The File
The bomb explodes four months after his death. The weekly Newsweek Polska publishes documents from the archives of the PRL’s special services concerning Kapuściński’s collaboration with intelligence, which lasted several years. Within the framework of Polish political debate after 1989, co-operation with the communist state’s secret services is generally regarded as something between treason, indecency and opportunism – whatever the material content of the co-operation.
The revelatory force of the sensational facts published in Newsweek is mitigated by an interview with Ernest Skalski, a friend of Kapuściński’s, a journalist who had intermittent contact with the intelligence service in his own history. (Before leaving for Denmark on a scholarship in 1967, Skalski was approached by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official and asked to take an interest, in the course of his stay, in some West German reporters whose statements ‘could pose a threat to Poland’. Skalski did not co-operate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.) Skalski’s basic thesis is that if Kapuściński had not agreed to co-operate with intelligence, he would not have gone abroad as a PAP correspondent, so books such as The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, The Soccer War and others would never have been written, and the great reporter and writer Ryszard Kapuściński would never have emerged. The price he paid for his consent was not high: he never harmed or injured anyone.
Newsweek found itself in the line of fire between supporters and opponents of lustration. The right-wing journalists did not hide their satisfaction: here lay yet another authority in ruins – left-wing or liberal, in short, ‘not one of us’. The man had proved to be an opportunist, ‘up to his neck in it’. Environments friendly with Kapuściński, above all Gazeta Wyborcza, objected to ‘the dramatic distortion of the truth about a great writer’, and ‘casting a shadow on an honourable man’ on the basis of ‘unverified security service documents’. There were also declarations such as: ‘We believe more in his books – in what he wrote and said to his readers and audiences, than in what he allegedly said surreptitiously to blackmailers from the secret police’.
Close friends and defenders also spoke up abroad. As British journalist Ian Traynor wrote in the Guardian:
[Kapuściński] is the latest prominent Pole to be ‘outed’ in what critics call a rightwing witchhunt orchestrated by a paranoid government that sees ‘reds under the beds’ everywhere in Poland.1
Or Italian journalist Paolo Rumiz in la Repubblica:
Polish lustration involves selective acts of vengeance, the aim of which is to attack free people who are credited with promoting the country’s good name. Lustration threatens to besmirch everything and is a game for hyenas. Kapuściński was a victim of the pitiless machine which was set mainly against those who had been abroad. Nonentities from Warsaw society could not forgive him his success and accused him of writing nonsense.2
An ideological war serves neither to establish the truth nor to promote calm consideration or subtle judgements. The lustrators are uninterested in the complex truth about the past, free of cheap moralizing, and in their turn the defenders of those lustrated – like it or not – become hostages for the attackers, and, unable to see that they are doing so, enter into their ways of thinking. Thus it happened up to a point, I think, in the case of Kapuściński. I sympathize with the defenders of Rysiek’s good name, and I wrote a good deal about the post-1989 witch-hunts, but neither of these facts exempts me from establishing – within the possibilities available – the truth about the hero of this account.
So, did Kapuściński co-operate with the intelligence service or not? If he did, what does it actually mean? What exactly did he do? Why? What did the PRL’s intelligence service generally do in the parts of the world to which Kapuściński travelled as a PAP correspondent? How useful was his co-operation? How did he himself regard it? How, in general, should one judge the co-operation of journalists with the secret services?
I often sensed – and this I now know for certain – that fear of the surfacing of the file from the special services archive, and fear of being publicly pilloried as a consequence, weighed on him physically and mentally during the last dozen or so years of his life. I also think that at least once this fear exerted an influence on his writing (a hypothesis I shall explain later). And so I want to, and must, find out what Kapuściński was so terribly afraid of. Did he have reason to be afraid? Did he, as some people now think, conclude an unwritten pact with the devil: co-operation with the intelligence service in exchange for trips abroad? Or perhaps the situation was actually completely different?
I can understand the chief motive for his never speaking of his own co-operation – the atmosphere in Poland after 1989 was not one in which a person could, without fear of being chewed up, spat out and branded, openly admit, ‘Yes, I co-operated. I did it because . . . I’m sorry that . . .’ Or, on the other hand, ‘I’m not sorry, because . . .’
It is time to tell this story in a manner that is free of moralizing blackmail, and free as well of the fear of it.
First of all, the file.3 What does it contain?
A key item is a conclusion drawn up by an anonymous Ministry of Foreign Affairs functionary in 1972: ‘he was used operationally for the identification and exposure of employees of intelligence HQs [in Latin America]. During his co-operation he showed much willingness, but did not hand over any vital materials of interest to the Security Service’.
Chronologically, the earliest items in Kapuściński’s file are notes compiled in 1963 by officers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department I (intelligence). Kapuściński was then a PAP correspondent in East Africa, and probably had no idea the secret services were interested in him. The notes contain perfunctory information on which schools he attended and which organizations he belonged to; that his parents were teachers, his wife a doctor, and his sister a student. One of the notes contains information about Kapuściński’s feud with the playwright Drozdowski, whom he had accused of plagiarism. ‘The subject is under investigation by us as a potential candidate for co-operation’, confirms a Department I officer in this note.
On the basis of the documents available at the Institute of National Remembrance, where the PRL’s secret service archives are stored, it is not possible to establish when the intelligence service first got in touch with Kapuściński.
Chronologically, the next two notes written by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer date from the spring of 1965; after a short stop in Poland, Kapuściński is getting ready to leave for West Africa. At this time he transfers the PAP’s African post from Nairobi to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. Then a personal conversation with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer takes place. In his account of this meeting, the officer refers to Kapuściński by the cryptonym ‘the Poet’ and calls him an ‘information contact’. He also summarizes his African travel plans (and writes in error that Kapuściński is going to East Africa).
In a note for the officer, Kapuściński describes the probable route of his next tour of Africa; he has not yet decided whether the PAP’s new headquarters will be in Accra (Ghana) or Lagos (Nigeria). A document has survived in vestigial form that lists the intelligence service’s expectations of Kapuściński: they are interested in information about the activities of American institutions, companies and organizations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer informs Kapuściński that in Africa someone will get in touch with him, using the password ‘Greetings from Zygmunt’. He is to reply: ‘Has he sold the car?’
Kapuściński receives instructions ‘for information and execution’, and signs them. However, there is no trace in the file of his co-operation with the intelligence service during his time in Africa, not a single piece of information, note or mention. It is not even known if anyone ever approached him with the password established in Warsaw.
The intelligence service remembers Kapuściński again before he leaves for his posting in Latin America. In late autumn 1967 he meets with Major Henryk Sobieski, who reports afterwards: ‘ “The Poet” is familiar to our apparatus from African terrain. Among all his personal acquaintances he enjoys complete trust and a very good reputation. He made a very positive impression on me too. He is close to us in class terms and has a strong ideological commitment. His attitude to working for us is very good.’
During the meeting, Sobieski tells Kapuściński that in Latin America the Polish intelligence services are interested in the activities of the United States’ spy network. ‘In view of his highly political position’, Kapuściński’s instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘will not diverge from the aims of his work as a journalist’. The intelligence service expects Kapuściński to ‘point them towards’ journalists ‘who have connections with the environment of counter-intelligence employees, or who from their official positions (they run the crime sections in their papers) have access to these institutions’. He will also ‘gain information on some issues connected with the activities of Zionism, the Americans and the Federal Republic of Germany’. The remaining topics of the conversation described in the note are of a technical nature: how Kapuściński is to get in touch with the headquarters in Warsaw (via a cryptographer at the embassy in Santiago de Chile; in Mexico City, someone yet to be identified will get in touch with him) and also how to hide from counter-intelligence.
Two years later, the intelligence service extends its expectations to include ‘identifying and reaching CIA and FBI cells deployed on Mexican territory or in other Latin American countries’, ‘gaining information on individuals connected with the activities of these institutions’, ‘gaining insight into environments and places frequented by CIA and FBI functionaries and identifying their contacts with citizens of local origin’, and also ‘hostile activity against the PRL’, conducted ‘above all by the intelligence agencies of the USA, Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany’.
During more than four years spent in Latin America, Kapuściński – as it appears from the archive material available at the Institute of National Remembrance – provides the intelligence service with only a few notes. He signs them with the pseudonym ‘Vera Cruz’.
He tells them about the Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo (CENDES), an institute for development studies at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas which, according to his findings, is ‘a major centre of CIA penetration and reconnaissance within Venezuela’.
(Many years later, Sandra La Fuente, who attended Kapuściński’s journalism workshops and whom I told about this note, will laugh and say that the maestro twisted everything: ‘CENDES has always been the most progressive institute in all Venezuela,’ she says. ‘Some people from the intellectual hinterland of Hugo Chávez’s governments come from there. It seems improbable that CENDES could have been a CIA cover’.)
Here are some extracts from a description of Pablo Morales, editor-in-chief of the Latin American edition of the monthly Reader’s Digest, ‘co-financed by the CIA’:
He has been living in Mexico City for several years. Spanish by origin, but a US citizen. As well as Spanish, he speaks English fluently with an American accent . . . age about 45–48. Tall – about 6 foot 3 inches. The manly type, very good-looking . . . Drinks often, but doesn’t get drunk. Always spending time in the company of women (Americans). Polite and courteous. The idle type, sophisticated, always smartly dressed. As a rule he is reticent. Never takes up conversations on serious topics . . . He is polite towards socialist correspondents, but shows no desire to establish contacts. Gives the impression of being an apolitical person, who likes good food, women and alcohol.
On the activities of fascist organizations in Latin America inspired by the CIA:
Inspired by the American special services, and particularly the CIA, terrorist organizations exist in Latin American countries whose activity is aimed against communist parties and any kind of progressive movement. The members of these organizations are usually representatives of the financial oligarchy and haute bourgeoisie who belong to the extreme right. Some of the members are also recruited from the lumpenproletariat. The organizations are financed by the CIA and extreme right groupings within the Latin American countries.
Kapuściński’s texts on a conference of US ambassadors accredited in Latin American countries and on a Trotskyite movement in the region have not survived, and are known only from a note by one of the officers in charge of him, pseudonym ‘Benito’. Kapuściński’s account of the American ambassadors’ conference was ‘passed [by Polish intelligence] in March this year [1970] to Cuban comrades’.
A text on Cuba’s aspirations to normalize relations with the Latin American countries is identical in form and language to reports he wrote for the PAP’s Special Bulletin.
Kapuściński states among other things that guerrilla groups in the style of Che Guevara are dying out, and that Cuba ‘is withdrawing its support for this sort of movement and activity’. Isolated in the Western hemisphere, the socialist country governed by Fidel Castro
is expressing readiness to renew diplomatic and trade relations with each of the individual Latin American countries, but on the other hand it does not want this normalization to happen via the OPA [Organization of American States]. Fidel Castro calls the OPA ‘the US Colonial Ministry’, and believes that within the framework of this organization, which is dominated by the United States, Cuba would lose its existing independence.
From the documents at the Institute of National Remembrance, it emerges that the intelligence service wanted Kapuściński to obtain materials from a congress of science and technology held in Tel Aviv. To this end, during a holiday in Warsaw he was supposed to meet with the vice-chancellor of a Mexican technical college on his way back from Israel. No information is available to say whether this meeting took place. (The interpreter of this material, whom I will introduce later, claims it did not.)
The largest number of unfavourable comments about Kapuściński, furtively expressed after the publication of the Newsweek piece, were prompted by his note about Maria Sten. An employee of Warsaw University and a scholar of pre-Columbian cultures, she was sacked from her job on the wave of anti-Semitic purges of 1968 and emigrated to Mexico. Kapuściński, who, as he explains in the note, did not know her previously, gives this account of their meeting:
Maria Sten had come straight from Poland. She presented a picture of what was happening there, calling it ‘a nightmare’. During the conversation, Sten brought up the following issues:
she said that 1968 was the most tragic year in the history of Poland, because ‘the best people’, in other words the Zionists, had been ‘forced to leave the country’,
she expressed surprise that in the meantime, while she was on her way from Warsaw to Mexico City, there had been nothing in our press about ‘the dismissal of Comrade Świtała and Comrade Szlachcic for installing a bugging device in the offices of Comrades from the Party leadership – Gomułka, Cyrankiewicz, Gierek and so on’,
she was surprised that Comrade Kępa had remained First Secretary of the Executive Committee, because when she left ‘there had already been a decision to remove him’,
she ‘could not understand’ why Solecki and Kolczyński had remained, who were also ‘going to be removed’,
she expressed her concern that ‘that whole gang hasn’t been driven out’, on which she was counting,
from her statements with regard to her future it emerged that she plans to remain in Mexico City and is looking for an apartment.
The note contains clichés typical of the official, anti-Semitic propaganda (Kapuściński calls Poles of Jewish origin who were forced to leave Poland at that time ‘Zionists’). By passing this information about Maria Sten to the intelligence service, could he have done her harm? Probably not. Sten was not planning to return to Poland, and Kapuściński knew that. Despite this fact, does the note have the tone of a denunciation? Unfortunately, yes, it does.
Danuta Rycerz, a close friend of Maria Sten’s, to whom I talk about my impressions, claims that Sten actually demanded of Kapuściński – with whom she was later on friendly terms for many years – that he relay her critical views to people at the top of the Party. I take this comment at face value, though I do not conceal my doubts: it sounds as if it were added after the fact, with the noble intention of defending her friend’s good name.
Sten is the only person about whom Kapuściński wrote this sort of note, although in Mexico he came into contact with other Poles who were critical of the government in Warsaw. One of these people was Professor Jerzy Plebański, a physicist from Warsaw University who went to Mexico in the 1970s as part of an academic exchange. Józef Klasa, shortly to become ambassador to that country, says that the intelligence service tried to recruit Plebański, but he resisted. He was threatened with the consequences of his refusal, and perhaps that was why in the end he decided to stay in Mexico for the rest of his life. ‘Rysiek,’ recalls Klasa, ‘used to meet with Plebański, and must have known his critical views about our government, but he never reported them to anyone. Rysiek was a decent man and would never have hurt a soul.’
Maybe he really did write, at her request, what Maria Sten thought about the Warsaw comrades?
There is one other note in Kapuściński’s file which provoked some biting comments after being published in Newsweek. It concerns Alice B., an Englishwoman, an alleged intelligence service agent, ‘playing the part of an ultra-leftist’. Kapuściński met her in Angola in 1975. According to the note, Alice B. was ‘ugly’ and ‘had sexual relations with blacks’. However, it was not Kapuściński who drew up the profile of her, written in the language of the secret-police subculture, but a Ministry of Foreign Affairs functionary quoting a conversation with him.
Three other statements have survived, signed with the pseudonym ‘Vera Cruz’, in which Kapuściński declares his expenses ‘in connection with performing tasks’: 350 Mexican pesos (about thirty dollars).
In 1972 the intelligence service archived Kapuściński’s documents, which means that the co-operation had been discontinued. According to materials available at the Institute of National Remembrance, it was renewed only once, during the liberation war in Angola. Whether and what sort of information Kapuściński provided to intelligence at that point is unknown; there are no relevant documents.
The intelligence officers who ‘minded’ Kapuściński in Latin America were two employees of the Polish embassy in Mexico. Privately they were his friends: Eugeniusz Spyra, who used the pseudonym ‘Grzegorz’, and Henryk Sobieski, aka ‘Benito’ – the man who presented Kapuściński with the intelligence service’s expectations before he left for the post, and the same man who many years later is offended when Kapuściński refuses to greet him warmly at the funeral of a mutual friend.
Kapuściński once mentioned Spyra to me in hushed tones, as if revealing a great secret: ‘That Spyra was our intelligence service resident for the whole of Latin America’.
They knew each other well, often spoke and visited each other’s homes.
Both Kapuścińskis kept up social relations with Sobieski and his wife for many years after leaving Mexico. When Sobieski became ambassador to Venezuela towards the end of the 1970s, Kapuściński visited him in Caracas (he had come to Venezuela to give a series of lectures). One of his former comrades says that after 1989, when his old contacts began to be a burden for Kapuściński, Alicja occasionally kept in touch with the Sobieskis.
Both Spyra and Sobieski refuse to talk to me in person about Kapuściński. I manage to have a chat with Sobieski over the phone.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he says, ‘the revelations in Newsweek are trivial. If anyone thinks it was possible to tell Kapuściński to do something, they know nothing about him. He was the one who could fix various things for me, not I for him – it was he who had the contacts high up.4 . . . No one could touch Kapuściński, he was out of reach . . . People from Rakowiecka Street [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs head office] could obstruct him but not harm him. He was good friends with Frelek, and Waszczuk . . . Besides, Kapuściński was no eager collaborator, as some people are writing nowadays, but an expert at ducking and diving!’
That would make sense. In a handwritten note for his superiors in Warsaw, ‘Benito’ explains that although Kapuściński ‘has a very good approach to our service and his political attitude does not arouse the slightest reservations’, yet he is overwhelmed by an excess of duties as a correspondent and hasn’t enough time to ‘implement our operational tasks’. ‘Benito’ admits that, to date, he has gained little from ‘operational conversations’ with Kapuściński. The key passage about his ‘expertise at ducking and diving’ goes like this: ‘Once he deals with finishing a book about Che Guevara (he is at the final stage), despite the afore-mentioned difficulties he will be able to set aside a little more time to perform the operational tasks assigned to him’.
Indeed, Kapuściński was planning to write a book about Che Guevara, but he never even started it. He must have told Sobieski that, on top of the daily PAP toil, he was also writing a book – which he was not actually writing – and that he didn’t have time for anything else. Or perhaps the friends agreed that Sobieski would write this sort of thing to his superiors so they wouldn’t keep bothering him? Because Kapuściński really was terribly busy with his own professional matters.
Examining the context is crucial to understanding the issue of ‘Kapuściński and the PRL intelligence service’. Without the context, the file from the Institute of National Remembrance is ‘a tale told by an idiot’, a collection of residual bits of information from which little emerges and which are, in addition, easy to misinterpret. What was the significance of the few notes and analyses he provided to the intelligence officers? Why did he write so few of them in the course of more than four years? Because he was unimportant as a collaborator? Or inept? Because Latin America was unimportant?
I will call him the Interpreter, because he explains the contents of the file and also the circumstances and rules in force at the point of contact between the intelligence service and foreign correspondents. In the absence of such explanations, nothing about this matter would be clear or comprehensible. I cannot write who he is. I can perhaps write only that his knowledge of the ‘Kapuściński case’ coincides to a very broad extent with the knowledge of the officers in charge. I trust the Interpreter, which means I am sure he explains the heart of the matter reliably, though I must assume he keeps some information to himself.
‘What was of interest to Polish intelligence in Latin America during the Cold War?’
‘Let’s start from a different point: which countries were within the sphere of interest of Polish intelligence in that era? What were the priorities? Without this hierarchy, something important will slip our notice.’
And so, our intelligence service was interested above all in the Western countries, first and foremost the United States and West Germany. That was where the main agents operated. The correspondents who went to postings there, as well as to other Western countries, were given tasks by the intelligence service and provided valuable, often very valuable information.
For journalists going to Third World countries, the situation was slightly different: they, too, were involved in co-operation, but it was done more for the sake of principle. In other words, each reporter who went abroad to a posting in Africa, Latin America or Asia was asked for information and to write reports, but their co-operation did not usually have great significance, nor was great weight attached to it.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the Third World as such was not important for our intelligence and only counted as a field of competition between America and the Soviet Union.’
‘But something did interest Polish intelligence in Latin America or Africa, for instance.’
‘Yes, the activities of the United States on that terrain, their agents, companies and organizations. In countries such as Mexico or Angola, to which Mr Kapuściński travelled as a correspondent, various intelligence services recruited collaborators. These collaborators were usually “dormant”, used sporadically, if the moment came when information from them could be useful.’
‘And did Kapuściński help to select and recruit these collaborators?’
‘Your question sounds rather as if Mr Kapuściński were some important agent, or had special duties. But he was just small fry, very small fry. On top of that, he travelled to regions of the world which were not strategically important for the politics of Poland at the time, or even for the Soviet Union. If not for the fact that it could sound impolite, I would say that as an intelligence service collaborator he was virtually a nobody. That file is a collection of rubbish.’
‘Rubbish? So why did the intelligence service need – for instance – a profile of the editor-in-chief of the Latin American edition of Reader’s Digest?’
‘The journal was known to have connections with the CIA, so a profile of the editor-in-chief was compiled just in case. Intelligence services collect information about anything that might come in useful, usually without any specific aim. Most of the information never gets used, but you have to have it, just in case . . . That’s what this work is all about. The intelligence service usually gathers the same sort of information as the journalists, and does its best to have a fraction of a percent more of it than the press. Because one or another detail might prove useful, who knows when or in what circumstances. The profile of the Reader’s Digest editor, moreover, like every other profile, has been compiled on the basis of several sources; what Mr Kapuściński provided was just one of the elements.’
‘Was he an important figure? An important CIA agent?’
‘As far as I know, he wasn’t. Intelligence services collect information not just on “reliable” agents or candidates for agents. The information about the Reader’s Digest editor was gathered just in case.’
‘Couldn’t a full-time intelligence employee have gathered it?’
‘Of course he could, but it’s always about having observations, information, comments from various sources. That is why Mr Kapuściński was asked for them – he knew the man.’
‘Was Kapuściński’s information that the CIA was financing right-wing terrorist organizations in Latin America who were murdering left-wing activists important to the intelligence service?’
‘That was known about without Mr Kapuściński. His report was just further confirmation.’
‘Maybe he had the right to believe that by providing such information he was exposing criminal activity by the enemy during the Cold War.’
‘But you know what all those death squads were, La Mano Negra, Triple A and many others. They committed monstrous crimes. Mr Kapuściński had wide knowledge on the topic.’
‘Why did the intelligence service order political analyses from Kapuściński, such as the ones about the “anti-communist turnaround” in Mexico’s policies, or about Cuba’s attempts to normalize its relations with other countries in the region?’
‘Because Mr Kapuściński was an excellent observer who wrote superb political analyses and had a wider view than the average intelligence employees. The intelligence services aim for that sort of analysis.’
‘And could the information he provided, about that editor for instance, have been dangerous for that person, as Kapuściński’s lustrators suggested in the press?’
‘You’re joking . . .’
‘One of Kapuściński’s lustrators wrote: “The profiles of foreigners included in his reports could have been useful to Polish and Soviet intelligence. And the information that appears there stating that someone might be ‘an agent of the [American] secret services’ could prove lethally dangerous for that person” ’.5
‘That’s nonsense – we’re talking about the real world. But anyone who takes James Bond films seriously imagines that’s what intelligence work is like.’
‘Wrongly? Why do you think it’s nonsense?’
‘Because intelligence services are involved in gathering information, not killing the other side’s agents.’
(In the memoirs of John Stockwell, CIA resident in Angola in the 1970s, I find a passage that provides a good response to the lustrator’s accusations: ‘In my twelve years of case officering [from 1966 to 1978] I never saw or heard of a situation in which the KGB attacked or obstructed a CIA operation’.6 In other passages in the book, Stockwell describes friendly conversations and drinking sessions enjoyed by CIA and KGB agents in Angola. He explains the iron principle of the intelligence services: their work relies on gathering information, and on ‘turning’ the opponents’ collaborators to get them to work for ‘our’ side, not killing them. Murder is a professional error, always a failure.)
‘I heard a rumour that after returning from his travels to Third World countries, Kapuściński used to go to Moscow. This rumour includes the suggestion that the Soviet comrades made use of his services too, and therefore he was a very important agent . . .’
(Laughter.) ‘Those are tales in the style of “how little Johnny imagines those days to have been” . . . Mr Kapuściński was even small fry for Polish intelligence. For Soviet intelligence he was non-existent, no one there knew about him or had ever heard of him . . .’
‘Is it possible that he provided the intelligence service with more information, but it was destroyed or got lost?’
‘No. If anything got lost, it was nothing essential. The file from the Institute of National Remembrance shows exactly what the importance of Mr Kapuściński’s co-operation with intelligence was. Minimal, almost non-existent.’
During conversations with some of Kapuściński’s acquaintances, the following refrains recur:
‘He had to play some sort of game with those guys from intelligence.’
‘He had no alternative, he had to agree.’
‘If he hadn’t co-operated, he wouldn’t have gone abroad and there would never have been Kapuściński the writer’ (this was one of the things Skalski said in his interview for Newsweek).
‘Does it emerge from your findings that Ryszard wriggled out of co-operating? I hope it does.’
‘Play a game’, ‘had to’, ‘wriggled out’ . . . All the hypotheses sound removed from historical context and are uttered from the perspective of post-1989 Poland, from the viewpoint of opponents to real socialism. They’re burdened by the mindset of anti-communist inquisitors and lustrators, even though they’re spoken by people who are far from belonging to the right-wing camp; some are even former Party members. In these wishful suppositions lie the unspoken assumptions: that People’s Poland was not Poland; that having contact with the intelligence service was just as morally reprehensible as giving information to the secret police who were spying on opponents of the dictatorship; and that Kapuściński was a decent person, so if he did co-operate with intelligence, it was not because he wanted to but ‘had to’, and if he ‘had to’, then he was ‘playing’ or ‘wriggling out’.
‘Don’t you think the situation might have been quite different?’ I suggest to one of my interviewees, who was very much hoping that Kapuściński had ‘wriggled out’ of co-operating. ‘That Ryszard Kapuściński wasn’t a warrior for the anti-communist underground, but a loyal Party member for almost thirty years? Not a careerist, but a true believer, who really did have faith in socialism for most of that time? People’s Poland was his Poland, even if he became disenchanted with Gomułka after his departure from the ideals of October ’56, or later on with Gierek. Kapuściński used to encourage his friends to join the ranks of the Party in order to make that reality better.’
My interviewee ponders these facts and admits, after a pause, that he has never thought about it like that before.
Meanwhile, to my mind, this is the only key to an explanation of Kapuściński’s life story, how he behaved and the choices he made – none of the others fit, they just grate in the lock, turn it halfway and move no farther. Only when we look at his political life in this way does sporadic co-operation with the intelligence service cease to look like a sinister agreement or an immoral pact with the devil, selling his soul for trips abroad, promotion, or a career.
There was no devil, at least not for Kapuściński. The old system may have appeared diabolical in the eyes of the sworn anti-communists and declared oppositionists, or even those members of the Party who joined its ranks only for career purposes. Kapuściński was a communist, a socialist, a left-wing believer. With the passage of time he had less faith, but more pragmatic approval; he recognized that, despite its deficiencies, socialism is a fairer system than capitalism. In any case, what could any sensitive person think who was familiar – from having spent time in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the Cold War era – with capitalism’s colonial, post-colonial, and imperialist versions? Kapuściński had the right to regard passing on information about sinister CIA operations and its agents to his own country’s intelligence service and writing a few political analyses as a morally good deed (a patriotic one perhaps?), in all certainty not as something reprehensible.
If he did ‘wriggle out’, if he did behave like ‘an expert at ducking and diving’, it was more likely because he was overwhelmed by the weight of his duties as a correspondent. From Mexico City he was covering the whole of Latin America – every day he had to read dozens or hundreds of newspaper articles in a foreign language, listen to radio and television broadcasts, write numerous brief reports and notes, and meet with numerous people. He didn’t have enough time for an extra-professional life.
Someone tells me that after returning from Latin America he complained to Frelek that the intelligence service was pestering him and that, through his connections, Frelek arranged for the gentlemen from Rakowiecka Street to leave him in peace. I doubt if the complaint sounded like anti-communist tale-telling, in which PRL intelligence played the role of a criminal institution. Kapuściński is more likely to have complained because he didn’t have time, while Rakowiecka Street was being insistent, demanding analyses and reports and bothering him.
In fact, thanks to his connections at the heights of power, he might have been able to refuse the intelligence service earlier, but perhaps it didn’t occur to him. From the meagre output in the file we can see that he did not commit himself to co-operation and certainly did not build his career on it.
Did he come to feel at certain moments that writing reports and analyses for the secret service even occasionally is not a proper occupation for a reporter? That it crosses a line which a journalist should not cross? Not because it is for the intelligence service of a communist state, but simply because it is for an intelligence service.
While reviewing the press clippings on ‘Kapuściński’s file’, now and then I come across evidence that even some of the commentators who are well-disposed towards Kapuściński fall into the trap of anti-communist political correctness.
‘Aren’t we absolving him too easily?’ ask the Newsweek chiefs Wojciech Maziarski and Aleksander Kaczorowski. ‘If it came to light in the US that a famous reporter who had won the Pulitzer Prize had co-operated with the CIA, he’d be compromised in the eyes of the readers.’
This thesis prompts me to examine how co-operation between journalists and the CIA was treated in ‘good’ America during the Cold War – yet another mirror to reflect the issue of ‘Kapuściński and PRL intelligence’. Possibly it will allow us to see the whole affair in another context, in different tones and proportions?
In the mid-1970s two committees of the US Congress – headed by Congressman Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church – conducted inquiries into CIA covert operations. In the course of these, it came to light that recruiting American journalists to co-operate with the CIA was standard practice for the agency. From the very start of the inquiries, the administration in Washington, led by President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, posed obstructions, and pressure both from former CIA chiefs and the then current chief, George H. W. Bush, stopped the members of congress and the senators from making further inquiries (restraining the latter with greater effect). The CIA chiefs argued that revealing such information would harm American foreign policy. However, some of the revelations, especially from Pike’s committee, were leaked to the press, prompting journalists to investigate the collaboration of some individual reporters, as well as entire media institutions, in intelligence activity.
Of the publications that appeared on this topic, the best known at the time was an article entitled ‘The CIA and the Media’, published in Rolling Stone magazine in October 1977. At the time its author, Carl Bernstein, was one of the two most famous reporters in America – to this day he remains one of the leading US journalists. Only three years earlier, his investigation into the Watergate affair for the Washington Post, jointly conducted with Bob Woodward, had led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
The following is a summary of ‘The CIA and the Media’:
As CIA documents clearly show, in the course of a quarter century, starting with the early 1950s, more than four hundred American journalists secretly worked for the CIA. Their relations with the intelligence service were of various types, from ‘innocent’ conversations or exchanges of insights to completely open co-operation, for example, the acceptance of commissions strictly focused on intelligence. The journalists shared the information they gathered with the CIA, and they were hired as liaison officers between headquarters and professional spies, for instance in communist countries. In the view of senior officials of the agency, they were among the CIA’s most valuable ‘tools’ for gathering data. Freelancers, stringers, full-time journalists from the biggest media, Pulitzer Prize winners regarded as informal ambassadors for their country abroad, and also the chiefs of opinion-forming newspapers, radio and television channels – all co-operated with intelligence.
Among the directors of large media concerns whom the agency officials name as individual collaborators with the CIA are Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and James Copley of Copley News Service (CNS). The following companies co-operated with intelligence: the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Newsweek, Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) and many others. In the view of senior CIA officials, the agency’s most useful connections were with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
How did this institutional co-operation work in practice? Usually the CIA director himself or one of his deputies established a friendship or acquaintance with someone from the management of the newspaper or television channel. The newspaper took on a CIA employee as a journalist or gave him its accreditation. The newspaper or channel’s offices abroad shared the information they gathered with the CIA agent. Sometimes the intelligence agents were employed at the office as administrative or technical staff.
The formal relations between the actual reporters and the CIA varied: some signed confidentiality agreements with the agency, some declared that they would never reveal their co-operation, and others functioned under contracts that resembled agreements for employment or temporary commissions. Many kept in looser touch, though they were often entrusted with the very same tasks as the reporters on contract.
What sort of tasks? The CIA used the journalists, above all, to recruit and run foreign agents, to obtain and analyse information, and also to produce disinformation, stirring up confusion and disseminating falsehoods among the political élite in the given country.
The agency’s ‘standard expectations’ of journalists – according to the account of a senior CIA official – went more or less like this: ‘We wanted to ask you a favour. You’ve just come back from Yugoslavia, right? What are the roads like over there? Did you see any sign of the presence of troops? Where exactly? Are there a lot of foreigners there? Just a moment, would you spell that name again . . .’
Briefing conversations before a journey were similar: what to watch out for, whom to meet, with whom to strike up an acquaintance. The CIA treated these journalists as its agents; they often regarded themselves as trustworthy friends who were doing the CIA a favour – usually for no financial gain but for patriotic reasons, for the good of the homeland.
The journalist Joseph Alsop, whom the CIA sent to the Philippines in 1953, just as any other employee would be sent abroad, later said openly, ‘I am proud they asked me and proud to have done it. The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.’
Co-operation between the media and the CIA during the Cold War had its ideology: the fight against ‘world communism’, the same ideology that justified co-operation between the intelligence service and many other institutions, corporations and companies. It was easy for the intelligence service to penetrate the world of journalism, since the borders between the political, economic and media establishments in America were never all that transparent. Whenever the CIA made use of the co-operation of journalists or their back rooms – in other words, the offices abroad of newspapers, radio and television channels – it was almost always with the knowledge of the owner, the editor-in-chief or some other key management figure. This means that the most powerful mass media – a total of about twenty-five organizations, corporations and media agencies – carried out functions for the intelligence service.
Involving the media and their foreign correspondents in co-operation with intelligence on a grand scale was begun by Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953. Hearing the reports of correspondents coming back from abroad, and obtaining notebooks from them full of contacts and observations, became standard practice for CIA officials from Dulles’s time onwards.
Intelligence employees were not in the habit of revealing the names of those who co-operated with them. They argue that it would not be fair to judge the conduct of those journalists in isolation from the context of the times in which – as one senior CIA officer says bitterly – ‘it wasn’t considered a crime to serve your government’.
However, from time to time some names did surface, such as Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Star, or Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, who won the Pulitzer Prize. According to agency officials, Hendrix provided the CIA with ‘extremely useful information’ about Cuban exiles in Florida, and O’Leary about the situation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The CIA has in its archives extensive reports on the activities of both journalists, from which it emerges that they received no money for their services.
According to the officials, O’Leary regularly worked for the CIA, yet the journalist himself saw it differently. He claimed that it was not work or co-operation, but ordinary conversations, an exchange of observations. He admitted to being on friendly terms with CIA agents, but it was they – he avowed – who were more helpful to him than he was to them.
This divergence is a good illustration of the non-transparency and ambiguity of the situation in which journalists who maintain contact with the intelligence service find themselves: they might think they are just having conversations with agents and gaining information from them that is necessary for their own work, but meanwhile they are regarded by the intelligence officials, in this case the CIA, as ‘our people’ or, quite simply, agents.
Certain American journalists were given clearly defined tasks by the CIA and signed contracts; for them, it would be difficult to contend that they were ‘just’ having conversations (Bernstein provides several names).
The ambiguous, ‘grey’ nature of the situation regarding agreements with intelligence – in this case institutional agreements – is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. In the years 1950 to 1966, his newspaper provided cover for ten CIA agents. The CIA owed the privilege of close relations with the most influential newspaper in the United States to Sulzberger’s friendly relationship with Allen Dulles. It was a deal made by two powerful people and two powerful institutions: both benefited from the agreement, and so it would be difficult to speak of ‘pressure’ being exerted on a weaker party by a stronger. Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA, the content of which is the subject of controversy. According to some sources, he only agreed not to reveal classified material made available to him ‘for information’, not for publication; according to others, he swore never to reveal any of the newspaper’s dealings with the agency. Sulzberger never hid from his editors and reporters the fact that the newspaper co-operated with the intelligence agency. However, information concerning which reporters or employees performed intelligence tasks in addition to doing their jobs for the newspaper, or who was a CIA employee for whom the paper provided cover, remained confidential.
In 1976, in the course of the inquiries by both committees of Congress, the then head of the CIA, George Bush Sr, promised publicly that the agency would not enter into any paid or contractual relationships with journalists employed within the American media. At the same time, he let it be understood that the intelligence service expected journalists to provide voluntary, unpaid co-operation.
One of the key messages of Bernstein’s article is that the job of the intelligence service is to gather information and that it needn’t be hampered by the ethics of the journalistic profession. That is the problem of journalists and their chiefs, the owners of the media. ‘If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect,’ says a former Los Angeles Times correspondent.
It would be hard to offer a more apt conclusion.
I ask five well-known American foreign reporters from the press and radio: Were they ever importuned by the CIA, were attempts ever made to recruit them or to talk them into an informal exchange of information? Each of my interviewees travelled to various conflict zones during the Cold War and subsequently: to Soviet bloc countries, including Poland, to Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, to Vietnam during the war and to Iraq following the American invasion in 2003. They all know the context of my question – that it relates to providing a broadened background to the case of Kapuściński and PRL intelligence, and showing how the intelligence services on both sides in the Cold War made use of journalists. Each of the five knows of Kapuściński’s lustration.
Only one answers the question in the affirmative: yes, the CIA did try to involve him in co-operation. Another admits to a conversation with American military personnel and ‘maybe intelligence too’ in Iraq, although nothing was ever said directly, and no offers were made. Someone else replies that the CIA never tried to get information out of him, but later in our conversation admits to a friendship with the CIA resident in one of the countries where he worked as a correspondent.
The only one of my interlocutors who says openly that CIA personnel made him an offer has so many articles to his name exposing criminal operations by American intelligence that I think it pointless to ask him how he responded.
This reporter points out that foreign correspondents, especially in conflict zones, can never be certain whether they serve as a source of information for people from the intelligence community, or if they figure in CIA archives as ‘operational contacts’ or ‘collaborators’. Because, he asks rhetorically, what is the natural place an American reporter heads to as soon as he arrives on site? The US embassy. If there isn’t one in that particular country, he goes to the headquarters of an American corporation doing business there, and corporations are sure to have their share of intelligence agents. It is entirely natural for a journalist to go to a meeting at a corporation, because that’s where he can find the support of his compatriots on foreign soil, and gain contacts and insights. Can he be certain, while exchanging comments with anyone who works at the embassy or for a big company, that he isn’t providing information to the CIA? Never. He has every reason to assume that the embassy’s political attaché he’s talking to will repeat his views to whomever necessary. And if he speaks directly to the ambassador and tells him something he has seen, heard, or unearthed to which diplomats do not have easy access, is he exceeding the appropriate limits? At what point can it be said that he is already co-operating with intelligence, or not yet doing so? For he can be quite sure that the ambassador will repeat a reporter’s revelations to CIA personnel.
‘So what’s your advice?’
‘Caution. You should never say too much. But to tell the truth, there is no good advice.’
I ask if the CIA still makes use of journalists nowadays. Of course, he says, though since the days of the Pike and Church committees it is more cautious and does not involve them so openly in co-operation as before.
‘How do you view the similarities and differences between the “Kapuściński case” and co-operation between American journalists and the CIA?’
My interlocutor draws a diagram on a piece of paper to illustrate the structure of the relationships between the political authorities and the media in the socialist countries and in America in the Cold War era. In the communist countries it is a vertical pyramid: authorities – medium (newspaper, press agency) – journalist. The press agency or weekly where Kapuściński worked was not independent; simply put, the authorities could issue orders to the chiefs of the press agency or newspaper. Considered hypothetically, if the journalist were to refuse to co-operate with intelligence, the country’s political authorities could order his employer to punish or fire him. The system enables this option, regardless of whether and to what extent it is used.
The sketch showing the relationship between the authorities and the media in America has no vertical dependencies. The authorities can speak directly to the journalist as well as to his bosses. It can influence the owners and managers of the media, but it cannot order them to do anything.
‘These differences between the systems are important in the political analysis, but in practice, when it came to a journalist or a media organization co-operating with intelligence, the nature of the information transmitted, the possible consequences and the ethical dimension were exactly the same.’
‘Meaning?’
His response is similar to what is found in Bernstein’s article: ‘If one correspondent is co-operating with intelligence, then we are all suspect. Co-operation with intelligence is a bloody dangerous practice for our profession. Not just because of credibility, the moral aspect; there are lots of “grey” situations that elude unambiguous judgements. But it’s also about our plain human safety. If suspicion falls on one person, no one can feel safe.’
Is this the main moral of the story about the reporter who is involved in collusion with the secret services? By co-operating with intelligence even occasionally, whether out of noble intentions or opportunism, Kapuściński wasn’t committing the sin of selling his soul to the ‘Red devil’, as the anti-communist inquisition declares, but a completely different sin. During the Cold War, determinations as to who was ‘good’ and who was ‘evil’ depended on the time and place. At that time in the Third World it was the Western countries, above all the United States, that were the enslaving powers, violating weaker countries and societies. But Kapuściński did commit a sin against his own profession, even if he did not fully realize it. Could he have been unaware of committing it? I think he could have, and for a long time at that. He did not grow up in the liberal culture of the Western world, where there is open debate about objectivity and bias in the media, about conflicts of interest and independence. Certain questions might not have occurred to him. Throughout his youth and middle age he was a committed reporter, an idealist who grew up in a Promethean, Romantic tradition, fighting for socialism or promoting the idea abroad; a reporter and man of his era, who identified with the ideals of peoples who were trying to gain their liberty – from Western bondage – and who saw the world in black and white. Moreover, he believed that way of seeing was perfectly appropriate.
By co-operating with intelligence, it was he himself whom he harmed the most, as he came to realize many years after his involvement ended. When Shah of Shahs came out in America in the mid-1980s, it was Kapuściński himself, without pressure from anyone – this is my conjecture – who removed the passages about the key role of the CIA in deposing Iranian prime minister Mosaddegh in 1953. Earlier I presented several hypotheses as to why he did it; here I offer only the most significant one. If his own biography included an episode of co-operation with the intelligence service of a Soviet bloc country, it would have been an unwise move, in Cold War–era America, to accuse the American intelligence agency of a political crime. Kapuściński could not know whether the CIA had in its files a profile of him – a correspondent from communist Poland, possibly an intelligence agent – a profile analogous to the one he himself had compiled in Mexico on the editor of Reader’s Digest. (It would not be surprising, in fact, if that man had profiled Kapuściński.) Not knowing whether the CIA had ever taken an interest in him, he preferred not to take the risk. As a former collaborator – no matter how insignificant – he had to deal with the fact that if he made accusations about the CIA in a book published in America, the agency might strike back. And knock him out. How would this have affected his credibility in the United States, what would have been the fate of his books or his subsequent career, if the CIA had leaked to the press the information that the author of Shah of Shahs, the denouncer of the CIA’s covert operation in Iran, was once in the pay of a rival – communist – intelligence service?
I have tried to determine whether the CIA holds any material on Kapuściński. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, who has often fought battles with the agency for declassification of its documents, tells me I shouldn’t waste my time and energy. The CIA does not provide information about people and never answers questions about specific individuals. In addition, the CIA has won several precedent-setting cases, in which attempts had been made, based on legislation concerning access to information, to force the agency to confirm or deny information about the existence in its archives of documents on specific individuals. It refuses even to issue a negative answer, such as, ‘We have nothing on Kapuściński’ – regardless of whether they have something or not.