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Dear Editor:

As to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, he denied asking for Soviet military help. This information (about him allegedly asking Soviet leader for military intervention in Poland) recently disclosed by the IPN (Institute for National Remembrance) is not new, it was first disclosed by Boris Yeltsin in a bunch of documents transferred to Poland in the 1990s. Jaruzelski had to play a difficult game with the Soviets in 1980-1982. Now Soviet marshals and generals deny they ever wanted to invade Poland in these years. But they were ready all the time. They just wanted to avoid repetition of the general condemnation and economic sanctions that followed after their intrusion into Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, and before, I worked against Soviet intelligence and after the formation of Solidarity I witnessed many attempts to provoke chaos and even a civil war in Poland. I also followed Soviet contacts with Communist hardliners in Poland, who opposed General Jaruzelski and pushed toward Soviet military intervention in my country.

History is never so simple as simple minds imagine it. And it never is "black-white" without any shades. The IPN is now headed by nationalistic and anticommunist historians who produce documents against many prominent people to discredit them. Also Lech Walesa became a victim of such vilification. As General Jaruzelski is the last still living former communist leader of Poland, they attack him viciously all the time.

I wrote to you (perhaps) about my meetings with General Jaruzelski in the 1990s and after 2000. I asked him many unpleasant questions, to which he responded with calm and dignity. He knew I was in the CIA and that I was jailed in communist Poland. But still he was eager to meet me and to share information and to discuss recent history. He always sent to me manuscripts of his books before they were published and also documents from his trials. I have a large volume of documentation from him.

It doesn’t mean that I trust Jaruzelski 100%. I know he had to build a "legend" about himself as a "savior of Poland" in the 1980s and as the leader who supported the regime change in Poland.

I also got in touch with some former Soviet generals and other officers who told me how they were preparing for crushing Solidarity and "restoring order" in Poland. One of them was the commander of a crack paratroopers division stationed at Kovno, Lithuania (then a Soviet Republic.) His task was to fly to Warsaw and to take over the headquarters of the Polish Communist Party (PUWP), the Polish Government and the General Staff of the Polish Army. They sent their spies to Warsaw several times to prepare the surprise invasion.

The old Soviet leadership under Brezhnev (in fact the USSR was ruled by a "troika" of Suslov, Andropov and Gromyko) was not too eager to repeat in Poland the invasion like in Hungary (1956) or in Czechoslovakia (1968). They planned and executed very strong pressure on Poland in the early 1980s and penetrated both Solidarity and the Polish communist authorities with their vast spy network (KGB and GRU). Soviet spies were also close to General Jaruzelski (I met at least two of them later; they were officers of the Polish Army and the Military Intelligence.) The Soviet leadership trusted Jaruzelski, but not to the end, knowing that he was a scion of the Polish landed gentry (with a family history reaching back to 13th century) and his family was persecuted by Soviets during the war. His father died in Altaysky Kray and he himself saved his life from perpetual exile by joining the Polish Army organized under Soviet command. He fought in WWII until the end (until the takeover of Berlin.) Then he pursued his military and communist party career in postwar Poland, knowing that there will be no other, free Poland under the Soviet domination.

In case, the martial law introduced by General Jaruzelski in December 1981 were not successful, the Soviets had an alternate, hard-line communist leadership for Poland, and they might support a brutal and bloody crackdown on Solidarity with their military forces already present on the Polish national territory (they had several hundred thousand troops here, including tank divisions, air force and even nuclear weapons.)

When preparing for the military-executed martial law in Poland, Jaruzelski had to communicate with the Soviet leadership all the time. A Polish general from the General Staff came from Moscow with a detailed plan of maneuvers of the Warsaw Pact in the Fall of 1980. In December, 1980, Soviet, Czechoslovakian and East German forces of the Pact were to enter Poland and encircle the main units of the Polish Army. The General Staff "decoded" their plans and General Jaruzelski, as the Minister of Defense, ordered a new dislocation of the Polish Army to counter foreign forces. But the top Soviet political leadership backed out under American pressure and cancelled the maneuvers of the Warsaw Pact at that time.

In December, 1981, the situation was different and probably the Soviets put their stakes on the "internal" solution, martial law to be introduced by Jaruzelski. The timing was not known. I got some hints from friends, officers of the Polish Army, in November, 1981. But no one of them knew an exact date. Not even Jaruzelski himself, because he still tried to calm the situation by tripartite talks involving Lech Walesa, Primate Josef Glemp and himself. But, Solidarity planned a huge rally in Warsaw for December 14 (the anniversary of the bloody crackdown on Polish workers in Gdansk in December, 1970,) then the date of the rally was moved to December 17, 1981. Jaruzelski was not sure what the Soviets could do when the rally of roughly one million people in Warsaw could begin riots and attacks on the communist party leadership. Nobody could control that. So the final decision to introduce martial law (named "The Wartime Law") came about noon on Saturday, December 12, 1981. I learned about this only in the evening of that day (the attack on Solidarity in Gdansk began on midnight December 12/13.)

I was supposed to meet and interview Lech Walesa in Gdansk on Saturday, December 12 and I booked my flight to that city. But on Friday, December 11, a friend from Gdansk Solidarity came to meet me in Warsaw and he told me a radical, "nationalistic" fraction of the Solidarity Trade Union wanted to oust Walesa on Saturday and to proclaim a general strike in Poland. I didn’t believe they could simply vote to oust Lech Walesa, so I instructed my reporter covering an All-Poland Solidarity Committee meeting in Gdansk, to approach Walesa and shift our interview date from Saturday to Sunday – December 13, 1981.

In the evening I got a call from my Gdansk reporter that telex communications were being interrupted. I asked him to call back to my home after 10:00 p.m., while I was preparing my car to drive to Gdansk in the early morning on Sunday, December 13. But in the late evening on Saturday (December 12) the phones were not working. I went to sleep after midnight, hoping that these were only some "tests" of the "state of emergency" that was being prepared by the army, the militia and the security units. But getting up early on Sunday, I put my radio and TV sets on and there was transmitted a speech of General Jaruzelski announcing martial law. I knew, there was no possibility for me to go to Gdansk. In the early morning I drove to downtown Warsaw to see what was happening there. The tanks, troop carriers and other vehicles, and the infantry and militia patrols, in the streets of Warsaw were POLISH. It was the sign for me that the Soviets kept out.

Later on I got information from intelligence sources (Soviet, East German) that the Warsaw Pact troops were on alert until the Summer of 1982. Just in case Polish martial law were not successful.

David M. Dastych