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]