Polish Anti-Communist Hero Was Communist Agent, Documents Show
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Presumed anti-communist Polish leader Lech Walesa actually served as a spy working for the murderous regime in Moscow and its secret-police puppets in Poland, according to recently released official documents from the 1970s. The revelations last month sparked an instant uproar across Poland, with even top government officials saying that the news casts a shadow over Polish history and independence. Walesa, who was in socialist-ruled Venezuela at the time, promptly denied the accusations, suggesting the papers may have been forgeries. But it is hardly the first time suspicions have been raised about the supposed left-wing freedom fighter’s links to international communism.

The “hero” and self-styled founder of the Solidarity labor union is best known for his supposed role in liberating Poland from Soviet-backed communist tyranny, at least according to mainstream history books. But for decades, the former shipyard worker’s legacy has been marred by accusations that Walesa was not who people think he was — or who he portrays himself to be still today. Now, with the release of never-before-seen documents seized by investigators, Walesa’s credibility appears to be in tatters with broad swaths of the public. According to the recently released papers, Walesa was a spy — code name Bolek — who betrayed his countrymen and collaborated with the communist Polish regime’s ruthless “security” apparatus.

Among the documents released by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which oversees investigations into crimes perpetrated by the nation’s former National Socialist (Nazi) and Communist rulers, were Bolek’s work and personal files. The papers, signed by what is said to be Walesa himself, appear to show that the supposed anti-communist activist was in fact a paid operative of communist authorities during the heyday of the protests he led at a shipyard in Gdansk. One of the documents is a handwritten agreement signed by Walesa in which he agrees to cooperate with the regime’s “security” service. Another document lists the payments he received. And a third includes testimony about Walesa from other communist agents.

“I commit myself to cooperate with the secret police in exposing and fighting the enemies of the PRL [Polish People’s Republic],” says one of the documents signed by Walesa, a reference to the Soviet-backed communist regime then enslaving the people of Poland. That particular paper, which committed him to snitching on genuine anti-communist activists, was dated 1970. At that time, Walesa was leading what were made out to be large-scale public protests against communism.

The documents were seized by investigators from the widow of General Czeslaw Kiszczak, who served as the final “interior minister” of the brutal communist regime before its ostensible collapse in 1989. Kiszczak died last year, and his widow reportedly tried to sell the papers to the government. According to a letter found among the documents, the former general decided to hold on to some of the communist-era papers so that they could not be used against Walesa or the Solidarity movement. Still, in the letter from Kiszczak, dated 1996, he reportedly asked that all the files be published five years after the death of Walesa.  

Instead, the INR released the documents publicly late last month and even allowed journalists to examine them. According to INR chief Lukasz Kaminski, the papers were released to the public in order to “end speculations about the contents of these files.” Despite allegations by Walesa defenders, the institute insisted that the documents were authentic and produced by the secret police of the era. The only remaining defense, then, is that the secret police created the papers as a means of discrediting Walesa, although that appears unlikely at this point. Other apologists claimed Walesa may have been coerced into signing them, though Walesa himself has not made that claim.   

The reactions by current Polish political leaders were swift. “Walesa may have been a puppet — we have to sort this out,” Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski was quoted as saying. “This casts a shadow over the creation of an independent Poland and its political elites.” Deputy Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, meanwhile, said it was now clear that “Lech Walesa had an agent’s past.”  Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, while alarmed, sounded a more cautious tone: “I think that above all we need to know the truth. Poles deserve this truth and the most important thing is to dispel all doubts.”

Walesa himself, who was in imploding Venezuela at the time of the revelations, fiercely denied the charges in interviews and on social media. “I was not an agent of the security services,” the 72-year old told the far-left U.K. Guardian newspaper shortly after the fresh accusations surfaced. “I have not spied on anyone in my life. I have taken no money. I will prove all of this. I have hired lawyers.” Separately, he said people were not able to change the “true facts through lies, slander and forgeries.” “It was I who safely led Poland to a complete victory over communism,” he insisted.

After the files were finally released to journalists, though, Walesa sounded a different tone. “I’ve lost. But only because almost everyone has believed that there was some treacherous collaboration on my part with the Security Service,” said the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner. “It is not true. Thank you. You have betrayed me, not me you.”

It is, of course, hardly the first time Walesa has faced such allegations. In fact, he was cleared of similar charges in 2000 by a special tribunal that examined the matter. But while the latest accusations took many by surprise, longtime readers of The New American and its predecessor publications have been well aware of the controversies for decades. In the December 4, 1989, issue, for example, this magazine published a commentary by prominent Solidarity union leader Anna Walentynowicz, sometimes described as the “mother of independent Poland.” In the piece, Walentynowicz made explosive allegations that cast doubt on the entire narrative surrounding events in Poland.   

“The role of Lech Walesa was different from the current popular myth,” explained Walentynowicz, who worked in the same Gdansk shipyard, was a key founder of Solidarity, and exposed Walesa’s collaboration with the regime within three days of the group’s founding. “First of all, Walesa is not the chairman of Solidarity, since his tenure expired two years ago. Furthermore, Walesa is not the founder of Solidarity, as is universally repeated in the Western mass media. To the contrary, had it depended on him, Solidarity would never have been formed.”

The regime also helped build up Walesa in the public mind, she said, allowing him to consolidate complete control over Solidarity. “When Walesa gained sufficient strength and an unequivocal position in the West, he peremptorily made short of the opposition within Solidarity,” continued Walentynowicz. “He illegally designated himself chairman, dissolved the National Commission, and formed the National Executive Committee, which was composed exclusively of loyal sycophants.”

After that, she said, bogus “talks” between Solidarity and the regime were held in which the regime “decided on the content and the results,” all with Walesa’s approval. And finally, sham “elections” were held in which all “opposition” candidates were selected by Walesa, but which the Western establishment press nonetheless fraudulently touted as “democratic” and legitimate. Noting that almost 40 percent of Poles boycotted the phony election in the first round, and 75 percent in the second, Walentynowicz described the farce as “the Left-in-opposition opposing the Left-in-power.” Real opposition was still forbidden, but the fraud gave the regime the appearance of legitimacy on the international stage — and allowed it to access Western aid.

By 1991, two years after TNA printed Walentynowicz’s stunning revelations, the “new” regime in Poland was still packed with communists and communist lackeys, despite the claims offered by the Western press. In fact, according to a July 30, 1991, article in this magazine by Joe Losiak, then the editor of Radical, a publication focused on Poland, “the entire economy is centrally controlled.” Communist insiders, he continued, had been placed “throughout the infrastructure of the Polish economy by the communists, and only a few superficial changes have been made.” And as “former” communists, they all received protection from Walesa for their past crimes, Losiak added. Walesa became president in 1990.  

Solidarity, meanwhile, had become a new instrument of repression, espionage, and more, he explained, noting that its representatives were even policing speech. “The joke in Poland is that the communists organized the opposition at gun point,” Losiak wrote. Similar absurdities occurred in many other “former” Soviet nations, he continued, with the exception of Romania, where an apparently uncontrolled public uprising resulted in communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife being executed by firing squad for their reign of mass-murder and savage terror.      

Of course, as in the United States or any other country, the reality of political developments is not always what is presented to the public in establishment-controlled media outlets. And in Poland, which was betrayed by the globalist U.S. establishment after World War II and handed over to suffer under generations of communist slavery, that holds true as well. Among other concerns, consider that ruling Law and Justice, like Poland’s other dominant party, Civic Platform, both have their roots in Walesa’s Solidarity, which is still broadly credited with having brought down communist tyranny in Poland in 1989.

But not everybody was convinced by the narrative even before the most recent release of documents — and for good reason. One prominent voice that has cast doubt on the prevailing view of Solidarity as anti-communist savior is Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, who worked in communist disinformation and deception operations. After defecting to the West, Golitsyn warned of a long-range strategy being pursued by the international communist conspiracy involving supposed “liberalization” in Eastern Europe and apparent collapse of the Soviet Union. Arguably the most important defector ever, virtually all of his predictions have come to pass, according to experts who have analyzed the issue.   

In his 1984 book New Lies for Old, Golitsyn argued that the partial communist “suppression” of Solidarity in the early 1980s was in fact part of the deception — an effort to dupe the West into believing that the alliance represented genuine opposition. Eventually, according to Golitsyn, “it may be expected that a coalition government will be formed, comprising representatives of the communist, of a revived Solidarity movement, and of the church,” he wrote. “A few so-called liberals might also be included.” On the creation of a coalition government with those components, Golitsyn’s prediction proved exactly correct.

Later developments also seem to have vindicated much of Golitsyn’s warnings. In 1989, for example, Solidarity leader Walesa offered alarming comments in an interview with Soviet publication New Times. “Let power remain in the hands of the Communists,” he was quoted as saying, “but let it be different. Let it serve the people better, respect the law and be accountable to society. We are prepared to cooperate constructively with such authorities.” More recently, former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking in London in 2001, approvingly referred to the EU, of which numerous “former” Soviet nations are members, as the “new European Soviet.”

And indeed, numerous Soviet-era communist criminals and murderers, who were never punished after the ostensible collapse of communism, are firmly embedded all throughout the EU’s architecture to this day. More than a few critics of the EU have pointed out that fact in highly public comments. It is true, though, that the current leadership of Poland includes a number of Polish anti-communist heroes whose commitment to keeping tyranny and terror at bay is not and has not been brought into question.

The Poles have been betrayed, oppressed, and stabbed in the back on numerous occasions in their rocky history. Indeed, essential to understanding what has happened in Poland is the history of how it was betrayed by the Western establishment and deliberately sold into slavery. This horrifying tale of betrayal, involving the highest echelons of power in the United States, including globalists at the Council on Foreign Relations, was recounted by the U.S. Ambassador to Poland at the time, Arthur Bliss Lane, in his must-read book I Saw Poland Betrayed. Once the true nature of the threat that Poles and all of humanity are dealing with is properly understood, the battle will be practically won.

Photo of Lech Walesa: AP Images

Related articles:

Poland’s Election Crushes Left, Roils EU and Climate Alarmists

Second October Socialist Revolution

Leninists Still Leading

Globalist Gorbachev Defends Putin; USSR Role in EU Revisited

Putin’s East vs. Globalist West: Merging Into a New World Order

Putin’s Russia

Bulgarian Communist Is Now “Frontrunner” to Lead UN

UN and UNESCO Bosses to Join Communist Tyrants at “Victory Day”

The Communist Nations and Western Assistance

The Grasp of Socialist International

Putin: Key Player in the “New World Order

Kissinger, Putin, and the “New World Order”