We All Came from the Reserves
// Lithuanian leaders admit to ties with the KGB
A Scandal
Yesterday, a special Seimas [parliament] commission investigating the ties of high-ranking government officials with the KGB of the USSR received a written declaration from Antanas Valenis, Lithuania's foreign minister. The minister admitted that he had been a member of the KGB reserves in the 1980s.
At the beginning of January, Lithuania was rocked by the news that Antanas Valenis and Arvydas Pocius, the head of Lithuania's State Security Department, had been KGB staffers [see Kommersant of January 13]. The press obtained documents proving that the current foreign minister was included in a KGB reserve list back in 1981 (when he was an instructor at the Lithuanian Communist Party's Taurage District Committee) and received the rank of captain in 1982.
Valenis explained what happened as follows. “In 1980, they summoned me to the Taurage City Military Registration and Enlistment Office and ordered me to fill out a form and an autobiography. They told me that I was being transferred along with a group of other conscripts to a newly formed structure, where we would be counted as “division staffers” (Valenis wrote this last phrase in Russian, but with Latin letters). These documents subsequently gave grounds to consider Antanas Valenis a KGB reservist. The foreign minister testified that he had neither received nor fulfilled any assignments from the KGB
As a result of the scandal in Lithuania, a discussion began on whether to regard KGB reservists as people who “knowingly collaborated with the special services of the former USSR” and what to do in this case with a provision of the law, according to which any candidate for a government position (before his appointment as foreign minister in 2000, Valenis was ambassador to Poland) is obligated to indicate collaboration with the Soviet special services. Some say that Valenis must resign immediately, while others say that, by his actions (especially in standing up for Luthuania's national interests in discussions with Russia on Kaliningrad transit), the minister has fully proved his loyalty to Lithuania.
In commenting on this situation in a conversation with Kommersant, Kazimira Prunskiene, the former head of the first government of independent Lithuania (she was later accused of collaborating with the KGB on the grounds that in the 1980s, she wrote reports about her foreign business trips, as was customary then), said the following. “Really? So writing reports means collaboration, and being in the reserves means being loyal?” According to Valentinas Mazuronis, the leader of the liberal democratic parliamentary faction, Valenis and Pocius must resign. “And if they don't understand that they must resign, then the people who appointed them must help them do this. We think that people at such a high level must not have these connections.”
The problem is that according to a law passed by the Seimas in 1999, On the Registration, Recognition, Reporting, and Protection of Identified Persons Who Secretly Collaborated with the Former Special Services of the USSR, being in the KGB reserves is not considered such collaboration. It is true that under this law, members of the Soviet special services had to admit to collaboration in writing within six months from the day registration began. It was assumed that all identified persons would be protected from blackmail attempts and that all information received from them would be classified. According to the law, security classification does not apply to persons occupying key government positions (the president, ministers, deputies, judges, prosecutors, and candidates for these positions).
The law bars former KGB members from legal practice and working in banks, and also restricts their opportunities for taking jobs in private companies. In addition, information on their work in the special services must be made public. But after promulgating the law, the Lithuanian government did not launch any further actions to screen former KGB members, and the law was quietly dropped.
Meanwhile, the scandal around the foreign minister opened a Pandora's box. Materials on the KGB connections of other officials multiplied in the media. Yesterday it was learned that Arvydas Pocius, the director of Lithuania's State Security Department, had also confessed to being in the KGB reserves [see the reference]. As Kommersant has already reported, Pocius has been accused of personally requesting the leadership of the KGB of the Lithuanian SSR to include him in the reserve list in August 1989. Furthermore, in 1990, i.e., after Lithuania declared independence, he expressed the wish to continue this collaboration.
Even Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, a former U.S. citizen who served nine years in American military intelligence, was suspected of collaboration with the KGB. A Lithuanian opposition publication shared its suspicions about this. According to its information, Adamkus was recruited by the KGB back in the 1970s, and he appeared in operational summaries under the pseudonym Fermer. They say this explains why the Soviet security services, which were certainly informed about his service at the Pentagon, had nothing against his visits to the Lithuanian SSR, which Adamkus began to make regularly in the mid-1970s.
The Wildstein List Is More Popular Than Sex
In mid-January, Polish journalist Bronislaw Wildstein published an Internet list of people who may have collaborated with the Polish security service during the years of the communist regime. He included nearly 240,000 surnames of people whose files are in Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which is in charge of the archives of the country's security service. The list includes staffers, informers, and people they planned to recruit. The publication of the Wildstein list caused an uproar in Poland and alarmed the Polish special services, since according to some information, the names of currently active agents are published along with the names of former agents. On February 2, Wildstein was fired from his job at the newspaper Rzeczpospolita for conduct “contrary to journalistic ethics.”
The documents dating from the period of communist rule in Poland are still classified. Ordinary citizens received the right to familiarize themselves with their personal files only in June 2000, although until recently, they showed little interest in this opportunity. Whereas 2 million such applications have been filed in Germany and 40,000 in the Czech Republic, only 14,000 have been filed in Poland. However, soon after its publication, the Wildstein list became one of the most frequent inquiries of Internet searches, surpassing sex by an order of magnitude.
To the KGB by Personal Request
The newspaper Lietuvos zinios published a facsimile of the references “A Conversation with Pocius A.Z.” and “The Personal Acquaintance of an Officer of the Criminal Investigation Department with Pocius A.Z., a Reserve Lieutenant of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR.” It is stated in these documents that Arvydas Zygmuntovich Pocius, the prosecutor of Sakiai District of the Lithuanian SSR, born in 1958 in the village of Zigaiciai, Taurage District, of the Lithuanian SSR, accepted an offer on April 20, 1984, to enter the KGB reserves and even carried out three operational assignments entrusted to him. A report dated November 13, 1989, and signed by Major General I.K. Zhukas, the deputy chief of the KGB's special division for the Baltic Military District, states that Pocius showed full willingness to transfer to the KGB reserves.
Vladimir Vodo, Vilnius; Anna Volkova
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 09, 2005
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