Date: 12/09/2020
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
If you’re incredibly lucky walking through life, you get to meet some extraordinary people. This is a story about one of mine.
What unfolded in 1980s Poland remains among the most dramatic and largely satisfying events in which I had a part to play in my decades of service to US intelligence. I say “largely” because it had a plus and a minus.
On the positive side, Poland became the first domino to fall in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. It transpired without losing a single American life; accomplished on a shoestring budget of about $30 million over a decade.
The downside was it forced me to bury some information that later would damage the reputation of one of the most important figures of the late twentieth century. It was one of the more difficult secrets I had to keep until it was blown by somebody else.
It seems events often must be examined differently if you happen to have something to do with where they end up, even if only marginally.
Given that this edition of my weekly Classified Intelligence Brief “Spy Tales” series deals with an actual operation, what I am saying here had to be reviewed by “mother.” Herein is what the vetting and redactions have ultimately allowed be say about this story.
As usual with all of my Spy Tales, we need to begin with some background.
At the end of 1981, the communist government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland. The move came after almost a decade of worsening economic problems, intense pressure from the USSR for the general to keep the Polish population in line, accelerating domestic tensions nonetheless, and a rising labor movement known as Solidarność (Solidarity).
Moscow had been unable to blunt the position of the Catholic Church, Polish history, or the grim determination of a people. It was a fire awaiting a spark.
That spark had been smoldering for a while. Repeated attempts to somehow merge communist central planning with the Polish will had been dismal failures. In 1970, massive food price hikes and the cutting of wages resulted in a strike at the Lenin Shipyards in the Baltic port city of Gdansk. The strikers were met with gunfire.
The massacre resulted in an ongoing labor movement. After a strike in 1980, that movement – Solidarity – was even recognized by the government (in the Gdansk Agreement).
Both actions were centered at Gate Number Two at the shipyard:
In response to the 1970 massacre, the workers even erected a memorial tower in commemoration. The monument was certainly grating to the Jaruzelski government. Every day workers would file through Gate Number Two, walking right by the memorial commemorating the firing on workers by security forces.
The shipyard was ultimately razed, but that memorial and Gate Number Two still stand. In the photograph below, the building behind the memorial is the Solidarity Museum.
Throughout the 1970s there was a tenuous cat-and-mouse relationship between the government in Warsaw and Solidarity. The movement may have begun at the shipyard in Gdansk, but by the time the decade ended it had spread throughout the county with a membership in excess of 10 million.
Matters came to a head in 1981. Following another price rise and reduced wages, Solidarity called for strikes across the country. Jaruzelski responded with a martial law decree and came down hard on the labor movement, arresting and imprisoning most of their leadership.
At the head of the movement was a gruff, unpolished, unemployed electrician named Lech Wałeşa (pronounced Va-wen-sa). He was short and paunchy, with a face one Solidarity member told me “could only have been loved by a nearsighted mother.”
Lech had a single skill that thrust him into the forefront of events. He remains the most awe-inspiring crowd orator I have ever met.
Our meeting took place for the first time in April 1988. This was toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term. His administration regarded the situation in Poland as an opportunity to put pressure on the Soviets. The country was clearly Moscow’s weakest link in the Warsaw Pact.
But the operation, which would have the apt code name QRHELPFUL (QR being the agency cryptonym header at the time for all things Polish), and begun in early 1982, had to be very carefully orchestrated.
There could be no deployment of American military/paramilitary personnel or arms, despite the rise of a vexing and more radical Solidarity splinter group intent on a bloody civil war. Neither could there be any outward indication of US involvement at all. Moscow would have never tolerated any direct intervention in what was acknowledged as its soft underbelly in Eastern Europe. The Polish security service Sluzba Bezpieczeństva (SB) had its suspicions, as did the KGB, the frustrated Russian parent back at its foreign service (First Chief Directorate) headquarters at Yasnevo outside Moscow. But QRHELPFUL had to be designed to prevent any visible American connection.
While the world was witnessing Solidarity’s resistance daily, nobody was to see the American connection. This is the essence whenever you speak of a covert operation. Such an op is designed to prevent the sponsor of action from being known. (In contrast, anything clandestine means all aspects of an operation remain unknown).
The last thing Washington wanted was a massive reaction from the USSR, leading to a full-scale occupation of Poland by the Soviet army, like the crushing of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 Czechoslovakia or the reaction to the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
Now I need to make something very clear before proceeding. This was a Polish-inspired and run popular insurrection from the get-go. Unquestionably, the reason it was domestic in origin and support ultimately guaranteed its victory. The US helped but neither initiated nor ran what was transpiring.
QRHELPFUL had two main parts. The first was its primary function. Through complicated venues starting in places like Paris, Vienna, Bonn, and Frankfurt, and continuing in places like Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Brussels, printing presses and supplies, ink, reams of paper, broadcast and communications equipment, printed material, and money were smuggled into Poland.
After the martial law and security crackdowns, Solidarity was outlawed and became in every sense of the term an underground movement. The smuggled material was essential to feeding the extensive network of personal connections throughout the country.
My involvement kicked in on March 31, 1988 with my landing in Warsaw from London by way of Vienna. I was part of a small contingent of Americans with specific (and short-term) assignments. This was the second part of QRHELPFUL.
For these activities, principal coordination came via the CIA station in London. That city was my base of activities throughout most of the decade. There were six of us on this side of the operation. Unlike the main part of activities, where US intelligence officers could coordinate from outside Poland, we needed to be in country for what we were doing.
And for that, each of us required a valid cover reason that would pass the SB’s “smell test.” Assignments included training, especially on jamming technology that allowed hijacking live local TV and radio broadcasts to move out Solidarity messages and infuriating the government.
Others involved specialized contacts. My assignment was to coordinate between Solidarity (still based in Gdansk) and support among academic and scholarly groups based in Warsaw, Krakow and elsewhere. The Poles could assuredly do this on their own, but they needed our logistical and financial support. That meant I ended up passing communications, contacts, and other material up and down the “line” to and from US/London and among cells in Poland.
Of greater moment was another less pleasant aspect of the assignment I will discuss in a moment.
I was a university professor in the states and the UK (at least, that was my “day job”) and had developed a name and scholarly recognition. The process had taken some time, but by 1986 I had finally been elected a foreign corresponding member of both the Polish and Czech Academies of Science (with some “help” from friends in both bodies).
That meant I was expected to provide a series of inaugural lectures during separate trips to Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Czech events are a story for another time.
In April 1988 I presented lectures in Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, Łodz…and Gdansk. The five appearances were spread over 18 days. I had two SB “guides.” Fortunately, one was also a US intel asset.
The other part of what I had to do was take possession of a file we thought was the sole copy of material smuggled out of the SB headquarters in Warsaw, bring it to Gdansk, confirm its contents with Wałeşa, get on a tour boat to see the sites, and on the way deep six the contents in the Baltic.
There was a specific reason why my cover allowed me to so this part. But the vetting for this issue of Spy Tales does not allow me to write about it. Does not help if we end up with blacked out redacted lines all over the text. So, this is one of several instances in which I have simply dropped matters, writing around material to keep the narrative going.
Anyway, everything went off well. I was back in London before the end of April, having met with Wałeşa, coordinated with groups in five cities, and dumped weighted-down papers off a boat.
By the end of 1988, the government was cracking. Mikhail Gorbachev was now in charge back in Moscow and there were clear indications the Soviets would not support Jaruzelski with troops. Solidarity was empowered, the economic situation inside Poland was worsening, and angry crowd were defying martial law all over the country.
Then it happened. The general caved and Solidarity was recognized as a legal political party. It contested and swept the 1989 elections for the Sejm (the lower house of the Polish parliament); the upper house was still appointed by the government.
One year later (1990), Lech Wałeşa was elected President of Poland. He would serve in that office until 1995 and received the Nobel Peace Prize among dozens of other international awards. He donated the money from the Nobel Prize to a Catholic Church program modernizing rural areas of Poland.
But he would also feel the harsh wind of history pass him by. His manner and belligerence began to play less well. He lost reelection in 1995. And when he ran again in 2000, Wałeşa received barely 1 percent of the popular vote.
Once again I was reminded that rabble rousers gain you access. From that point on, bureaucrats are entrusted with delivering the policies.
I last met with President Wałeşa in 2010 and have talked about that meeting elsewhere (attached below). But years after that boat ride, what I dumped in the Baltic Sea came back to haunt him.
Perhaps it was naïve to believe that only one copy existed of that file. But information contained in it “surfaced” from the widow of a fellow who had been a Polish Interior Ministry official throughout the Solidarity period.
Lech Wałeşa had been a paid SB informant during his early labor days.
Back in 1988 I gave him the opportunity to deny it. He did not. He was struggling to support a family, he told me, and had no choice.
Release of that information may well have derailed Solidarity whose fate was almost interchangeable with that of Wałeşa. At least we kept it quiet for a while.
Back then, given everything else happening in Eastern Europe by the early 1990s, the communists would have fallen in Warsaw anyway.
Yet the future of that unemployed electrician would not have been the same and Poland’s destiny would have been dependent on matters outside its immediate control.
The world is still a better place because Lech Wałeşa took the reins of a movement in 1980. It ended up being one hell of a ride, even for those like me who were only on board for a short time.
On March 28 of last year, I wrote the following about the last time I met President Wałeşa. That piece had within it an even earlier writing of mine. It is worth revisiting.
Sunday [March 31, 2019] marks the thirty-first anniversary of one of the more interesting of my assignments during a parallel career in US intelligence. This one remains a unique success story, one that involved no US weapons, deployment of paramilitary forces, American loss of life, or large expenditures.
But it was still high stakes covert gamesmanship in that world of shadows, targeting first the weak link in Soviet control over Eastern Europe and then the actual fall of a puppet government.
This is how a well-run action for focused limited objectives should work. It may also be the most satisfying operation in which I was ever involved, for three reasons. First, it succeeded beyond our loftiest expectations, with everybody from our side coming out of it in one piece. Second, it supported a genuine grass-roots movement bent on returning a government to its own people. And third, it introduced me to one of the greatest popular figures of the twentieth century.
The country is Poland, the movement is Solidarity, and the individual is Lech Wałeşa – out of work electrician, rabble rouser, Novel laureate, and ultimately President of Poland.
I was last with President Wałeşa in late February 2010. The location of that meeting was this memorable place – Malbork Castle, outside Wałeşa’s hometown of Gdansk.
This is what I remember and wrote in 2010, along with some comments on a development that is once again likely to change the European markets:
Two decades ago, I found myself in Gdansk, Poland. I was a young(ish) university professor at the time but had ongoing responsibilities from the kind of government job you never really leave. So, when an unemployed electrician was leading a strike there, Washington sent several of us in to provide logistical support.
That strike would bring down a communist government, lead to the collapse of a wall, and turn an unassuming man into an international hero, Nobel laureate, and Polish president. His name was Lech Wałeşa, and I would never see him again…
Until last Saturday evening.
We met for dinner at Malbork Castle, Europe’s largest Gothic fortress and the medieval seat of the Teutonic Knights. Located about an hour outside Gdansk, the castle suffered significant damage during World War II and has been under renovation for years. The war began in 1939 a few miles from Gdansk, leveling the city twice before the Russians took it over. Thanks to Poles like President Wałeşa, they were finally obliged to give it back.
We reminisced, exchanged stories, and talked some politics. But mostly we discussed new markets and new investment opportunities. I had accepted an invitation from another major Polish figure – European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek – to address an energy security roundtable meeting in Gdansk. They even gave me a personal security team, which was certainly something different. When last in this city, those were the very guys I was trying to avoid.
I presented a briefing on the impact of planned oil and natural gas import channels into the Baltic region and Western Europe in general, along with how new sources are going to transform the energy balance. This region has remained dependent on energy imports from the east. Every time there is a political hiccup, or Russian gas giant Gazprom (OGZPY) flexes its muscles, people in places like Poland must worry about staying warm.
Yet the spin is actually much worse than the reality.
Russia is as dependent on European purchases as Europe is on Moscow sales. Despite what politicians and the media say about Russia’s “bear hug” approach to Europe’s energy supplies, a mutual need has resulted.
The real issue remains having too many eggs in one basket. That is where the new opportunities emerge.
By 2020, as Europe moves from a crude-oil-based energy structure to natural gas and alternative sources, it will be importing over 57 percent of its gas. Two major developments, however, are changing where that gas comes from and the structure of import flow. Both are going to provide investment profits well beyond the Baltic.
One advance is the rise of unconventional gas in Poland and surrounding countries. Any domestic sourcing will change the energy balance significantly, along with security implications for the entire region. This is an important focus for investors moving forward. It is also one of the primary reasons I am headed to London on March 1st to the annual energy gathering at Windsor Castle.
The second development is already providing investor access to fundamental shifts in European energy. In this case, a shift to liquefied natural gas (LNG). It is having a major impact worldwide.
The process involves cooling gas to a liquid so that it can be moved by tankers, then re-gasifying the volume on the receiving end. It is a large and growing part of the Asian energy picture and accounts for a rising percentage of deliveries in Europe.
In my judgment, LNG will be the single most significant change in energy distribution over the next two decades.
It also has another primary effect on global gas.
Once LNG traffic becomes an ongoing regular component of the trade, genuine spot markets will emerge. Spot sales in crude oil allow us to set a pricing floor for longer-term transactions. In the past, however, gas has not been able to give us anything beyond regional pricing support, since it’s been limited by where the pipelines travel.
LNG is changing all that…
The rise in LNG worldwide will allow us to influence price even in markets without significant tanker traffic.
In places like Europe, where the source of gas is becoming as important as the amount, LNG will have an even greater result. That means major LNG receiving terminals, such as the Rotterdam Gate project in the Netherlands and the Polskie LNG Co. facility at Swinoujscie (on the Polish Baltic), are important to the overall development of the entire market.
The LNG revolution provides us a dual point of access to the resulting profits – through the local companies involved and the foreign contractors poised to build the facilities. Polskie LNG is a prime case in point. It is a wholly owned affiliate of Gaz-system. Both are not currently traded, but parent company PGNiG SA is listed in London. Those infrequently traded shares will be increasing in exchange value as the Polish LNG projects move into construction phase.
The other LNG opportunity in this part of the world arises from the foreign companies needed to construct the facilities.
Here the pre-tendering process in Poland has produced a short list of finalists for first-stage investor supervision, with two consortia having the inside track and including companies on my radar. Privately-held Savannah-based MEI has previously received the initial due diligence contract for the Rotterdam Gate LNG project, while London-traded has a subsidiary up and operating in the Polish market.
Once the FEED (Front End Engineering and Design) contract is tendered, most of the biggest names in the LNG business will be pre-qualified. This list will include privately-held Bechtel, Saipem SPA (SAPMY), Technip (TKPPY), McDermott International (MDR), London-traded Petrofac Ltd., Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. (HYHZF), and Keppel Corp. (KPELY).
On the Polish crude oil and refining side, LOTOS Grupa is also in a thinly traded London Stock Exchange environment, but that is likewise set to change. This primary source of refined product is coming out of its largest upgrade ever. Upon completion later this year, refinery capacity will have more than tripled. The LOTOS Naftaport at Gdansk will be able to increase shipments from non-Russian sources, further limiting the stranglehold Moscow could apply in the future.
I spent several days with LOTOS and PGNIG executives discussing the rising flexibility in the European energy mix. They provided me with advance notice on two new directions likely to keep your attention fixed on this region. One involves rising capital needs for new projects, prompting both companies to consider expanded equity placement offers in London and New York. The other addresses the need to accelerate foreign technical help in designing the new oil and gas network. The average investor will be able to play both the domestic and foreign companies, benefiting from the change.
And it is this rapid change that struck me most in Gdansk, symbolized by an encounter upon leaving Malbork. As we came out of the castle into a mixture of snow and drizzle, a police officer snapped to attention and then extended his hand to Wałeşa. “Jan koija,” the policeman said, smiling: “Thank you.”
We walked on for a few minutes in silence. Finally, the former shipyard laborer who literally transformed the world remarked: “That’s one of the biggest changes in my country – smiling policja.”
Back decades in my own thoughts, I understood.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it.
Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations). After moving through the inner circles of royalty, oligarchs, billionaires, and the uber-rich, he discovered some of the most important secrets regarding finance, geo-politics, and business. As a result, he built one of the most impressive rolodexes in the world. His insights and network of contacts took him from a Vietnam veteran to becoming one of the globe’s most sought after consultants, with clients including six of the largest energy companies and the United States government.
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