Trenchcoat warfare
Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's cabinet has not been short of controversial personalities, and one of them has been Janusz Palubicki, minister in charge of Poland's intelligence services. Under the current system, although both the civilian State Security Office (UOP) and the Military Intelligence Services (WSI) have strong chiefs, it is Palubicki with his ministerial rank who coordinates their activity. Yet for someone whose job depends on discretion and secrecy, Palubicki has been one of the Buzek government's most public ministers.
It is difficult not to spot Palubicki from a distance, since he obstinately refuses to wear suits, and has for years affected a uniform of baggy black sweater, hiking boots and natty over-the-shoulder carryall, even when the Buzek cabinet trooped off to the presidential palace on their inauguration day. Palubicki is part of the Solidarity old guard, having been a key member in 1980-1981 when the union first appeared on the political scene. During martial law, he was in the underground movement that opposed the communist authorities and then after 1989 reemerged as a union, rather than a political party, activist.
Palubicki's staunch anticommunist background explains why he has in the past been more vocal than most politicians about his antipathy to communists in general, and to President Aleksander Kwasniewski in particular. When Kwasniewski initially vetoed legislation on the establishment of the National Remembrance Institute, set up to open communist secret police files to ordinary Poles, Palubicki held a press conference at which he called Kwasniewski "the president of all secret policemen." Earlier, Palubicki had publicly said he would never consider Kwasniewski his president, on account of the fact that the president has been "economical with the truth" about whether or not he had, in fact, a university degree.
But the tension between Palubicki and Kwasniewski does not stop with sentiments about the past. Kwasniewski is also upset by what he sees as Palubicki's role in the cooling of Polish-Russian relations. These are almost on ice since the expulsion of nine Russian Embassy members from Poland on spying charges, a move initiated by Palubicki after Polish intelligence gathered a mass of evidence about their espionage activities within the country. Since then, both Kwasniewski and Leszek Miller, the leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), have been making much play of the fact that a future SLD government would improve Polish-Russian relations. Kwasniewski has openly criticized the Buzek government for its role in the chilly relations with Russia, and last week Miller supported the argument for improved relations during a speech at London's prestigious Chatham House on the basis that such an improvement is "what NATO wants to see." Perhaps. But Palubicki's response is that part of the reason for joining NATO was to make sure Poland was freed from Russian interference, not to have it sanctioned.
And what of Palubicki's future? His problem is not only that he poisoned relations with the president, but that he has also made enemies inside the ruling Solidarity Election Action (AWS) party. The best example of this came a few months ago, when Palubicki engineered the dismissal of General Slawomir Petelicki, head of Poland's GROM antiterrorist unit, on grounds of irregularities in the unit's finances, and followed it with a purge of GROM's commanders and Interior Ministry officials. That was a blow to allies of former Deputy Prime Minister Janusz Tomaszewski, himself disgraced in the autumn over accusations of past collaboration with the communist secret services. These events led to widespread criticism of Palubicki across the AWS spectrum, not just from the core AWS Social Movement (RS AWS) party but also from others such as Czeslaw Bielecki, head of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee.
There has been evidence during the last few days that patience is growing thin with Palubicki over the surprise publication of a classified internal document analyzing security threats to Poland on UOP's internet page. This time Buzek, who has normally been tolerant of Palubicki's controversies, publicly expressed concern about a "breach of security," although the document in fact contained nothing more sinister than a potpourri of analytical musings by security experts who by definition must identify threats to justify their own existence.
Whatever the merits of Palubicki's actions, their side effect has been to give ammunition to opposition politicians like Miller, who now have all the excuses they need to purge UOP and other intelligence agencies upon their return to power under the pretext of eliminating excess and promoting "good neighborly relations" with Russia. Many observers fear that it is this renewed politicization of Poland's intelligence services, rather than Palubicki's actions, which will be the real threat to their cohesion and credibility.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
