Polish counterintelligence chief questioned over alleged deal with Russia
December 6, 2017 3 Comments
The former director of Poland’s military counterintelligence agency has been questioned by the country’s military police, over allegedly illegal cooperation with Russian intelligence. From 2006 to 2012, General Piotr Pytel was head of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MCS), which is responsible for domestic security and for ensuring the war-readiness of Poland’s armed forces. According to government prosecutors, General Pytel struck an illegal agreement with the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, in 2010. The alleged agreement concerned the return to Poland of troops who had been sent to serve in Afghanistan with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Several hundred Polish troops participated in ISAF, a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, established by the United Nations Security Council in 2001.
General Pytel’s critics claim that he reached out to the FSB without authorization, and struck an agreement allowing for the passage of Polish troops through Russian soil on their way back to Poland from Central Asia. Some in the Polish government claim that the passage of Polish troops through Russia allowed the Russian spy services to collect intelligence on the Polish armed forces and thus weakened the Polish military vis-à-vis Russia. Polish authorities also accuse Genera Pytel’s predecessor at the helm of the MCS, General Janusz Nosek, of striking similar agreements with Moscow. These agreements were not authorized by NATO or the Polish high command and thus exceeded the prerogative of the MCS directors, according to prosecutors. The same prosecutors also questioned Donald Tusk, the current President of the European Council, who was Prime Minister of Poland in 2010. Mr. Tusk is also suspected of colluding with the Russian FSB, according to some reports.
But Mr. Tusk, and Generals Pytel and Nosek, deny that they engaged in illegal dealings with Russia and accuse the Polish prosecutor’s office of engaging in a political witch-hunt. All three of the accused belong to the Civil Platform, a liberal political party that is now in opposition but was the ruling party in the country from 2007 to 2015. Members of the Civil Platform have accused the Minister of Defense, Antoni Macierewicz, a member of the ruling conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), of politically persecuting his opponents. In statements made on social media on Wednesday, Mr. Tusk said he was proud to have worked with the two MCS former directors, whom he described “shining example[s] of responsibility, patriotism and honor”. He also called for Minister of Defense Macierewicz to resign.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 6 December 2017 | Permalink
Senior European Union official Donald Tusk was grilled for several hours on Wednesday, in the context of a Polish government probe into an intelligence agreement between Warsaw and Moscow. But Tusk, who is the current president of the European Council, and served as Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, dismissed the probe as politicized and said it was deliberately designed to harm his political career. The investigation was launched by the government of Poland earlier this year. Its stated goal is to investigate an agreement that was struck in late 2013 between Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MCS) and the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation. The agreement allegedly took place in secret, but was never implemented. The government of Poland canceled it in 2014, after accusing Moscow of illegally annexing the Ukrainian region of Crimea.
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Poland to probe alleged ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence
February 6, 2026 by Ian Allen 4 Comments
THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND has announced plans to launch an investigation into the possibility that an international sex trafficking ring set up by the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a “honey trap” set up by Russian intelligence to entrap “the elites of the Western world,” according to Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Tusk announced the commencement of what he referred to as a “special investigation” at a press conference on Wednesday, following a senior-level government meeting. He told reporters that the investigation would be led by members of the Office of the Prime Minister in association with the Ministry of Justice and the Polish intelligence services.
In 2008 a Florida court convicted Epstein—a jet-setting financier with links to hundreds of prominent individuals in finance, politics, industry, and academia—for sex offences. The disgraced financier was found dead in his jail cell in 2019. Prosecutors in the United States say they have identified over 100 victims of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, but some estimates claim that as many as 1,000 other victims have yet to come forward.
At last week’s press conference, a stern-looking Tusk pointed to Epstein’s large fortune, describing it as “unexplained” and adding that it raised important questions about the late financier’s links with state actors. He reminded his audience that “a growing number of commentators and experts assume that it is highly probable that this pedophilia scandal was a premeditated operation by the Russian KGB”—a term still frequently used in Eastern European countries to refer to the post-Soviet intelligence community.
The operation may have been a “so-called ‘honey trap’, a sweet bait, a trap set for the elites of the Western world, primarily the United States,” Tusk said. The Polish prime minister then added: “I don’t need to tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organized this operation is.” Among other things, it could “mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.” He added that investigators would systematically review and assess “every document currently available in the public domain.”
In a social media post later that day, Russian businessman Kirill Dimitriev, who last year was appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin as Russia’s special presidential envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation, dismissed the Polish government’s move. According to Dimitriev, all allegations about connections between Epstein and Russian intelligence are “lies” spread by “leftist elites.”
► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 06 February | Permalink
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