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

Among the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Poland after Wojtyła’s election was Oleg Petrovich Buryen (codenamed DEREVLYOV), who posed as the representative of a firm of Canadian publishers. DEREVLYOV claimed to be collecting material about Polish missionaries in the Far East and used this as a pretext for contacting a number of prominent Church figures, most of whom recommended him to others. If arrested by the police or SB, he was told to stick firmly to his cover story and insist that he was a Canadian citizen. In case of real emergency, however, he was instructed to ask to see Colonel Jan Slovikowski of the SB, who appears to have acted as a point of contact for KGB agents who found themselves in difficulty with the Polish authorities. Among DEREVLYOV’s most prized contacts was one of the Pope’s closest friends, Father Józef Tischner, a fellow philosopher who had helped him found the Papal Theological Academy in Kraków.²⁷ Tischner was a frequent visitor to Rome and one of those chosen by John Paul II to revive his spirits when he felt trapped in the Vatican.²⁸

One of John Paul II’s chief ambitions during the first year of his pontificate was to return to Poland. Early in 1979, horrified that the PUWP Politburo was prepared to contemplate a papal visit, Brezhnev rang Gierek to try to dissuade him. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek replied, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Absurdly, Brezhnev urged him to persuade the Pope to have a diplomatic illness: “Tell the Pope—he is a wise man—that he could announce publicly that he cannot come because he has been taken ill.” When Gierek failed to see the merit of this odd suggestion, Brezhnev told him angrily, “Gomułka was a better Communist [than you] because he wouldn’t receive [Pope] Paul VI in Poland, and nothing awful happened!” The conversation ended with Brezhnev saying, “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your Party don’t regret it later”—at which point Brezhnev put the phone down.²⁹

On June 2, 1979 more than a million Poles converged on the airport road, on Warsaw’s Victory Square and in the Old City, rebuilt from the rubble after the Second World War, to welcome John Paul II on his emotional return to his homeland. Over the next nine days at least ten million people came to see and hear him; most of the remaining twenty-five million witnessed his triumphal progress through Poland on television. At the end of his visit, as the Pope bade farewell to his home city of Kraków, where, he said, “every stone and brick is dear to me,” men and women wept uncontrollably in the streets. The contrast between the political bankruptcy of the Communist regime and the moral authority of the Catholic Church was plain for all to see.

The papal visit, the Centre reported to the Politburo, had lived up to its worst expectations.³⁰ Many Polish Party members, faced with the Pope’s “ideological subversion” of the Communist regime, felt that the ideological battle had been lost. During the visit the KGB mission in Warsaw had even thought it possible that KOR militants and anti-Communist workers in Kraków might try to seize power from the Party. Emergency preparations were also made to evacuate the Soviet trade mission in Katowice, which was headed by a KGB officer, to Czechoslovakia.³¹ The Centre believed that John Paul II had set out to challenge the foundations of the whole Soviet Bloc. One KGB report emphasized that he had repeatedly called himself not just the “Polish Pope” but, even more frequently, the “Slav Pope.”³² In his homilies he had recalled one by one the baptism of the peoples of eastern Europe: Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgarians, Moravians, Slovaks, Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Lithuanians:

Pope John Paul II, a Slav, a son of the Polish nation, feels how deeply rooted he is in the soil of history… He comes here to speak before the whole Church, before Europe and the world, about those oft-forgotten nations and peoples.³³