In Poland itself, post–martial law politics gave new meaning to Vá-clav Havel’s memorable description of communism as a culture of lies.4 Prior to the imposition of martial law, the “Front of National Unity,” the political facade behind which and through which the communist party controlled the Sejm, the rubber-stamp Polish parliament, was dissolved; a new entity that would maintain the fiction of a political coalition in charge of Poland’s affairs was needed. Thus the Patriotic Movement for National Renewal [PRON] was born; slightly more pluralistic than its predecessor, it nonetheless shared the old Front’s task of being a “platform on which various groups that supported the status quo could rally to the side of the party.”5 Its further purpose, in addition to providing cover for martial law, was to create a regime-controlled alternative to underground Solidarity.6
Martial law inevitably led to political divisions within Solidarity. Some Solidarity leaders proposed organizing for a general strike, while others preferred what came to be known as the “long road” approach, which focused on rebuilding civil society. After the imposition of martial law, these options were debated in a clandestine press despite the regime’s efforts to crush Solidarity’s publishing capabilities; historian Andrzej Paczkowski estimates that “during the course of 1982 at least eight hundred illegal periodicals appeared, most of them associated with Solidarity groups and organizations.”7 An Interim Coordinating Commission [TKK], which came to be recognized as the de facto leadership of underground Solidarity, was established on April 22, 1982. The TKK subsequently spun off affiliated organizations, including a Foreign Coordinating Bureau in Brussels. Clandestine educational, cultural, scientific, and farmers’ organizations were also organized, all parts of a complex network of “underground society.” The Church in Poland played a key role in providing free space for independent, non-regime-controlled educational and cultural activities. Churches opened themselves to “evening poetry readings, theater performances, exhibitions, and even popular scientific sessions.”8 St. Brigid’s Church in Warsaw (Wałęsa’s parish), St. Maximilian Kolbe Church in Nowa Huta, and the Church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Warsaw were among the leaders in this kind of work; at the latter, a young priest named Jerzy Popiełuszko began to make a name for himself as a popular preacher at a regular “Mass for the Fatherland.” Such Masses, and the cultural and educational activities surrounding them, “played a major role in maintaining the will to resist among the broad ranks of believers.”9 Like John Paul II, the Polish episcopate had been cautious in its public statements after the imposition of martial law. Still, the sanction given by the Catholic hierarchy to these church-based exercises in “free space” (or, perhaps better, “moral extraterritoriality”) cannot be gainsaid as a significant factor in maintaining a civil society alternative to totalitarianism in Poland.10
The debate over direct action or the “long road” did not last more than a few months. Despite the wealth of clandestine enterprises under way, it was clear to most activists that the regime’s political and economic control of the country was such that only the path charted by John Paul II during the Nine Days of June 1979—the reconstitution of civil society and public moral culture—held any hope of success over time. Meanwhile, the Pope himself was being as supportive as he could of Poland’s underground society. One of his contacts was Jacek Woźniakowski, whom Karol Wojtyła had first met in his early days as a curate at St. Florian’s parish. Woźniakowski had since become a distinguished art historian, but his anticommunist views had consistently impeded his academic career, so he made part of his living working at Tygodnik Powszechny. Woźniakowski managed to get to Rome in January 1982 and was quickly invited to the Vatican, where he spent all morning, lunch, dinner, and the bulk of the evening in the papal apartment, briefing John Paul II on the situation at home; evidently unhappy with the information he was getting through his Secretariat of State, John Paul told his old friend that his was “the first decent report on what’s happening in Poland” that he’d received.11 Some time later, after the Solidarity foreign bureau had been set up in Brussels, its head, Jerzy Milewski, asked Woźniakowski to act as an intermediary with the Pope. Woźniakowski, back in Rome from a teaching position in Toulouse, asked John Paul whether he thought the Brussels operation was a good idea. “Yes,” the Pope replied, “you can tell him I think it’s a good idea.”12
Tadeusz Mazowiecki had a harder time of it, having been jailed on December 13, 1981, and then put into an internment camp, formerly a military base. When families were permitted to visit, letters were smuggled in and out. Cardinal Franciszek Macharski also came to visit the former editor of Tygodnik Solidarność; he and Mazowiecki’s son smuggled out of the camp letters written by the imprisoned Solidarity leader to John Paul II and got them to Rome. In one of these letters, Mazowiecki asked the Pope not to abstract the “idea of solidarity” from its specific expression in the trade union/mass movement that had been created, and then crushed: the legalization of Solidarity, Mazowiecki suggested, had to be the minimal baseline for any agreement with the regime—“there were some things that could not be given back.” After some time, Mazowiecki recalled, he received a brief, handwritten letter from John Paul II, which had been smuggled into Poland; “I’ve read your letter,” the Pope wrote Mazowiecki, “and I’ve been thinking carefully about the situation. I have read your letter three or four times.” Mazowiecki immediately understood the code: he and John Paul II “understood each other” on the matter of a legal restoration of Solidarity.13
On June 7, 1982, John Paul received Ronald Reagan at the Vatican. In his remarks after their meeting, the president went out of his way to highlight “the martyred nation of Poland—your homeland,” noting that Poland had for centuries been “a brave bastion of faith and freedom in the hearts of her courageous people, if not in [the hearts of] those who rule her.”14 That rhetorical shot across General Jaruzelski’s bow had little effect on the situation on the ground, however, as the martial law regime rejected all TKK proposals for a settlement. These proposals included an amnesty for those arrested, the release of political prisoners, reinstatement in their jobs for those fired for having supported Solidarity—and, ultimately, restoration of the legal status of NSZZ Solidarność; the TKK had previously proposed that the principles of Catholic social doctrine be the basis for a national dialogue.15 The authorities rejected all of this, and Jaruzelski viciously attacked the union in the Sejm on July 21, 1982. That same month, negotiations between the Holy See and the martial law regime on a previously planned 1982 papal pilgrimage to Poland broke down, and the Vatican announced that the visit would be held at a later date.
The TKK leadership then called for peaceful public protests on August 31, the anniversary of the 1980 Gdańsk Accords. Large, if not overwhelming, numbers of protesters turned out that day and were met with aggressive countermeasures by the SB, the police, and the paramilitary militia, the ZOMO; four were killed and eight wounded in the worst incident, in Lublin, “where the ZOMO opened fire on demonstrators and literally went hunting.”16 These demonstrations were the high-water mark of public support for underground Solidarity, which subsequently began to decline as the passions of the previous nine months abated.17 The regime, for its part, was sufficiently confident of its control that it released Lech WaJçsa on November 14, announcing that “the former leader of the former Solidarity trade union is currently a private citizen.”18
Whether that would remain true would have no little to do with another government announcement, made at the same time: an agreement with the Church had been reached, and an invitation extended to John Paul II to return to Poland in June 1983.19
“ONE GREAT CONCENTRATION CAMP”
The months leading up to Poland II, John Paul II’s second pilgrimage to his homeland, coincided with a period of maximum paranoia in the Soviet leadership. For the first time in Soviet history, the KGB gave the party its new leader; former spymaster Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the Co
mmunist Party of the Soviet Union on November 12, 1982. Some Western reporters fawned over Andropov as a sophisticate whose tastes in Scotch, jazz, and popular American novels suggested a new kind of Soviet leader, which was correct, if not in the way the Western press intended: Andropov was pathologically suspicious about the West in general, and the United States and the Catholic Church in particular. Now, his paranoia focused on fears of an American nuclear first strike that would obliterate the USSR.
Eighteen months before, as Mehmet Ali Agca stalked John Paul II, Brezhnev and Andropov had denounced Reagan’s alleged warmongering to a KGB conference, with Andropov asserting that “not since the Second World War … has the international situation been as explosive as it is now.” At the end of the conference, Andropov announced an unprecedented initiative: a joint operation, RYAN, to be conducted collaboratively by the KGB and Soviet military intelligence (the GRU), to discover the Americans’ first-strike plans. Nothing was discovered, there being nothing to discover. But among Andropov’s first priorities as general secretary was to intensify RYAN activities, as the former KGB chieftain remained convinced that Reagan was determined on a nuclear first strike. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin note that, during his brief tenure as Soviet leader, Andropov’s most frequent visitors were his old KGB associates, while RYAN remained the primary operational priority of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate [Foreign Intelligence].20
In this atmosphere—which longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoli Dobrynin frankly described as “paranoid”—it was hardly surprising that planning for Poland II was extremely difficult, or that the SB did everything possible to impede the pilgrim’s progress of John Paul II.21 The most dastardly of these SB efforts involved what was known as Operation TRIANGOLO.
The full range of TRIANGOLO activities remains a mystery. One early reference to an SB operation with that code name comes from a note dated April 3, 1979, two months before the Nine Days of John Paul II: in it, Colonel Zenon Płatek, head of the SB’s Department IV, remarked that he was going to Vienna for six days to meet a secret coworker, TOM, who has not been identified. Some sources suggest that Agca was in Vienna at this time, but that suspicion runs counter to the assumption that the SB would have been left out of whatever complicated network of deceit was being spun around (and with) Agca. In any event, the fact that Płatek, the head of one of the SB’s most important departments, would be gone for such a length of time clearly indicates that something important was afoot—as does Płatek’s SB history, which featured work with the Ukrainian KGB to organize sophisticated provocations against Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of the Diocese of Przemyśl, including the forging of Vatican documents.22
If TRIANGOLO was in fact the code name for an ongoing SB project of “disintegration” against John Paul II, then the SB officer (or, on May 13, 1981, officers) who regularly monitored John Paul’s general audiences may have been working under this operational rubric. Zenon Płatek attended meetings of intelligence agencies in Moscow and other communist capitals on a regular basis, where the agencies’ battle against the Vatican was often discussed. While there is no presently available documentary evidence to suggest that TRIANGOLO operations were discussed in these sessions (there is no reference to TRIANGOLO in the Mitrokhin archive, for example), it does seem unlikely that an active measures campaign aimed at the man whom these very intelligence services regarded as a prime enemy would not have been bruited with the senior officials of those services.
Whatever other TRIANGOLO provocations may have been conducted between 1979 and 1982 remain unknown. The single most bold attempt to “disintegrate” John Paul II’s second pilgrimage to Poland, however, was a TRIANGOLO operation in early 1983. The SB created a personal journal, said to have been the work of Irina Kinaszewska, an employee of Tygodnik Powszechny who had died some years before; abandoned by her husband, she would have likely drawn the sympathy of Cardinal Wojtyła. The SB intended to suggest that there was far more to the relationship, and forged a diary in which Kinaszewska claimed to have been Wojtyła’s lover.
The plan was to plant (and hide) the diary in the apartment of Father Andrzej Bardecki, where it would then be “discovered” in a police raid. So one night in February 1983, four SB operatives from Independent Group D, knowing that Bardecki was out, went to the priest’s apartment on Sikorski Place and planted the forged diary; the leader of the operation was Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski. After hiding the forgery, Piotrowski went out with one of his Group D colleagues and got roaring drunk. Driving away from the bar, he crashed his car and was arrested by the police. Unable to control himself, or perhaps trying to get himself out of an embarrassing scrape, he bragged of being a member of Independent Group D and revealed what he had been up to prior to his alcoholic binge. Then word of the operation began to leak out of the police. Meanwhile, Father Bardecki found the not very well hidden “diary” and took it to the Kraków curia, where it was quickly recognized for the forgery it was. Word of the provocation soon spread from that source, as well, and for a brief period this crude attempt at “disintegration” became notorious in circles alert to such matters.
What did the SB hope to accomplish through this TRIANGOLO operation in February 1983? The “diary” was doubtless intended as an instrument with which to blackmail John Paul II and the Church in Poland. To what ends? With the terms and program of the June 1983 papal pilgrimage still being negotiated between the martial law regime and the Vatican, any number of possibilities suggest themselves. A pope fearful of blackmail, they likely thought, would be less determined to press for certain events in June that the regime was eager to avoid: such as a papal meeting with Lech Wałęsa. A blackmailed pope might moderate his public statements while in Poland. A Church fearful of scandal might be more accommodating to the WRON’s plans to hand over post–martial law authority to the PRON, while ignoring Solidarity as if it did not exist. And there was always the possibility that a scandal would further demoralize the Polish people, thus rendering them more malleable and acquiescent. None of this made a great deal of sense; even if Piotrowski’s “disintegration” operation had not been disintegrated in turn by his own drunken chatter about the forgery and the plant, how many Poles (familiar with these tactics for thirty years) would have believed that John Paul II was as duplicitous as the “diary” suggested? Nonetheless, the February 1983 TRIANGOLO diary affair does suggest just how frightened the martial law regime remained of its papal countryman, even as it illustrates graphically the lengths of prevarication to which it was prepared to go in order to destroy his reputation, and thus his moral authority.23
As for Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski, he would reenter the drama the following year, in an even more brutal context.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the able SB agent Edward Kotowski was using the contacts he had cultivated since 1978 to provide information to his superiors (and, ultimately, to Moscow Center) on John Paul II’s plans for Poland II.24 After five years in Rome, Kotowski, or PIETRO, who had a tremendous memory and exceptional skills as an interlocutor, had developed three levels of contacts. Each of these sets of contacts would have helped Kotowski and his superiors try to get inside the mind of John Paul II and his closest associates; some were far more dangerous than others.
The first level of PIETRO’s contacts involved those with whom he would have met in the normal course of his diplomatic work—for as far as Vatican diplomats were concerned, Kotowski was not an agent of Polish intelligence but their diplomatic counterpart, with whom a certain openness, albeit matched by a certain discretion, was expected. Prominent among these contacts were the head of the Polish section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, Msgr. Józef Kowalczyk; another Vatican diplomat, Msgr. Janusz Bolonek, a priest of the Łódź diocese who worked closely with Cardinal Casaroli; and Father Adam Boniecki, M.I.C., the editor of the Polish edition of L’Osservatore Romano. These were, in the jargon of the trade, “official contacts”; none of them was clandestine; all took place in an appro
priate setting; and there is no suggestion that they produced anything other than what might be expected from normal diplomatic conversations. At the same time, however, PIETRO used these contacts to convey to Vatican officials both accurate information about the Jaruzelski government’s thinking and plans, and disinformation aimed at muddying the waters.25
The second level of PIETRO’s contacts included informants who thought they were talking to a diplomat, not a skillful intelligence agent, but whose openness was not combined with discretion or caution. These “informal” contacts included some seventeen Polish priests, most of them working in Rome, others just visiting. Those who worked in Rome were in low-level agencies such as Vatican Radio. The hundreds of cyphergrams sent back to Warsaw reporting on what they had said suggest that, as historian Andrzej Grajewski put it, there was “much stupidity and vanity involved,” but nothing particularly revealing or damaging.
The third, and by far the most dangerous, of PIETRO’s three levels of Vatican contacts were SB agents who found themselves in Rome, permanently or occasionally, and whom PIETRO contacted knowing that they were already part of the SB apparatus. One of these, HEJNAł, was a Polish Dominican, Konrad Hejmo, who worked with Polish pilgrimage groups. HEJNAł was not in a position to get the SB deeply inside the Pope’s mind or plans, although he sent back, directly or through PIETRO, a stream of information for which he was well paid. Far more dangerous was POTENZA, whose identity was not known as of 2009. A Kraków archdiocesan priest, his contacts with the papal apartment fed the SB’s insatiable interest in John Paul II’s views about martial law, other Polish bishops, plans for Poland II, themes to be developed in the Pope’s addresses, and Lech Wałęsa’s political future. POTENZA also provided his SB spymasters with analyses of the Polish Church situation as he knew it. POTENZA was not “operational” in the sense that he was not an agent deployed to try to impede Poland II by various forms of skulduggery; rather, he was an expression of the SB’s determination to get inside John Paul II’s view of Solidarity’s prospects by digging as deeply into the Vatican as possible for information. Needless to say, the most important news was immediately shared with the KGB’s Moscow Center.26
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