4. Interview with NSC staff member Norman A. Bailey, May 24, 2005. Bailey recalled these exact words from Allen to the NSC staff.
5. I have spoken to Schweizer about the document, which indeed appears authentic.
CHAPTER 8
1. Steven Strasser, Theodore Stanger, and Douglas Stanglin, “Crackdown on Solidarity,” Newsweek, December 21, 1981, 28.
2. David Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” London Times, December 16, 1981.
3. Ibid.
4. Interview with Joseph Dudek, conducted by Margie Dudek, November 2004.
5. Strasser et al., “Crackdown on Solidarity,” December 21, 1981; and Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland,” December 16, 1981.
6. Richard Owen, “How Army has filled vacuum left by party,” London Times, December 14, 1981.
The last time martial law was introduced in Eastern Europe was during the uprising in Hungary in 1956. The difference in this case twenty-five years later was that the armed forces took over the reins of government. In any other context, wrote Richard Owen in the London Times the next day, these actions would be classified as a military coup. Instead, Poland implemented a sort of hybrid government between the military and Communist politicians.
7. Transcript was published in major newspapers around the world on December 14 and 15, 1981.
8. Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
9. “Ex-Prime Minister among those held,” London Times, December 14, 1981; and Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
10. It was the kind of prudent religious sensitivity by Polish Communists that the brute Lenin and Soviet Communists never countenanced.
11. Official Soviet TASS statement, published in the London Times, December 14, 1981, 6.
12. Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
13. Schweizer, Victory, 29, 31.
14. Agostino Bono, “Officials say pope, Reagan shared Cold War data, but lacked alliance,” Catholic News Service, November 17, 2004.
15. Bill Clark, “President Reagan and the Wall,” Address to the Council of National Policy, San Francisco, California, March 2000, 7–8.
16. This is fact easily and immediately confirmable by speaking to Poles from the era. One scholar who demonstrates it nicely is Timothy Garton Ash in The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 3, 7.
17. Interview with Bill Clark, August 24, 2001.
18. Among them was a compelling November 2, 1976 piece about the Katyn Forest massacre.
19. Gerhard Simon, “The Catholic Church and the Communist State in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” in Bociurkiw and Strong, eds., Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (London: Macmillan, 1975), 212–13. Simon states that Catholic Church organization in the USSR was completely destroyed by the 1930s, and Catholicism was not permitted to reestablish a central apparatus after World War II, unlike some other churches. Writing in the mid-1970s, Simon reported that there was not a single Catholic monastery, convent, school, or welfare institution in the entire Soviet Union. Poland, however, was another story.
20. Ibid., 212–15, 242–51.
21. Fr. Robert A. Sirico, “The Cold War’s Magnificent Seven, Pope John Paul II: Awakener of the East,” Policy Review, no. 59 (Winter 1992): 52.
22. Malachai Martin, The Keys of This Blood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 102.
23. Ibid., 103.
24. This particular broadcast was titled simply, “The Pope in Poland.” Located in “Ronald Reagan: Pre-Presidential Papers: Selected Radio Broadcasts, 1975–1979,” October 31, 1978 to October 1979, Box 4, RRL. For a full transcript, see Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand, 174–75.
25. Reagan, “Address to the Roundtable National Affairs Briefing,” Dallas, Texas, August 1980,” vertical files.
26. Located in “Ronald Reagan: Pre-Presidential Papers: Selected Radio Broadcasts, 1975–1979,” October 31, 1978 to October 1979, Box 4, RRL. For a full transcript, see Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand, 176–77.
27. Quoted in Schweizer, Victory, 35–36, 59, 69, 159–61. Allen said that, “Reagan had a deep and steadfast conviction that this pope would help change the world.” Quoted in Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 270. Ed Rowny, a Polish-American and one of Reagan’s chief advisers on nuclear arms, who would brief John Paul II four times on Reagan’s behalf, also confirms that the president believed that the pope would be an important factor in the eventual liberation of Poland. Agostino Bono, “Officials say pope, Reagan shared Cold War data, but lacked alliance,” Catholic News Service, November 17, 2004.
28. Interview with Bill Clark, August 24, 2001.
29. Editorial, “The Polish Pope in Poland,” New York Times, June 5, 1979, A20. Reagan was not entirely alone. George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, states that the import of those nine days in Poland was not lost among two key Slavic observers: In Moscow, KGB head and future Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov was gravely concerned; prior to the Poland visit, within just six weeks of Karol Wojtyla’s election as Pope, Andropov ordered up a “massive” (Weigel’s word) KGB analysis on the potential impact of the new chief at the Holy See. (There have been reports, not to mention statements from John Paul II himself, that the USSR was so worried about the Polish pope that the KGB began considering assassination options.) Another Russian of very different ideological bent, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, witnessed the Pope’s reception in Poland from his exiled home in Vermont. He was elated: “This is the greatest thing to happen to the world since World War I,” he declared. “It’s the first real sign of hope since the Bolshevik revolution.” Quoted by George Weigel, “And the Wall Came Tumbling Down: John Paul II and the Communist Crack Up,” Address at Grove City College, February 15, 2001.
30. Information provided by Tomasz Pompowski, senior editor and reporter at Fakt (“Fact”), Poland’s largest daily newspaper, via e-mail correspondence September 5, 23, and 29, 2005.
31. Quoted in Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, The Reagan Revolution (New York: Dutton, 1981), 11–12.
32. Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” June 16, 1981.
33. Acknowledging this spiritual link, Russia expert James Billington notes that as a “bottom-up mass movement rooted in religion,” Solidarity was not the typical movement that apparatchiks could domesticate by decapitation or by offering carrots and sticks to its members. James H. Billington, “The Foreign Policy of President Ronald Reagan,” Address to the International Republican Institute Freedom Dinner, Washington, DC, September 25, 1997, 2.
34. Arthur R. Rachwald, In Search of Poland (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), 3.
35. Cited by Brian Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1999), 359.
36. Among others, see Reagan, “Proclamation 4891—Solidarity Day,” January 20, 1982.
37. Reagan, “Address to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,” Columbus, Ohio, August 1980,” vertical files.
38. Schweizer, Victory, 29, 31.
39. Benjamin Weiser, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2004), 3. I also learned of Kuklinski’s importance from Gus Weiss, who told me only vaguely that Kuklinski “earned his salary during the crisis.” Interview with Weiss, November 26, 2002.