In West Berlin, on Saturday, 5
December 1953, Jozef Swiatlo, a lieutenant colonel in the Polish secret police,
"defected" to the West. Whether or not he was a double agent already
under the control of the CIA or was a genuine defector is a matter of
historical debate. For example, in his book
Operation
Splinter Factor, British
journalist Stewart Stevens claims that Swiatlo was first an agent of British
Intelligence and turned over to the CIA in 1949 for various reasons. Another
version has it that Swiatlo reportedly defected after being sent to the West to
intimidate or kill Mrs. Wanda Bronksa, a former Communist Party member and influential
RFE Polish Service broadcaster since 1952.
American Journalist Flora Lewis
has written in her book The Red Pawn: The
Story of Noel Field:
He was a man
with the ineradicable
spot of blood on his hands; he personally had been a torture master. His nickname was the ‘Butcher’. When the
United States agreed to give him asylum
it was in the knowledge that he would have to be protected for the rest of his life because the number of his victims
and relatives of victims sworn to exact retribution
was so great
Who was Jozef Swiatlo?
According
to one biography, Jozef Swiatlo was born as Izak (Isaac) Fleischfarb to a “poor
Jewish family” in the village Medina, Ukraine (now Poland), on 1 January 1915
and attended public school for only seven years. He was a member of a Zionist
organization “Gordonia” and joined the Communist Youth Union in 1933. For
"political reasons and his youthful inexperience," he was twice
arrested for his political activities. In 1938, he was drafted into the Polish
army.
After
the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, he was captured by the German
army, escaped, and fled to the Eastern Section of Poland, then under Soviet
army control. He joined a Soviet-backed force and marched westward with the
army as a political officer in the Kosciuszko Division that remained in a
Warsaw suburb during the Uprising in 1944.
Afterward,
he joined the University of Public Security and became a Polish Security
Service officer in 1945. He rose to the position of Deputy Chief of Department
10, responsible for protecting the Communist Party from non-Party subversive forces
and "protect the purity of the Party from within the Party" by
screening all appointments and conducting surveillance of Party and Government
officials.
After this defection in West
Berlin in 1953, the Americans sent him to a “Defector Reception Center “in
Frankfurt, Germany. He was "debriefed" by CIA official Ted Shackley,
who established his bona fides as a "defector" and sent his findings
to CIA headquarters. In his memoirs, Spymaster:
My Life in the CIA, Shackley wrote:
The wealth of
detail that Swiatlo was able to give me about the organization,
functions, and misdeeds
of UB, soon made it evident that Swiatlo was uniquely
able to provide answers
to questions that had long remained unanswered, and I
was bombarded by cable
demands from headquarters that I tackle Swiatlo on
other subjects.
After a debriefing that lasted
five hours a day, seven days a week for three months, Shackley and Swiatlo then
flew to the United States in April 1954.
Swiatlo and Radio Free Europe
The
CIA then gave Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America access to Swiatlo. RFE’s
Voice of Free Poland started broadcasting
his “revelations” on 28 September 1954, when Swiatlo “officially” surfaced in
the United States at a press conference in Washington, D.C.
On
20 October 1954, RFE’ began a series of 78 programs
entitled “Inside Story of Bezpieka and Party” that were broadcast until 31
January 1955. They were not verbatim interviews but were prepared scripts based
on Swiatlo’s material. Swiatlo voiced the scripts. Other programs were
broadcast throughout 1955 for a total of 141 Swiatlo programs.
Cord Meyer,
one CIA officer responsible for RFE, has written: “He turned out to be a gold
mine of detailed and accurate information on the corruption and personal
rivalries that flourished among the leadership of the Polish Communist Party.”
Swiatlo's
name is translated as "light," and since listening to RFE was
considered a crime, listeners referred to his programs by asking, "will
there be any light at your house tonight?" For the following months, RFE's
other language services and the RFE's sister station Radio Liberation used his
"revelations."
Swiatlo's broadcast over Radio
Free Europe reportedly caused a significant chain reaction in Poland with the
dismissal, transfer, and worse, of thousands of Communist Party members and
government officials. According to one estimate, as many as 150,000 party
members were affected by RFE's programming.
RFE’s
radio programs about Swiatlo were described as "a brilliant tactical decision
that brought unforeseeable strategic gains" and "one of the most
successful pieces of radio propaganda ever." The Polish regime responded
with silence for a few weeks before it launched a heavy counter-propaganda
campaign of radio commentaries, articles, poems, and cartoons.
Leaflet Balloons to Poland
Based
on experiences in its previous balloon programs, on 12 February 1955, the Free
Europe Press began sending copies of a forty-page summary of his testimony,
"The Inside Story of the Bezpieka (Security Apparatus) and the
Party," to Poland. This balloon campaign was called Operation SPOTLIGHT,
which "was designed to bring to the Polish people the revelations of
corruption and immorality in the hierarchy of the Polish Communist regime."
The
purpose of the Free Europe Press balloon launching-leaflet program was "to
weaken the Communist control apparatus, and through detailed exposure of
Communist techniques, to enable the Polish people better to defend themselves
against the Communists.” The FEP pamphlet’s forward was hard-hitting:
Swiatlo is a man who has drunk from many a filthy well. Does he regret
it today? Has he resolved to improve his ways in the innermost recesses of his
heart? Does he treat the story of his experiences as contrition, or does he
regard it as an act of vengeance of his former Party comrades. We have no first-hand
information on this matter. We only know that he is to be believed.
This booklet is like a hand grenade. It may become
dangerous should you try to keep it in your possession. It may also be
dangerous to repeat the text of this booklet to your neighbor. On the other
hand, no harm will be caused to the public good should this pamphlet reach the
hands of representatives of the regime.
From February through May
1955, over 260,000 pamphlets were launched into Poland, with only 30 per
balloon, because of the pamphlet's weight. The number of launchings would have
been greater, but for the weather: in April, for example, no launches took
place because the winds blew from East to West. Additional
brochures were sent via postal mail to members of the Polish Communist Party
bureaucracy and distributed in Paris and elsewhere in the West
RFE
also put out details of Swiatlo in the March 1955 issue of News Behind the Iron Curtain, a monthly subscription journal
published by the Free Europe Press. The short introduction explained the
importance of the Swiatlo revelations:
Here
is the mirror of what it means to "build a Socialist state," and
"what Socialist morality" is truly like. It is a tale of the evils
done by the police, Party and Government to their adherents, and horrible as it
is, it is far less horrible than what all of these combined have done to the
Polish people.
Controversy at Radio Free Europe
The
Swiatlo programs also affected Radio Free Europe as the Polish broadcasting
service in Munich and management in New York were divided on the programs.
Robert Lang, the Director of Radio Free Europe, stationed in New York, wrote an
eight-page resignation letter in which he complained to the Executive Committee
of the Board of Directors of the Free Europe Committee that the Deputy Director
of RFE in New York had turned down the balloon program and was not consulted
before the Free Europe Press in Munich started Operation SPOTLIGHT. He
explained in the letter how the Polish émigrés in the United States were
unhappy with the RFE's use of Swiatlo and "the Polish press in this
country broke out in a rash of angry editorial comment, and, in
brief—poof--there went our carefully built up validity."
Lang also reveals in his
letter that Swiatlo had once sued RFE for “uncoordinated publishing on his
material in News From Behind the Iron
Curtain” and received $2,000. He threatened to sue again, this time for $10
000 because he was "infuriated—particularly by the introduction that was
flown in with his materials in which, among other things, he was labeled a man, "Who has drunk of every
shame." Also, Swiatlo had first
learned about SPOTLIGHT two weeks after it had started.
The controversy came to a head
in a meeting of CIA, VOA, and RFE officials on 7 October 1954, during which CIA
set ground rules for further interviews with Swiatlo.
In
December 1956, Poland expelled Life magazine photographer Lisa Larsen
when her visa expired. According to her, the Polish Foreign Department
explained that her visa was not extended due to Life magazine's 26 November 1956 article published under Swiatlo's
name. The Polish press department complained that “This article by one of
Poland’s worst criminals was sensational and untrue and its publication was an
unfriendly act. Polish newspapers accused Swiatlo of “robbing prisoners, using illegal
methods of interrogation and ordering the liquidation of at least one political
prisoner while he was a police officer.”
Crusade for Freedom
In the February 1956
Crusade for Freedom campaign, Swiatlo's story was used in the United States
with this nationwide newspaper appeal prepared by the Advertising Council:
SHAKE-UP
Broadcasts
cause removal of
Polish Police officials
MUNICH--A series of broadcasts by Radio Free Europe have caused great upheaval and embarrassment in Poland.
They were based on highly inflammatory information
about corrupt
Polish police operations obtained from Josef Swiatlo, a Polish Security Ministry official who had defected to the West. As a result of the broadcasts, the Reds were forced to dismiss four of Swiatlo's former chiefs and reorganize the ministry.
This is just a single example of the influence of Radio Free Europe's words of truth. Up to 20 hours of truth daily are broadcast to five key satellite countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Bulgaria, and Hungary. Moreover, the truth is getting through, despite
costly Red jamming
attempts.
Millions take the risk daily to listen. Millions more hear the truth from Radio Free Europe as it is passed cautiously from mouth to mouth.
Truth builds hope and continued resistance. Each
dollar sponsors
a minute of truth. Send your truth dollars to CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM, c.o. Local Postmaster
Post RFE?
The CIA prepared part 7
of a National Security Council report dated 2 March, 1955, in which it was
written: "the Polish Security Official, Josef Swiatlo, although defecting early in
1954, made outstanding contributions to U.S. intelligence and psychological warfare programs during this period.“
By
the 1960s, Jozef Swiatlo, once called "the most successful Western agent
in the Cold War," had effectively become a nonperson. Former CIA Director
Allen Dulles' book, The Craft of
Intelligence, published in 1963, contained only a two-sentence and
incorrect reference to Jozef Swiatlo saying that he had defected in Berlin in
1954, not 1953.
Former
CIA officer Ted Shackley wrote:
Once he had fulfilled his obligations to the U.S.
government, he sank quietly into private life as a legal resident of the United
States. According to what little I have heard about him, he moved to New
York—whether City or State I don't know—and opened a small business. The
absence of any news to the contrary gives me confidence that his resettlement
was a success.
Another CIA officer who had
the chance to interview Swiatlo, after his arrival in the United States, was
Tennent H. Bagley, who wrote in his book Spy
Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games:
Gave important and high-level
insights into Soviet operations and techniques....
This information, sent
to Poland by leaflet and radio, shook the regime and
led to reforms that,
developed in later years, made Poland a factor in the eventual
collapse of Soviet
Communism.
On 24 November 1982, the
Polish Intelligence Service decided to "close" the examination of his
case because of "the lack of information where he lived, where he is, and
what he did."
In January 2009 the Polish
Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) asked the U.S. Justice Department for
current information about Jozef Swiatlo. A year later, the response was one
sentence advising only that Jozef Swiatlo died on 2 September 1994 in the
United States.
#
Recommended
Reading
A. Ross Johnson, The Inside Story of the Secret Police and
the Party; Origins of the Swiatlo Broadcasts on RFE, http://wolnaeuropa.org/history%20forum/content/view/17/29/
L. W. Gluchowski, The Defection of Jozef Swialto and the Search for Jewish Scapegoats in
the Polish United Workers' Party, 1953-1954, Intermarium, Columbia
University electronic journal of modern East Central European postwar
history.
http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/ece/research/intermarium/vol3no2/gluchowski.pdf (Last accessed
September 2010)
Operation
SPOTLIGHT: Regime, Press and Radio, Western Press and Radio and Internal
Reactions, 12 February - 13 March, 1955, Free
Europe Committee, New York, March 1955, Free Europe Press. RFE/RL Collection,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California
The
Inside Story of the Bezpieka and the Party: Jozef Swiatlo Reveals the Secrets
of the Party, the Regime, and the Security Apparatus, English translation, RFE/RL
Collection,
