Newly found files show Poland’s Wałęsa was informer for communists, says historian
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
12.12.2018 12:20
Newly unearthed documents are “further confirmation” that the co-founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement and former president Lech Wałęsa was once an informer for the communist regime, a historian said on Wednesday.
![Lech Wałęsa. Photo: Jarle Vines [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons](http://external.polskieradio.pl/files/c9a28340-4fde-4417-be7c-c73b817fa823.file "Lech Wałęsa. Photo: Jarle Vines [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons")
Lech Wałęsa. Photo: Jarle Vines [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
Sławomir Cenckiewicz, director of the Warsaw-based Military History Bureau (WBH), was speaking after a team of Polish journalists found an archive of previously unknown communist-era documents in the United States, the niezalezna.pl news website reported.
The files have been traced at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in Stanford, California, which holds several hundred pages of documents of the former Polish communist security service, including documents and personal notes of onetime Interior Minister Czesław Kiszczak, niezalezna.pl said.
“We have further confirmation that Wałęsa was a security service agent and that this matter became a state secret” after communism fell in the country in 1989, Cenckiewicz said of the documents, which have been seen by journalists from Poland’s Rzeczpospolita daily and public broadcaster Polish Radio, according to niezalezna.pl.
Cenckiewicz said on Polskie Radio 24 that Kiszczak “was a very important guardian of this lapse of memory."
Cenckiewicz suggested that Kiszczak's widow sold the documents after his death.
“In fact, the files were also the subject of deals prior to his death,” Cenckiewicz said, adding that “Czesław Kiszczak himself participated in financial negotiations with the Americans.”
The uncovered documents include a personal letter from Wałęsa to former Polish communist strongman Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, niezalezna.pl reported.
Wałęsa in August last year reaffirmed his denial of allegations that he was a paid informer for the country's communist-era security services.
"I never collaborated with the communist services; I was never on the communist side," Wałęsa told broadcaster Polsat News at the time when asked about a probe launched by prosecutors from Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
Officials from the government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance in January last year cited an analysis by graphology experts of files found in Kiszczak's house following his death in late 2015 as confirming that Wałęsa was a paid informer for Poland's communist-era authorities.
The newly retrieved “Kiszczak collection” also contains documents about the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 and some that could shed new light on the 1980s murders of school student Grzegorz Przemyk and Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, according to niezalezna.pl.
(gs/pk)
Source: niezalezna.pl