Polish Solidarity Operative Witold Radwanski Reveals the Golden Rule of Konspiracja

01/24/20 • 58 min

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Witold’s experience as a daring underground operator working within and around the Polish borders offers a view into the relationships, ratlines, allies, enemies, and tradecraft necessary to fund and supply the Solidarity insurgency movement from the late 70s until the Communists were peacefully voted out of power in 1989. He speaks to me from an apartment in Warsaw near the former Ghetto where his relatives had struggled a generation before him.
His unassuming codename - Makaron - means ‘noodle' in Polish, which may offer an explanation to why he was never caught. After the interview he showed me his favorite spot in Old Warsaw to lose a tail, how they encoded messages using poetry, and the home of controversial Polish spy Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski.
This is the first episode in collaboration with my sponsor the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Los Angeles, California. I’ve included one of my interviews for the The Wende Museum’s Historical Witness Project, sponsored by Fiona Chalum and Joel Aronowitz, which seeks to preserve voices of the Cold War for future generations.

In November of last year I went to Warsaw, Poland to help retrieve historical documents and samzidat (smuggled during the near decade of martial law) for an upcoming exhibit for the Wende Museum. I interviewed several key players in the Polish anti-communist movement, one of whom is my guest for this episode - Witold Radwanski.

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Canadian Author and Journalist Joyce Wayne Rolls Up the Soviets and Local Members of the Cold War’s Ottawa Spy Ring

Joyce Wayne has written a historical novel called The Last Night of the World about a Soviet female operative, a key player in the Gouzenko Affair. When Igor Gouzenko defected from the GRU to the RCMP in September of 1945 the west would see for the first time the extent of Soviet espionage activity in North America. His 200 pages of documents would reveal a covert ring of dozens of operatives working for Soviet military attaché and GRU Rezident Nicholai Zolotkin in the capital city.

In this interview Joyce lays out the setting of wartime Ottawa, the unassuming spy city just north of the American border. Aside from diplomatic and government centers, a target of intelligence collection was an hour and a half north of Ottawa at the atomic facility called Chalk River, which is still in use today as an active research facility.

Joyce’s fiction has the haunting credibility of a first-hand account. Her father was a member of Zolotkin’s ring and managed to avoid detection and prosecution throughout his life. He left the communist party in 1947, disillusioned with Stalin’s brutality. She explains the attraction of Communism in the 1930s and 40s and how this period, and the Gouzenko Affair, is not talked about much in Canada.
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More about the author at Joycewayne.com

Her book The Last Night of the World is available on Amazon.

Other works cited in this interview:

How the Cold War Began, by Amy Knight
The Fall of a Titan, by Igor Gouzenko
The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs, Physicist and Soviet Double Agent by Mike Rossiter
The Sound of Neutrons - Deep River Players - Chalk River, Ontario
Spybrary Episode with Joyce Wayne
Joyce Wayne on Spycast

Live Drop theme on electric cello by Danica Pinner danicapinner.com

More available at show notes on thelivedrop.com
Hello Listener, If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please consider signing up as a contributing patron and join the community for exclusive commentary, and content. A $10 a month donation will really keep us going ---> https://www.patreon.com/thelivedrop

Alternatively, if you would like to help make Season Three operational you could offer a one time donation of any amount right here ---> https://www.paypal.me/thelivedrop

Thank you for listening and your support,

Mark Valley
Creator/Host

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.