European Document/To Spy for Poland
Swick, Thomas
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT TO SPY FOR POLAND by Thomas Swick High among the annoyances of living as a foreigner in Poland is the process of getting the permission to do so. When your visa expires and you...
...When I first went to Poland in the late 1970s, the visa office was located on the first floor of a solemn building on Warsaw's well-named Raven Street...
...You make notes, you come to us once a week, and you tell us what people saying...
...Never had we met a Soviet who looked, acted, and sounded more like ourselves...
...It's very like what journalists do—you gather information and then you report it...
...My visa was to expire the first week of February, during the semester break at the school where I was teaching...
...Posner put us at ease...
...First was amazement that with people bitching and speaking out in food lines daily the government should need special envoys to learn their thoughts...
...On the wall hung not picturesque travel posters nor even more understandable socialist slogans, but blanched advertisements for "Western" goods sold in Warsaw's dollar shops...
...Posner wore upscale Western clothes, spoke flawless English, smiled frequently, and made statements about Soviet pplicy that we did not expect to hear...
...Well," he said at last, putting his hands resignedly on his desk, alluding—I supposed—to the phantom pa-perwork, "if that's your answer, then there is not anything we can do for you.,, As I had not accepted the offer, I felt free to tell anyone...
...sometimes is, the bother) you must report to an imposing bureau of unsmiling functionaries who hold in their flabby, print-stained hands your fate...
...After six months my Polish was still execrable—another reason for my desire to stay...
...I sat quietly, knowing that my departure from Poland was decided, and feeling in a strange way flattered...
...the interview fruitless minutes...
...So much for those dour men in dark suits reviewing weapons on Red Square...
...From Moscow's standpoint, his visit Donald K Emmerson, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written on Soviet affairs for the Christian Science Monitor...
...Nevertheless, in keeping with standard Soviet precautions, while Posner was in Madison his wife and child stayed in Moscow...
...His face, though the color of clay, coruscated with a silver bicuspid on either side...
...With the arbitrariness of decision-making, it becomes a sort of lottery in which the participants invest not money but time...
...It also alters their way of thinking...
...You have contacts with many people...
...The American persona of Vladimir Posner dates from 1940, when at the age of six he and his wealthy Russian parents fled Nazi-occupied France for Manhattan...
...In his many appearances around town Posner diverged repeatedly from Soviet policies...
...To make certain that I had not misunderstood, Iasked him, naively, to elucidate...
...Hania followed me silently out of the building—she told people later that I looked as if I had just seen a ghost—for I feared confessing while still inside its walls...
...By thetime the family moved to Berlin in 1948, _where -Posner acquired Soviet citizenship, his American accent and tastes were well established...
...In Madison, this was headline news: "Top Soviet Commentator Backs Open Emigration" . . "Soviet Commentator Rips Radio Jamming" . . . "Soviet Doesn't Always Toe the Party Line" . . . "Posner Doesn't Fit Soviet Mold...
...In my final days in Warsaw, my Polish friends greeted the story with comparable sangfroid, expressing puzzlement at only two facets of it...
...We even felt free to kid him about how independent-minded he seemed to be...
...You don't have the 2-S form...
...Private incentives" were...
...Some Polish friends had told me of similar interviews when applying for passports abroad, and I wondered how they had acted...
...To get admitted to an office you had to barge in while it was occupied (to show your face) and then return with a platoon when it was vacated...
...Yours does it...
...SUMMER GUESTS by Donald K. Emmerson Madison, Wisconsin Madison has been unusually busy this summer welcoming Soviets, showing them around, and getting in touch with the USSR...
...I remember wondering if this phenomenon of omnipresence found us in his dreams as well...
...Many of us had already seen him perform on television as a guest of Phil Donahue, Ted Koppel, Robert Novak, or Larry King...
...was "counterproductive...
...The few chairs were usually all taken by Arab men stymied by questionnaires (the model ones in English and French were most of the time in use) and assisted by gum-cracking blondes...
...Once, when I must have looked especially taken aback, he said: "Of course, every country does this sort of thing...
...For I don't know how long I sat dumbfounded...
...SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CH KTVN 'C~~ WTTS...
...I was no longer convinced that there was not a single reason why the authorities should deny me a visa: I thought that if by some slim chance they did not find me unworthy, I should be eternally grateful...
...It would be nice to report that I responded sarcastically, or full of moral indignation...
...The desk held nothing atop it save a soft green telephone...
...I was enjoying my work—teaching English to high-spirited Polish teenagers—and had a contract until the summer when, it had then been made known, Karol Wojtyla would make his first trip back to his homeland since becoming Pope...
...Visits there always made me queasy...
...It,took Soviet authorities thirty-eight years to realize Posner's value as an emissary to the U.S...
...He did not try to coerce me into accepting, though he would occasionally add encouragements...
...But that doesn't make it right," mymother would have told him...
...c%.' WGTC 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 The room was empty save for two chairs, a desk, and a large man who sat behind it...
...You should be used to this sort of work," he said smiling, and flashing his silver...
...Also, my fiancee, Hania, was still attending Warsaw University...
...Of all our Soviet guests, the most memorable was Posner...
...The waiting area, dimly lit and windowless, was surrounded by numbered offices out of which tie-less clerks would regularly emerge, lock the doors behind them, and then bustle down the corridor carrying forms or decks of shuffled passports...
...And two, that that little friend of yours know nothing about this...
...I said: "I only want to teach...
...On our first two visits we had no marked success other than, I like to hope, shortening the career of the clerk assigned to my case...
...You have to get it from the Ministry of Education...
...Another headline concluded: "Soviet a Hit with Most in Madison," and he was...
...In July a local teacher arranged for his middle-school pupils to talk with Soviet counterparts on a Madison-to-Moscow conference call...
...Thirteen more Soviets arrived in August, fresh from a "peace cruise" down the Mississippi River...
...This time after the requisite wait, we were approached by our man, looking timorous, who told me to come along alone with him: Hania should wait...
...Despite the incipient close of Gierek's period of prosperity (1979 had just be-gun and the what seemed to me already poor food supplies were getting poorer) and the relentlessness of Poland's worst winter in a century, I wished to stay...
...You're a journalist...
...He was leaned back heavily in his seat, his clothing ill-matched and disrupted—even the enormous tie—by his outspread stomach...
...On the delay in acknowledging Chernobyl, Posner admitted that "in my country, the bureaucratic element prefers to stonewall" before letting people know about important events...
...When your visa expires and you wish to renew it (because you have found the charm of the country exceeds, or in fact Thomas Swick is a writer living in Philadelphia...
...He asked me to sit down and proceeded to go through the file our man had handed him...
...What if I made a scene, I mused, or stalked out with a stinging epithet (the movies again...
...The wait could take hours...
...Whatever our views, we enjoyed the performance...
...He was a pale, stocky man in his thirties, with a thick moustache and a prematurely grievous voice...
...Exit visas should be granted, he told us, to "anyone who wants to leave" the Soviet Union...
...I agreed...
...He repeated the offer and the job description, which, admittedly, made it seem easy enough...
...Hania accompanied me each time to Raven Street—we began our visits at the end of January—to work on my be-half as interpreter...
...I began looking on these sessions as part of a vast screening process to keep out those who were not fully dedicated to living in Poland...
...We spent minutes looking at each other in silence across the empty desk...
...The thought occurred to me—as it has with this intensity only one or two other times in my life—that what I was experiencing happens only in movies...
...We don't do anything for you until you show us that...
...You are a foreigner," he said, pronouncing the g as in "ginger" with the n before it...
...If you help us, we can help you...
...Although what he told us was of course in no sense anti-Soviet, Posner's artful departures from the party line surprised us...
...About halfway down the hall he opened one of them, led me inside, and departed...
...I only want to teach," a statement that, coming from someone who had begun his career as an instructor only six months before, was beginning to sound hollow...
...Well," he said...
...We went back a third time to Raven Street—after being refused both a visa and a reason why—because it is customary in Poland to apply repeatedly for such formalities regardless of the firmness of the first rejections...
...It may also have taken that long for the Kremlin to reassure itself that a man with an American childhood would not defect...
...I said: "It doesn't interest me...
...That they finally allowed him in 1986 to revisit his previous homeland reflects Mikhail Gorbachev's interest in using Western public relations techniques more effectively...
...I noticed that some of the doors we passed were padded...
...needed to speed the lagging Soviet economy...
...He preceded me up some concrete stairs to the second floor—where I had never been before—and down an empty corridor...
...This idea seemed all the more real to me when, on my third request for a visa—after living and working for six months in the country—I received an offer to become a spy...
...It's nothing unusual...
...In fact, I think I waited until it was out of sight...
...The event was not nearly as fantastic to her, being Polish, as it was to me: she asked jokingly what the starting salary was...
...You have contacts at work with Poles, and you have contacts with other foreindzers...
...In poor English, he recounted aloud my recent past, noting that I had been a journalist in the States, that here in Warsaw I was teaching English, finally, that I wanted a visa to stay...
...The enormity of the statement struck me immediately...
...Then he would repeat his proposal, and I my refusal...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...At one point, undefeated, he said: "Of course if you accept you must promise two things, One, that everything you telling us is the truth...
...His government's jamming of Western radio broadcasts...
...Before an overflow crowd at one dinner for him, the American master of ceremonies gave Posner a favorite local bumper sticker for emergency use, should his candor in Madison get him canned in Moscow...
...Once in another part of the city we stood on a traffic island and, looking into the back seat of a taxi waiting at the light, saw our man—scrunched with his briefcase set atop his knees, his eyes turned up at us nonplussed...
...here was a public relations bonanza...
...He would retreat from his office, fumbling with a prodigious batch of keys, when his eyes would meet ours gazing expectantly back at him, and he would make off in a languid huff...
...Second was surprise that they would try to recruit a foreign journalist, someone who they knew could upon returning home make the deed public—as, here, I finally have...
...Cinzano and Sony...
...In only two days with us, he received more than five hours of time on local radio or TV...
...He had his own paper route and developed a life-long liking for peanut butter...
...The sticker read: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 37...
...I was unsure how conversations such as this one were ended...
...In June we played host to a delegation led by the Soviet TV and radio personality Vladimir Posner...
...Posner remembered the family's Fifth Avenue apartment as "swanky" and the schools he went to as "posh and progressive...
...Like food lines, such bureaucracy keeps the masses occupied...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
