5th Polish Security Officer Named in Covert Actions Against Slain Priest

A secret police lieutenant Thursday named a fifth, unindicted officer of Poland’s security service as having taken part in covert actions against Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the slain pro-Solidarity priest.

Lt. Waldemar Chmielewski testified for a second day in the trial in which he and three other internal security officers are charged with abducting and murdering Popieluszko last October, then attempting to cover up the crime.

Speaking with an agonizing stutter, which he said began after his arrest, the 29-year-old lieutenant insisted that he intended only to frighten Popieluszko, not to kill him. He said he experienced relief when an earlier attempt to involve the priest’s car in a highway accident failed.

Allowed to Sit

Wearing a brown sweater and dark trousers, the boyish-looking officer appeared pale and strained. During a mid-day recess, doctors examined Chmielewski, and on their recommendation he was allowed to sit while testifying and to take hourly breaks.

Under questioning by one of the seven judges hearing the case, Chmielewski said that before he and two other defendants kidnaped the priest Oct. 19, it was clear to him that still more officers were engaged in broad but unspecified efforts to curtail Popieluszko’s political activities.

The “actions” against the priest, he testified, were “carried out on the broadest scale, including actions by other people--namely deputy section head (Janusz) Drozdz and Warsaw police headquarters.”

No further details of Drozdz’s identity have been disclosed and his precise role in planning covert action against the slain priest remain unknown.

Three officers--Chmielewski, Lt. Leszek Pekala, 32, and Capt. Grzegorz Piotrowski, 33--are accused of carrying out the abduction and murder. A fourth officer, Col. Adam Pietruszka, 47, the deputy head of the secret police department assigned to control the church, is accused of aiding and abetting the murder and attempting to cover it up.

The name of Drozdz, the fifth officer, has appeared in pretrial testimony and is mentioned in passing in the government’s indictment of the four men now on trial.

According to court documents, Pekala told investigators that his immediate superior, Piotrowski, had described operations against “Popiel”--their thinly disguised code-name for Popieluszko--as broadly based and “triply confidential.”

Warsaw Office Cited

Part of the operation, Pekala told investigators, “is carried out by the Warsaw office (of the security service), part by deputy head of section Drozdz and part by we three.”

The indictment also mentions Drozdz as participating in meetings held in September and October to discuss a proposal by Col. Pietruszka to arrange an accident in which Popieluszko “might fall out of a train,” a variant that was eventually deemed unworkable.

Chmielewski’s pregnant wife listened from a back row in the crowded courtroom as he testified that the night the priest was kidnaped, beaten and finally thrown dead into the Vistula River was a “long nightmare.”

“It seemed to me we were overstepping the limits of our mission,” he said, and added that he felt a sense of outrage when Capt. Piotrowski repeatedly beat Popieluszko with a wooden club as the priest tried desperately to escape.

“I didn’t see any sense in continuing this action,” Chmielewski maintained, wringing his hands as he spoke. “I thought we had already accomplished the goal of our mission--which was to scare the priest.”

As the lieutenant described how the priest was beaten, Piotrowski, the accused leader of the kidnap team, sat with his head down and his face buried in his hands.

The two lieutenants, the only witnesses to testify so far in four days of the trial, have both claimed that they did not want to kill the priest but felt compelled to obey orders. Chmielewski, however, portrayed his fellow lieutenant in a different light, saying that Pekala ridiculed their leader, Piotrowski, when he failed to cause the priest’s car to crash in an earlier attempt on his life six days before they abducted him.

According to the indictment, the three officers lay in ambush along the Gdansk-Warsaw highway on Oct. 13. As Popieluszko’s car rounded a gentle curve, Piotrowski planned to heave a heavy rock through the windshield, but the priest’s driver foiled the plan by coolly driving straight toward the captain.

As Piotrowski dived for safety, the rock flew harmlessly over the priest’s Volkswagen, which accelerated out of sight. The plan was to kidnap Popieluszko, but in the event of injuries in the crash, “they would pour gasoline over the car and ignite it,” according to the indictment.

Chmielewski told the court that later, in a parking lot, Pekala laughed at the captain for missing the car, then showed him how he thought the rock should have been thrown.

“I even scolded him (Pekala), as he went too far in laughing at Piotrowski, while I was happy with the course of events,” he said. “In fact, I was glad there was no accident.”

There was a moment of laughter in the courtroom as Chmielewski told of the trouble he had finding a satisfactory pair of handcuffs for the kidnaping. When he asked a friend, a uniformed policeman, for a second pair, he said the officer “told me he was no wholesaler, and I could get a pair at the flea market for about 1,000 zlotys” or $8.

State-run Polish news media are giving extensive coverage to the trial, being held in the northern city of Torun, but the authorities have restricted the access of Western reporters to seven journalists chosen by the government. Several of those admitted are providing notes to news media barred from the trial, including The Times.

The trial is expected to continue through much of January, with 22 witnesses scheduled to appear.