THE DIPLOMAT AS DEFECTOR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606330001-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 27, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 3, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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WASHINGTON POST
3 April 1986
The Diplomat
As Defector
Romuald Spasowski's Tale of
Intrigue. Protest-and Poland
By Sarah Booth Conroy
Washington Post Staff Wnter
If they kill me now," said Romuald Spasowski,
shrugging, "it doesn't matter. I have survived to
write the truth of my life, my father's and my
son's. It is a sad book."
His eye is not dry as he speaks. And a blast of
Siberian cold seems to blow through the room.
At 2:14 p.m. on Dec. 19, 1981, Spasowski
was the Polish ambassador to the United States.
He was also dean of the Polish diplomatic corps,
former Polish deputy foreign minister and the
son of a Marxist philosopher for whom a War-
saw street was named.
At 2:15 p.m., Dec. 19, 1981, he called the
U.S. State Department and became the highest
ranking Communist to defect to the West. The
Polish diplomat and his family, what was left of
it, packed documents of their lives, regrets of
their past and fragile hopes for the future, and
fled the ambassadorial residence in
Northwest Washington for an FBI
safe house.
On Dec. 20, Spasowski riveted the
world's attention with his impassioned
plea against the Soviet crackdown on
the Polish people and the arrest of
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. "The
cruel night of darkness and silence has
spread over my country," he said.
Two days later, he and his wife
Wanda met with President Reagan
before moving on to another safe
house.
In August 1982, Polish Gen.
Wojciech Jaruzelski and his junta final-
ly got around to condemning him to
death.
Last night, Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich gave a coming out party for
Romuald and Wanda Spasowski at the
Watergate Hotel, their first public
appearance since they disappeared
from sight after their defection.
"He made the most difficult decision
a man of conscience can make," said
Alexander Haig, secretary of state
when Spasowski defected. "People in
public service have a struggle when
they don't agree with their govern-
ment. You can stay on, trying to do
what you can to change things. Spa-
sowski defected when he realized he
could no longer make a difference
from within. Not easy, but coura-
geous."
Another former secretary of state,
Edmund Muskie, remembered well
the serious concerns Spasowski
expressed at the last meeting they
had. Charles Z. Wick, USIA director,
said he first met Spasowski when
USIA filmed "Let Poland Be Poland."
Edwin Meese made a brief stop
before going down the river with Wick
aboard publisher Malcolm Forbes'
yacht.
The publishers, scenting a success,
came on strong with Marie Arana-
Ward, who edited the book; Richard
Lourie, whose novel "First Loyalty" is
about the KGB; Eugene McCarthy,
who has a new book coming out with
HBJ; and Marta Istomin, Kennedy
Center artistic director, who also is on
the HBJ board. Almost 250 friends
filled the Riverview room, hugging
the honorees, turning their other
cheeks for double kisses, lining up to
have their heavy books autographed,
sympathizing with the Spasowskis'
ordeal and congratulating them on
their triumphant return to the world.
Spasowski's 704-page autobiogra-
phy, "The Liberation of One," has all
the Sturm and Drang of Goethe's
"Faust," a middle-European drama of
one who sold his soul to the devil for
the traditional temptations of power
and sex-but who in the end is
redeemed from sin by repentance.
The only glimmer of sunshine in the
Sturm are Polish jokes, which by defi-
nition tend toward black humor.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publish-
ers is betting money on Spasowski,
sending the author to more than a
dozen cities to promote his book. "I
want to make my statement as loud as
possible to be heard everywhere," he
said.
At 65, six feet tall, with a goatee
and mustache, his gray hair holding its
coppery tints, Spasowski still looks, in
his brown striped suit, like a 1930s
Eastern European diplomat. His
English, like his German, Russian and
a few other languages, is fluent
though measured and formal.
Not yet 60, Wanda Spasowski has
dark hair pulled back in a bouquet of
curls. Her blouse is of Polish embroi-
dery. She counts out three heart med-
icine pills and puts them before him,
the image of the European helpmate.
She offers around the big tin of fancy
cookies and instant cappuccino she
brought herself as though the glass
hot-water pot
ference room a velvet-hung embassy
salon.
To look at them, you might think,
At last, the Spasowskis have escaped
to a happy beginning."
His book is finished and is promised
a wide reception. Their daughter Mis-
ia and her husband Andrzej Grochulski
are teaching in the United States. His
93-year-old mother, just before her
death in December, received an Israe-
li award for sheltering Jews during the
Nazi occupation. She lived out her last
days in comfort in a Jewish hospice in
Poland.
Still, the Spasowskis' sweets have
sour centers.
"I will be always stateless," he said
bitterly. "1 can never be a citizen of
another country. Yet my Poland does
not exist anymore. As Wanda says,
their Warsaw is not my Warsaw. All
Poland is now a political prison and
the people are the prisoners."
His words have a faint echo of the
note left by his father, when Wladys-
law Spasowski committed suicide
under the Nazi occupation.
"Moriturus to salutat... I am a cit-
izen of the world and do not wish to be
any other sort of citizen," the father
wrote, before taking cyanide.
Years later, when Romuald Spa-
sowski was Poland's ambassador to
India, his son died mysteriously there,
A brilliant 19-year-old who so hated
Poland's Communist regime he could
not bear to return to his native land
pnd who had spent all he had to help
the Indian poor. The youth's death
remains a mystery. Was he harassed
by Communist threats into commit-
jing suicide? Or was his death caused
Vlore directly?
Spasowski says it is in memory of
)lis father and his son that he defected.
"I had to be free to witness, to give
testimony to what the Communists
have done to Poland. It is not difficult
to know what is happening."
In his book (condensed from his
original 5,000 handwritten pages) he
describes how he decided to make it a
personal confession, a mea culpa, set
against the painful history of Poland in
this century.
I began what seemed a hundred
books-in my head, in endless permu-
tations, on scores of crumpled sheets of
paper. Should it be a political essay? An
anti-Communist tract?A history of the
Polish People? Yet another, book con-
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cluding that Communism went
wrong? These promised mere reflec-
tions that related little and convinced
less It is Polish lives that tell Poland's
story, the human tragedies that have
been played out on Poland's stage ...
To relay a sense of that story to the rest
of the world I need only describe my life
... I need only start at the beginning
and tell it absolutely as it was.
Spasowski said to write the book,
he had to "wear my old shoes." "Today
I am a wise man. Then I was naive,
stupid, an opportunist. Reliving my
life is often painful."
He tells how he abandoned his wife
and two children, leaving them often
hungry, to five with another woman
before coming back to his family. He
doesn't believe his paramour was a
Soviet plant. "But I was approached
other times, several times, by women
who were."
Twice since he asked for asylum for
his family, Communists have
approached his daughter, once holding
her for an hour, threatening them all
in an attempt to stop her father from
writing the book.
"I have no illusions of what they
were prepared to do," Spasowski said.
With the book out and in the stores,
the Spasowskis feel safer than ever.
Though they change residence often,
they five under their own name.
The State Department, he says,
does not support them financially now.
"My publisher does," he says, "and I
have no complaints. We need very lit-
tle."
Spasowski came into his new life
with a dowry. As though he'd learned
the lesson of Franz Kafka, he brought
with him suitcases full of 40-odd years
of documents.
"At first I challenged him on how he
could remember conversations in such
detail," said Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich editor Marie Arana-Ward. "I
showed her," Spasowski says. "I have
notes for every conversation. Notes,
memos, factual material. And I am
always taking these things with me."
From the beginning, he kept a dip-
lomatic diary, in a code so carefully
written, it could be read over his
shoulder without giving him away.
In his memories echo the intense
debates of the avant-garde intellectual
salons in Poland between the wars and
the broadcast peal of the Kremlin bells
ringing from the radio of his father's
house in Warsaw. To the Spasowskis,
the talk and the bells seemed to ring
in a future of equality for all.
Spasowski writes:
I would sit beside my father and vow
silently never to depart from the path
he had taken or betray the hopes he had
invested in me.
Spasowski was born in August 1920
to the sound of guns as the Polish loy-
alists held the line at the Vistula River
against the Bolshevik aggressors.
His father was an atheist and a
Marxist revolutionary, educated amid
the intellectual ferment of the early
20th century in Switzerland. He sent
his only child to an orphanage for "six
months of tearful nights" and took him
into the slums of Warsaw to show him
how others lived. In between, the
young Spasowski spent his days with
Warsaw's intelligentsia: poets, lin-
guists, explorers.
Both parents' families were land-
owners. But hers were not prepared
for his father. "Mother's father
detested my father so much that once,
when told in jest that Spasowski was
approaching the estate, he grabbed
his double-barreled shotgun and
steamed out to the road to wait for
him." His parents finally divorced.
As his father became part of War-
saw's Communist establishment, the
young teen-ager first became accus-
tomed to the police attention that fol-
lowed him most of his life. "I was
always running into strangers fidget-
ing in our gateway."
In the few years of Polish indepen-
dence, the young Spasowski became a
member of the young Polish Commu-
nist movement and fell in love with a
Jewish girl who later vanished during
the Nazi occupation. After the Nazi
invasion, he dug his mother a bomb
shelter and went off to fight the Nazis.
His harrowing adventures across
Poland ended in refuge with a Jewish
family in Lutsk.
Later, he and his mother paid his
debts by making secret underground
rooms in his mother's Villa Rosa out-
side Warsaw where they sheltered
Jews. Young Spasowski lived under-
ground-sometimes literally. Once he
and Wanda, whom he knew from the
age of 2, were almost suffocated while
hiding from the Nazis in a dirt pit.
Wanda, even as a very young girl,
served as a courier for the under-
ground. Even so, they managed,
though her family thought him a dan-
gerous man, to marry.
Spasowski's book has tantalizing
tastes wit if secrets in secret.
Working For-Polish military inte i-
gence. he obtain a list of britush
units operating in Germany from their
mutual aun pickups. When he was
at the v
where his staff regularly went through
his sa e. he made himself a document
hideaway under the parquet floor.
During Richard Nixon 's visit to
Poland, Spasowski as vice foreign min-
ister was negotiating with U.S. State
Department officials. "Suddenly I
heard a metallic voice that seemed to
be coming from a tin can. 'Well, how
come he's not saying anything?' The
voice had come from under his jack-
et."
Spasowski tells of the temptations
of real estate, foreign food, chances to
buy gold and other consumer goods
offered Communist officials, while
American food aid was diverted from
the Polish people. He says he bought
nothing, that all he owned in Poland
was the cemetery lot where his father
and son were buried.
And he tells how his daughter and
son, after growing up in the United
States during his first tour as ambas-
sador (1955-1961), went back to
Poland looking for a real iron cur-
tain-and found one.
When the Spasowskis came back in
1978, his second tour as ambassador-
he told his government he wanted to
retire after the tnur The Pt Ikhf
Embassy here, he soon found, was "no _
post of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
.. but a Security espionage unit - . .
Whatever I say at our meet' s is
reported at once to the viet Em bas-
?y and the KGB ... "
Wanda Spasowski found the life
"suffocating." The embassy had been
stripped of its traditional Polish
antiques. All the servants reported to
the dread "Security." Worse yet, the
Spasowskis were required, like all oth-
er Communist diplomatic couples, to
attend monthly dinner parties that
were actually hunting and trapping
sessions, aimed at snaring any bud-
ding dissident.
In the book, Wanda Spasowski (who
plans to write her own) tells of a party
at the East German ambassador's res-
idence. While the men had their
cigars, the women had their own
entertainment.
"It began with Irina Dobrynin,"said
Wanda. `She asked me to tell her some
Polish jokes... They put on some rau-
cous jazz and began dancing alone or
in twos, stopping only to drink and
devour the desserts... screeching wild-
ly, undulating vulgarly, lifting their
skirts above their heads, especially the
wives of the Cuban and the Bulgarian
ambassadors, though the Czech's wife
wasn't far behind I'd never seen any-
thing like it. And with that demon
Mrs Dlobrynin leading them alL' They
carried on like a witches' sabbath ... "
Fortunately for the Spasowskis, the
government au rued them to buy a _
residence for the embassy. Wanda
SPasOwSki erse oversaw the remod-
ehn of the house in Northwest Wash-
ington. She kept house herse to be
free of embassy spies.
J
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Meanwhile, Spasowski tried to fend
off Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dob-
rynin, who he says dominated the
Eastern Bloc diplomats from the
Beaux Arts mansion on 16th Street.
In his windowless office, which roared
perpetually with a jamming mecha-
nism, Dobrynin characterized then
president Jimmy Carter as "an eccen-
tric from Georgia" and said Carter's
national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski "poisons the atmosphere."
Later Spasowski said he was ordered
to dig up what dirt he could to discred-
it Brzezinski.
Spasowski established his own inde-
pendence. The Pole admired Carter's
stand on human rights and hoped for
sympathy from then secretary of state
Muskie and Brzezinski because of
their Polish ancestry. One American
disappointed Spasowski. When the
Pole finally got an appointment with
the speaker of the House, Rep. Thom-
as P. (Tip) O'Neill posed for a picture,
shaking hands with Spasowski, and
walked away.
Spasowski tells of the anxieties of
those years: the Polish Politburo
member who bought a diamond pen-
dant with party dues; an attache's ille-
gal purchases of American electronic
equipment in New York; American aid
to Poland diverted to the Soviet
Union; visits home when aspirin was
so scarce their friends would only
accept seven from a box; interpreting
the Solidarity movement to the Unit-
ed States and finding their daughter
was a part of it; and his efforts to
enlist the aid of the Catholic Church
for Poland.
Spasowski has been an atheist from
childhood, but his wife is devout. The
ambassador was often criticized for
his wife's devotion, especially when
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow was
elected pope and the Spasowskis went
to mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral.
Spasowski himself joined the church
after his defection.
Not long before he defected, Spa-
sowski had dinner with Walter Stoes-
sel, then U.S. under secretary of state
for political affairs. He told Stoessel of
preparations in Poland for a Soviet
invasion.
"I told him without hesitation that
the Polish people were in mortal dan-
ger. I caught myself speaking my
mind without any regard for the diplo-
matic considerations. I had crossed
the fine."
In August 1981, while the Soviet
military maneuvers went on in Poland,
his daughter and her husband
received permission to come to Wash-
ington to teach.
When Lech Walesa was being taken
into custody, Dobrynin summoned
Spasowski to the embassy. Spasowski
refused. Instead, he said to the press:
"The Poles are facing tremendous
odds. Listen. Can't you hear their
silent scream ... "
As the glacier of Soviet domination
slid over Poland, a chill enveloped the
Spasowskis. He was recalled to War-
saw.
Dec. 19, 1981. His cryptographer
limited his access to the coded cables
instructing Spasowski to inform the
Americans that Poland was back to
normal. At the State Department,
John Scanlan, deputy assistant secre-
tary for Eastern Europe, told Spa-
sowski that the Pole was followed by
Soviet military attaches. And the
American showed him reports of bru-
tal attacks on the Polish people and
the death of the Wujek miners who
supported Soldidarity. Spasowski's
secretary called again and again,
"insisting that I come at once, every-
one was lined up waiting to see me
11
"I had not made up my mind to
defect," Spasowski said the other day,
"but I knew then I must." In his book
he writes:
I stood in the middle of the room, my
mind in turmoil, images whirling.? my
mother in Poland, my father's burning
eyes... the telephone... I reached out
and lifted the receiver. It seemed as
heavy as 60 years
3
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