The intelligence service in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920.
On August 12, the media reported the discovery of sensational documents on the role of Polish intelligence in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920, but historians are in dispute as to whether the decryption of Red Army ciphers by Polish cryptographers had a decisive impact on the outcome of that war.
The daily 'Gazeta Wyborcza' reported that in a book about to be published in late August, Dr. Grzegorz Nowik, a historian from the Military Historical Research Office, who discovered documents at the Central Military Archive (CAW), argues that Polish cryptographers, notably the mathematician and linguist Jan Kowalewski, had cracked the Soviet military codes in September 1919 due to which the Polish High Command was kept posted on Red Army intentions on a running basis. This facilitated the victorious Polish counter-offensive, known in Poland as 'the miracle on the Vistula'.
Historians, asked by PAP, are agreed that the documents unearthed by Dr. Nowik – several thousand deciphered Soviet telegrams – shed new light on the war.
Dr. Jan S. Ciechanowski of the Institute of National Remembrance, says that historians had known about this aspect for at least forty years but could not take it up because up to the late 1990s, these materials were held at the Ministry of the Interior archives which were closed to researchers.
"To the best of my knowledge, the first mention of the Soviet ciphers having been cracked appeared in Jan Kowalewski's obituary written by Gen. Tadeusz Pełczyński in 1965." says Ciechanowski. Subsequently, several references to Kowalewski appeared both in émigré publications and at home, notably in the Polish Biographical Dictionary.
According to Prof. Paweł Wieczorkiewicz, Dr. Nowik's discovery means that the history of the campaign of 1920 has to be re-written. "The significance of this work is comparable to earlier works that revealed that the Poles cracked the 'Enigma' code." he emphasizes and adds that these documents make it clear that the decisive battle, known as 'the miracle on the Vistula' was based on Marshal Piłsudski's informed decisions.
According to Wieczorkiewicz, this does not diminish Piłasudski's role as commander-in-chief. "The biggest skill of a commander is to identify enemy plans. Given the balance of forces, the information supplied by intelligence was decisive" – he stresses.
Prof. Andrzej Garlicki of Warsaw University argues that Nowik's findings do not change the picture of that war in a significant way. "It's one thing to crack a code, and another how it was utilized by the Polish command" – he says.
Garlicki points out that "The fact that Polish cryptographers cracked the code does not mean that intelligence reports reached Piłsudski promptly…" pointing to the account of Gen. Wacław Jędrzejewicz (an intelligence officer at the time), who suggested that our leaders did not know about the concentration of Soviet forces to the north, in the spring of 1920."