Aparaty centralne służb wywiadu cywilnego Układu Warszawskiego jako wyspecjalizowane struktury państwa 1944-1991. By Jan Larecki, Leszek Pawlikowicz and Paweł Piotrowski

Abstract

In the early 1990s, two of the most embarrassing questions facing democratically elected politicians responsible for national security in the former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) member states—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania and to some degree the ex-GDR—were ‘how closely did their civilian intelligence services cooperate with the Soviet KGB?’ and ‘what were their activities around the world?’ The Warsaw Pact was a military organization and, at the beginning of its existence, Moscow's agenda was the only one the other members and their intelligence services were allowed to have. This began to change in the 1960s, when Albania became China's outpost in Europe, and Romania gradually adopted the status of a reluctant observer in the organization. In post-communist Europe, only the GDR ceased to exist as a state, and it was in the united Germany that the first informative publications about the intelligence efforts of the NSWP regimes began to appear. Gradually, scholars, critics and former intelligence practitioners began to publish their works in other former Warsaw Pact member states.