The head of Poland’s history institute says that recently seized documents show that former president and Solidarity founder Lech Walesa was a paid informant for the communist-era secret security from 1970-76.
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“The personal file contains an envelope and in it there is a manually written commitment to collaborate with the secret service signed: Lech Walesa “Bolek”,” said a spokesman for the institute.
“In the secret collaborator’s operational folder there were 279 pages in their original covers, including numerous reports of the secret collaborator “Bolek”, said Lukasz Kaminski, the institute’s head.
This is not the first time Walesa has been accused of being an informer as he has continuously denied the accusations since the 1970s. “I will prove it in court”.
In 2000 he was cleared by a special court which said it found no evidence of collaboration. As in other eastern European countries the security services were used to suppress dissent and keep people under control.
He was the first “freely” elected president of Poland in 1990 after 63 years of communist rule.
“There can exist no documents coming from me”.
Speaking on Thursday, Mr Tusk called the latest allegations, “unfortunate from the point of view of Poland’s image, this great tradition and legend of Solidarity and Lech Walesa”.
Walesa, who in 1983 won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in opposing the communist regime in Poland, has disputed allegations that in the 1970s, before leading the dissident Solidarity trade union, he had spied for the communists.
According to Kaminski, the institute seized five more packets of documents but these have not yet been opened. Prosecutors and police were also searching Kiszczak’s summer house. She demanded 90,000 zlotys ($23,000) for them.
Walesa was assigned the codename “Bolek” and was paid for his services to the country’s Communist authorities, according to IPN.
Lech Walesa founded the Solidarity movement in 1980 that brought an end to communism in Poland. Walesa sued the conservative politician, but withdrew the case after Kaczynski died in a plane crash in 2010.
Mateusz Morawiecki, a deputy prime minister from the ruling Law and Justice party, said it was now clear “Lech Walesa had an agent’s past”.
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“Walesa was the agent Bolek… he betrayed friends and colleagues”, Mr Cenckiewicz said on Thursday.
