Title: Polish Weekly Views Personnel Moves in Intelligence, Internal Security
Agencies

Document Number: FBIS-EEU-2002-0813
Document Date: 17 Aug 2002
Sourceline: EUP20020813000172 Warsaw Polityka (Internet Version-WWW) in Polish
17 Aug 02
Citysource: Warsaw Polityka (Internet Version-WWW)
Language: Polish

Subslug: Article by Janina Paradowska: "Clean Purge"

[FBIS Translated Text]     More personnel shifts in the special services.
These services are again becoming politicized. SB ([Communist] Security
Service) people are coming back. Employees of the former UOP [Office for
State Protection] will bolster the ranks of the mafias.... Such are just
a few of the opinions heard in the last few days, which demonstrate that
in Poland the secret services still are stirring strong emotions.

    Let us put the facts in order: On 29 June the Office for State
Protection has ceased to exist and was replaced with two new
agencies--Domestic Security and Intelligence. They are headed by
politicians having the rank of ministerial secretaries of state. The PM
has entrusted heading the Intelligence Agency to Zbigniew Siemiatkowski,
and the Domestic Security Agency to Andrzej Barcikowski, the last
director of the UOP.

    Right after the ABW [Domestic Security Agency was established, layoff
notices were served to 420 [UOP] employees, or 8 percent of the total.
For some reason, they were served at night (could it be following the
principle that these services work in the dark?), which made the
situation additionally dramatic.

    Immediately afterward [as published] Col. Pawel Pruszynski was
appointed first deputy director of the ABW. Col. Pruszynski had been
discharged from the UOP during the AWS [Solidarity Electoral Action]
administration, and he is an active SLD [Democratic Left Alliance] member
and a Lodz councilman who actually had begun his career serving in the SB
although, to be sure, he had passed his vetting in 1990. To any
opposition, and especially to an opposition who still relishes calling
itself the anti-communist opposition, such a biography is very much grist
for the mill.

    Thus, the opposition has declared that the layoffs are in the nature
of a political purge and former SB agents are being rehired. But there is
no proof of this. There is simply no legible pattern to these layoffs.

    The lawmakers have decided that the directors of both new agencies
have only 14 days after the law takes effect to propose to employees new
terms of service or terminate their employment. Thus it is obvious that
the layoffs have been planned for a long time now (more or less since
February), although the official reason is a shortage of funds, which is
said to have arisen recently.

    Other reasons can be found too. For example, trimming a bloated staff
is just as good an argument as a shortage of funds, especially
considering that the UOP was indeed a bloated agency. Whatever the
reason, Andrzej Barcikowski was provided with lists of people slated for
layoffs prepared by his predecessor, that is, by Zbigniew Siemiatkowski
and his people (Siematkowski used to be director of the UOP until April
2002).

    How did the lists of people slated for layoffs become drafted and who
was settling what scores?   I could get no specific response from the
first director of the UOP, Krzysztof Kozlowski or from Konstanty
Miodowicz (head of UOP Counterintelligence under the AWS administration).
Both mentioned score-settling at branch-office levels (getting rid of
rivals) and in general the absence of clear criteria. It is thus
difficult to speak of a political purge. Such a purge did take place much
earlier and was undoubtedly conducted by the previous director of the
UOP, Col. Zbigniew Nowek, during whose term of office more than 1,400
employees had been discharged, and subsequently by Zbigniew
Siemiatkowski, who rehired his people and fired the "Nowek" people.

    Andrzej Barcikowski contends that the commission which considered the
appeals was objective; ultimately, 31 persons were reinstated, including
seven for "purely humane" reasons, because most of those laid off were
indeed among the least effective employees. Particularly ineffective,
especially in operational work, proved to be those with a service record
of three to 15 years. One-half of those reinstated were the most recent
employees with less than three years of service.

    Thus, it is not true that those originally hired by Col. Nowek were
the ones most discriminated against, even though at times their selection
was strange. For example, it turned out that under his directorship a
person could become promoted to UOP officer rank after only a few days of
training. Normally, the preparatory period, covering cycles of training,
takes precisely three years. That period includes dormitory life, medical
examinations, and psychological tests of resistance to various factors,
such as to religious fundamentalism (whoever fails that test is
automatically disqualified).

    Whether Barcikowski can be believed or not, it is a fact that such
situations did take place, and even Konstanty Miodowicz, undoubtedly a
main adversary of the current ABW director, considers the purges
conducted by Nowek to be outrageous, and that also is how he views the
current purge.

    In Miodowicz's opinion, the appointment of Col. Pawel Pruszynski to
the post of first deputy director of the ABW is also an outrage. This
appointment precisely is to be crowning evidence of the return of the
"old SB guys" and of politicization of the new agency.

    Perhaps Andrzej Barcikowski has lost his political instincts, because
the return of the pre-1989 special-services personnel is beginning to be
increasingly evident, and not just within the special services at that.
The appointments of former PZPR [Polish United Workers Party] activists
to various offices are becoming too numerous, even though they had joined
the SLD [Democratic Left Alliance] not while that grouping was in the
opposition but after it already was climbing to power. It is they who
nowadays exert the strongest pressures on the SLD leadership for
appointments to offices; it is they who very often represent the new TKM
[Teraz, kurwy, my   ("Now, you bastards, is our turn for spoils of
office")].

    Pruszynski's appointment is undoubtedly part of this new climate of
the return of old communist security agents. To be sure, it is worth
noting that even such a declared anti-communist as Janusz Palubicki had
appointed Gen. Bogdan Libera the intelligence chief: Consider that Libera
had formerly worked in PRL [Polish People's Republic] intelligence, but
he was thought well-qualified.

    It thus appears that the only reasonable criterion for deciding
whether a person is qualified or not for work in the special services
should be whether he had been vetted in 1990. Those who had passed that
vetting (and Pruszynski did pass it) cannot be automatically ineligible.
Should, on the other hand, unvetted people begin to be appointed to the
services, then and only then we can speak of a return of the SB. For the
time being this has not happened.

    There is not either any evidence that sacked UOP personnel are
bolstering the mafias, contrary to the muddied assertions of Deputy
Zbigniew Wasserman (Law and Justice party). It cannot, of course, be
precluded that some or other former UOP employee, or even a current ABW
officer, will violate the law (for example, when ties between the police
and gangsters surface), but claiming that several hundred UOP officers
will switch to working for the mafias, because they have nowhere else to
go, is a gross misunderstanding. There are no signs that UOP employees
laid off by that agency's previous director have begun to collaborate en
masse with gangsters. Well then, do there exist any grounds for
suspecting that officers of the former UOP as a group are especially
prone to become law-breakers? This kind of reasoning would lead us to the
conclusion that the special services are a collection of potential
criminals, which is likely a cockamamie conclusion.

    The idea that laid-off personnel need special attention so as not to
feel frustrated too much was proclaimed by Zbigniew Siemiatkowski,
especially when he was founding the association of former such employees.
Soon it turned out, however, that he had thereby in reality created a
lobby serving mainly former SB officers with political ambitions. It was
due to their influence that the current, very lopsided, reform of   the
special services was conceived. They also were influential in getting
passed the law [disbanding the UOP and creating the two new agencies],
which in reality is a law on the rights of the employees rather than on
the agencies protecting Polish domestic and foreign security. It may be
that the agents currently being laid-off will also, upon being prompted
by politicians, establish their own association of former employees and
begin to plot a new reform of the special services, to be ready by the
time the right will win the next elections.

    The current reform was planned by Zbigniew Siemiatkowski precisely
together with a team of former special-services employees. The impression
may arise that the principal objective of this reform was to abolish the
appellation of the UOP as an institution established after 1989. In other
words, the objective was to obliterate that dividing boundary between the
old and new systems of society. Isolating the intelligence section from
the organizational structure of the UOP was a logical necessity and
should have been done long ago. But as for everything else, it has
remained unchanged [in the new ABW]. Above all, the investigation
department has not been shut down. It had been needed in the early 1990s,
but it is no longer needed now that the CBS [Central Bureau of
Investigation] exists, now that resources should be concentrated on
combatting organized crime instead of being dispersed among competing
services.

    This interservice rivalry, this unwillingness to exchange
information, this unhealthy race to court publicity, is causing more harm
than good. The Domestic Security Agency should simply operate as a
counterintelligence service and normal political police [as published]
protecting the constitutional order in the State. Yet such a reform has
not been carried out precisely because then some of the agency's
personnel would then have to be transferred to posts within the police,
which they would consider as less prestigious, as well as financially
disadvantageous, because the ABW pays higher salaries.

    This largely confirms the notion that the actual reform was intended
to   benefit special-services employees rather than to implement some
broad vision of the status of these services in the State. The new law
has not even defined precisely the scopes of activities of the individual
services. This means that, of a certainty, coordinating committees will
be soon set up, and they will not coordinate anything anyway, because
everyone will have his own axe to grind.

    The reform has not either strengthened civilian control over the
special services. At present such control has conversely become an
instrument exploited   by the special services to penetrate politics, and
this is an extremely dangerous phenomenon.

    During the dispute about the appointment of Col. Pruszynski, Deputy
Miodowicz disclosed a document from the Pruszynski's personnel file
showing that the present deputy director of the ABW had during the
martial-law era taken part in suppressing worker strikes.

    It is said that someone had apparently dropped off copies of that
document into the letterboxes of Sejm deputies.

    Well, this fact reflects the situation with which we have been
dealing for some time now. Too many special-services functionaries dig up
documents from personnel files and pass them on to various power brokers
and political friends. Some pass them on, anonymously or not, to
Miodowicz, others to Jerzy Urban, and others still to friendly reporters.
And so the game of denunciations rolls on. This is a purely political
game, and those participating in it also include people who are supposed
to exercise civilian control over the special services, such as for
example members of the Sejm [Special Services] Committee.

    Following the recent events the Freedom Union party has issued a
declaration which contains this major statement: "...the Sejm Special
Services Committee has ceased to function. The fact that the new chairman
of the Committee is a representative of Samoobrona [radical peasant
Self-Defense], a party with a law-breaking program, means that the
Committee will not be exercising properly its designated role as an
oversight body. Deputy Grzesik's rival was Deputy Antoni Macierewicz, who
is responsible for misusing the special services for purely political
ends, inclusive of a compromising procedure for vetting. We are amazed
that at present Deputy Macierewicz is accepted by the Civic Platform and
Law and Justice parties as a defender of nonpartisan special services."

    This passage from the Freedom Union's declaration describes quite
well the present status of the Sejm Special Services Committee, which now
includes as members either persons who totally lack credibility or
persons with extensive and at times compromising involvement in the
special services and lacking the detachment required for assessing their
problems honestly and impartially. The present composition of that
Committee is exceptionally deplorable. This is a Committee that lacks
credibility and is becoming a source of incessant political anxieties
instead of exercising genuine oversight.

    So long as there is no genuine oversight of the special services with
the participation of the parliamentary opposition (and in such a
committee the opposition rather than the governing coalition should
predominate), the special services will be periodically causing scandals.
Another requirement is that its members should be authoritative persons,
not readily amenable to the conspiracy theory of history. The scandals in
question are moreover often vicarious scandals. That is because nowadays
the real problem is not that 400 functionaries were laid off; most of
them are certain to find other jobs (after all, it is not only UOP
officers who lose their jobs in Poland). No, the real scandal is how the
performance of the special services is being assessed, how national
security is interpreted, and where run the dividing lines among the
various police outfits, whose numbers have multiplied so greatly. The
real scandal also is an issue to which politicians are completely blind,
namely, the fact that the law on the protection of information has opened
virtually unlimited access to the economy for the special services. If
the efficient performance of a business hinges on its being certified for
access to classified information, any businessman aware that such
certification can take many months will not hesitate long in hiring
someone who already has such certification.

    The presence of employees of the current special services and the
former UOP as well as of the Military Information Services in the economy
is becoming striking. It increasingly prompts the conclusion that this is
resulting in the rise, by now almost quite openly, of a
business-political-cronyist complex. Such a complex does not necessarily
put national interests first, and instead it focuses on undermining
rivals by providing damaging personal information on them. This gives
rise to rumors and gossip, intensifies an atmosphere of suspicion, and
causes many events within the power elites to become opaque, even where
they should be transparent.

    This is a more important issue than determining whether Pawel
Pruszynski did or did not suppress worker strikes during the martial-law
era (there is evidence that he did) and whether it is precisely his
appointment that will violate the principle of apolitical operation of
the special services.


[Description of Source: Warsaw Polityka (Internet Version-WWW) in Polish
-- leading political weekly with a center-left orientation]