Lech Walesa, the former shipyard worker who helped bring about the collapse of communism in Poland and then served as its president, faces new accusations that he was an informant for the secret police during the communist era.
For many years, accusations of collaboration have dogged Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and served as president from 1990 to 1995, but a special court cleared him in 2000.
However, he faces new allegations from a trove of documents that prosecutors confiscated on Tuesday from the home of the widow of General Czeslaw Kiszczak, who, as interior minister, helped crush Solidarity in 1981, when martial law was imposed, and was briefly, in 1989, the nation’s final prime minister under the communist regime.
The documents include 350 pages of secret-police files that have never been open to public view. They mention a man called “Bolek,” which is said to have been Walesa’s code name, according to Lukasz Kaminski, head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a government-run commission established in 1998 to investigate crimes committed during the Nazi occupation and Soviet domination.
“In the files, there is an envelope, and in it there is a handwritten agreement to cooperate with the secret service signed ‘Lech Walesa, Bolek,’” Kaminski said at a news conference on Thursday. “There are also handwritten money receipts signed ‘Bolek.’”
The files suggest that Walesa was a paid informant from 1970 to 1976.
Kaminski, a historian, said an archival expert who examined the materials “is certain of their authenticity.” However, he did not say if he believed that the allegations in the documents were true. It is conceivable that the extent of Walesa’s involvement — if any — might have been exaggerated as part of an effort to intimidate, harass or blackmail him.
Czeslaw Kiszczak died on Nov. 5. His widow, Maria Kiszczak, offered to sell the documents to the institute for 90,000 zlotys (US$27,000), said Agnieszka Sopinska-Jaremczak, a spokeswoman for the institute.
Maria Kiszczak, in comments to reporters this week, denied trying to sell the documents; she said that it had been the institute that offered to pay for them.
In any event, the authorities seized the papers on Tuesday, asserting that the documents belong to the Polish state. It was not clear how long Czeslaw Kiszczak held on to the documents, or why.
The first time that the Polish public heard about Walesa’s alleged collaboration was in 1992, when Antoni Macierewicz — then the interior minister and now the defense minister in the new government of the conservative Law and Justice Party — released two lists of 66 high-ranking officials who had supposedly collaborated with the secret services. The name of Walesa, who was Poland’s president at the time, was on one of the lists.
A special court in 2000 found that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that he had been a collaborator. A former head of the secret police, Piotr Naimski, has long maintained that Walesa was a collaborator.
Walesa, in interviews, has said that as a dissident, he “played a game” with the communist authorities, but that he never actively served them.
Earlier this year, Walesa even proposed a public debate about the accusations at the Institute of National Remembrance. Later, though, he withdrew the offer.
Walesa, who was in Venezuela this week to show solidarity with political prisoners there, denied the latest accusations on his blog.
In a post on Thursday on Wykop, a Polish social media Web site, Walesa wrote: “There cannot be any materials written by me. If there were any, there would be no need to forge them. I will prove it in court.”
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