My hundred days: not even the most cynical guessed what would be the biggest difficulty in booting Poland's Communists out

National Review, July 20, 1992 by Radek Sikorski

Not even the most cynical guessed what would be the biggest difficulty in booting Poland's Communists out.

IT WAS a Friday afternoon. I was on the roof of Chobielin, the old manor house I'm restoring, checking the tiles. They are old, and must be laid in an old-fashioned way; the workmen don't always get it right. This time they did, and I was just about to pronounce myself satisfied when one of them ran up, panting, from the keeper's lodge. There was a telephone call, he said, all the way from Warsaw.

I ran back to get it. The sound was faint--the last mile of telephone cable leading to Chobielin is of pre-war vintage--but I made out the voice of Jan Parys, Poland's first civilian, nonCommunist minister of defense. I knew him slightly; we belonged to the same political clubs in Warsaw. He had worked on negotiating the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland, and had a reputation for toughness.

When I was writing a book about Afghanistan, I had consequently brushed up against the British and American military establishments. Minister Parys was a staunch Atlanticist, interested in developing better links with those countries. Now, over the crackling telephone line, Parys asked whether I would become his deputy, responsible for security policy and foreign relations. It meant giving up my job, taking a salary of $266 per month, slowing down work on the house, and living in polluted Warsaw. I rang my fiancee; within the hour I rang the minister back and accepted.

Our First Mistake

THOSE telephone calls were our first mistake. They were bugged, and the listening ears of military intelligence were not friendly. While the old Polish security police had been purged two years earlier, military intelligence and counterintelligence, known in Polish as WSI, were untouched. They did not like my appointment. I had traveled in Afghanistan on the side of the mujahedin, and in Angola with Savimbi. My sympathies were unlikely to lie with a corrupt, unreformed Communist secret service.

As soon as they heard my name, they knew exactly what to do. On Sunday morning--meaning that they had submitted the information, laundered through several hands, between Friday night and Saturday noon--the London Observer ran a short, nasty little story about me in its gossip column, full of mistakes. That article did what it was meant to do, causing a furor in Poland and calling the appointment to the attention of President Lech Walesa.

It is a time-honored method. In provincial societies, people presume foreigners are right. When the Communists wanted to broadcast something widely, they bounced the information off foreign sources, even if it had to be the Morning Star. Nowadays, when President Walesa wants to have flattering things said about himself, he gets the television news presenters to quote the New York Times, never the Polish press. The hack at the Observer patted himself on the back for his "scoop" the following week; I later confirmed that the WSI had been the ultimate source of the plant.

In practice, Poland has no libel laws: you can sue, but it takes years and the court usually awards negligible damages. Newspapers, even those aspiring to quality, laugh at the penalties and write what they want. It's as if the Washington Post maintained the standards of the National Enquirer. So I could do nothing when I was said to have lied about lectures I gave at British and American universities, when they hinted that British intelligence had paid my university fees, and insinuated a "friendship" with Minister Parys, whatever that meant. I could not object when I was pilloried for "disloyally" choosing to take a British passport when, in 1987, I thought I would never be allowed to return to Poland. Radek Sikorski really ought to be in jail, wrote one charming woman, for traveling armed in Afghanistan in 1986, without the permission of Poland's (then Communist) government. Even Gazeta Wyborcza, a newspaper which prides itself on its cosmopolitanism, hit positively Stalinist chords and called me "an agent of foreign capital." My crime was to have worked for a British company trying to secure investments in Poland. Throughout my hundred days in office, not once did a Polish journalist ring me to check a story.

But my worst offense, by far, was to be too pro-Western. Those who attacked me and Jan Parys the most viciously were either former Communists or old dissidents, whose sympathies also lie on the Left. There is virtually no newspaper, magazine, or radio station that one of these groups does not control. They fully supported the old Polish defense establishment, which had committed itself, if not to remaining in the Warsaw Pact, then at least to approaching the West at a snail's pace. I had not anticipated the sheer malice of the attacks. But then, I had not guessed who would be spearheading this drive away from the West, back toward the East.

In Jaruzelski's Seat

MY ministerial office was in a small villa across the street from the presidential palace. On the other side of the garden, the Soviet Embassy towered above me. General Jaruzelski was said to have recorded there the television speech announcing the imposition of martial law in December 1981. It felt odd to sit in an armchair from which orders for arrests and internments were once barked.