Effort to Repair Polish Security Forces’ Image Suspected in Ouster of U.S. Diplomat

Poland’s expulsion of the U.S. Embassy’s military attache on charges of spying may be part of an effort to repair the tattered image of the Polish security forces as a result of the conviction of four secret police officers for the murder of a pro-Solidarity priest, Western diplomats believe.

By expelling a military attache for doing what all military attaches routinely do, the diplomats said, the authorities appeared to be trying to convince ordinary Poles that Western spies are a tangible threat and that the security forces are a vital guardian of the nation’s interests.

“It may appear to them that the Reagan Administration is just letting relations with Poland simmer, so they may have thought they had more to gain internally than they had to lose with Washington,” said one diplomat, who asked not to be identified.

Col. Frederick Myer and his wife, Barbara, are scheduled to leave Warsaw today on a commercial flight to Zurich six days after Polish security police detained them in a small town north of Warsaw on charges of photographing a military installation. Amid a flurry of charges and countercharges from Warsaw and Washington, the Myers were told Monday that they had 48 hours to leave Poland.

The incident has led to a sudden downturn in U.S.-Polish relations that had just begun to improve after three years of American sanctions in retaliation for the crushing of Solidarity, the independent trade union, under martial law in 1981.

Sanctions Could Be Renewed

A State Department official said in Washington that the whole range of U.S. sanctions imposed against Poland in 1981, but since eased, could be reinstituted if necessary. Like the diplomat in Warsaw, the official speculated that the action was prompted by a desire to show that, despite the murder conviction of the four secret police officers, “the government is not totally caving in” to radical liberals.

The State Department said the Myers were seized last Thursday and held incommunicado for six hours in violation of their diplomatic immunity. In addition, U.S. officials said, Barbara Myer was forced to undress in a provincial police station and subjected to a degrading full-body search, a charge Polish authorities have denied.

Within minutes of receiving the expulsion order Monday, the State Department gave Poland’s military attache, Col. Zygmunt Szymanski, 48 hours to leave the United States, delayed the return to Warsaw of John Davis, the U.S. charge d’affaires, and called off talks on a new scientific and technical cooperation agreement with Poland.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Tuesday, “We would consider repetition of the actions by the Polish government, like those taken in the case of Col. Myer, as a reason for even more serious action on our part.”

Speakes would not spell out specific actions but said, “If they do it again, we’ll really get tough.”

Polish government spokesman Jerzy Urban said at his weekly news conference Tuesday that expulsion of Poland’s military attache was unjustified and a vendetta, and he repeated his claim that the United States deliberately provoked the incident to undermine relations. But diplomats from several Western countries said in interviews Tuesday that the Myers’ expulsion appeared to have been a Polish ploy.

“We were expecting a spying incident sooner or later,” said a diplomat who asked not to be identified by name or nationality. “We’re into the post-Popieluszko trial period now, and they’ve got to do something to try to rebuild the image of the security forces.”

Four veteran officers of the Security Service, Poland’s equivalent of the Soviet KGB, were sentenced to long prison terms earlier this month for the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the unofficial chaplain of Solidarity. In an apparent effort to discipline and chasten the security forces, Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski’s government treated the public to an open trial that provided an unprecedented and chilling look at the internal workings of the secret police.

The government has steadfastly suggested, however, that the four officers were unfortunate exceptions in an otherwise honorable and professional service that has Poland’s interests clearly in mind.

The exposure of an American “spy” in a blare of publicity, diplomats said, seemed designed to reinforce this view, which has found limited acceptance in a Roman Catholic nation still outraged at the murder of a beloved priest.