of state. Zabłocki would become one of the world’s leading designers of sports stadiums as well as an exhibited watercolorist and an authority on the history of fencing. Zbigniew Czajkowski, another key member of the group, would qualify as a doctor and write over twenty books on fencing and sports psychology. He became manager, then head coach, of Polish fencing (as he is still, in his eighties), helping to take Polish foil and épée to the same level as saber.*
Jerzy Pawłowski lands his second world saber title in 1965. This newspaper cutting was stuck inside the scrapbook of his team colleague and fellow Olympic champion Witek Woyda; years later Woyda learned that throughout this period Pawłowski was sending reports back about him to the Polish authorities. (illustration credit 18.2)
Then there was Ryszard Parulski, world youth saber champion in 1959, world foil champion in 1961, and in 1963 a member of the gold-medal-winning épée team: he became a leading lawyer, representing Solidarity in the 1980s, and president of Polish fencing from 1979 to 1982. Two others on the team were Emil Ochyra, world individual silver medalist in 1961, a depressive who would commit suicide at the age of thirty-five by throwing himself from a window; and Ryszard Zub, who would leave Poland in 1969 for Padua, to become, within three years, saber coach to the Italian team—a remarkable reversal in the normal traffic in top coaches.
But Pawłowski was the group’s prince and seemingly never aged. In all, he was a world finalist eighteen times. In 1973, at the Göteborg championships, he reached the final for the last time at forty-two, only narrowly missing a medal, nearly twenty years after his first. That same year he published his autobiography, Trud olimpijskiego zlota (The Burden of Olympic Gold).4
Pawłowski was a hero not only among fencers. His book on the Olympics, his regular appearances on television, and his talks to sports clubs and army units made him a known figure throughout Poland. He received the highest decorations the state could bestow, and under his auspices fencing grew into one of the country’s most popular sports. Appointed president of Polish fencing while still an active team member, he was also central to dealings between the government and Legia, Warsaw’s leading club, which was subsidized by the army. “So great was the country’s pride in Pawłowski’s prowess,” Time magazine was to report, “that Polish Party chief Edward Gierek is said to have brought the fencer with him to an informal meeting with Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev.”5 In the mid-1960s, while studying law at Warsaw University, Pawłowski drove around in a Mercedes 300—the same model as used by his country’s prime minister. By this time he was living in the center of Warsaw, on Warecki Street, in a five-room apartment full of antiques, expensive books, and good paintings. But people didn’t begrudge their hero his way of life: he had earned it. He was popular outside Poland too; he spoke several languages with ease, and his mischievous charm won him friends worldwide, especially in Britain and America. The ladies loved him and the gentlemen envied him, for the most part without rancor.
Then there was his fencing. At a dinner in Budapest in the 1960s, the U.S. saber captain jokingly said to Pál Kovács that Pawłowski was “the last Hungarian Olympic champion.” Kovács, so great a champion himself, paused only for a moment before agreeing. By then the lightning-fast tear-away of the 1950s had been replaced by a supreme technician with the footwork of a dancer. Not only could he win; he displayed an extraordinary grace, combined with an acute strategic sense. A rival team manager reckoned that Pawłowski had eight different ways of moving forward—eight styles of footwork, each calculated to induce a different reaction.6 One teammate recalls Pawłowski’s lessons with Kevey, their blades moving so fast that even an experienced onlooker could not follow the action.7 In his final years in Poland, Kevey took to giving Pawłowski lessons with a saber in each hand, so that the old coach could parry and riposte almost simultaneously: “Why waste time?” he would say. Pawłowski just got faster.
Pawłowski stories are the stuff of legend. In the early days, before the Hungarians had been toppled, Kevey was still unsure that his young team could win on talent alone. In the late 1950s, during a competition in Budapest before a partisan home crowd, he told Pawłowski—set to fight Zoltán Horváth, who regularly beat him—that if he used his usual tactics he was sure to lose yet again: Horváth’s technical repertoire was too great. Instead, he should use his speed to get an early hit by counterattacking to the head as the Hungarian came forward. Horváth would take note and expect a second flèche; instead Pawłowski should sit back and wait—play with distance, make an occasional false attack, but not commit himself. The crowd would get restless and taunt their champion for not polishing off this diminutive Pole. Horváth, a vain man much given to brooding when his plans went awry, would become frustrated, get too close in his anxiety to score—and Pawłowski could trust himself to flèche again.
The match went ahead as foreseen. Pawłowski scored the first hit, then seemed to do nothing. The crowd started to chant—“Hughue, hughue, hajra!”—exhorting its man on in the words of an ancient battle cry dating back to Attila the Hun. After a few moments of chanting, Pawłowski suddenly stopped, took off his mask, and started to conduct the audience with his saber. Eventually realization dawned—among those looking on, and for Horváth. In Russian the word, pronounced phonetically “Hughie,” coincidentally means “penis,” or, more accurately, “prick”; in Polish, the word is spelled “Huj” but pronounced similarly. The crowd was unintentionally insulting its champion. The fight resumed, Horváth pressed angrily forward, and Pawłowski hit him aga
in and again, to win with ease.8
Pawłowski became adept at playing not only audiences but juries and referees too. In the Buenos Aires world championships of 1962 he confronted Horváth once again, in the culminating match for the team gold. Horváth was set on revenge, especially as there were many Hungarian emigrants in the audience who had come to see their old country triumph; but time and again the judges seemed to miss his hits and give their votes to Pawłowski. Not once but twice Horváth became so furious that he laid mask, glove, and saber on the strip and glared successively at his opponent and each of the five judges. On both occasions Pawłowski—beaming, cracking jokes, winking at the audience—collected Horváth’s equipment and with extravagantly demoralizing courtesy handed it back to him. Poland soon had its second team gold.
The following year, at the world championships in Gdansk, a similar drama unfolded. In the individual final Pawłowski was forced to accept second best, losing to the Russian Jacob Rylski. Three days later came the saber team final, pitting the Poles against a fast-improving Russian side. The match ended in eight victories apiece, which meant that each team would have to nominate one member to a winner-take-all fight-off. Zabłocki had won three of his four bouts, while Pawłowski had lost two, including a 2–5 defeat by Rylski. The Poles told Zabłocki to warm up, which he did energetically, while Pawłowski took a lesson in secret behind the stands. The Russians, deceived, did not put forward Rylski, their new champion, but Ouimar Mavlikanov, as their only fencer to have beaten Zabłocki; and were astounded when Pawłowski took the strip. Minutes before, Pawłowski had been given a shot of neat vodka, which seems to have done the trick: he trounced Mavlikanov 5–0, staggering theatrically off the piste into his teammates’ arms.
This showmanship extended beyond the fencing hall. In 1973 the world championships were held in Göteborg, a city renowned for its nightlife, particularly its sex shows. One distinguished French referee recalls that, taken to the most celebrated of these, he found himself in an audience crowded with fencers from all nations. The show was a pageant of celebrated women from the past, each girl coming on stage “dressed” as a famous figure from history. At its climax, a particularly pretty actress sashayed onstage in an approximation of Marie-Antoinette and slowly, layer by layer, took off the top half of her clothes until she was naked from the waist up. Below, she still wore the enormous bustle of eighteenth-century court fashion. As she moved center stage the bustle, which was hinged, suddenly parted—to reveal Pawłowski, milking the moment for all it was worth. The two performers, straight-faced throughout, took a bow to rapturous applause. How he had inveigled himself into the show, he never revealed.
Pawłowski on the attack against Viktor Sidiak of the USSR, gold medalist of 1972. (illustration credit 18.3)
Pawłowski was still part of the Polish team the following year, at the world championships in Grenoble. He had been ill in the weeks leading up to the event and was not sufficiently prepared: even so, it was a surprise when he was eliminated in the quarterfinals. What none of us knew then was that we would not see him again for more than a decade. It was later alleged that he had planned to stay on in France after the championships. However, his poor showing meant that he was still 2.5 points (the equivalent of a silver medal) away from overtaking Eduardo Mangiarotti as the most successful fencer of all time—an accolade calculated from world and Olympic top-three placings. His plan, he later revealed, had been to get to the Montreal Games, achieve his goal, then apply for asylum in America. Instead, he simply disappeared “as if he had fallen through the earth,” as a Polish reporter put it.
News leaked out over that summer that he had been arrested “for crimes against the interests of the state.” Then other rumors started to make the rounds—that he had committed suicide in Modlin Prison outside Warsaw; that he had been engaged in illegal currency trading (which would not have been unusual: most East European sportsmen dabbled in foreign exchange) or was involved in a smuggling ring; then that he was working for the French, that he was working for NATO, for the KGB, for the British—nobody in the fencing community seemed to know anything for sure. Only one fact was clear: Pawłowski was an army officer; if tried and found guilty of spying, he would face the death penalty.
A rumor began to circulate that a disaffected ex-CIA agent, Philip Agee, had just completed a book, Inside the Company, a CIA Diary, which, while it did not specifically name Pawłowski, nevertheless incriminated him.9 According to the Los Angeles Times, the two had met in Mexico City in 1968, where Agee was working under the cover of special Olympic attaché at the American embassy. When the book appeared in late 1975, it was hard to tell whether it implicated Pawłowski or not. Soon after, in a follow-up volume, On the Run, Agee strenuously denied that he and Pawłowski had ever met and said that the suggestion that he had “fingered” the Pole was an Agency attempt to discredit him because of his criticisms.10
Some time later I heard another version of events, this time from Zbigniew Czajkowski, by now Poland’s head coach. In 1974 a spy working for a NATO power defected to the Bulgarian Embassy in Havana and revealed that he had five coagents. One of them was “Pawel”—Pawłowski’s principal nickname (although he had several others: Polish counterintelligence knew him both as “Szczery,” “The Sincere One,” and “Gracz,” “The Card Player,” because of his fondness for poker; he was also sometimes called “Papuga,” “Parrot”). That same year Pawłowski had been in Moscow and had spent a night with a woman in his hotel room. While she slept he looked inside her handbag and discovered that she had taken his secret notebook, with all his Western addresses and contacts. He recovered it, but sometime later it was stolen from his car. He went once more to Moscow, to sign a publishing deal, but instead was met by security officials at the airport. His friend General Jaruzelski, at that time Minister of Defense, came to his aid, insisting that it was impossible for Pawłowski to be a spy. He was an honest and courageous Pole, against whom there was no conclusive evidence. As with Kevey twenty years before, the case was seemingly dropped, under hazy circumstances.
But a number of Pawłowski’s friends and colleagues knew that something was in the wind. A foil team member had been told that the police were closing in and in January 1975 passed on a warning when they met at training camp. Pawłowski applied for a visa to go abroad and for the first time was refused. One night after practice, when showering with another friend and rising saber star, Jacek Bierkowski, he confided that he was having problems with his passport and admitted that he was desperate.
Even then, he was desperate with style. Just days before his arrest, he and Zabłocki drove to a film set in the countryside outside Warsaw, where they had been invited to take part in a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals. They got chatting with two girls in the makeup department, and Pawłowski suggested to Zabłocki that they stay overnight to see what might come of it. Zabłocki made his excuses and left his friend in sole possession. Whatever else one makes of this episode, it shows remarkable sangfroid. Two weeks later, at the beginning of May, Pawłowski was arrested. Radio Free Europe broadcast the news on June 11.
Just before he was taken into custody, Pawłowski had been pronounced the most outstanding sportsman Poland had produced in more than a decade. Time would call him “the undisputed sports hero of Poland.”11 Thus, as the influential Neue Züricher Zeitung put it, “the news of his arrest shocked the Polish public, especially the army and young people, for whom he was almost a national idol.” The Polish government had “added to this dismay by removing his name from its prominent position in its ‘Program of Patriotic Education.’ ”12
Almost immediately, continued the Zeitung, influential figures in the government and the army had tried to cover up the affair, convinced there would be “unpleasant consequences” if Pawłowski were brought to trial. At the same time, the Russian representative on the Warsaw Pact High Command demanded “an exemplary sentence”—in other words, the death penalty. Pawłowski was interrogated for two and
a half months—which explains why his appearance in court was so long delayed—and eventually put on trial before a Polish military tribunal meeting in secret. It found him guilty and gave him a sentence that had no standing under Polish law—twenty-five years’ imprisonment—for espionage “on behalf of an undesignated NATO country.” There was talk that he had been spared the death sentence because he had used to go out hunting (he was a fine marksman) with Jaruzelski; but the court itself declared that it had not invoked the ultimate penalty because he had admitted his crimes, revealed his contacts, and provided a detailed account of all his spying activities. There had been a tense struggle between the military and civilian authorities as to who would try the case. Had it gone to the civilian courts—more under Moscow’s thumb than the military—Pawłowski would have been unlikely to have survived.
Pawłowski entered the army while a student and rose to the rank of major; in Polish law his treachery carried the death penalty. (illustration credit 18.4)
One of Pawłowski’s friends, Jerzy Kosinski, for many Poland’s leading literary figure, wrote of the affair in Blind Date, a roman à clef published in several languages, which in the absence of an official version became accepted as the most nearly accurate account. The novel revolves around the adventures of its mysterious central character, Levanter. One of his old friends is “J.P.,” a legendary figure: “three times world fencing champion, Olympic gold medalist, winner of scores of other international meets, J.P. ranked as the greatest fencer of all time.”13 After various adventures, Levanter is warned by an Arab diplomat that the Polish government is poised to act against J.P., who sure enough is arrested as he steps off the plane after a trip to New York and taken to a fortress. Kosinski continues:
By the Sword Page 54