This article covers the history of Polish Intelligence services dating back to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Commonwealth Though the first official Polish government service entrusted with espionage, intelligence and counter-intelligence was not formed until 1918, Kingdom of Poland and later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had developed networks of informants in neighbouring countries. Envoys and ambassadors had also gathered intelligence, often using bribery. Such agents included the 17th-century Polish poet Jan Andrzej Morsztyn.
Polish kings and Polish–Lithuanian military commanders (hetmans) such as Stanisław Koniecpolski maintained intelligence networks. The hetmans were responsible for intelligence-gathering in the Ottoman Empire, its vassal states and disputed territories such as Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania. Intelligence networks also operated in Muscovy and among the restless Cossacks.
In 1683, during the Battle of Vienna, the Polish merchant-spy Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki secured a promise of military assistance for Vienna, besieged by the Turkish forces of Kara Mustafa Pasha, and thus facilitated the victory of a Christian European coalition led by Polish King Jan III Sobieski. Kulczycki is reported to have received a reward for his services: the Turks' supplies of coffee beans and establishment of Vienna's first coffee house.
Partitions During the period when Poland had been partitioned (beginning in 1772, until 1918) by three adjacent empires, intelligence played an important role in patriotic Poles' surveillance of their occupiers and in their planning and conduct of successive Polish uprisings.
1914–1918 In 1914, Józef Piłsudski created the Polish Military Organization, an intelligence and special-operations organization which worked alongside the Polish Legions. As such, it was independent of Austro-Hungary and loyal to Piłsudski and to a future independent Poland.
1918–1921 Immediately upon achieving independence in 1918, Poland established armed forces. Reflecting the influence of the French Military Mission to Poland, the Polish General Staff was divided into divisions entrusted with specific tasks: Oddział I (Division I) – Organization and mobilization; Oddział II (Division II) – Intelligence and counterintelligence; Oddział III (Division III) – Training and operations; Oddział IV (Division IV) – Quartermaster.
Division II (colloquially, "Dwójka," "Two") was formed in October 1918, even before Poland had declared her independence. Initially called the "General Staff Information Department," Division II was divided into sections (sekcje): Sekcja I – Reconnaissance and close intelligence; Sekcja II IIa (East) – Offensive intelligence for Bolshevik Russia, Lithuania, the Belarusian People's Republic, Ukraine and Galicia; IIb (West) – Offensive intelligence for Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom; Sekcja III – General intelligence and surveillance abroad (East and West); Sekcja IV – Preparation of a front-line bulletin; Sekcja V – Contacts with military and civilian authorities; Sekcja VI – Contacts with attachés in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow and Kiev; Sekcja VII – Ciphers (i.e., cryptology).
An extensive network of domestic and foreign informants developed rapidly. This was due to Poland's poor economic situation, itself the result of over a century of foreign occupation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Poland's economic and political situation had forced hundreds of thousands to emigrate. With the advent of Polish independence, many émigrés offered their services to Polish intelligence agencies. Other Poles who had been living in the former Russian Empire and were now making their way home through war-torn Russia, provided priceless intelligence on the logistics, order of battle and status of the parties in the Russian Civil War.
In Western Europe (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) the Polish diaspora often formed the backbone of heavy industry; some one million people of Polish descent lived in the Ruhr Valley alone. Many of these provided intelligence on industrial production and economic conditions.
After the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in early 1919, intelligence from the east proved vital to Poland's survival against a far superior enemy. A separate organization was formed within Polish Intelligence, taking over most intelligence duties for the duration of the war. This was a Biuro Wywiadowcze (Intelligence Bureau) comprising seven departments:
Organisation; Offensive Intelligence "A"; Offensive Intelligence "B"; Offensive Intelligence "C"; Defensive Intelligence; Internal propaganda; Counterintelligence.
The fourth department, Offensive Intelligence "C", became the most developed because it carried out all the duties connected with "front-line" reconnaissance and intelligence, as well as "long-range" intelligence and surveillance in countries surrounding Bolshevik Russia, including Siberia (still in the hands of the White Russians), Turkey, Persia, China, Mongolia and Japan.
The third department, Offensive Intelligence "B," controlled an intelligence network in European Russia.
Additional intelligence was obtained from Russian defectors and prisoners of war who crossed the Polish lines in their thousands, especially after the 1920 Battle of Warsaw.
1921–1939
After the Polish–Soviet War and the Treaty of Riga, Polish Intelligence had to restructure to cope with new challenges. Though Poland had won most of her border conflicts (most notably the war with Russia and the Greater Poland Uprising of 1918–19 against Germany), her international situation was unenviable. By mid-1921, Section II had been restructured into three main departments, each overseeing a number of offices: Organization Department: Organization; Training; Personnel; Finances; Polish ciphers and codes, communication, and foreign press. Information Department: East; West; North; South; Statistics office; Nationalities and minorities; Intelligence Department: Intelligence technology; Central agents' bureau; Counterintelligence; Foreign cryptography (Biuro Szyfrów); Radio intelligence and wire-tapping.
Until the late 1930s the Soviet Union was seen as the most likely aggressor and Poland's main adversary. Section II developed an extensive network of agents within Poland's eastern neighbor and other adjoining countries. In the early 1920s Polish intelligence began developing a network for "offensive intelligence." The Eastern Office (Referat "Wschód") had several dozen bureaus, mostly attached to Polish consulates in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Kharkov and Tbilisi.
Short-range reconnaissance was carried out by the Border Defense Corps, created in 1924. On a number of occasions, soldiers crossed the border disguised as smugglers, partisans or bandits. They gathered information on the disposition of Soviet troops and the morale of the Soviet populace. At the same time, Soviet forces carried out analogous missions on Polish soil. The situation finally stabilized in 1925; however, such missions continued to occur occasionally.
Polish Intelligence produced fairly accurate pictures of the capabilities of Poland's main potential adversaries—Germany and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, this information was of little avail when war came in September 1939. Good intelligence could not offset the overwhelming superiority of the German and Soviet armed forces. The conquest of Poland took four weeks—too short a time for intelligence services to make a significant contribution. With Poland conquered, her intelligence services had to evacuate their headquarters to allied French and British territories.
1939–1945
Until 1939 Polish intelligence services did not, as a rule, collaborate with the intelligence services of other countries with the exception of Imperial Japan. A partial exception was also France, Poland's closest ally; even then cooperation was lukewarm, with neither side sharing their most precious secrets. An important exception was the long-term collaboration between France's Gustave Bertrand and Poland's Cipher Bureau, headed by Gwido Langer. The situation only began to change in 1939, when war appeared certain and Britain and France entered into a formal military alliance with Poland. The most important result of the subsequent information-sharing was the disclosure to France and Britain of Polish techniques and equipment for breaking German Enigma machine ciphers.
The initial break into the Enigma ciphers had been made in late 1932 by mathematician Marian Rejewski, working for the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau. His work was facilitated, perhaps decisively, by intelligence provided by Bertrand. With the help of fellow mathematicians Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, Rejewski developed techniques to decrypt German Enigma-enciphered messages on a regular and timely basis.
Six-and-a-half years after the initial Polish decryption of Enigma ciphers, French and British intelligence representatives were briefed on Polish achievements at a trilateral conference held at Cipher Bureau facilities in the Kabaty Woods, just south of Warsaw, on July 26, 1939, barely five weeks before the outbreak of World War II. This formed the basis for early Enigma decryption by the British at Bletchley Park, northwest of London. Without the head start provided by Poland, British reading of Enigma encryptions might have been delayed several years, if it would have gotten off the ground at all.
Key Polish Cipher Bureau personnel escaped from Poland on September 17, 1939, on the Soviet Union's entry into eastern Poland, and eventually reached France. There, at "PC Bruno" outside Paris, they resumed cracking Enigma ciphers through the "Phony War" (October 1939 – May 1940). Following the fall of northern France to the Germans, the Polish-French-Spanish cryptological organization, sponsored by French Major Gustave Bertrand, continued its work at "Cadix" in the Vichy "Free Zone" until it was occupied by German forces in November 1942.
After the 1939 invasion of Poland, practically all of the General Staff's Section II (Intelligence) command apparatus managed to escape to Romania and soon reached France and Britain. Reactivating agent networks throughout Europe, they immediately began cooperating with French and British intelligence agencies. After the subsequent fall of France, most of Section II ended up in Britain.
At that time Britain was in a difficult situation, badly in need of intelligence from occupied Europe after rapid German advances had disrupted its networks and put German forces into areas where Britain had few agents. Following the personal intervention of Churchill and Sikorski in September 1940, cooperation between British and Polish intelligence organizations entered a new phase.
The Poles placed their Section II at the disposal of the British, but as a quid pro quo requested and obtained (at that time without any reservations) the right to use, without British oversight, their own ciphers which they had developed in France. The Poles were the only Allied country that was given this unique status, though as the war progressed it was challenged by some agencies of the British government. Due to support from members of the British Special Operations Executive, the Poles kept their ciphers to the end of hostilities.Michael Alfred Peszke, The Polish Underground Army, the Western Allies, and the Failure of Strategic Unity in World War II, p. 50.
In the first half of 1941 Polish agents in France supplied Britain with intelligence on U-boat movements from French Atlantic ports. The Polish network in France grew to 1,500 members and, before and during Operation Overlord, supplied vital information about the German military in France. Agents working in Poland in the spring of 1941 supplied extensive intelligence about German preparations to invade the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).