NO „ZERO OPTION” BUT A SHAKE UP

The Reform of the Polish Secret Services

by David M. Dastych *

The die is cast. On June 11, 2002 the President of Poland, Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski, put his signature on the Internal Security Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Agency Act of May 24, 2002 and the most controversial reform of the Polish Secret Services became a documented fact. At the same time the Office for State Protection (UOP) ceased to exist. But the Military Counter-Intelligence and Intelligence (WSI) remained almost intact.

This reform, carried out by the present coalition Government, led by the social democrats (SLD), wasn’t the first one in the post-1989 Poland. Urzad Ochrony Panstwa (UOP) (Office for State Protection) was founded on April 6, 1990 as a department of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1996 it was transformed into a separate government agency under the supervision of the Prime Minister. It was responsible for intelligence, counter-intelligence and government electronic security. The UOP replaced the communist-era Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) (Security Service),founded in 1956, whose responsibilities had additionally included the suppression of the opposition to the communist government, prior to 1989. The Military Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (WSI) slipped out of that reform, just changing its former name Wojskowe Sluzby Wewnetrzne (WSW) to Wojskowe Sluzby Informacyjne (WSI).

After the collapse of the communist system in Poland (June, 1989) and in the USSR (December, 1991) there was an urgent need to disband the repressive communist secret service system and to get rid of thousands of its functionaries and secret informants. Each of the post-communist countries dealt with this problem in its own way. The general trend was to verify the professional cadres by dismissing the most compromised functionaries of the regime and to form new institutions and recruit new people. In Poland this had been accomplished in the early 1990s but never to the end. A “ZERO OPTION” or the complete dismissal of the Secret Services (called in Polish: Special Services) and building them anew in the reformed structures and with new people was also sought but never fully materialized. The reasons were simple: the lack of the qualified people to man the Intelligence and Counter-intelligence Services of the democratic country. It was then more easy to organize new institutions with a “mixed personnel”, consisting of the old (previously “verified” or “screened”) agents and the new would be agents, recruited from among the members of the anti-communist opposition. This had been done in practice. The “positively verified” former officers of the  communist Foreign Intelligence and Counter-intelligence were transferred to the Office for State Protection (UOP) and their main task was to train the new admissions. The key jobs were in the hands of the former opposition activists, politically appointed and responsible to the new government. Not a small number of the former officers and agents pleaded loyalty to the Republic of Poland (RP) and voluntarily dropped their obligations to the (communist) People’s Republic of Poland, the state that ceased to exist. Some of the new recruits, mostly young people from anti-communist organizations, quickly learned the trade and advanced, even to the post of the Head of the Counter-intelligence (in UOP), department heads and the like. The former communist functionaries, sacked of their jobs, became professionals in many trades, some went to business and were successful. There were also some “black sheep” who organized their mafia-like organizations and used their spy and spy-catcher’s experience to indulge into the illegal trade in arms, military equipment and nuclear materials and products. Some became the bosses of the narcotic trade or “specialized” in financial and banking swindles. This is often called the “criminal offspring” of the former communist Secret Services.

The verification had been also done in the Military Secret Services (WSI) but no new institutions were founded there. The MI (Military Intelligence) and the MC-I (Military Counter-intelligence) remained subordinated to the Ministry of Defense, headed by a number of civilian politicians from the often changing democratic governments. Some experts and critics of the Military Services claim that there was no reform there and the Services still remain under the influence of the “old” functionaries. This is true only in part as many young officers advanced to the higher ranks on their jobs. The Military Services always were “secretive”, due to the nature of their secret operations, aimed at the protection of the Polish Land Army, Navy and Air Force from enemy spies and at the covert intelligence operations abroad to “steal” foreign countries’ military secrets. But since Poland joined NATO (March 12, 1999), the reform of the Polish Military Secret Services became also a priority.

Turf wars and scandals

From 1990 until 2001 the structures of the Polish secret services were gradually reformed and institutionalized. The “civilian” foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence shifted from the Ministry of the Interior to the Office for State Protection, responsible to the Prime Minister of the Government and the Military Services remained under the Ministry of Defense, now headed by a civilian politician, not by a military person as before. The subsequent governments and presidents of Poland as well as the political parties actually in power engaged in a series of “turf wars” seeking  the hegemony over the Secret Services. Finally a post of the Minister-Coordinator of the Special Services was specially formed to oversee the Services and to report to the Prime Minister and the Government, as well as to the Parliament. All the time during these 11 years there was an open question to what extend the Secret (or Special) Services should be non-political and impartial, serving just to the Polish State. In practice that goal could never be reached as the changing governments formed by a number of political parties and coalitions always wanted to control the Services to their own benefit. Moreover, the control over the Archives of the former SB (Security Service or political police) and the WSW became a top priority to each of the ruling parties and political groups, who used them to compromise and blackmail the opponents by accusing them of being “foreign spies” or secret agents and/or informants of the SB or the WSW, to eliminate them from the active political life and to deprive them of their high posts in the state administration. This trend is being continued until now, however in a more “civilized” way, by the legally approved lustration process of all political figures and public functionaries. By trial in a special Lustration Court theoretically all people holding government or other public jobs can be cleaned of the false accusations or judged guilty of the participation in the former communist repression system. In practice this is sometimes a lottery, as a large part of the secret documents had been destroyed or taken out of the SB and WSI archives before 1990 or even later on.

The best known scandal came out in December 1995. It was the (false) accusation, brought by the then Minister of the Interior, Mr. Andrzej Milczanowski against the Prime Minister of the Government, Mr. Josef Oleksy. The Minister of the Interior, responsible to President Lech Walesa, used the Office of State Protection (UOP) to spy on the Prime Minister from the social-democratic (SLD) government and publicly accused him in the Parliament of being “a Russian spy”. The unproven accusation caused the demission of Prime Minister J. Oleksy and the “spy-case” went to the Military Prosecutor, who dismissed the alleged testimonies of the UOP agents. Mr. Josef Oleksy was found not guilty but the intelligence officers, who manipulated the accusations, were promoted by President Lech Walesa to higher ranks, before Walesa left the Presidential Office, after the lost re-election campaign in 1995 (the winner was the actual president, Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski who is serving his second and last term now). That scandal had a close similarity to a political provocation against the so called post-communist Left. President Walesa, who had the constitutional power over the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense, could have used the “Oleksy spy-case” to introduce the martial law and to remain in the Presidential Palace for a longer time, in spite of the lost elections. Did he really meant to do so? I doubt. But certainly he wanted to prove that the post-communists are “former Soviet agents” not worth to rule the democratic Polish state. If so, the scheme had failed. The Oleksy case wasn’t the last scandal involving the Secret Services. In 2000 both presidents  - Mr. Lech Walesa and Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski - became subject to the lustration trials as contestants in the presidential elections of the year 2000. At that time there were some efforts made with the “help” of the UOP to manipulate by the SB archive documents to prove that both presidents of Poland were communist secret services agents or informants. But the truth prevailed and the presidents were found not guilty. Lech Walesa, again, lost to Aleksander Kwasniewski who became the president of Poland for the second term.

“Zero option” and the Present Reform

In Fall of 2001 there were to be held the elections to the Polish Parliament (the Sejm and the Senat) and the reform of the Secret Services became an important part of the Election Program of the social democrats (SLD - the Social Democratic Alliance, led by Mr. Leszek Miller, the actual Prime Minister of the Government). A long time before the elections, SLD founded a National Security Institute in order to work out a new system of the Secret Services for Poland to replace the one compromised by enduring scandals and political rivalry. At that time the country was still ruled by a bizarre coalition of the Right parties, called AWS (The Election Action Solidarnosc). The Prime minister was then Mr.Buzek and the Minister-Coordinator of the Secret Services was Mr. Palubicki, a former anti-communist activist. Mr. Palubicki’s role in the “turf wars” with the use of the UOP was evident.

The AWS Government wasn’t interested in the reform of the Services, as they were under the control of their own political factions. In fact, the UOP and the WSI have noted a number of successes in the counter-espionage and in disrupting of the organized crime, the mafias and the narcobusiness. But the SLD had it’s own vision of the Secret Services, inspired by the organization of the foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence as well as of the domestic security in some Poland’s NATO partner states in Europe, mainly in Germany and Great Britain. The draft of the reform was prepared by the National Security Institute of the SLD, with the participation of a number of former intelligence and counter-intelligence officers, members of the Special Services Control Commission of the Sejm and it was consulted with the National Security Bureau of the Presidential Office, possibly also with President Kwasniewski himself.

The team working on the reform wanted to change the whole system of the Secret Services, splitting them into two main Agencies: the Foreign Intelligence Agency (Agencja Wywiadu) and the Internal Security Agency (Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego). The office of the Minister-Coordinator should be abolished and, in its place, an Intelligence Community should be established to serve the main political leaders of the country. The Intelligence Community should be led the Head of the Foreign intelligence Agency (AW). The powers of the Internal Security Agency (ABW), formed mainly on  the base of the former UOP should embrace the counter-intelligence, constitutional state protection, a fight against corruption and the organized crime. To some extend the model for the ABW was the American FBI. The AW should be a typical foreign intelligence service, working abroad. It should comprise the intelligence officers of the former UOP as well as a part of the WSI, a number of officers working in strategic intelligence. The both Agencies should be headed by civilian politicians of the actually ruling parties or coalitions, responsible to the Prime Minister and controlled by the Parliament and other state control institutions. The officers in the Agencies should not be political nominees but “state servants”.

Following the parliamentary elections of 2001, won by the social democrats (SLD) and the Government formed by a coalition of the three political parties of the center-left: SLD, UP and PSL the reform of the Secret Services was in progress. The concerning Act was approved by the Sejm in May 2002 and signed by the President in June of this year, after a prolonged discussion and protests from the opposition of the Right parties. The main argument against the reform, voiced by the opposition, was that it enabled the return of former communist functionaries at the cost of the officers and agents recruited by the former political opposition to the communist state. The social democrats reply that it never was true and that the two Agencies will employ non-political staff, selected by their professional qualities. Actually the forming of the two Agencies is in progress and the polemics never ended. The heads of the AW (Mr. Zbigniew Siemiatkowski) and of ABW (Mr. Andrzej Barcikowski) represent the SLD. The lower position jobs are being filled in by intelligence and counter-intelligence professionals. Only the future will prove who was right and how the new Agencies will serve Poland, at home and abroad.

 * The author of this article, Mr. Mariusz Dawid Dastych, is a veteran journalist, political analyst and a former intelligence operative, living in Poland. Presently a free-lance writer and contributor to several foreign institutes of strategic studies and “think tanks”.