A Polish institute responsible for prosecuting Communistera crimes said on Thursday that new-found documents showed Lech Walesa was a Communist secret agent, an allegation the Solidarity freedom hero
A Polish institute responsible for prosecuting Communistera crimes said on Thursday that new-found documents showed Lech Walesa was a Communist secret agent, an allegation the Solidarity freedom hero immediately denied. In a secret police file “there is a collaboration agreement signed by Lech Walesa (codename) ‘Bolek’,” Lukasz Kaminski, head of the Institute of National Remembrance, said.
Apparently dating from the 1970s, the documents also contain payment receipts signed by “Bolek”, Mr Kaminski said.
Mr Walesa was quick to deny the allegation in a Thursday social media post saying: “There cannot be any materials written by me.”
The 72-year-old Nobel Peace laureate who led the Solidarity movement that in 1989 negotiated a peaceful end to communism in Poland also vowed to prove his innocence in court.
Poland’s first post-Communist era President has long insisted accusations of collaboration are “absurd” and a special vetting court cleared him in 2000. But rumours persist he covertly fed the Communist regime information while leading the freedom-fighting Solidarity, the Soviet bloc’s only independent trade union.
Experts have consistently raised doubts about the credibility of Communist-era secret police files, arguing they could easily have been manufactured to frame opposition activists like Walesa.
The IPN recently seized a fresh cache of document from the home of the widow of Communistera General Czeslaw Kiszczak, who helped orchestrate a brutal 1981 crackdown on the pro-freedom Solidarity movement. He died in 2015.
