Polish Premier Resigns Amid Spy Charges

Polish Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy, accused by his political enemies of spying for Moscow, resigned Wednesday after a military prosecutor concluded that evidence against him warranted a formal espionage investigation.

Oleksy, a former Communist official who became prime minister in March, delivered a somber defense of his actions in a televised address Wednesday night. He characterized himself as a victim of a “brutal fight for power” and welcomed the investigation as an opportunity to clear his name.

“I am resigning because I am innocent,” said Oleksy, 49. “I don’t want anyone to charge that I am hiding behind the high office of prime minister. I have nothing to hide.”

The sensational departure of Oleksy, the first former Communist to hold high office in democratic Poland, followed more than a month of explosive allegations about his 13-year relationship with Soviet and Russian intelligence agents, which allegedly came to an end only last year.

Charges of spying were first made by Interior Minister Andrzej Milczanowski, a close ally of former President Lech Walesa, shortly before he resigned in December. His resignation followed Walesa’s reelection defeat by another former Communist, Aleksander Kwasniewski.

The timing of the disclosure and Walesa’s bitter pledge to seek revenge against his ex-Communist foes softened the initial political fallout for Oleksy.

A recent public opinion poll showed Oleksy’s support slipping, but 43% of respondents were still satisfied with his performance while 34% were not. Support for his ruling coalition of former Communists, known as the Democratic Left Alliance, remained strong.

“The Oleksy case was perceived by the majority of public opinion as a continuation of the presidential election campaign, which was quite aggressive,” said Andrzej Rychard, a political analyst at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Even the seriousness of the allegation didn’t change this.”

But the decision Wednesday by the military prosecutor in Warsaw to launch an official probe raised the stakes significantly and left Oleksy little room to maneuver, analysts said. It also left the former Communists in an embarrassing predicament, with Kwasniewski traveling just last week to Brussels, where he professed Poland’s desire to join the Atlantic alliance and break with its Soviet-bloc past.

“The jury is still out on this one,” said one Western diplomat in Warsaw. “The thing is so complicated now and there are so many different agendas from all sides, no one really has sorted it out yet.”

Oleksy has acknowledged meeting and socializing with the two Moscow agents but denies knowing they were spies and says he never passed along state secrets. He said one of the spies was a neighbor and hunting partner, while the other was more of an annoyance than a friend--and eventually was thrown out of Oleksy’s house by the prime minister’s wife, according to one account.

Oleksy has acknowledged that such personal relationships were “imprudent” in hindsight, but he said the spying charges were concocted by his enemies, some of whom he has since sought to purge from his government.

He recently dismissed the deputy interior minister, Gen. Henryk Jasik, who supervised the inquiry into his alleged espionage, and named one of his closest associates, Jerzy Konieczny, as interior minister. Poland’s chief of counterintelligence quit in protest.

Military prosecutor Col. Slawomir Gorzkiewicz, who was referred to the case by the Interior Ministry to avoid a conflict of interest with Polish intelligence services, concluded just hours before Oleksy’s resignation that there is enough evidence “to justify the suspicion of a crime being committed.”

If found guilty on espionage charges, Oleksy could face imprisonment or the death sentence, though Parliament, controlled by his coalition, would first have to vote by a two-thirds majority to remove his parliamentary immunity.

The prosecutor said the investigation will delve into Oleksy’s dealings with the two Russian agents as well as the alleged espionage activities of the agents.