Whatever effect John Paul’s letter had on the Soviet Union continuing to stay its hand in December 1980, it undoubtedly underscored to the Soviet leadership the mortal threat posed by this Polish pope who commanded the world’s attention, who was determined to support Solidarity, and who would almost certainly be in sympathy with the vigorous anticommunist stance that would be taken by the incoming Reagan administration in the United States. Their response to that threat would not be long in coming.
A ROMAN MEETING, AND A NEW AMERICAN PRESIDENT
The SB’s efforts to suborn those close to John Paul II into cooperating with the Polish secret intelligence service were enlarged in the months after Solidarity’s founding. Among the targets were men and women long known to be close to Karol Wojtyła: Fathers Stanisław Dziwisz, Tadeusz Rakoczy, and Andrzej Bardecki; the philosopher Stanisław Grygiel; the poet and journalist Marek Skwarnicki; and Wanda Półtawska, a survivor of Nazi “medical experiments” at the Ravensbruck concentration camp who had helped Wojtyła launch his family ministry program as archbishop of Kraków. None of these efforts succeeded; nor did an exceptionally energetic campaign aimed at Father Adam Boniecki, M.I.C., the chronicler of Wojtyła’s life who had been brought to Rome in April 1980 to launch a Polish monthly edition of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. In Boniecki’s case, when direct efforts at seduction were unavailing, the SB fabricated “compromising” material about him aimed at discrediting him with the Pope. None of it worked.69
As the SB was bending every effort to penetrate the Pope’s closest circle of Polish friends and advisers, Vatican diplomats were being approached by some of their official Polish interlocutors in an attempt to minimize the impact of a visit that a Solidarity delegation was going to make to the Vatican in mid-January 1981. During the first week of that month, Kazimierz Szablewski, the Polish head of the permanent working contacts group established by the Ostpolitik, met with Archbishop Achille Silvestrini, the Vatican “foreign minister” (formally, the head of the Holy See’s Council for the Public Affairs of the Church). According to a secret, coded cable sent to Polish deputy foreign minister Józef Czyrek on January 9 (and shared with party leader Kania and defense minister Jaruzelski), Silvestrini told Szablewski that he counted on him for reliable information about events in Poland, evincing aggravation at the “Poles surrounding the Pope, who do not see fit to act in accordance with the rules and customs prevailing in the Curia,” as Szablewski put it. In the Curia’s view, Szablewski reported, the most urgent requirement in Poland was to “achieve a stable situation as soon as possible,” because a “prolonged unstable situation in Poland” was “potentially dangerous for everyone,” including the Vatican. Evidently piqued that the planning for the Solidarity delegation’s visit was being done by the papal apartment and the Solidarity leadership, rather than through the Secretariat of State, Silvestrini was, according to Szablewski, astonished when the Polish official told him some of the details of the plan, which Szablewski had seen in Warsaw.* Silvestrini then told Szablewski that he would do everything possible to make the Solidarity visit “as reasonable and ordinary as possible,” while also assuring the Pole that he and Cardinal Casaroli would try to ensure that the visit did not have “dangerous consequences.” Szablewski, who concluded the cable by telling Czyrek that he would meet with Cardinal Casaroli in a few days, noted that Archbishop Silvestrini seemed “particularly troubled” by plans for a press conference by the Solidarity delegation, as “there were bound to be questions about the talks between Wałęsa and the Pope.”70
Even considering the possibility that Archbishop Silvestrini was dissembling a bit with his Polish interlocutor in order to provide some maneuvering room for the Pope in a situation in which the Polish government was clearly unhappy, the Szablewski cable suggests that there was tension between senior papal diplomats, such as Casaroli and Silvestrini, and the Pope on the question of how to handle the Solidarity movement. John Paul’s insistence that his involvement in Polish affairs would be run out of the papal apartment with assistance from the papal Secretariat of State, rather than run through the Secretariat of State, clearly rankled. The Pope was determined that the Solidarity delegation’s visit should strengthen the union’s hand in Poland, so he wanted it to have the highest possible character; the diplomats, for their part, wanted it downgraded as much as possible, so as not to complicate their ongoing work with the Polish government through the permanent working contacts group. That Casaroli should have agreed to see Szablewski on short notice suggests how urgently the secretary of state wanted to communicate to Warsaw his continuing commitment to “normalization” and his concern that things not get out of hand in the wake of the Pope’s meeting with Wałęsa and his delegation. At one point in the conversation, when Silvestrini was assuring Szablewski that he and Casaroli knew that the situation was volatile and “potentially dangerous for everyone,” he added (according to Szablewski) “especially since the Pope himself is Polish”—which could have meant two things: that any unraveling could become an international incident, or that the Pope, being Polish, was unpredictable and thus perhaps uncontrollable.71
John Paul met with the Solidarity delegation in several formats and venues between January 15 and January 18, 1981.72 At one meeting, Tadeusz Mazowiecki remembered, the Pope “began by speaking about solidarity to Solidarity,” emphasizing that “Solidarity was not against something or somebody but for something.” It was important, the Pope stressed, to “fight for something,” not simply against something. This was a new and different kind of revolution, a revolution of conscience “directed toward—toward the common good” of national reform. It was a theme to which the Pope returned in a Mass he celebrated for the delegation in the papal apartment chapel before hosting them to breakfast on January 18. Concluding his homily, the Pope asked his fellow Poles and indeed all Poles to “let your work serve human dignity, let it elevate man, let it elevate families, let it elevate the whole people.” Solidarity, the movement, would serve freedom’s cause if it were guided by a familiar biblical antiphon: “I come, Lord, I come, Lord, to do thy will.”73
If the Pope’s views on Solidarity caused concern among his professional diplomats committed to stability and “normalization,” they were enthusiastically shared by the new president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated two days after the Solidarity delegation’s closing Mass and breakfast with John Paul II. Reagan brought to the White House long-standing interests in communism (having fought communists for control of the Screen Actors’ Guild) and in John Paul II; the incoming national security adviser, Richard V. Allen, remembered how impressed and indeed moved Reagan had been by John Paul’s Nine Days, about which the former California governor had spoken in a national radio address. A month after Reagan’s inauguration, as John Paul was returning from a grueling first pilgrimage to Asia and the papal plane briefly touched down in Alaska for refueling, the president sent his old friend William Wilson as his personal emissary to greet the Pope during his minutes on American soil, having rammed Wilson’s clearance through the sclerotic State Department in record time.74
Journalists would later speculate about a “holy alliance” between Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.75 No such “alliance” ever existed. There were, however, interesting parallels between the two men. Both were orphans, at least of a sort; Wojtyła was a genuine orphan before he was twenty-one, while Reagan’s difficult experiences with an alcoholic father had given him something of an orphan’s sensibility. Both were men of the theater, with shared convictions about the power of words. Both took unconventional routes to positions of eminence that the conventional wisdom assumed they would never hold. Both were what might be called positive anticommunists, in that the cause of freedom and the promotion of human rights set the context for their respective critiques of communist theory and practice. As the two men considered the world, neither was locked into the conceptual categories of Realpolitik, as were old-school American conservative
s, liberal American arms controllers, and more than a few senior Vatican diplomats. And because of this, both were unafraid of challenging the conventional wisdom and their own bureaucracies. That challenge would come both in terms of policy (Reagan’s commitment to disarmament rather than arms “control,” and his determination to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative; John Paul’s open support for Solidarity, and for the persecuted Church behind the Iron Curtain) and in terms of personal initiative (as John Paul had done in December 1980, Reagan wrote a personal appeal to Leonid Brezhnev in April 1981; in both instances, the principals’ diplomats were unhappy). Reagan, of course, had ways of signaling his policy that were unavailable to John Paul, for instance, arranging for the booby-trapping of American technology the USSR was stealing through Canada. The bottom line was the same for both men, however: communism, being false, was to be defeated, not simply contained or managed.76
They would soon share another common experience: surviving an assassination attempt, which in Reagan’s case deepened his conviction that the quest for a new, peaceful world order was his vocation, which he ought to pursue in concert with men like John Paul II.77
EVIL TAKES A HAND
Throughout the spring of 1981, Poland lived through a war of nerves between Solidarity and the Polish regime.78 The economy was crumbling. Solidarity was trying to formulate its platform, with Wałęsa struggling to keep the rambunctious movement together and directed on a course of “self-limiting revolution.” A major crisis erupted over brutality against Solidarity activists in Bydgoszcz in March 1981; by keeping its collective head, maintaining nonviolence, gaining some regime concessions through the threat of a general strike, and mounting a major international media offensive, Solidarity managed to pry a major public relations victory out of the jaws of a very ugly situation.79 When the Soviet Union wasn’t spreading disinformation about an alleged meeting between John Paul and the Soviet ambassador to Italy in March 1981 (i.e., behind the backs of a beset Solidarity leadership), its satellites were up to more deadly forms of mischief. Moscow’s client intelligence service, the Afghanistani KHAD, plotted to disrupt a public event John Paul II held in Pakistan in February 1981 by detonating a bomb during the Pope’s homily in a Karachi stadium filled with 100,000 worshipers; the bomb exploded prematurely at the stadium entrance, killing the agent who was to detonate it, along with a local police officer.80
Meanwhile the Polish political scene was changing, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski installed as prime minister on February 9, 1981, not least because he was known as “a sincere friend of the Soviet Union.”81 That friendship would quickly be tested when Jaruzelski and Stanisław Kania, still clinging to his post as head of the Polish Communist Party, were verbally assaulted on March 4 by Leonid Brezhnev and other members of the Soviet Politburo at a Moscow meeting to which they had been peremptorily summoned. Kania, for his part, had made it known to a Polish comrade that “I don’t want to go down in history as the butcher of the Polish people”—a sentiment immediately relayed to the KGB, which presumably read it as a sign of fatal weakness. Nonetheless, on March 27, Kania and Jaruzelski signed a document, “The Central Concept of Introducing Martial Law in the Territory of the Polish People’s Republic,” which set the theoretical and “legal” framework for a massive state intervention to “liquidate Solidarity.”82 A month later, on April 2, Dmitri Ustinov, the Soviet defense minister, told the Politburo that “bloodshed is unavoidable” if communism were to survive in Poland, while KGB chairman Andropov railed against Solidarity as the unthinkable—a political opposition.
The Soviet Politburo clearly recognized that, in the wake of Bydgoszcz, it was losing the game, both in Poland and in the battle for world opinion. Thus on April 3, Jaruzelski and Kania were ordered to come to Brest-Litovsk (scene of the Bolsheviks’ surrender to Wilhelmine Germany in World War I) to be given what amounted to an ultimatum: they were to declare martial law and crush Solidarity, or the Soviet Union would intervene militarily. Jaruzelski and Kania asked for more time. Three weeks later, the Soviet Politburo approved a political analysis of the Polish situation which stated that Solidarity had “been transformed into an organized political force, which has the capacity to … take de facto power into its own hands.” In order to forestall this, and “as a deterrent to counterrevolution,” the Politburo agreed to “exploit to the utmost the fears of international reactionaries and international imperialism that the Soviet Union might send its troops into Poland.” At the same time, the Soviet leadership agreed to “support Comrades Kania and Jaruzelski, who despite their well-known waffling, are in favor of defending Socialism.” On the other hand, the two Poles must be “put under constant pressure to pursue more significant and decisive actions to overcome the crisis and preserve Poland as a Socialist country friendly to the Soviet Union.”83
These fears were exaggerated, however, for things did not unravel for the communist authorities in Poland in late March, April, or early May 1981; they began to unravel for Solidarity. The Bydgoszcz crisis, and the dramatic debate within the movement over whether to use the weapon of a general strike, turned out to have been the high point of the first phase of the Solidarity revolution. Afterward, as one Solidarity historian put it, “it was Solidarity that began to gradually lose the support of a society increasingly weary of the economic crisis and the propaganda noise of the government.”84 Veteran dissident Jacek Kuron detected the change, after Solidarity had won concessions to conclude the Bydgoszcz crisis: “A wave of relief has swept the country. Once people hoisted Wałęsa’s car shoulder high. A short while later they were happy they wouldn’t have to go to war. Then came the disappointment that nothing had changed.”85
That Solidarity had passed its first apogee was not, of course, understood at the time, in either Rome or Moscow. Indeed, Moscow’s campaign to “exploit to the utmost the fears” of the West about a Soviet military intervention in Poland had a pronounced effect in the Roman Curia. In a secret, coded cable of April 3, 1981, Kazimierz Szablewski reported to deputy foreign minister Józef Czyrek on his meeting the day before with Archbishop Achille Silvestrini. The Holy See, Silvestrini indicated, was very, very worried, and Poland had become the chief preoccupation of its international diplomacy. He then reiterated his conviction, and Casaroli’s, that “stability” in Poland was in the interests of the Vatican—and then spelled out what this meant. As Szablewski reconstructed the conversation,
[Stability] means … maintaining and developing everything that lies in the interest of the nation, and rejecting everything that threatens independence and internal peace or could cause grave international upheavals. With this in mind, [Silvestrini] reiterated Casaroli’s well-known arguments about the need to reconcile internal reform and change with basic principles of the political system and international conditions. Poland is viewed very sympathetically in the world for its efforts to reform, but no major world power is interested in developments in Poland that could seriously upset the balance of power—a balance achieved with such effort.86
Silvestrini also worried that what he perceived as saber-rattling by the new American administration was making matters worse, and bringing “some desperate acts closer rather than distancing them from us.” The Vatican’s role in this very grim situation was “obvious: to preserve détente, encourage dialogue, to appease conflicts and strengthen peace.”87
A month later, on May 6, Kazimierz Szablewski met with Cardinal Casaroli and had what he described to deputy foreign minister Czyrek in another enciphered and secret cable as a “lengthy conversation.” According to Szablewski, Casaroli told him that, while there is “great potential for change in the system,” the blunt fact of the matter was that, for Poland, “there is no alternative to socialism”—meaning communism. Casaroli then urged party leader Kania to “persevere” on his “chosen path”; at the same time, the Vatican secretary of state said, “If I could, I would … wish [Polish] society to be more patient.” Casaroli was full of admiration for Wyszyń
ski’s handling of the March crisis, in which the Primate had supported Wałęsa’s moderating line, but he worried aloud to Szablewski that Wyszyński’s declining health would create a bad situation in that his replacement “is unlikely to have the same authority in society.” The senior Vatican diplomat then promised to try to urge moderation on the Reagan administration when he visited the United States in mid-May, and asked that Szablewski keep him fully informed of the Polish government’s views on the Polish situation.88
Cardinal Casaroli thus remained confident that the course of prudence was to stabilize the Yalta system, the balance of power, and the European status quo that, as Silvestrini noted in April, had been achieved with such great effort. The secretary of state’s admonitions to patience on the part of Poles also reflect the veteran diplomat’s sense, which was not shared by John Paul II, that rowdy social movements tended to make a mess of things and in any event vastly complicated the work of the professionals, who ought to be allowed to arrange things according to the dictates of prudence.
That this commitment to stability and playing by the rules of the game was not universally shared was unmistakably demonstrated seven days after the Casaroli/Szablewski meeting, when, on May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter’s Square and gravely wounded by a Turkish gunman and trained assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca.89 It was a very close-run business: according to Gabriel Turowski, a physician and a longtime member of Karol Wojtyła’s Środowisko who came to Rome to help the convalescent pontiff, the bullet that cut through the Pope’s abdomen missed the main abdominal vein by five or six millimeters; had that vital vein been severed, John Paul would have bled to death in five minutes. Moreover, when another bullet hit the Pope’s finger, its trajectory was deflected so that it missed damaging the Pope’s spinal cord and paralyzing him from the waist down.90
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