Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  However irritated the military were with Wałesa, the generals could make no serious moves against him. He was too well known, especially after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1983. He dared not go to Stockholm to receive the award, for he feared the junta would not allow him back into Poland. So Danuta went in his stead and read his acceptance speech on his behalf. Mrs Wałesa was no longer the shy, retiring, nervous woman she had been when she married. Though she was in her husband’s shadow, she was not awed by him - or by anybody else, as an extraordinary tape made by the Polish secret service makes clear. Never a Communist, she became vigorously and increasingly opposed to the regime over time. Their home in Pilotów Street, Gdansk, was bugged, as all the family knew. When, on one occasion, SB officers arrived to pickup Wałesa for interrogation, as they routinely did several times a year, he was out. Danuta opened the front door and this was the exchange that followed:CAPTAIN MAREK ROGOWSKI: Where’s Wałesa?

  DANUTA WAŁESA: So walk around the place. Feel at home. Mr Wałesa! Militia here to see you. Hey, you [to another young policeman poking his nose around the rooms]. My husband will be here in a moment.

  CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Let me in. I haven’t come to see you.

  DANUTA: Just wait... What do you think you’re doing? You’re behaving like a thug. What do you mean you have orders? To break into a person’s place and start recording things?

  CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Keep your hands off, Mrs Wałesa. Stop pushing me.

  LECH WAŁESA: (returning home) I’m on sick leave and not supposed to go out . . . You can’t take a sick man by force.

  CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Yes we will.

  DANUTA: So four bulls have come to take my husband away. You’re a thug. Oh, look at that one . . . he looks almost normal . . . Take your gun out and shoot, what do you have to lose? Swines, cannibals. Yes, keep on recording. I’ll smash this ashtray over your heads, you blockheads.

  CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: I warn you that offending a policeman on duty . . .

  DANUTA: I’m a citizen just like you. But I can’t come into your place and record you . . .

  LECH WAŁESA: Calm down, darling. There may be trouble.

  DANUTA: You cops are running around like cats with sick bladders.

  LECH WAŁESA: This is simply an assault on my home.

  DANUTA: Those shits . . . You can’t frighten me though.

  CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI : I will ask our doctor to examine Mr Wałesa.1

  The effort and expense that for many years went into keeping tabs on Lech Wałesa was extraordinary. He calculated once, some time later, after seeing documents about the surveillance operation mounted against him, that the cost of a limited three-week operation - recording and transcribing 170 hours of conversations, paying for twenty-one eight-hour days - could have financed a month’s work of the entire welding unit at the Lenin Shipyard. And that did not cover payment for the night shift, nor the translators’ wages, nor the cost of the cars and police van outside his home.2

  Martial law was lifted in July 1983, but many of the regulations remained in place, principally the ban on Solidarity and on demonstrations. The war of attrition went on for a further three years. Few of the Solidarity leaders who managed to escape on the night martial law was declared stayed out of jail permanently. It was a cloak-and-dagger existence for some of them, said the inspiring young underground Solidarity leader in Warsaw, Zbigniew Bujak. ‘I never stayed at any place for longer than a month - usually for a lot less,’ he said. ‘Each of us was designated a flat, but we never worked in the same place . . . we never met each other in the flats where we were living.’ For some of the martial law period it looked as though Solidarity would disappear, said Bujak - but it was their job to make sure it survived.

  There were rules of engagement, though. The violence from the regime was restrained. Though there were hotheads in Solidarity who had weapons, they were never used. Bujak said that when he discovered that one extreme radical group was stockpiling some rifles he found out where they were, raided the weapons cache, loaded them on to a van and threw the guns into the River Vistula near Warsaw. Some figures in the regime ‘wanted to provoke us towards terrorism . . . but we were not interested in street confrontations . . . if we went down that road, we knew we would lose’. Bogdan Borusewicz, who ran the Gdansk underground, said he was shot at twice in the martial law period, but that was exceptional. On the whole the police did not use their weapons. ‘They were serious about catching us and arresting us but there was an unwritten agreement. Generally they didn’t shoot at us and we didn’t shoot at them . . . We did not step over certain limits . . . and they didn’t keep us in prison too long.’3

  The regime continually tried to create splits amongst the opposition, sometimes subtly, more often with the heavy-handed crudity expected of a military dictatorship. The historian and journalist Adam Michnik was jailed soon after martial law was declared. In December 1983 the Polish Security Minister, General Czesław Kiszczak, summoned Michnik’s girlfriend Basia Labuda to his office. He asked her to convince Michnik to go abroad. ‘I had the choice of spending Christmas on the Riviera or staying in jail for a few more years,’ he said. ‘From a corner in my cell I wrote to him “I know that in my place you would have chosen the Riviera. But that’s the difference between us. You are pigs. We are not. I love Poland, even from my cell. I have no intention of leaving Poland. So don’t count on it.” ’4

  Pope John Paul met President Reagan in the Vatican on 7 June 1982. Despite agreeing on the evils of communism, the two were not ideological soulmates. The President, for a start, was a born-again evangelical of a thoroughly American kind. The Pope disapproved of rampant market capitalism and materialism almost as much as he did of Godless socialism, though his many supporters in the West rarely tended to read his homilies on that subject. Yet the Pope and the President joined forces in support of Solidarity. They agreed to share intelligence on Poland and at first most of it came from the Vatican. The Pope himself and the Polish clergy in Rome maintained good contacts in the country and passed on vital information to Washington. Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey, was an ardent Cold Warrior, a confusing mixture of brilliant thinker and uncouth eccentric who had learned his craft as an Office of Strategic Services operative in World War Two, before the CIA had come into being. He was a voracious reader, but had a strange habit while immersed in a book, or an interesting conversation, of picking his teeth and his fingernails with the same paperclip.f He believed passionately in renewing the psychological, cultural and propaganda wars with the Soviets which had been a been a major part of the superpower struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. Poland, he thought, would be a vital front in that war. Casey, ebullient and unpredictable, was also a devout Catholic. He met regularly in Washington with Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Apostolic Representative in the US, and in the Vatican with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Curia official in charge of foreign affairs, to plan how Solidarity could be provided with material support.5

  Initially it was the Carter administration that began helping Solidarity. Carter’s Polish-born National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was a firm supporter of the union and had helped to raise substantial funds for it privately. But in public the US government was wary: Solidarity’s cause would not be helped if it became known that the American government was aiding the movement, Brzezinski argued, and potentially it could be dangerous for the US to be seen interfering in Polish affairs. Small amounts of American money went towards launching a Solidarity-backed magazine, Kultura, and there was plenty of moral support. At first the Reagan administration was equally cautious and pledged no substantial funds, even immediately after martial law was declared. But a year later the Americans changed their minds and the CIA began funnelling large amounts of money, printing and broadcasting equipment, as well as hundreds of photocopying machines to Poland ‘for the purposes of waging underground political warfare’ according to Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates. It was channelled through the American trade union organis
ation, the AFL-CIO, via its European director Irving Brown, who had worked closely with American intelligence since the earliest Marshall Plan days.

  Casey ‘insisted that deniability was very important for Solidarity’ as well as for the US, said Gates, so elaborate ruses to protect CIA involvement from scrutiny were worked out. The AFL-CIO handed money over to the Institute of Religious Workers, a Catholic organisation with close links to the Curia. Then the Vatican Bank, along with the Banco Ambrosiano, set up shell companies in the Bahamas and Panama in a paper trail that ended in accounts set up by the Solidarity-in-exile office in Brussels run by Jerzy Milewski. A soft-spoken physicist and Solidarity thinker, he had been in the West when General Jaruzelski launched his military coup. A charming, mild-mannered intellectual, he never imagined he would ever spend his days as a bagman for laundered money from an espionage agency, however noble the cause. He organised aid shipments to Poland, through Sweden, hidden amongst consignments of charity donations from the Catholic Church and otherwise legitimate cargo. The Prime Minister Olof Palme - a Solidarity sympathiser - had assured Reagan that Swedish Customs would turn a blind eye to exports destined for Gdansk.

  Did the Polish regime know about the CIA/Vatican aid? General Władisław Pozoga, head of Polish counter-intelligence during martial law, insists, boastfully, that it did. ‘We had infiltrated the [Solidarity] underground with precision,’ he claimed. They had spies in Solidarity’s Brussels office and had agents in Sweden. His boss, the Security Minister Kiszczak, agreed. ‘Because of our agents . . . we kept track of the huge flow of printing materials being smuggled in,’ he said. ‘We could intercept messages sent to, amongst others, Lech Wałesa . . . We broke the codes and thanks to a spy in Milewski’s office all computer-coded intelligence set on . . . disks was read by the secret police.’ They let all the equipment go through and allowed the contacts to continue as a way of ‘keeping tabs on the Underground’, he insisted.

  If the generals knew the extent of the material entering the country it turned into a costly mistake to allow it through unhindered. Printing machines, books and all the communications equipment it was receiving helped to keep the flame of Solidarity alive, during dark days which could easily have seen the movement destroyed. In particular, the Americans sent a clever device, developed by the CIA, which could interrupt television signals. It transmitted a unique beam which over-rode the conventional signal broadcast by state TV. The normal screen would be obscured while a prerecorded screen appeared with the Solidarity logo accompanied by a message saying the movement lived and resistance could triumph. The transmissions were aired at peak viewing periods - at half-time in soccer matches, for example. The device had limited and localised effect - only for a couple of kilometres and for a few minutes. But the broadcasts had a profound psychological impact. They showed that Solidarity was still in a position to confound and embarrass the regime. Viewers were asked to ‘make a sign’ if they had seen the transmissions by switching their house lights on and off, creating spectacular lighting effects during Polish evenings. The CIA continued to supply Solidarity regularly until the end of 1988, with a brief hiatus in 1983 after the SB arrested and expelled an American businessman James Howard, who they claimed was a CIA agent they had picked up at a meeting with Solidarity activists in Warsaw. Altogether over about six years the CIA sent Solidarity, with the Vatican’s assistance, more than US$ 50 million.6

  At around four in the afternoon of 31 October 1984 the body of a badly battered man was fished out of a reservoir near the small town of Włocławek 120 kilometres east of Warsaw. Though he was barely identifiable, bloated and disfigured, the police frogmen who lifted him from the icy water knew whom they had found. It was the remains of a thirty-seven-year-old Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. For the last ten days rumours about the pastor’s disappearance had spread throughout the country. He was the most popular man in Poland - more so even than Lech Wałesa because he wore a cassock and dog collar. Now the suspicion was that he was dead - and well before his body had been discovered, the received wisdom was that his death was a murder and the assassin had been the Communist regime.

  Wałesa called Popiełuszko ‘Solidarity’s unofficial chaplain’ and the government branded him officially a ‘provocateur’. His electric sermons at St Stanisław Kostka in Warsaw attracted regular congregations of 40,000, sometimes more on high days and holidays. He held them in the square outside the church, but people spilled on to adjoining streets to hear him. Each Sunday he spoke of ‘the tears and injuries and blood of workers’. His sermons were beautifully crafted, elegantly expressed and unashamedly political. There were many troublesome priests in Poland, but in the regime’s eyes Popiełuszko was without a doubt the most problematic of them all, the most eloquent and the most able to rouse the public. Apart from his gifts of rhetoric and the power of his faith, it was well known that he also stored substantial amounts of cash for the use of underground Solidarity groups in Warsaw. On the evening of 15 October three SB officers hijacked his car as he was returning to the capital from a visit to Gdansk and abducted him. They carried him from the road to a remote wood. The plan had been to beat the priest and to scare him, not to kill him. But they botched the job. They hit him on the head with a wooden stake and he died. The SB officers panicked and threw him into the Vistula. The public reacted with fury and the government tried to respond swiftly. Communist regimes did not habitually deliver up to justice over-zealous secret policemen. So it was a milestone when the three men who killed Father Popiełuszko and the officer who ordered the abduction were immediately arrested, tried and given long prison sentences.g No conclusive evidence exists to prove that others higher up the chain of command were involved; the deed seems to have been the work of rogue elements in the SB. But the public did not believe it. The conviction spread that there was a cover-up to protect more senior figures.7

  The Popiełuszko murder brought to the surface tensions and splits inside the Polish opposition and the Church. There were extraordinary scenes at the priest’s funeral on Saturday 3 November at St Stanisław Kostka. An estimated 200,000 grieving congregants attended. The Primate, Cardinal Glemp, delivered a moving eulogy about Popiełuszko’s ‘sacrifice’, but privately he was furious that even in death the priest had tried to thwart him. The fifty-five-year-old Cardinal was instinctively pragmatic, a man of compromise. He did not see Popiełuszko as a martyr, but as trouble. At the time of the priest’s death, Glemp was trying to have him transferred from Warsaw, where he was highly visible, to a backwater parish somewhere quiet. Glemp thought that openly political priests threatened the unity of the Church and weakened its bargaining position with the Communists. Often he sided with the regime. He continued to assert that martial law was better than the alternative, which he believed was a Soviet invasion. In one important matter Jaruzelski and Glemp shared a common goal. Both wanted another visit from the Pope - the General because it would legitimise his rule and show that Poland looked like a ‘normal’ country, and the Cardinal because he thought it would strengthen the Church and his own position as Primate.

  The Pope would agree to go only if the country was peaceful. For both Glemp and the regime, that meant that the Church should try to distance itself from the underground activities of Solidarity. Glemp disciplined ‘wayward’ priests, as he called them, and ordered them to keep politics out of their sermons. He summoned 300 of them to Warsaw where he issued a stern warning. ‘I do not see any chances for the political victory of Solidarity,’ he said. ‘After the military victory of the authorities we can expect an attack on the Church. It is therefore the duty of priests to prepare for this . . . by concentrating on religious work. Priests should steer clear of politics.’ He said the Polish Church was in danger of abandoning its spiritual mission for a political one and if that continued it would lose. ‘Some priests are behaving like journalists,’ he said angrily.8

  The Pope returned to Poland in June 1983, to restore hope to a demoralised nation, as he
put it. Part of an agreement the Vatican made with Jaruzelski was that martial law would be lifted if the trip went ahead, and the regime kept its word a month later. The visit lacked the joy and emotion of four years earlier. The crowds were again huge, but more restrained. There were few scenes of ecstasy. Again, as before, the Pope was careful to avoid overtly political statements but when, at a mass before a million people in his beloved Kraków, he spoke of ‘the terrible injustices of history’ and declared that Poles had been ‘called to victory’, his audience knew what he meant.

  After the Pope returned to Rome, Glemp continued to compromise - and became increasingly unpopular. When he was appointed Primate, the Polish Security chief Czesław Kiszczak sent a secret minute to the KGB in Moscow saying Glemp’s elevation was a great relief to the Warsaw regime: ‘The new primate . . . is not as anti-Soviet as his predecessor. Wyszyeski enjoyed immense authority; his word was law. He was the object of a personality cult . . . Glemp is a different kind of man and there are undoubtedly possibilities of exerting influence on him.’ He was right. Glemp’s breach with Solidarity came out into the open after he told a Brazilian journalist in 1984 that Wałesa had lost control of the movement because Solidarity had ‘become a sack into which everything was thrown, all the opposition, Marxists, Trotskyists and then all the careerists and Party members’. He won a few concessions - the regime allowed 900 new churches to be built and Glemp was given permission to appear at Christmas and Easter on TV. But in large and small things he caved in under pressure. A new word entered the Polish language that translated as ‘Glempic’ and was a term meaning sanctimonious waffle.9