The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

Rolph and his deputy didn’t like it, but they got the message. Almost immediately, they responded by launching a campaign to pick over the remnants of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. To their surprise, the CIA officers would quickly discover that, beneath the surface, there was little left of the once mighty MfS. As in Warsaw and Prague, the old order in East Berlin was beginning to crack.

Warsaw, 1990

Andrzej Milczanowski, a rough-hewn and tough-minded provincial lawyer and longtime dissident, had paid his dues to Solidarity. Born in 1939 in a section of eastern Poland that was later absorbed into the Ukraine, Milczanowski came by his hatred for the Communists early on. Soon after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland following Stalin’s disastrous pact with Hitler, Milczanowski’s father, a local prosecutor known for his anti-Communist beliefs, was dragged away by the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. His family later learned that he had been taken to Kiev and executed, along with other local Polish government and military leaders.

His mother took Andrzej and his sister and fled to Lvov and then to the countryside, and finally after the war they were able to settle in western Poland. Milczanowski studied law in Poznan and like his father became a local prosecutor, working, and chafing, under the Communist regime.

Milczanowski eventually left the prosecutor’s office in Stettin to become a defense lawyer, and in 1978 he took on the case of a pair of local dissidents. The case had a major influence on Milczanowski, so when Solidarity emerged in 1980, he was ready to take on a leadership role in the local movement in Stettin. He served as a member of the Solidarity strike committee in the city. At the beginning of martial law in Poland in 1981, Milczanowski was leading a strike committee at Stettin’s dockyards, and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. An amnesty decree cut his sentence to two and a half years, and when he emerged from prison in 1984, Milczanowski went right back into dissident work, becoming head of the underground Solidarity movement in Stettin. In August 1988, he led a strike against the local public transit company, one of the many labor actions around the country that so bedeviled the Communist regime in the months before it finally agreed to roundtable talks with Solidarity.

After Solidarity took control of the government, Milczanowski was put in charge of intelligence matters and soon had to decide what to do with the Communist-era service.

Initially, Milczanowski was frustrated by the fact that so many files had been destroyed. When he asked to see the files from one particular department, an officer came and laid a few pieces of paper on his desk. “Is that your whole file?” Milczanowski asked in exasperation.

“Yes,” the officer said matter-of-factly and with little embarrassment.

Despite his own tragic personal history with the Communists, Milczanowski approached the issue of what to do with Poland’s foreign intelligence officers with hardheaded pragmatism. Poland had undergone a sudden and radical political transformation, but the Soviet Union still lurked next door. The new democracy, Milczanowski believed, was still vulnerable to external threats. He decided that Poland couldn’t afford the wholesale dismissal of its most experienced spies. Milczanowski later watched in disgust as the new government of Václav Havel fired its intelligence service and started with greenhorns. It was nothing less than unilateral disarmament, Milczanowski believed, and he eventually told the Czechs so in what the Czechs recalled as a very unpleasant meeting.

One of Milczanowski’s new duties was to head a special vetting committee to determine which foreign intelligence officers should be kept and which ones let go. Gromoslaw Czempinski was chosen by the foreign service to serve as an advocate for its officers in front of the vetting committee, and soon the ex-Communist spy had developed a close relationship with Milczanowski, the ex-dissident who was now his boss. Czempinski was eventually named deputy chief of the foreign intelligence service and became, in effect, Poland’s DDO.

But they sometimes fought fiercely over which officers should be retained. The vetting committee was particularly suspicious of officers who had been extremely active under the Communists and often let those who lacked much of an operational track record slip through. In the end, the committee agreed to keep about six hundred of the approximately one thousand officers from the foreign intelligence service, although Milczanowski later regretted some of the individual selections. He discovered that many of those who had been the most active—and who thus came under the most scrutiny from the vetting panel—were also the best and most efficient. The officers who had done little under the Communists were not closet dissidents or secret Polish heroes, but simply lazy.

Among the most effective of the foreign intelligence officers to be fired was Aleksandr Makowski, the officer who had been in charge of the special branch spying on Solidarity and its ties to the CIA. Czempinski made a special plea to the vetting committee on Makowski’s behalf, but his work against Solidarity was simply too much for the new government to swallow.

Prague, March 1990

Oldrich Cerny was surprised when Jiri Krizan, Havel’s first national security adviser, asked him to walk with him in the gardens around Prague Castle, the seat of government. “We have to get rid of the intelligence service, and we need your help,” Krizan told Cerny quietly. “We have all of these old Communists and we have to move them out. Havel wants you to do it,” Krizan added.

“All right,” Cerny said. “When do you want me to start?”

“Right now,” Krizan said. “We are five minutes late for a meeting with British intelligence.”

The first halting efforts by the new Havel government to reform the security services had been a failure, and now Havel was turning to Cerny to help clean up the mess.

The StB had been formally dismantled in February and its officers told not to report for work until they could be vetted by