Daughters of the KGB (24 page)

The situation was a stand-off, with Jaruzelski’s strong-arm tactics somehow managing to short-circuit direct intervention by Moscow. In November 1982 Wałesa and his cohorts were released, but it took the visit of a Polish pope to this still premoninantly Catholic country to effect the final lifting of martial law and an amnesty for the majority of jailed dissidents. Just when things might have settled down, in October 1984 came the murder of 37-year-old Jerzy Popiełuszko, the priest who was an outspoken advocate of Solidarnosc. They first faked a car accident to kill him on 13 October, which failed. Six days later they kidnapped him in flagrant KGB style, beat and tortured him and dumped his body in a reservoir near Włocławek. So great was the fury at Popiełuszko’s brutal murder that more than a quarter-million people attended his funeral on 3 November. News of the political murder caused uproar throughout Poland, and the three killers were tried and jailed, together with the UB colonel who had given the orders.

Many people believed that these men had received their orders from the government itself and Poland continued its rocky path through strikes, concessions, inflation and more concessions. After power-sharing with Solidarnosc, the Polish Party voted itself out of existence on 28 January 1990.

Notes

1
.    Extract from
http://www.doomedsoldiers.com

2
.    Deposition of Miroslav Barczynski, historian at Museum of Southern Podlaskie, see above

3
.    P. Kenney,
Rebuilding Poland
, London, Cornell Paperbacks 2012, p. 39–40

4
.    Kenney,
Rebuilding Poland
, p. 55

5
.    G. Dallas,
Poisoned Peace
, London, John Murray 2005, p. 563–4

6
.    P. Sudoplatov, J.L. Schechter and L.P Schechter,
Special Tasks, the memoirs of an unwanted witness
, London, Little Brown 1994

7
.    Sudoplatov,
Special Tasks
, p. 223. He refers to him as ‘Moravitz’

8
.    Kenney,
Rebuilding Poland
, pp. 54–5

9
.    M. Scisłowka, article in
Toronto Star
, 10 January 2008

10
.  B. Wasserstein,
On the Eve, the Jews of Europe before the Second World War
, London, Profile Books 2013

11
.  Brogan,
Eastern Europe
, p. 53

12
.  Born Izaak Fleischfarb, he took the name of his wife, Justyna Swiatło, to conceal his Jewish origins

13
.  Applebaum,
Iron Curtain
, p. 414

14
.  Chrezvychainaya Kommissia, meaning ‘the Extraordinary Commission’

15
.  Some sources say fifty-seven deaths

16
.  Which had been signed the previous year

14

T
HE
H
ORIZONTAL
S
PY

The Poles have a long history of espionage, which is not surprising if one takes a glance at the map of Central and Eastern Europe, where the brothers Methodius and Kyril have a lot to answer for. When sent to proselytise the Slavic tribes in the ninth century, these two Byzantine monks disagreed over the alphabet to give their previously illiterate converts. Kyril gave to the eastern Slavs a Greek-based alphabet, modified by the addition of symbols borrowed from other languages for sounds that did not exist in Greek. Methodius chose the Latin alphabet for the western Slavs, with the addition of various accents for sounds that did not exist in Latin. As a result, the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed the Renaissance, while the eastern Slavs with their Cyrillic alphabet did not.

Lying on the boundary between the two linguistic groups, the Polish nation has constantly confronted an aggressive, continually expanding people on their eastern border, with little in the way of natural barriers to deter invasion.
¹
As a result, the eastern borderlands have been historically in a state of flux, with the tsars and their Soviet successors constantly nibbling away at Polish territory, except for moments when they took large bites. The other neighbours have also done some nibbling and the Poles at times have also grabbed extra land. It would take a whole book to follow the changes, but the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia
²
does a fair job of reducing the flux into two sentences:

In 1492, the territory of Poland-Lithuania covered 1,115,000 km (431,000 sq mi), making it the largest territory in Europe; by 1793 it had fallen to 215,000 km (83,000 sq mi), the same size as Great Britain, and in 1795 it disappeared completely. The first 20th century incarnation of Poland, the Second Polish Republic, occupied 389,720 km (150,470 sq mi) while since 1945, a more westerly Poland covered 312,677 km (120,725 sq mi).

Living where they do, many Poles have developed gallows humour into an art form. They can make jokes about anything, even the million tragedies in every territorial ‘adjustment’ decided by statesmen at international conferences. There is even one about this flux: having been informed that the border had been moved to the east after the First World War, a Polish-speaking farmer in the disputed territory that was now legally part of Poland, said, ‘
Dzieki Bogu. Nie wiecej rosyjski zimy!
’ Thank God. No more Russian winters!

Threatened by land-hungry neighbours to the west, south and east, the rulers of historical Poland under its various titles needed good intelligence about the intentions of those neighbours. While low-grade spying was a blue-collar affair, so that no one wept when a spy with a telescope was caught and shot in the field, high-level spying – like stealing the enemy’s order of battle – was an upper-class occupation in those class-conscious times.

Fitting perfectly the image of the ‘gentleman spy’ was Jerzy Franciszek Kulczucki, born into a Polish–Lithuanian noble family in 1640 near Sambor, now in Western Ukraine. Fluent in German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish and Ukrainian, he joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks in search of adventure – and found it. Captured by Turks, he was sold to some Serbian merchants, in whose service he worked as translator in the Belgrade office of an Austrian trading company. In 1678, about to be arrested by the Turkish overlords of the Balkans, he slipped away to Vienna, where he had managed to stash away considerable savings that enabled him to start up his own trading company. Five years later, Vienna was under siege by the 100,000-strong forces of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha. Inside the city were a mere 10,000 Austrian defenders. After the Turks had captured part of the walls, Kulczucki and a trusted servant rode casually through the siege lines dressed in Ottoman style and chatting in Turkish with anyone who tried to stop them.

Reaching the camp of Duke Charles of Lorraine, commander of the Habsburg forces, he imparted the latest information about the siege. Returning to Vienna with the news that relief was on the way, Kulczucki persuaded the garrison not to surrender. With insufficient men to make a frontal attack on Mustafa Pasha’s army, the Duke of Lorraine harrassed its lines of communication and managed to get supplies into the city until a Polish Christian army under King Jan III Sobieski arrived and drove the Turks off. Kulczucki was the hero of the hour, generously rewarded by the rich merchants of Vienna. The legend has it that Jan III Sobieski himself also gave the city’s saviour several sacks of green coffee beans found in the deserted Turkish camp after the decisive battle of Kahlenberg, a few miles north of the city. From his dealings with Turks, Kulczucki knew what to do with the beans and opened Vienna’s first coffee house, near the cathedral. With the flamboyant owner supervising the roasting of the beans and serving the clients dressed in his Turkish costume, this became a roaring success. He died eleven years later and was afterwards memorialised like a patron saint of Viennese coffee houses, with a street baptised with the German spelling of his name – Kolschitsky – and his statue on the corner of Kolschitskygasse and Favoritenstrasse showing him in costume serving coffee in the Turkish manner.

Handsome spies, beautiful mistresses who had access to secret plans and rich rewards for success … Reality in the period between the two world wars puts James Bond to shame. Jerzy Sosnowski – who used many aliases at various times – was a Polish master spy born in Łwów in 1896. At the time, this was Austro-Hungarian territory administered from Vienna, so he grew up speaking perfect German. Aged 18, he was called up for service in an Austrian infantry regiment, was posted to a cavalry training school and fought against the tsarist forces on what was loosely called ‘the eastern front’.
³
Following Russia’s withdrawal from the war in 1917, he received flying training, making him an all-round soldier by the standards of the time.

After his country gained independence from Austro-Hungary in 1918, Sosnowski joined the new Polish Army and commanded a squadron of cavalry against Trotsky’s Red Army, which was trying to repossess Poland’s newly acquired eastern provinces. In 1926 he joined the Dwójka, or
deuxième bureau
of the Polish General Staff, and set himself up in Weimar Berlin in the guise of an anti-communist baron, using the Austrian title Ritter von Nalesc. A horseman of international standard, he was popular with German officers, whom he cultivated as part of his plan to obtain documents relating to the Wehrmacht’s plans for an invasion of Poland. One method he used to build the network code-named In-3 was the discreet lending of money to officers with gambling debts who could be useful, so it was probably an unrepayable loan that brought Lieutenant Colonel Günther Rudloff into the ranks of his sources. Sosnowski’s other favourite method was to seduce well-connected women into becoming his accomplices. One of his first conquests was Benita von Falkenhayn, the wife of a retired officer, distantly related to First World War Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn. By the end of the year, she was actively collaborating with Sosnowski, despite knowing that he was a Polish spy.

His increasing flow of material, passed through the Polish embassy in Berlin, seemed to Sosnowski’s masters in Warsaw too good to be true. They suspected him of feeding them German disinformation, especially after he seduced four more women, all of whom had connections with the Reichswehrministerium, or War Ministry, where the most secret war plans were prepared. Showing that he had nothing to learn from later practices of the KGB or CIA, Sosnowski flew a false flag to get one of them into bed. Knowing Irene von Jena hated Poles, he pretended to be a British journalist, revealing his true identity only after she had fallen in love with him. All these women supplied top-grade intelligence. In 1929, after one of them handed him a copy of the invasion plans, Sosnowski demanded a bonus of 40,000 Reichsmarks from his masters in Warsaw for handing these over, despite his network already being the major item in the budget of the Dwójka. By this time, Warsaw trusted neither him nor the plans. In the end, Sosnowski passed the plans to Warsaw without payment, but they were regarded as German disinformation and not acted upon.

In autumn 1933, hell had no fury… Whether the Abwehr started unravelling Sosnowski’s network thanks to actress Maria Kruse, another mistress of whom he had grown tired, or whether he was betrayed to it by his jealous predecessor in Berlin, a Polish officer who had had no remotely similar success either in espionage or in bed, is impossible to know. But certainly both were somehow involved. A few days after Sosnowski was arrested, most of his network fell into the net. The notable exception was Rudloff, who managed to talk his way out by claiming that his liaison with Sosnowski enabled him to get useful information about Polish plans. He, however, committed suicide in 1941.

The espionage trials in the Nazi Volksgericht during February 1935 led inevitably to sentences of death for treason for von Falkenhayn and another of the women. Benita’s second husband pleaded for clemency for her, although she was at the time desperately trying to divorce her third husband and marry Sosnowski in order to get a Polish passport and thus escape the penalty for the crime of treason committed by a German citizen. The two women were beheaded by axe at Plötzensee prison two days after the verdict. Sosnowski and Irene von Jena were sentenced to life imprisonment.

In April 1936, after fourteen months’ total isolation in prison – not even allowed to see his guards – Sosnowski was released in a spy swap for three German agents who had been caught in Poland. He recounted how he had been appalled at the deaths of Benita and Irene, but was himself accused of treason for a second time by his own superiors in the Dwójka. On 17 June 1939, as the world headed into war, he was judged guilty of treason in the service of Germany and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Was he evacuated eastwards by his captors during the German invasion of September 1939? It would seem logical, but nothing certain is known about the remaining lifetime of Jerzy Sosnowski. He may have been shot by his guards when about to be overtaken by the rapid German advance, although some sources aver that he was handed over to the NKVD and worked for them in the Armia Ludowa in Warsaw until being killed during the uprising of summer 1944. It is somehow fitting that the later life of the great horizontal spy should be shrouded in mystery.