Thursday, December 01, 2005

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?