Thursday, December 01, 2005

Has TASS taken over the AP's Warsaw bureau?

Here's how the Associated Press covered the story about post-nomenklatura Poland's decision to release the secret archives of the old Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance. Four times in the first five paragraphs, AP blames Poland's new leaders for antagonizing Russia:

WARSAW, Poland -- Poland is risking further strains in relations with Russia by throwing open Cold War-era archives that include a 1979 Soviet retaliation plan that envisaged nuclear strikes on western European cities in the event of a war with NATO.

The map foresaw the nuclear annihilation of Poland and was dotted with red mushroom clouds over the German cities of Munich, Cologne, Stuttgart and the site of NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

It was revealed Friday by Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, a staunch anti-communist who went into exile in Britain in the 1980s to oppose Poland's Moscow-backed communist rulers.

By declassifying some 1,700 volumes of a Soviet-led military bloc's files, Sikorski and Poland's other new conservative leaders risk antagonizing Russian leaders, who rue the loss of their superpower status with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

"This could worsen Russian-Polish relations," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs. "At this point, there is no more destructive topic for Russian-Polish relations than the historic one." . . .


The November 29 byline of AP's Warsaw correspondent Ryan Lucas appears on the story.

Not a Soviet collaborator, Poland's new defense minister opens Warsaw Pact archives

Now that Poland has decided to cleanse its political leadership of former Soviet collaborators and communist secret police agents, it is doing what the country should have done more than a decade ago: Opening up the secret Warsaw Pact archives.

Defense Minister Radek Sikorski signed an order November 25 to release 1,700 volumes of Soviet bloc documents, including plans to destroy Belgium and parts of West Germany with nuclear weapons.

Files unearthed last spring showed that former military dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was defense minister when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, was himself a longtime GRU Soviet military intelligence agent. Jaruzelski began his four-decade career of treason as one of Stalin's shock troops in the Soviet takeover of Poland after World War II.

For some reason, the late Kwasniewski regime didn't see fit to make those secrets known.

What else is out there?