Lech Walesa-Was He A Communist Informant?

This is actually an old story that was supposedly settled, but it seems to have roared back to life. Two brothers have written a book detailing what they insist is proof that Lech Walesa, in the early to mid seventies, worked as a spy for the Polish communist State Security Services and informed on many of his fellow Solidarity members, resulting in the arrest of as many as twelve or thirteen of them. They go on to insinuate that Walesa might have gone on to lead Solidarity in it's opposition to the Polish government government with the support of many in the same security services who might have had their own reasons for wanting to overthrow the communist regime.

From the article in the timesonline-

In The State Security Service and Lech Walesa, Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk make two central claims. The first is that Mr Walesa was an informer for the secret police between 1970 and 1976 under the codename “Bolek”. The second is that as President from 1990 to 1995 he borrowed his police file from the Interior Ministry archives and returned it with key pages missing.

Walesa still denies the charges, of course, in no uncertain terms, but the writers of the book insist that they have gained access to previously sealed records that point to him as being the mysterious "Bolek", in addition to the aforementioned charges of evidence tampering.

Walesa is threatening to sue the writers, and insists his political opponents today (including the present day head of the Polish conservative party) are behind the charges, much the way he earlier claimed that the incriminating documents were forged by enemies within the Polish State Security Service in order to decimate his standings with the people and within Solidarity.

Coming on the heels of all this is the news that just this last Sunday, another former high ranking Solidarity official, Bronislaw Geremek, himself later a high ranking cabinet minister in post communist democratic Poland, was killed when the car he was driving was involved in a head-on collision with another vehicle. No word on the condition of the driver of the other vehicle. Geremek, curiously, served in the administration of the successor to Walesa, who defeated him for re-election.

Geremek was a Nobel nominee and in fact was responsible for moving Poland into the EU, while remaining himself a staunch nationalist at the same time. He also proved instrumental in overturning a law, since held to be unconstitutional, that stated any aspirant for public office in Poland had to swear to never have been involved in any undercover spy capacity for the former communist government's secret police. Any found to have been so involved were denied the right to serve in any official capacity for a period of ten years. Geremek refused to make such a pledge, and challenged the law in court, leading to its eventual repeal.

Of course, Geremek's unfortunate demise might well be coincidental, and the charges against Walesa might turn out to be, at most, the proverbial tempest in a teapot. For now, though, it is certainly a strange brew.