said Bujak - but it was their job to make sure it survived.
There were rules of engagement, though. The violence from the regime was restrained. Though there were hotheads in Solidarity who had weapons, they were never used. Bujak said that when he discovered that one extreme radical group was stockpiling some rifles he found out where they were, raided the weapons cache, loaded them on to a van and threw the guns into the River Vistula near Warsaw. Some figures in the regime ‘wanted to provoke us towards terrorism . . . but we were not interested in street confrontations . . . if we went down that road, we knew we would lose’. Bogdan Borusewicz, who ran the Gdansk underground, said he was shot at twice in the martial law period, but that was exceptional. On the whole the police did not use their weapons. ‘They were serious about catching us and arresting us but there was an unwritten agreement. Generally they didn’t shoot at us and we didn’t shoot at them . . . We did not step over certain limits . . . and they didn’t keep us in prison too long.’ 3
The regime continually tried to create splits amongst the opposition, sometimes subtly, more often with the heavy-handed crudity expected of a military dictatorship. The historian and journalist Adam Michnik was jailed soon after martial law was declared. In December 1983 the Polish Security Minister, General Czesław Kiszczak, summoned Michnik’s girlfriend Basia Labuda to his office. He asked her to convince Michnik to go abroad. ‘I had the choice of spending Christmas on the Riviera or staying in jail for a few more years,’ he said. ‘From a corner in my cell I wrote to him “I know that in my place you would have chosen the Riviera. But that’s the difference between us. You are pigs. We are not. I love Poland, even from my cell. I have no intention of leaving Poland. So don’t count on it.” ’ 4
Pope John Paul met President Reagan in the Vatican on 7 June 1982. Despite agreeing on the evils of communism, the two were not ideological soulmates. The President, for a start, was a born-again evangelical of a thoroughly American kind. The Pope disapproved of rampant market capitalism and materialism almost as much as he did of Godless socialism, though his many supporters in the West rarely tended to read his homilies on that subject. Yet the Pope and the President joined forces in support of Solidarity. They agreed to share intelligence on Poland and at first most of it came from the Vatican. The Pope himself and the Polish clergy in Rome maintained good contacts in the country and passed on vital information to Washington. Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey, was an ardent Cold Warrior, a confusing mixture of brilliant thinker and uncouth eccentric who had learned his craft as an Office of Strategic Services operative in World War Two, before the CIA had come into being. He was a voracious reader, but had a strange habit while immersed in a book, or an interesting conversation, of picking his teeth and his fingernails with the same paperclip. f He believed passionately in renewing the psychological, cultural and propaganda wars with the Soviets which had been a been a major part of the superpower struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. Poland, he thought, would be a vital front in that war. Casey, ebullient and unpredictable, was also a devout Catholic. He met regularly in Washington with Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Apostolic Representative in the US, and in the Vatican with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Curia official in charge of foreign affairs, to plan how Solidarity could be provided with material support. 5
Initially it was the Carter administration that began helping Solidarity. Carter’s Polish-born National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was a firm supporter of the union and had helped to raise substantial funds for it privately. But in public the US government was wary: Solidarity’s cause would not be helped if it became known that the
There were rules of engagement, though. The violence from the regime was restrained. Though there were hotheads in Solidarity who had weapons, they were never used. Bujak said that when he discovered that one extreme radical group was stockpiling some rifles he found out where they were, raided the weapons cache, loaded them on to a van and threw the guns into the River Vistula near Warsaw. Some figures in the regime ‘wanted to provoke us towards terrorism . . . but we were not interested in street confrontations . . . if we went down that road, we knew we would lose’. Bogdan Borusewicz, who ran the Gdansk underground, said he was shot at twice in the martial law period, but that was exceptional. On the whole the police did not use their weapons. ‘They were serious about catching us and arresting us but there was an unwritten agreement. Generally they didn’t shoot at us and we didn’t shoot at them . . . We did not step over certain limits . . . and they didn’t keep us in prison too long.’ 3
The regime continually tried to create splits amongst the opposition, sometimes subtly, more often with the heavy-handed crudity expected of a military dictatorship. The historian and journalist Adam Michnik was jailed soon after martial law was declared. In December 1983 the Polish Security Minister, General Czesław Kiszczak, summoned Michnik’s girlfriend Basia Labuda to his office. He asked her to convince Michnik to go abroad. ‘I had the choice of spending Christmas on the Riviera or staying in jail for a few more years,’ he said. ‘From a corner in my cell I wrote to him “I know that in my place you would have chosen the Riviera. But that’s the difference between us. You are pigs. We are not. I love Poland, even from my cell. I have no intention of leaving Poland. So don’t count on it.” ’ 4
Pope John Paul met President Reagan in the Vatican on 7 June 1982. Despite agreeing on the evils of communism, the two were not ideological soulmates. The President, for a start, was a born-again evangelical of a thoroughly American kind. The Pope disapproved of rampant market capitalism and materialism almost as much as he did of Godless socialism, though his many supporters in the West rarely tended to read his homilies on that subject. Yet the Pope and the President joined forces in support of Solidarity. They agreed to share intelligence on Poland and at first most of it came from the Vatican. The Pope himself and the Polish clergy in Rome maintained good contacts in the country and passed on vital information to Washington. Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey, was an ardent Cold Warrior, a confusing mixture of brilliant thinker and uncouth eccentric who had learned his craft as an Office of Strategic Services operative in World War Two, before the CIA had come into being. He was a voracious reader, but had a strange habit while immersed in a book, or an interesting conversation, of picking his teeth and his fingernails with the same paperclip. f He believed passionately in renewing the psychological, cultural and propaganda wars with the Soviets which had been a been a major part of the superpower struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. Poland, he thought, would be a vital front in that war. Casey, ebullient and unpredictable, was also a devout Catholic. He met regularly in Washington with Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Apostolic Representative in the US, and in the Vatican with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Curia official in charge of foreign affairs, to plan how Solidarity could be provided with material support. 5
Initially it was the Carter administration that began helping Solidarity. Carter’s Polish-born National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was a firm supporter of the union and had helped to raise substantial funds for it privately. But in public the US government was wary: Solidarity’s cause would not be helped if it became known that the
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