The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Wojtyła rarely read newspapers, listened to the news on the radio or watched it on television. Every fortnight, however, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the Church’s liaison officer with the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (to which Wojtyła was a regular contributor), came to his study in the archbishop’s palace at Kraków and gave him a news briefing.⁷ Bardecki had been a target of PROGRESS operations by KGB illegals ever since BOGUN, posing as a West German press photographer, had first made contact with him in 1971.⁸ In 1977 another illegal, Ivan Ivanovich Bunyk, codenamed FILOSOV (“Philosopher”), who had been instructed by the Centre to develop sources inside the Polish Church, had a series of meetings with Bardecki. Bunyk had been born in France but had emigrated as a teenager with his Ukrainian family to the Soviet Union in 1947. In 1970 he had returned to France as a KGB illegal, trained as a journalist and set himself up as a freelance writer and poet. On his first meeting with Bardecki in 1977, FILOSOV probably presented him with one or more of the books he had published in France with the aid of KGB subsidies. Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not include FILOSOV’s reports from Poland, there is little doubt that his main priority in cultivating Bardecki was to seek out information on Wojtyła.⁹

SB surveillance reports during 1977 showed Wojtyła aligning himself with a variety of protest movements. On March 23 he received the student organizers of a petition of protest to the authorities and gave them his support.¹⁰ Increasingly he invoked the example of St. Stanisław, the martyred bishop of ancient Kraków whose silver sarcophagus formed part of the high altar in the cathedral, as a symbol of resistance to an unjust state:

St. Stanisław has become the patron saint of moral and social order in the country… He dared to tell the King himself that he was bound to respect the law of God… He was also the defender of the freedom that is the inalienable right of every man, so that the violation of that freedom by the state is at the same time a violation of the moral and social order.¹¹

It is easy to imagine the rage in the Centre as Wojtyła continued with impunity to defend the rights of the individual against violation by the Polish state.

Among the greatest triumphs of Wojtyła’s years at Kraków was the consecration on May 15, 1977 of the great new church at Nowa Huta, constructed after many years of opposition from a regime which had sought to exclude a visible Catholic presence from what it intended as a model “Socialist city.”¹² In his sermon to a congregation of over 20,000, Wojtyła gave his blessing to those protesting against the death of a KOR activist, Stanisław Pyjas, who was widely believed—despite official denials—to have been murdered by the SB.¹³ That evening a long procession of mourners wound its way through the streets of Kraków to Wawel Castle, where a Committee of Student Solidarity was formed. Similar committees followed in other cities, all independent of the officially sponsored Socialist Union of Polish Students.¹⁴

As church bells rang out across Poland on October 16, 1978 and the streets filled with excited crowds to celebrate Wojtyła’s election as pope, the PUWP Politburo reacted with private shock and alarm. Publicly, the Politburo reluctantly felt compelled to associate itself with the mood of popular rejoicing and sent a lengthy telegram of congratulations to the Vatican, expressing hypocritical joy that for the first time “a son of the Polish nation… sits on the papal throne.” What particularly disturbed the KGB, however, was the evidence that among many PUWP members, even some senior officials, the joy was genuine.¹⁵ As well as sending official reports on Polish popular rejoicing, KGB officers in Warsaw also unofficially relayed to their colleagues at the Centre some of the political jokes circulating immediately after John Paul II’s election. The white smoke from the Vatican chimney, traditionally used to signal the election of a pope, was said to have been followed on this occasion by red smoke; Wojtyła had burned his Party card. According to another satirical account, the new pope had secretly visited the Polish interior minister, who was responsible for the SB, and announced after the election, “Comrade minister! Your important instructions have been carried out!”¹⁶

Two days after the election, Aristov, the Soviet ambassador, reported to Moscow in more serious vein: