Walesa examines communist-era security files

Solidarity founder and former President Lech Walesa examined dozens of files today that communist-era Polish secret police gathered against him while he was a dissident leader in the 1970s and 80s.

He said most were worthy only for the garbage can.

“Only 10 per cent is interesting, the rest should be thrown out as trash,” Walesa said on TVN24 television after examining stacks of files for more than an hour.

Walesa, 62, was able to see the files, kept at the state-run National Remembrance Institute, after it cleared him last month of allegations he collaborated with the communist-era secret police. He viewed the documents at its office in his northern hometown of Gdansk.

He repeated he was clean “as a tear drop,” but acknowledged that at the start of his opposition activity, in the 1970s, he answered questions from security officers because he was not aware he could refuse. That, however, proved useful later, he said.

“If I had no experience in dealing with the security forces in the 1970s, I would not have known how to fight them in the 1980s” as leader of the massive Solidarity movement, Walesa said.

He said he was struck that many files evidently had been destroyed and those remaining were in disorder. The files are not open to the public, but Walesa has indicated that he might make them available.

The security officers “must have been paid by the ton of material, there is so much boring stuff there,” Walesa said.

Walesa asked to see the files in March after a participant in a debate on the ultraconservative station Radio Maryja alleged he had co-operated with communist officials. The allegations were made even though a special court in 2000 said Walesa had not collaborated with authorities during Poland’s communist era.

Walesa, who won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, filed against the radio station this spring, claiming it lied about his past. He has faced collaboration allegations for years, chiefly from fellow dissidents who founded Solidarity with him in 1980, but then fell out with him.

Walesa, an electrician, was imprisoned during martial law in the early 1980s. He served as the country’s first popularly-elected president from 1990-1995.