What did MI6 do with records of what Polish spies did?

DAVID SELLS:
A Polish clock that sings a song. And for the first time in decades it has something to sing about. Poland today is a free nation. This clock is in the Sikorski Institute in London, surrounded by memorabilia of the Second World War. Poland was a terrible victim of that conflict, carved up by Hitler and Stalin. Yet as a people Poles have survived. Theirs is a triumph of identity. And history is crucial to it, above all the truth about history. This is why Evgenia Maresch and Jan Ciechanowski are delving into the archives at the Public Records Office, seeking to illuminate that story of Polish intelligence activity in World War Two. A genuine saga, eclipsed by events post-war, it has been little reported.

PROFESSOR JAN CIECHANOWSKI:
There is so far no book or publication which is actually based on Polish and British documents, so this would be a very worthwhile contribution to the history of the Second World War.

EVGENIA MARESCH:
When the war came here, the Polish people and the Polish Government came to Britain, we had great hopes of very close co-operation. The results of that war have been bitter, especially to those people who fought alongside the British.

SELLS:
Out of the blue last year, the Prime Minister, urged on by his opposite number in Warsaw, Jerzy Buzek, implicitly conceded that where wartime history is concerned, and Britain's subsequent approach to it, the Poles do have a point. Tony Blair set up an Anglo-Polish committee to examine the record.

PROFESSOR NORMAN DAVIES:
I think the Anglo-Polish commission is very important. The Poles are our partners in NATO at the present time, just as they were our allies during the war. I think the British Government needs in some way to re-establish its credentials. For a long time Poland was sidelined. Polish history was covered up in one way or another. To re-establish this important British-Polish alliance within NATO, and very soon within the European Union, a show of honesty and openness is very, very necessary.

SELLS:
There are several archives that committee members are investigating, not least those kept by the Polish community in Britain. Andrzej Suchcitz is custodian of those at the Sikorski Institute. He is a second-generation Pole, born and bred in this country, free of the painful memories of that wartime generation which ultimately felt itself betrayed, but acutely aware of the burden of history.

ANDRZEJ SUCHCITZ:
Because of Poland's history, that history is important to the Poles. It is even more important that history has been falsified, by the communists over the past 50 years, and secondly it has been falsified and underplayed. Not just the role of military intelligence, but other Polish contributions have been underplayed by our allies in their historical research and publications.

SELLS:
Savaged by the Germans from the West in 1939, and then almost immediately by the Soviets from the East, the Poles set up a government-in-exile in Paris. This was forced to retreat to London in June 1940, when France itself collapsed. Its dominant figure was General Wladyslaw Sikorski. I am sitting at General Sikorski's desk, his wartime base in London. From this desk he led a government in exile, commanded troops and ran a formidable military intelligence, with agents operating not just in occupied Poland but all over Europe. Information garnered by this Polish network was fed directly to Britain's MI6. It has, I think, been largely forgotten quite how substantial Poland's intelligence contribution was to the Allied war effort. In 1940, General Sikorski and Winston Churchill had agreed to share Polish intelligence. The British found this of prime importance when France and the Netherlands fell to German invaders. Polish Intelligence had a huge network of agents in France. Agents reported ahead of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, helping too ahead of the Allied invasions of North Africa, Italy and the Balkans. Throughout the war the London Poles passed on intelligence to MI6.

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW:
Professor of Modern History Nothing like this had ever happened in any previous war at any time or at any place in human history. So it went from really technical intelligence, code-breaking, right through to agent reports. We wouldn't have broken Enigma as rapidly as we did at Bletchley Park if the Poles hadn't made a start ten years before World War II. So the assistance ranges from code-breaking to agents' reports. And there is the sheer volume of it. Because all of the reports have not survived, we don't know now many reports were being produced then, but there are a couple of weeks in 1942, one in May, one in August, when we do know the exact number. In both those weeks Polish intelligence was sending British intelligence over 100 reports.

SELLS:
It was for Poland that Britain had nominally gone to war in 1939. This common interest became clouded when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Soviets, who had connived with Hitler to gobble up Eastern Poland, now became our allies. Then, in April 1943, German radio announced the Katyn massacres of the Polish officer corps, blaming the Soviets. Some 15,000 officers were later found to have been butchered. The Soviets blamed the Nazis. General Sikorski in London had no doubts that Stalin was to blame. He demanded an international inquiry. Stalin was furious, and so too was Churchill. For the first time the anti-Hitler coalition was split.

PROFESSOR NORMAN DAVIES:
If you take an affair like that of the Katyn massacres, for example, it's quite clear that for 40 years the British Government was less than honest, less than open, about what it actually knew. It deliberately gave the impression during the war that the Katyn massacres were a Nazi crime, knowing full well that this was a Soviet crime. And, after the war, it gave the impression that nobody quite knew what had happened, and so on. Anyone with more than superficial experience of these wartime matters has good reason to smell a rat.

SELLS:
And, to a degree, even with our Government's decision to appoint this Anglo-Polish committee, suspicions still lurk. London Poles do have some documentation. This is an archive of the Home Army, the wartime non-communist Polish underground. But what would have been, historically speaking, their prize source, has mysteriously vanished. At the end of the war, citing the original 1940 agreement, MI6 asked Polish Intelligence, its so-called Second Bureau, to hand over its wartime archive. The Poles complied. They saw the SIS as custodians. More than 50 cases of paper-work were surrendered. The Poles kept track of them until the 1950s, only to be told in 1959, without explanation, that they had now been destroyed. This is still the Government's contention. If true, how come such an important historical record has been dumped? Polish members of the committee remain baffled.

PROFESSOR JAN CIECHANOWSKI:
Well, possibly, it was destroyed. But if the archives were destroyed, then we should be told exactly when they were destroyed, on whose orders they were destroyed, why they were destroyed, whether everything was destroyed, and so on.

SELLS:
Professor Andrew, an historian schooled in the ways of MI6 in its Cold War days and in its abiding culture of secrecy, speaks for the British side of the committee.

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW:
This only seems odd if you don't understand the way SIS treated its archive during the Second World War and immediately afterwards. Now, the first thing to remember, and this was government policy, this wasn't SIS policy, is that SIS was never going to be avowed. Every government in British history believed that until 1992. Since SIS was never going to be officially admitted, it followed that its archive was never, ever, going to become available.

PROFESSOR NORMAN DAVIES:
The Poles had a very widespread intelligence network throughout the Soviet Union, beyond the Soviet Union, in China, in Turkey and so on. All this was of capital importance at the beginning of the Cold War, and it is simply not believable that competent British Officers would have thought this was material fit for shredding.

SELLS:
The prowess of Polish troops in the Allied cause during World War II has long been celebrated. They captured Monte Cassino in Italy at appalling cost. Their fighter pilots were stars of the Battle of Britain. Only their intelligence achievements have stayed unsung. MI5 has kept its archives. The SOE, the wartime Special Operations Executive, has its archive. GCHQ, we are told, also has its archive. Only MI6, it seems, at Polish expense, has been remiss. How careless of them.