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Lech Walesa Denounces Report Labeling Him a Communist Informer

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WARSAW — A handwriting analysis has determined that Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s anticommunist Solidarity movement and later the president of Poland, was a Communist paid informant in the 1970s, according to a new official report issued on Tuesday.

Mr. Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, immediately denounced the report as unreliable and politically motivated, while his supporters insisted that the full picture of his seeming collaboration with the Communist authorities was more complicated than the report suggested.

The report was prepared by the state-run Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow, which analyzed more than 150 documents that were found last year in the home of Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the longtime interior minister during the Communist era, who died in 2015.

“From Dec. 29, 1970, to June 19, 1976, the future leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, was an informant for the Communist secret services under the code name ‘Bolek,’ who spied on his colleagues and got paid for it,” said Jaroslaw Szarek, the president of the government-run Institute of National Remembrance, which looks after the records of Poland’s Communist past.

WARSAW — A handwriting analysis has determined that Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s anticommunist Solidarity movement and later the president of Poland, was a Communist paid informant in the 1970s, according to a new official report issued on Tuesday.

Mr. Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, immediately denounced the report as unreliable and politically motivated, while his supporters insisted that the full picture of his seeming collaboration with the Communist authorities was more complicated than the report suggested.

The report was prepared by the state-run Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow, which analyzed more than 150 documents that were found last year in the home of Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the longtime interior minister during the Communist era, who died in 2015.

“From Dec. 29, 1970, to June 19, 1976, the future leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, was an informant for the Communist secret services under the code name ‘Bolek,’ who spied on his colleagues and got paid for it,” said Jaroslaw Szarek, the president of the government-run Institute of National Remembrance, which looks after the records of Poland’s Communist past.

Andrzej Pozorski, who leads a commission that investigates Communist-era crimes, said that Mr. Walesa could be prosecuted for giving false testimony, though it seems unlikely that the authorities will want to pursue criminal charges.

Mr. Walesa, 73, said he believed the handwriting experts and officials from the government-run institute were under political pressure from Poland’s right-wing governing party, Law and Justice, to declare the uncovered files authentic.

The party has long tried to undermine Mr. Walesa’s legacy. Its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is effectively the most powerful man in Poland, has been estranged from Mr. Walesa for over 25 years, after a falling out soon after the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

The files in question include a handwritten agreement, signed “Lech Walesa, Bolek,” to cooperate with the state security service, as well as 17 receipts and 29 denouncements, all handwritten and signed by Mr. Walesa either as “Bolek” or himself, the report says.

Jan Widacki, a representative of Mr. Walesa, said the matter was by no means settled. “This is just an opinion, and we have the right to respond to it,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We would like the prosecution to gather expert witnesses from various institutions, not just one that is subordinate to the government.”

The accusations against Mr. Walesa have been made for more than 20 years, and he has long maintained that they are a result of a vendetta by former Communists. He was cleared of collaboration charges by a special court in 2000, but the controversy — along with the taint on his reputation — has endured.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Walesa, who was traveling outside Poland on Tuesday, repeated his denial that he had ever been a Communist. “Kiszczak could not recruit me, he could not buy me or even kill me,” he wrote. “So he decided to write those quasi-denunciations to convince you. You can either believe me or Kiszczak.”

Jan Skorzynski, a historian at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw who studied Mr. Walesa’s dossier, said that he believed the documents were authentic — but that the political context behind them was much more complicated than the institute’s analysis suggested.

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Mr. Walesa was just 27 when he found himself one of the leaders of a major strike at the Gdansk shipyard. He was arrested — like many other dissenters — and faced grave pressure to collaborate, Mr. Skorzynski said.

“After the police arrived at his house to arrest him, he left his wedding ring and watch with his wife so that she could exchange them for money in case he didn’t come back,” Mr. Skorzynski said. “Those were the times when police tortured their prisoners. Walesa signed the agreement to collaborate in an general atmosphere of terror.”

Over the next several years, Mr. Skorzynski said, Mr. Walesa was transformed from reluctant informant into genuine rebel.

Andrzej Celinski, a Solidarity leader in the 1980s who later became a critic of Mr. Walesa, said that whatever might have transpired between Mr. Walesa and the Communists in those early days, “it only made him tougher, stronger and smarter when it came to playing them in the 1980s.”

Mr. Walesa’s critics say he was wrong to sit down with Communists in 1989 to negotiate a peaceful transition of power, which resulted in many Communists’ remaining in public life.

On Tuesday, Mr. Szarek even wondered aloud how cooperation with the Communists might have influenced Mr. Walesa during the Solidarity years and as Poland’s president, implying that he could have continued to function as a Communist agent.

But Mr. Celinski called that charge “insulting.” “Since 1976, Walesa was constantly under surveillance, fired from one job after another,” he said. “He and his family lived in constant fear.”

Mr. Skorzynski, the historian, said he hoped that this single episode in Mr. Walesa’s life would not define his legacy. “Because he went on to redeem himself,” he said. “He redeemed himself many times over.”

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