TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/022492/0224990.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 33.1 KB | 685 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL REPORT, Page 28

COVER STORY

The Holy Alliance


Faced with a military crackdown in Poland, Ronald Reagan and
John Paul II secretly joined forces to keep the Solidarity union
alive. They hoped not only to pressure Warsaw but to free all
of Eastern Europe.

By CARL BERNSTEIN


    Only President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II were
present in the Vatican Library on Monday, June 7, 1982. It was
the first time the two had met, and they talked for 50 minutes.
In the same wing of the papal apartments, Agostino Cardinal
Casaroli and Archbishop Achille Silvestrini met with Secretary
of State Alexander Haig and Judge William Clark, Reagan's
National Security Adviser. Most of their discussion focused on
Israel's invasion of Lebanon, then in its second day; Haig told
them Prime Minister Menachem Begin had assured him that the
invasion would not go farther than 25 miles inside Lebanon.

    But Reagan and the Pope spent only a few minutes reviewing
events in the Middle East. Instead they remained focused on a
subject much closer to their heart: Poland and the Soviet
dominance of Eastern Europe. In that meeting, Reagan and the
Pope agreed to undertake a clandestine campaign to hasten the
dissolution of the communist empire. Declares Richard Allen,
Reagan's first National Security Adviser: "This was one of the
great secret alliances of all time."

    The operation was focused on Poland, the most populous of
the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and the birthplace of
John Paul II. Both the Pope and the President were convinced
that Poland could be broken out of the Soviet orbit if the
Vatican and the U.S. committed their resources to destabilizing
the Polish government and keeping the outlawed Solidarity
movement alive after the declaration of martial law in 1981.

    Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it
flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely
by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and John
Paul II. Tons of equipment -- fax machines (the first in
Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave
radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers,
word processors -- were smuggled into Poland via channels
established by priests and American agents and representatives
of the AFL-CIO and European labor movements. Money for the
banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for
Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade
unions.

    Lech Walesa and other leaders of Solidarity received
strategic advice -- often conveyed by priests or American and
European labor experts working undercover in Poland -- that
reflected the thinking of the Vatican and the Reagan
Administration. As the effectiveness of the resistance grew, the
stream of information to the West about the internal decisions
of the Polish government and the contents of Warsaw's
communications with Moscow became a flood. The details came not
only from priests but also from spies within the Polish
government.

    Down with Yalta

    According to aides who shared their leaders' view of the
world, Reagan and John Paul II refused to accept a fundamental
political fact of their lifetimes: the division of Europe as
mandated at Yalta and the communist dominance of Eastern Europe.
A free, non communist Poland, they were convinced, would be a
dagger to the heart of the Soviet empire; and if Poland became
democratic, other East European states would follow.

    "We both felt that a great mistake had been made at Yalta
and something should be done," Reagan says today. "Solidarity
was the very weapon for bringing this about, because it was an
organization of the laborers of Poland." Nothing quite like
Solidarity had ever existed in Eastern Europe, Reagan notes,
adding that the workers' union "was contrary to anything the
Soviets would want or the communists [in Poland] would want."

    According to Solidarity leaders, Walesa and his
lieutenants were aware that both Reagan and John Paul II were
committed to Solidarity's survival, but they could only guess
at the extent of the collaboration. "Officially I didn't know
the church was working with the U.S.," says Wojciech Adamiecki,
the organizer and editor of underground Solidarity newspapers
and now a counselor at the Polish embassy in Washington. "We
were told the Pope had warned the Soviets that if they entered
Poland he would fly to Poland and stay with the Polish people.
The church was of primary assistance. It was half open, half
secret. Open as far as humanitarian aid -- food, money,
medicine, doctors' consultations held in churches, for instance
-- and secret as far as supporting political activities:
distributing printing machines of all kinds, giving us a place
for underground meetings, organizing special demonstrations."

    At their first meeting, Reagan and John Paul II discussed
something else they had in common: both had survived
assassination attempts only six weeks apart in 1981, and both
believed God had saved them for a special mission. "A close
friend of Ronald Reagan's told me the President said, `Look how
the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence
intervened,' " says Pio Cardinal Laghi, the former apostolic
delegate to Washington. According to National Security Adviser
Clark, the Pope and Reagan referred to the "miraculous" fact
that they had survived. Clark said the men shared "a unity of
spiritual view and a unity of vision on the Soviet empire: that
right or correctness would ultimately prevail in the divine
plan."

    "Reagan came in with very simple and strongly held views,"
says Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the CIA.
"It is a valid point of view that he saw the collapse [of
communism] coming and he pushed it -- hard." During the first
half of 1982, a five-part strategy emerged that was aimed at
bringing about the collapse of the Soviet economy, fraying the
ties that bound the U.S.S.R. to its client states in the Warsaw
Pact and forcing reform inside the Soviet empire. Elements of
that strategy included:

    -- The U.S. defense buildup already under way, aimed at
making it too costly for the Soviets to compete militarily with
the U.S. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative -- Star Wars --
became a centerpiece of the strategy.

    -- Covert operations aimed at encouraging reform movements
in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

    -- Financial aid to Warsaw Pact nations calibrated to
their willingness to protect human rights and undertake
political and free-market reforms.

    -- Economic isolation of the Soviet Union and the
withholding of Western and Japanese technology from Moscow. The
Administration focused on denying the U.S.S.R. what it had hoped
would be its principal source of hard currency in the 21st
century: profits from a transcontinental pipeline to supply
natural gas to Western Europe. The 3,600-mile-long pipeline,
stretching from Siberia to France, opened on time on Jan. 1,
1984, but on a far smaller scale than the Soviets had hoped.

    -- Increased use of Radio Liberty, Voice of America and
Radio Free Europe to transmit the Administration's messages to
the peoples of Eastern Europe.

    Yet in 1982 neither Reagan nor the Pope could anticipate
the accession of a Soviet leader like Mikhail Gorbachev, the
father of glasnost and perestroika; his efforts at reform
unleashed powerful forces that spun out of his control and led
to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Washington-Vatican
alliance "didn't cause the fall of communism," observes a U.S.
official familiar with the details of the plot to keep
Solidarity alive. "Like all great and lucky leaders, the Pope
and the President exploited the forces of history to their own
ends."

    The Crackdown

    The campaign by Washington and the Vatican to keep
Solidarity alive began immediately after General Wojciech
Jaruzelski declared martial law on Dec. 13, 1981. In those dark
hours, Poland's communications with the noncommunist world were
cut; 6,000 leaders of Soli darity were detained; hundreds were
charged with treason, subversion and counterrevolution; nine
were killed; and the union was banned. But thousands of others
went into hiding, many seeking protection in churches, rectories
and with priests. Authorities took Walesa into custody and
interned him in a remote hunting lodge.

    Shortly after Polish security forces moved into the
streets, Reagan called the Pope for his advice. At a series of
meetings over the next few days, Reagan discussed his options.
"We had a massive row in the Cabinet and the National Security
Council about putting together a menu of counteractions," former
Secretary of State Haig recalls. "They ranged from sanctions
that would have been crushing in their impact on Poland to
talking so tough that we would have risked creating another
situation like Hungary in '56 or Czechoslovakia in '68."

    Haig dispatched Ambassador at Large Vernon Walters, a
devout Roman Catholic, to meet with John Paul II. Walters
arrived in Rome soon after, and met separately with the Pope and
with Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state. Both
sides agreed that Solidarity's flame must not be extinguished,
that the Soviets must become the focus of an international
campaign of isolation, and that the Polish government must be
subjected to moral and limited economic pressure.

    According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Pope had
already advised Walesa through church channels to keep his
movement operating underground, and to pass the word to
Solidarity's 10 million members not to go into the streets and
risk provoking Warsaw Pact intervention or civil war with Polish
security forces. Because the communists had cut the direct phone
lines between Poland and the Vatican, John Paul II communicated
with Jozef Cardinal Glemp in Warsaw via radio. He also
dispatched his envoys to Poland to report on the situation. "The
Vatican's information was absolutely better and quicker than
ours in every respect," says Haig. "Though we had some excellent
sources of our own, our information was taking too long to
filter through the intelligence bureaucracy."

    In the first hours of the crisis, Reagan ordered that the
Pope receive as quickly as possible relevant American
intelligence, including information from a Polish Deputy
Minister of Defense who was secretly reporting to the CIA.
Washington also handed over to the Vatican reports and analysis
from Colonel Ryszard Ku klinski, a senior member of the Polish
general staff, who was a CIA informant until November 1981, when
he had to be smuggled out of Poland after he warned that the
Soviets were prepared to invade if the Polish government did not
impose martial law. Kuklinski had issued a similar warning about
a Soviet military action in late 1980, which led the outgoing
Carter Administration to send secret messages to Leonid Brezhnev
informing him that among the costs of an invasion would be the
sale of sophisticated U.S. weapons to China. This time,
Kuklinski reported to Washington, Brezhnev had grown more
impatient, and a disastrous harvest at home meant that the
Kremlin did not need mechanized army units to help bring in the
crops and instead could spare them for an invasion. "Anything
that we knew that we thought the Pope would not be aware of, we
certainly brought it to his attention," says Reagan.
"Immediately."

    The Catholic Team

    The key Administration players were all devout Roman
Catholics -- CIA chief William Casey, Allen, Clark, Haig,
Walters and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the
Vatican. They regarded the U.S.-Vatican relationship as a holy
alliance: the moral force of the Pope and the teachings of their
church combined with their fierce anticommu nism and their
notion of American democracy. Yet the mission would have been
imposs ible without the full support of Reagan, who believed
fervently in both the benefits and the practical applications
of Washington's relationship with the Vatican. One of his
earliest goals as President, Reagan says, was to recognize the
Vatican as a state "and make them an ally."

    According to Admiral John Poindexter, the military
assistant to the National Security Adviser when martial law was
declared in Poland, Reagan was convinced that the communists had
made a huge miscalculation: after allowing Solidarity to
operate openly for 16 months before the crackdown, the Polish
government would only alienate its countrymen by attempting to
cripple the labor movement and, most important, would bring the
powerful church into direct conflict with the Polish regime. "I
didn't think that this [the decision to impose martial law and
crush Solidarity] could stand, because of the history of Poland
and the religious aspect and all," Reagan says. Says Cardinal
Casaroli: "There was a real coincidence of interests between the
U.S. and the Vatican."

    The major decisions on funneling aid to Solidarity and
responding to the Polish and Soviet governments were made by
Reagan, Casey and Clark, in consultation with John Paul II.
"Reagan understood these things quite well, including the covert
side," says Richard Pipes, the conservative Polish-born scholar
who headed the NSC's Soviet and East European desks. "The
President talked about the evil of the Soviet system -- not its
people -- and how we had to do everything possible to help these
people in Solidarity who were struggling for freedom. People
like Haig and Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige and James
Baker [White House chief of staff at the time] thought it
wasn't realistic. George Bush never said a word. I used to sit
behind him, and I never knew what his opinions were. But Reagan
really understood what was at stake."

    By most accounts, Casey stepped into the vacuum in the
first days after the declaration of martial law in Poland and
-- as he did in Central America -- became the principal policy
architect. Meanwhile Pipes and the NSC staff began drafting
proposals for sanctions. "The object was to drain the Soviets
and to lay blame for martial law at their doorstep," says
Pipes. "The sanctions were coordinated with Special Operations
[the CIA division in charge of covert task forces], and the
first objective was to keep Solidarity alive by supplying money,
communications and equipment."

    "The church was trying to modulate the whole situation,"
explains one of the NSC officials who directed the effort to
curtail the pipeline. "They [church leaders] were in effect
trying to create circumstances that would head off the serious
threat of Soviet intervention while allowing us to get tougher
and tougher; they were part and parcel of virtually all of our
deliberations in terms of how we viewed the evolution of
government-sponsored repression in Poland -- whether it was
lessening or getting worse, and how we should proceed."

    As for his conversations with Reagan about Poland, Clark
says they were usually short. "I don't think I ever had an
in-depth, one-on-one, private conversation that existed for more
than three minutes with him -- on any subject. That might shock
you. We had our own code of communication. I knew where he
wanted to go on Poland. And that was to take it to its nth
possibilities. The President and Casey and I discussed the
situation on the ground in Poland constantly: covert operations;
who was doing what, where, why and how; and the chances of
success." According to Clark, he and Casey directed that the
President's daily brief -- the PDB, an intelligence summary
prepared by the CIA -- include a special supplement on secret
operations and analysis in Poland.

    The Pope himself, not only his deputies, met with American
officials to assess events in Poland and the effectiveness of
American actions and sent back messages -- sometimes by letter,
sometimes orally -- to Reagan. On almost all his trips to Europe
and the Middle East, Casey flew first to Rome, so that he could
meet with John Paul II and exchange information. But the
principal emissary between Washington and Rome remained Walters,
a former deputy director of the CIA who worked easily with
Casey. Walters met with the Pope perhaps a dozen times,
according to Vatican sources. "Walters was sent to and from the
Vatican for the specific purpose of carrying messages between
the Pope and the President," says former U.S. Ambassador to the
Vatican Wilson. "It wasn't supposed to be known that Walters was
there. It wasn't all specifically geared to Poland; sometimes
there were also discussions about Central America or the
hostages in Lebanon."

    Often in the Reagan years, American covert operations
(including those in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola) involved
"lethal assistance" to insurgent forces: arms, mercenaries,
military advisers and explosives. In Poland the Pope, the
President and Casey embarked on the opposite path: "What they
had to do was let the natural forces already in place play this
out and not get their fingerprints on it," explains an analyst.
What emerges from the Reagan-Casey collaboration is a carefully
calibrated operation whose scope was modest compared with other
CIA activities. "If Casey were around now, he'd be having some
smiles," observes one of his reluctant admirers. "In 1991 Reagan
and Casey got the reordering of the world that they wanted."

    The Secret Directive

    Less than three weeks before his meeting with the Pope in
1982, the President signed a secret national-security-decision
directive (NSDD 32) that authorized a range of economic,
diplomatic and covert measures to "neutralize efforts of the
U.S.S.R." to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe. In practical
terms, the most important covert operations undertaken were
those inside Poland. The primary purposes of NSDD 32 were to
destabilize the Polish government through covert operations
involving propaganda and organizational aid to Solidarity; the
promotion of human rights, particularly those related to the
right of worship and the Catholic Church; economic pressure; and
diplomatic isolation of the communist regime. The document,
citing the need to defend democratic reform efforts throughout
the Soviet empire, also called for increasing propaganda and
underground broadcasting operations in Eastern Europe, actions
that Reagan's aides and dissidents in Eastern Europe believe
were particularly helpful in chipping away at the notion of
Soviet invincibility.

    As Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, a member of the
House Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 1990, who was apprised
of some of the Administration's covert actions, observes, "In
Poland we did all of the things that are done in countries where
you want to destabilize a communist government and strengthen
resistance to that. We provided the supplies and technical
assistance in terms of clandestine newspapers, broadcasting,
propaganda, money, organizational help and advice. And working
outward from Poland, the same kind of resistance was organized
in the other communist countries of Europe."

    Among those who played a consulting role was Zbigniew
Brzezinski, a native of Poland and President Jimmy Carter's
National Security Adviser. "I got along very well with Casey,"
recalls Brzezinski. "He was very flexible and very imaginative
and not very bureaucratic; if something needed to be done, it
was done. To sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms
of supplies, networks, etc., and this is why Solidarity wasn't
crushed."

    On military questions, American intelligence was better
than the Vatican's, but the church excelled in its evaluations
of the political situation. And in understanding the mood of
the people and communicating with the Solidarity leadership,
the church was in an incomparable position. "Our information
about Poland was very well founded because the bishops were in
continual contact with the Holy See and Solidarnosc," explains
Cardinal Silvestrini, the Vatican's deputy secretary of state
at that time. "They informed us about prisoners, about the
activities and needs of Solidarity groups and about the attitude
and schisms in the government." All this information was
communicated to the President or Casey.

    "If you study the situation of Solidarity, you see they
acted very cleverly, without pressing too much at the crucial
moments, because they had guidance from the church," says one
of the Pope's closest aides. "Yes, there were times we
restrained Solidarnosc. But Poland was a bomb that could explode
-- in the heart of communism, bordered by the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Too much pressure, and the bomb
would go off."

    Casey's Cappuccino

    Meanwhile, in Washington a close relationship developed
between Casey, Clark and Archbishop Laghi. "Casey and I dropped
into his [Laghi's] residence early mornings during critical
times to gather his comments and counsel," says Clark. "We'd
have breakfast and coffee and discuss what was being done in
Poland. I'd speak to him frequently on the phone, and he would
be in touch with the Pope." Says Laghi: "They liked good
cappuccino. Occasionally we might talk about Central America or
the church position on birth control. But usually the subject
was Poland."

    "Almost everything having to do with Poland was handled
outside of normal State Department channels and would go through
Casey and Clark," says Robert McFarlane, who served as a deputy
to both Clark and Haig and later as National Security Adviser
to the President. "I knew that they were meeting with Pio
Laghi, and that Pio Laghi had been to see the President, but
Clark would never tell me what the substance of the discussions
was."

    On at least six occasions Laghi came to the White House
and met with Clark or the President; each time, he entered the
White House through the southwest gate in order to avoid
reporters. "By keeping in such close touch, we did not cross
lines," says Laghi. "My role was primarily to facilitate
meetings between Walters and the Holy Father. The Holy Father
knew his people. It was a very complex situation -- how to
insist on human rights, on religious freedom, and keep
Solidarity alive without provoking the communist authorities
further. But I told Vernon, `Listen to the Holy Father. We have
2,000 years' experience at this.' "

    Though William Casey has been vilified for aspects of his
tenure as CIA chief, there is no criticism of his instincts on
Poland. "Basically, he had a quiet confidence that the
communists couldn't hold on, especially in Poland," says former
Congressman Edward Derwinski, a Polish-speaking expert on
Eastern Europe who counseled the Administration and met with
Casey frequently. "He was convinced the system was falling and
doomed to collapse one way or another -- and Poland was the
force that would lead to the dam breaking. He demanded a
constant [CIA] focus on Eastern Europe. It wasn't noticed,
because other stories were more controversial and were perking
at the moment -- Nicaragua and Salvador."

    In Poland, Casey conducted the kind of old-style operation
that he relished, something he might have done in his days at
the Office of Strategic Services during World War II or in the
early years of the CIA, when the democracies of Western Europe
rose from the ashes of World War II. It was through Casey's
contacts, his associates say, that elements of the Socialist
International were organized on behalf of Solidarity -- just as
the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe had been used
as an instrument of American policy by the CIA in helping to
create anticommunist governments after the war. And this time
the objective was akin to creating a Christian Democratic
majority in Poland -- with the church and the overwhelmingly
Catholic membership of Solidarity as the dominant political
force in a postcommunist Poland. Through his contacts with
leaders of the Socialist International, including officials of
socialist governments in France and Sweden, Casey ensured that
tactical assistance was available on the Continent and at sea
to move goods into Poland. "This wasn't about spending huge
amounts of money," says Brzezinski. "It was about getting the
message out and resisting: books, communications equipment,
propaganda, ink and printing presses."

    Look for the Union Label

    In almost every city and town, underground newspapers and
mimeographed bulletins appeared, challenging the
state-controlled media. The church published its own newspapers.
Solidarity missives, photocopied and mimeographed on
American-supplied equipment, were tacked to church bulletin
boards. Stenciled posters were boldly posted on police stations
and government buildings and even on entrances to the
state-controlled television center, where army officers
broadcast the news.

    The American embassy in Warsaw became the pivotal CIA
station in the communist world and, by all accounts, the most
effective. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, which had been the largest
source of American support for Solidarity before martial law,
regarded the Reagan Administration's approach as too slow and
insufficiently confrontational with the Polish authorities.
Nonetheless, according to intelligence sources, AFL-CIO
president Lane Kirkland and his aide Tom Kahn consulted
frequently with Poindexter, Clark and other officials at the
State Department and the NSC on such matters as how and when to
move goods and supplies into Poland, identifying cities where
Solidarity was in particular need of organizing assistance, and
examining how Solidarity and the AFL-CIO might collaborate in
the preparation of propaganda materials.

    "Lane Kirkland deserves special credit," observes
Derwinski. "They don't like to admit [it], but they literally
were in lockstep [with the Administration]. Also never forget
that Bill Clark's wife is Czechoslovak, as is Lane Kirkland's
wife. This is one issue where everybody was aboard; there were
no turf fights or mavericks or naysayers."

    But AFL-CIO officials were never aware of the extent of
clandestine U.S. assistance, or the Administration's reliance
on the church for guidance regarding how hard to push Polish and
Soviet authorities. Casey was wary of "contaminating" the
American and European labor movements by giving them too many
details of the Administration's efforts. And indeed this was not
strictly a CIA operation. Rather, it was a blend of covert and
overt, public policy and secret alliances. Casey recognized that
in many instances the AFL-CIO was more imaginative than his own
operatives in providing organizational assistance to Solidarity
and smuggling equipment into the country. According to former
deputy CIA director Inman, Casey decided that the American labor
movement's relationship with Solidarity was so good that much
of what the CIA needed could be financed and obtained through
AFL-CIO channels. "Financial support wasn't what they needed,"
says Inman. "It was organization, and that was an infinitely
better way to help them than through classic covert operations."

    The Solidarity office in Brussels became an international
clearinghouse: for representatives of the Vatican, for CIA
operatives, for the AFL-CIO, for representatives of the
Socialist International, for the congressionally funded National
Endowment for Democracy, which also worked closely with Casey.
It was the place where Solidarity told its backers -- some of
whose real identities were unknown to Solidarity itself -- what
it needed, where goods and supplies and organizers could be most
useful. Priests, couriers, labor organizers and intelligence
operatives moved in and out of Poland with requests for aid and
with detailed information on the situation inside the government
and the underground. Food and clothing and money to pay fines
of Solidarity leaders who were brought before Polish courts
poured into the country. Inside Poland, a network of priests
carried messages back and forth between the churches where many
of Solidarity's leaders were in hiding.

    In the summer of 1984, when the sanctions against Poland
seemed to be hurting ordinary Poles and not the communists,
Laghi traveled to Santa Barbara to meet with Reagan at the
Western White House and urge that some of the sanctions be
lifted. The Administration complied. At the same time, the White
House, in close consultation with the Vatican, refused to ease
its economic pressures on Moscow -- denying technology, food and
cultural exchanges as the price for continuing oppression in
Poland.

    Much of the equipment destined for Solidarity arrived in
Poland by ship -- often packed in mismarked containers sent from
Denmark and Sweden, then unloaded at Gdansk and other ports by
dockers secretly working with Solidarity. According to
Administration officials, the socialist government of Sweden --
and Swedish labor unions -- played a crucial role in arranging
the transshipment of goods to Poland. From the Polish docks,
equipment moved to its destination in trucks and private cars
driven by Solidarity sympathizers who often used churches and
priests as their point of contact for deliveries and pickups.

    "Solidarity Lives!"

    "The Administration plugged into the church across the
board," observes Derwinski, now Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
"Not just through the church hierarchy but through individual
churches and bishops. Monsignor Bronislaw Dabrowski, a deputy
to Cardinal Glemp, came to us often to tell us what was needed:
he would meet with me, with Casey, the NSC and sometimes with
Walters." John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, whose father was
born in Poland, was the American churchman closest to the Pope.
He frequently met with Casey to discuss support for Solidarity
and covert operations, according to CIA sources and Derwinski.
"Krol hit it off very well with President Reagan and was a
source of constant advice and contact," says Derwinski. "Often
he was the one Casey or Clark went to, the one who really
understood the situation."

    By 1985 it was apparent that the Polish government's
campaign to suppress Solidarity had failed. According to a
report by Adrian Karatnycky, who helped organize the AFL-CIO's
assistance to Solidarity, there were more than 400 underground
periodicals appearing in Poland, some with a circulation that
exceeded 30,000. Books and pamphlets challenging the authority
of the communist government were printed by the thousands. Comic
books for children recast Polish fables and legends, with
Jaruzelski pictured as the villain, communism as the red dragon
and Walesa as the heroic knight. In church basements and homes,
millions of viewers watched documentary videos produced and
screened on the equipment smuggled into the country.

    With clandestine broadcasting equipment supplied by the
CIA and the AFL-CIO, Solidarity regularly broke into the
government's radio programming, often with the message
"Solidarity lives!" or "Resist!" Armed with a transmitter
supplied by the CIA through church channels, Solidarity
interrupted television programming with both audio and visual
messages, including calls for strikes and demonstrations. "There
was a great moment at the half time of the national soccer
championship," says a Vatican official. "Just as the whistle
sounded for the half, a SOLIDARITY LIVES! banner went up on the
screen and a tape came on calling for resistance. What was
particularly ingenious was waiting for the half-time break; had
the interruption come during actual soccer play, it could have
alienated people." As Brzezinski sums it up, "This was the first
time that communist police suppression didn't succeed."

    "Nobody believed the collapse of communism would happen
this fast or on this timetable," says a cardinal who is one of
the Pope's closest aides. "But in their first meeting, the Holy
Father and the President committed themselves and the
institutions of the church and America to such a goal. And from
that day, the focus was to bring it about in Poland."

    Step by reluctant step, the Soviets and the communist
government of Poland bowed to the moral, economic and political
pressure imposed by the Pope and the President. Jails were
emptied, Walesa's trial on charges of slandering state officials
was abandoned, the Polish communist party turned fratricidal,
and the country's economy collapsed in a haze of strikes and
demonstrations and sanctions.

    On Feb. 19, 1987, after Warsaw had pledged to open a
dialogue with the church, Reagan lifted U.S. sanctions. Four
months later, Pope John Paul II was cheered by millions of his
countrymen as he traveled across Poland demanding human rights
and praising Solidarity. In July 1988, Gorbachev visited Warsaw
and signaled Moscow's recognition that the government could not
rule without Solidarity's cooperation. On April 5, 1989, the two
sides signed agreements legalizing Solidarity and calling for
open parliamentary elections in June. In December 1990, nine
years after he was arrested and his labor union banned, Lech
Walesa became President of Poland.