passed on throughout the country. It was a spectacular mistake by the military regime, which reacted with grim predictability. Harasiewicz was arrested and jailed.
However irritated the military were with Wałesa, the generals could make no serious moves against him. He was too well known, especially after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1983. He dared not go to Stockholm to receive the award, for he feared the junta would not allow him back into Poland. So Danuta went in his stead and read his acceptance speech on his behalf. Mrs Wałesa was no longer the shy, retiring, nervous woman she had been when she married. Though she was in her husband’s shadow, she was not awed by him - or by anybody else, as an extraordinary tape made by the Polish secret service makes clear. Never a Communist, she became vigorously and increasingly opposed to the regime over time. Their home in Pilotów Street, Gdansk, was bugged, as all the family knew. When, on one occasion, SB officers arrived to pickup Wałesa for interrogation, as they routinely did several times a year, he was out. Danuta opened the front door and this was the exchange that followed:
CAPTAIN MAREK ROGOWSKI: Where’s Wałesa?
DANUTA WAŁESA: So walk around the place. Feel at home. Mr Wałesa! Militia here to see you. Hey, you [to another young policeman poking his nose around the rooms]. My husband will be here in a moment.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Let me in. I haven’t come to see you.
DANUTA: Just wait... What do you think you’re doing? You’re behaving like a thug. What do you mean you have orders? To break into a person’s place and start recording things?
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Keep your hands off, Mrs Wałesa. Stop pushing me.
LECH WAŁESA: (returning home) I’m on sick leave and not supposed to go out . . . You can’t take a sick man by force.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Yes we will.
DANUTA: So four bulls have come to take my husband away. You’re a thug. Oh, look at that one . . . he looks almost normal . . . Take your gun out and shoot, what do you have to lose? Swines, cannibals. Yes, keep on recording. I’ll smash this ashtray over your heads, you blockheads.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: I warn you that offending a policeman on duty . . .
DANUTA: I’m a citizen just like you. But I can’t come into your place and record you . . .
LECH WAŁESA: Calm down, darling. There may be trouble.
DANUTA: You cops are running around like cats with sick bladders.
LECH WAŁESA: This is simply an assault on my home.
DANUTA: Those shits . . . You can’t frighten me though.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI : I will ask our doctor to examine Mr Wałesa. 1
The effort and expense that for many years went into keeping tabs on Lech Wałesa was extraordinary. He calculated once, some time later, after seeing documents about the surveillance operation mounted against him, that the cost of a limited three-week operation - recording and transcribing 170 hours of conversations, paying for twenty-one eight-hour days - could have financed a month’s work of the entire welding unit at the Lenin Shipyard. And that did not cover payment for the night shift, nor the translators’ wages, nor the cost of the cars and police van outside his home. 2
Martial law was lifted in July 1983, but many of the regulations remained in place, principally the ban on Solidarity and on demonstrations. The war of attrition went on for a further three years. Few of the Solidarity leaders who managed to escape on the night martial law was declared stayed out of jail permanently. It was a cloak-and-dagger existence for some of them, said the inspiring young underground Solidarity leader in Warsaw, Zbigniew Bujak. ‘I never stayed at any place for longer than a month - usually for a lot less,’ he said. ‘Each of us was designated a flat, but we never worked in the same place . . . we never met each other in the flats where we were living.’ For some of the martial law period it looked as though Solidarity would disappear,
However irritated the military were with Wałesa, the generals could make no serious moves against him. He was too well known, especially after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1983. He dared not go to Stockholm to receive the award, for he feared the junta would not allow him back into Poland. So Danuta went in his stead and read his acceptance speech on his behalf. Mrs Wałesa was no longer the shy, retiring, nervous woman she had been when she married. Though she was in her husband’s shadow, she was not awed by him - or by anybody else, as an extraordinary tape made by the Polish secret service makes clear. Never a Communist, she became vigorously and increasingly opposed to the regime over time. Their home in Pilotów Street, Gdansk, was bugged, as all the family knew. When, on one occasion, SB officers arrived to pickup Wałesa for interrogation, as they routinely did several times a year, he was out. Danuta opened the front door and this was the exchange that followed:
CAPTAIN MAREK ROGOWSKI: Where’s Wałesa?
DANUTA WAŁESA: So walk around the place. Feel at home. Mr Wałesa! Militia here to see you. Hey, you [to another young policeman poking his nose around the rooms]. My husband will be here in a moment.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Let me in. I haven’t come to see you.
DANUTA: Just wait... What do you think you’re doing? You’re behaving like a thug. What do you mean you have orders? To break into a person’s place and start recording things?
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Keep your hands off, Mrs Wałesa. Stop pushing me.
LECH WAŁESA: (returning home) I’m on sick leave and not supposed to go out . . . You can’t take a sick man by force.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: Yes we will.
DANUTA: So four bulls have come to take my husband away. You’re a thug. Oh, look at that one . . . he looks almost normal . . . Take your gun out and shoot, what do you have to lose? Swines, cannibals. Yes, keep on recording. I’ll smash this ashtray over your heads, you blockheads.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI: I warn you that offending a policeman on duty . . .
DANUTA: I’m a citizen just like you. But I can’t come into your place and record you . . .
LECH WAŁESA: Calm down, darling. There may be trouble.
DANUTA: You cops are running around like cats with sick bladders.
LECH WAŁESA: This is simply an assault on my home.
DANUTA: Those shits . . . You can’t frighten me though.
CAPTAIN ROGOWSKI : I will ask our doctor to examine Mr Wałesa. 1
The effort and expense that for many years went into keeping tabs on Lech Wałesa was extraordinary. He calculated once, some time later, after seeing documents about the surveillance operation mounted against him, that the cost of a limited three-week operation - recording and transcribing 170 hours of conversations, paying for twenty-one eight-hour days - could have financed a month’s work of the entire welding unit at the Lenin Shipyard. And that did not cover payment for the night shift, nor the translators’ wages, nor the cost of the cars and police van outside his home. 2
Martial law was lifted in July 1983, but many of the regulations remained in place, principally the ban on Solidarity and on demonstrations. The war of attrition went on for a further three years. Few of the Solidarity leaders who managed to escape on the night martial law was declared stayed out of jail permanently. It was a cloak-and-dagger existence for some of them, said the inspiring young underground Solidarity leader in Warsaw, Zbigniew Bujak. ‘I never stayed at any place for longer than a month - usually for a lot less,’ he said. ‘Each of us was designated a flat, but we never worked in the same place . . . we never met each other in the flats where we were living.’ For some of the martial law period it looked as though Solidarity would disappear,
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