Kaczynski: Former spy agency overstepped jurisdiction (Roundup)

Feb 16, 2007, 15:23 GMT

Warsaw - Poland's recently reformed Military Intelligence Service (WSI) significantly overstepped its jurisdiction by infiltrating political parties, the media and state-owned companies up for privatization, Polish President Lech Kaczynski said Friday.

The president published a 374-page report on the findings connected to the recent liquidation of the WSI on his official internet site on Friday.

Kaczynski and the conservative right-wing Law and Justice government of his twin brother Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski liquidated the communist-era WSI last year as part of their promise to 'de-communise' Poland's state apparatus.

The service was replaced by a new counter intelligence agency. Opposition politicians have criticised the operation as sloppy and a national security risk.

On the heels of the 1989 collapse of communism, more than 100 WSI informants worked in Poland's flagship Lot airline and 100 more in the foreign ministry, according to the president.

WSI informants were also prevalent in the fuels sector, foreign trade companies, the media and political parties, particularly those with roots in the anti-communist Solidarity movement, he added.

The author of the report, Antoni Macierewicz, said evidence found while compiling the report served as the basis for complaints to prosecutors for suspected unlawful activities.

Macierewicz said the WSI was particularly active in economic circles in the early 1990s just as Poland's private sector economy was taking its first steps and the lengthy and lucrative process of privatising state industry got underway.

Dating from the communist era, the WSI also had links with Soviet intelligence services, Macierewicz said.

While President Kaczynski said it was 'absurd' to say the WSI has covertly governed Poland or controlled politics, he insisted it had 'significant influence' in areas in which it had no business in a democratic state.

The report is expected to be released in full this summer, Macierewicz said.

Lech Walesa, the legendary leader of Poland's anti-communist Solidarity trade union and first democratically elected president after 1989, on Friday slammed the report.

'There are many things one can criticise from the early 1990's,' he told Poland's TVN24 news channel.

'We didn't have a free homeland yet then - there was no legislation - there was no constitution, no structures,' he said. Solidarity leaders who had been catapulted from opposition activists into government via Poland's first democratic elections did the 'best they could' to avert chaos, he said.

He also criticised the Kaczynski twins, who at the time had served in his presidential chancellery, for poor hindsight.

'Those Kaczynskis are smart today, but they could have acted then - nobody was stopping them,' Walesa said. Once close political allies, Walesa and the Kaczynski brothers are now estranged.

Ex-communist and left-wing opposition politicians also criticised the report as completely unobjective and described the dismantling of the WSI as damaging to Poland's national security.