To Pavlov’s relief, Kiszczak, who was in charge of implementing operation X, appeared much more resolute than Jaruzelski. In the course of Saturday December 12 he provided the KGB with the detailed timetable of the operation. At 11:30 p.m., telephone communications throughout the country would be shut down; all embassies would lose their landline connections; communications abroad would cease; and the borders would be closed. Foreign reporters without permanent accreditation would be expelled. The arrests would begin at midnight. Four thousand two hundred would be detained overnight and another 4,500 placed in “protective custody” on Sunday December 13. Wałęsa would be asked to enter talks with the government and arrested if he refused. In a broadcast at 6 a.m. Jaruzelski would declare martial law and announce the creation of a “Military Council for National Salvation.” In order to keep people at home and off the streets on Sunday, church services would—unusually—be televised. If necessary, Monday December 14 would be declared a public holiday. The security forces had orders to open fire if they encountered serious resistance. But, Kiszczak warned, there was no guarantee of success:
If the operation that we have undertaken fails, if we have to pay with our lives, then the Soviet Union will have to be ready to face a hostile state on its western border, whose leaders will promote nationalism and anti-Sovietism. From the outset they will receive energetic assistance from the imperialist states to an extent sufficient for them to sever all ties with Socialist countries. Poland’s Socialist development would be put into reverse for a long period.67
In the event, the enforcement of martial law went more smoothly than Jaruzelski had dared to hope. Kryuchkov, who had arrived from Moscow to observe operation X at first hand, must also have been pleasantly surprised. Solidarity was caught off-guard, with most of its leading activists asleep in bed when the security forces arrived to arrest them. Zbigniew Bujak, the most senior Solidarity leader to escape arrest and go underground, said later, “The authorities were clearly planning a sizeable operation against the union. But we never thought it would be as serious as this.” There had been so much talk about the growing powerlessness of the Polish government that Solidarity had begun to believe its own rhetoric. Poles awoke on Sunday morning to find an army checkpoint at every crossroads and declarations of martial law posted to every street corner. Jaruzelski’s 6 a.m. broadcast was repeated throughout the day, interspersed with Chopin polonaises and patriotic music. Television viewers saw Jaruzelski, dressed in army uniform, sitting at a desk in front of a large Polish flag. “Citizens and lady citizens of the Polish People’s Republic!” he began. “I speak to you as a soldier and head of government! Our motherland is on the verge of an abyss!”68 Many interpreted his speech as a warning that only martial law could save Poland from a Soviet invasion.
In the early hours of the morning Wałęsa had been taken by military escort, accompanied by the minister of labor, Stanisław Ciosek, to a villa on the outskirts of Warsaw. Wałęsa later recalled that he was addressed as “Mr. Chairman,” there were apologies for the inconvenience to which he was being put and the razor was removed from the villa’s marble bathroom in case he was tempted to commit suicide.69 Later in the day Ciosek reported to the PUWP Politburo that Wałęsa was in a state of shock, had said that his role as chairman of Solidarity was at an end and that the union would have to be reorganized. He was also alleged to be willing to cooperate with the government. Kiszczak passed on the good news to the KGB mission.70 Milewski exultantly told Pavlov and Kryuchkov, “Wałęsa cannot hide his terror!”71 In reality, though stunned by the suddenness of the declaration of martial law, Wałęsa is unlikely to have panicked. He had been arrested over a dozen times before and his wife Danuta was accustomed to the routine of packing a holdall for him to take to prison.72
While Wałęsa was being installed in the government villa, Glemp was being visited by Kazimierz Barcikowski, secretary of the Polish Central Committee and president of the Joint Commission for the State and the Episcopate, and Jerzy Kuberski, Minister of Religious Affairs, to be informed of the impending declaration of martial law. Since no telephones were operating, they had arrived unannounced at 3 a.m. at the archbishop’s palace, where a patrolman rang the doorbell repeatedly until at last a light went on inside, Glemp was woken and a nun came to let them in. “The whole thing,” said Barcikowski, “was a bit theatrical.”73 Contrary to Jaruzelski’s alarmist forecasts, Glemp showed no inclination to declare a holy war and no desire to become “a Polish Khomeini.” Milewski informed Kryuchkov and Pavlov that Glemp had reacted calmly, with “a certain degree of understanding.” Though the declaration of martial law did not surprise him, he had not expected it to occur until after the Christmas holidays.74
The immediate concern of the authorities had been the homily that Glemp was due to give on Sunday afternoon at the Jesuit church of Mary Mother of God in Warsaw’s Old City.75 They need not have worried. The keynote of Glemp’s sermon was caution. “Opposition to the decisions of the authorities under martial law,” he warned, “could cause violent reprisals, including bloodshed, because the authorities have the armed forces at their disposal… There is nothing of greater value than human life.” “The Primate’s words,” writes historian Timothy Garton Ash, “were bitterly resented by many Christian Poles who were, at that moment, preparing to risk their own lives for what they considered greater values.” Jaruzelski, by contrast, felt an enormous sense of relief. Glemp’s homily was broadcast repeatedly on television, printed in the Party newspaper and put up on the walls of army barracks.76
On the first day of martial law, Brezhnev rang Jaruzelski to congratulate him on the beginning of operation X.77 Kryuchkov, Pavlov and Kulikov jointly telegraphed from Warsaw that the first stages of the operation had been successfully completed. “But the most dangerous days,” they believed, “will be Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the coming week [December 14-16] when Solidarity activists who are still at large will try to spread disorder among workers and students.”78 “During the next two weeks,” Jaruzelski told Kryuchkov, “a great deal will depend on the market situation.” The best antidote to Solidarity would be well-stocked shelves in Polish shops for Christmas. He appealed to Moscow to send shoes, children’s toys and other consumer goods as quickly as possible: “Any material aid now will cost much less than the expenditure required by the Polish situation if the unthinkable began to happen here.”79
The worst violence after the declaration of martial law took place at a coal mine near Katowice, where more than 2,000 miners began a sit-in. On Tuesday December 15 helicopters dropped tear gas into the mines, while ZOMO paramilitary police from the ministry of the interior, supported by forty tanks, began firing rubber bullets at the miners. The security forces then attacked the doctors and ambulance drivers who came to tend the wounded.80 Seven miners were killed and thirty-nine injured; forty-one ZOMO policemen were also injured, though none were killed. Overall, however, casualties were much lower than the SB and KGB had expected. The mere threat of Soviet intervention had proved as effective in crushing opposition as the actual Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia thirteen years earlier. By the year’s end organized opposition to martial law had virtually disappeared. Graffiti on the walls of Polish cities proclaimed optimistically, “Winter Is Yours. Spring Will be Ours!” But Spring did not truly return until 1989 with the formation of a Solidarity-led government and the disintegration of the Communist one-party state.
Jaruzelski gave the main credit for the success of operation X to the SB, ZOMO and other interior ministry personnel. At a meeting in the ministry on December 31 he praised the SB’s dedication to Socialism and the high moral and political qualities of its operational officers. “You were the defenders of Socialism in Poland,” Jaruzelski told them. “The Polish army contributed to the success, but the main work was done by the Interior Ministry.” The SB’s principal role now was deep penetration of the opposition movement to provide the intelligence necessary “to neutralize the adversary by
the swiftest possible means.” In answer to a question about the “mildness” of the sentences passed on the strike organizers at Katowice and elsewhere, Jaruzelski said that, though he was personally in favor of more severe punishment, public opinion had to be taken into account: “If we were to impose excessively severe sentences, say ten to twelve years’ imprisonment, people would say that we were taking our revenge on Solidarity. So we have to be content with moderate sentences.” As usual, an account of the meeting was forwarded to the Centre by the KGB mission in Warsaw.81
According to self-congratulatory SB statistics supplied to the KGB, during the year after the declaration of martial law, 701 underground opposition groups were identified, 430 of them associated with the now-illegal Solidarity; 10,131 individuals were interned; over 400 demonstrations dispersed; 370 illegal printing presses and 1,200 items of printing equipment confiscated; the distribution of over 1.2 million leaflets prevented; and 12 underground Solidarity radio stations closed down. A total of 250,000 members of the security forces were allegedly deployed on these operations, among them 90,000 members of police reserve units, over 30,000 soldiers and 10,000 members of the volunteer police reserve.82 The figures for the deployment of security forces, however, are suspiciously high and may well have been substantially inflated in order to impress Moscow. Jaruzelski commended all those who had taken part in the enforcement of martial law as intrepid defenders of Polish Socialism.
The SB’s biggest problem was Wałęsa, whose worldwide celebrity made it impossible either to subject him to a show trial or to treat him with the casual brutality meted out to less well-known Solidarity activists. (Even Wałęsa’s wife Danuta and their small daughters were subjected to humiliating strip searches.) As the initial shock of internment wore off, however, Wałęsa’s old combative spirit returned and he refused to negotiate with the authorities. The SB’s first tactic was to try to persuade Wałęsa to follow the more accommodating policy of Cardinal Glemp by giving the Primate’s spokesman, Father Alojsy Orszulik, regular access to him.83 Orszulik was initially accompanied by an interior ministry official later identified as Colonel Adam Pietruszka, deputy head of the SB church department, who three years later was to be implicated in the murder of the Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. Wałęsa did not take to Orszulik. When urged to give up his resistance to negotiating with the Military Council for National Salvation, Wałęsa shouted, “They’ll come to me on their knees!” Polish Catholics did not normally shout at their priests and Orszulik seems to have been shocked. According to Wałęsa, he “disapproved of my lack of Christian humility, and it too us some time to get used to each other.”84
Wałęsa’s clashes with Orszulik had the advantage, so far as the SB was concerned, of alienating Glemp. In January 1982 Kiszczak reported to the KGB, with evident satisfaction and possibly some exaggeration, that Glemp was “completely disenchanted with Wałęsa,” and believed that the leaders of Solidarity “have learned nothing from events and refuse to budge from their previous positions.”85 The SB also informed the KGB that Orszulik’s visits eventually had a “favorable effect” on Wałęsa.86 As Wałęsa later acknowledged, he dropped one by one all his conditions for negotiating with the authorities, “finally aligning himself with the church’s position.”87
The SB also tried less subtle methods of influencing and discrediting Wałęsa. While working as a shipyard electrician in the early 1970s, Wałęsa had been in contact with the SB. Among the SB files discovered in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Communist regime was one codenamed BOLEK, whose full contents have yet to be revealed and whose authenticity remains to be established, but which is known to contain alleged details of Wałęsa’s role as an SB informer. According to some reports, after seeing a copy of the file in 1992, Wałęsa, by then President of the Polish Republic, began to draft a public statement in which he acknowledged that he had put his signature to “three or four” SB interrogation protocols, but asked for understanding of the difficult position of those pressured by the SB to act as informers in the 1970s. In the end, it is claimed, Wałęsa had second thoughts and scrapped the statement.88
The KGB files noted by Mitrokhin do not disclose the exact extent of Wałęsa’s cooperation with the SB in the 1970s. But they do reveal that the SB sought to intimidate Wałęsa after his internment by “reminding him that they had paid him money and received information from him.” If Wałęsa did indeed act at one stage of his career as a paid informant of the SB, it is easy to imagine the pressure exerted on him to do so, as on the millions of other informers to Soviet Bloc security services. Kiszczak told the KGB that Wałęsa had been confronted by one of his alleged former SB case officers and a conversation between them tape-recorded.89
Since the SB did not wish to advertise its vast network of willing and unwilling informers, it made only limited use of Wałęsa’s past contact with it in active measures intended to discredit him. Instead, it resorted to a series of fabrications designed to portray Wałęsa as a greedy, foul-mouthed embezzler.90 To add authentic detail to its forgeries, it stole a tape-recording made by his brother Stanisław during Wałęsa’s birthday celebrations on September 29.91 On November 11, the anniversary of Polish independence, Wałęsa was freed from internment. Moscow was outraged that the news was broadcast in Poland at the same time as the announcement of Brezhnev’s death the previous day.92 Kiszczak sought to reassure Pavlov that, despite Wałęsa’s release, active measures were still in hand to compromise Wałęsa.93 Jaruzelski told Aristov that the material being assembled to discredit Wałęsa included pornographic photographs (presumably of Wałęsa with a mistress) and would expose him as “a scheming, grubby individual with gigantic ambitions.” Wałęsa, Jaruzelski claimed, had already lost half the popular authority he had possessed before his internment. Though he remained a potential threat, he no longer had his Solidarity base and would be unable to rebuild his previous alliance with the church.94
Moscow was far from reassured. Since the unexpectedly successful introduction of martial law, many of its previous doubts about Jaruzelski had resurfaced. A KGB agent in Jaruzelski’s entourage described him as “the offspring of rich Polish landowners” with little sympathy for working people: “His tendency is pro-Western and he surrounds himself with generals who are descendants of Polish landowners and are anti-Soviet in inclination.” The agent (presumably something of an anti-Semite) also reported that Jaruzelski was in contact with “a representative of Polish Zionism”: “One should examine whether he himself is not a Zionist.” By contrast, Jaruzelski “virtually ignored” the advice of the Soviet ambassador.95
The reports of both the KGB mission and the Soviet embassy during 1982 repeatedly condemned Jaruzelski’s tolerance of men with revisionist tendencies in the Polish leadership, chief among them Mieczysław Rakowski, whose allegedly defeatist attitude to anti-Socialist forces aroused deep suspicion in Moscow. Rakowski was reported to have told the Council of Ministers in June, “The PUWP is sick. Martial law made it possible to overcome the peak of the opposition, but there is no noticeable change for the better in the attitude of broad layers of the population.” The strength of the Catholic Church meant that a policy of confrontation would be mere “adventurism.”96 A report by Rakowski on June 22 concluded that there were “100,000 hostile teachers” in Polish schools, but that it was impossible to sack them all.97 Jaruzelski was alleged to have told Milewski, “I know that Rakowski is a swine, but I still need him.” In a telegram to Brezhnev on June 29, however, Aristov argued that keeping Rakowski and other like-minded individuals in the Polish leadership was “not simply a tactical move, but a strategic line for Jaruzelski, who shares their position on a number of problems”: “It is therefore very important at the present stage to continue to exert influence on Comrade W. Jaruzelski.”98
Pavlov and Aristov continued to press for more arrests and trials of counter-revolutionaries. At a meeting with Kiszczak on July 7, Pavlov denounced the policy of the interior minist
ry and the SB as “weak and indecisive.” Kiszczak replied that there were 40,000 Solidarity activists, and it was impossible to prosecute them all.99 Four days later Aristov brought Jaruzelski a personal message from Brezhnev and repeated the Soviet demand for more prosecutions. Jaruzelski argued that to try Wałęsa would be impossible because of the international as well as Polish outcry it would produce, and that a trial of leading opposition figures which excluded Wałęsa would lack credibility.100 The Polish decision in December to suspend (though not yet formally end) martial law caused predictable dismay in Moscow. When pressed by Aristov to keep it in force, however, Jaruzelski delivered something of a lecture, which was duly reported to Moscow:
We cannot continue martial law as if we were living in a bunker; we want to pursue a dialogue with the people… Glemp’s latest statements are such that they could even be printed in Trybuna Ludu [the Party newspaper]. He appeals for calm, restraint and realism… We are, of course, playing a game with the Catholic Church; our aim is to neutralize its harmful influence on the population. The aims of the Church and my aims are still different. However, at this stage we must exploit our common interest in stabilizing the situation in order to strengthen Socialism and the positions of the Party.101
Jaruzelski’s attitude to Moscow had become visibly less deferential since operation X a year earlier. The KGB mission reported that he had declared on one occasion, “The Soviet comrades are mistaken if they think that the Polish section of the CPSU Central Committee will make Polish policy as in the days of Gierek. This will not happen. [Those] days are over.”102 Jaruzelski was, initially, favorably impressed by the signs of a new, less hectoring style in the Soviet leadership after Brezhnev’s death. He told Kiszczak after a meeting in Moscow with Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor, in December 1982:
The Sword and the Shield Page 91
