Intelligence Chief In Poland Defects

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29060, 24 November 1959, Page 15

Intelligence Chief In Poland Defects

(Rec. 10 p.m.) NEW YORK, November 23. One of Poland’s top intelligence agents, Colonel Pawel Monat, had fled Pohnd and was reported to have turned himself over in Vienna to United States representatives, the “New York Times” reported today from Vienna.

Colonel Monat’s defection was reported by A. M. Rosenthal, a “New York Times” correspondent who was recently expelled from Poland as a result of his dispatches on the situation within the Government of Mr Wladislaw Gomulka. Colonel Monat was in charge of co-ordinating the work of Polish military attaches all over the world. Rosenthal said that Colonel Monat left Poland during the summer when a crisis was brewing. His defection had political ramifications. It was a result of economic and political problems and had only gone to add to the state of nervous tension that had gripped Mr Gomulka and other Polish. Communist leaders. The defection was one of the incidents that had helped convince Mr Gomulka that Communist rule in Poland was “rotting” because of lack of “discipline,” Rosenthal added, and that tougher men and tougher ways were needed inside the Communist apparatus as much as outside it. For the Soviet Union, the Monat case, coupled with the defection of Polish military agents in Paris and Tokyo, seemed to have provided a lever to help swing a fervently pro-Soviet Pole, Lieu-tenant-General K. Witaszewski, into a high place in the Polish intelligence system, which the Russians had controlled until 1956. Rosenthal said.

There is a variety of forms of

intelligence in Poland—Army espionage, which goes by the usual euphemism of counter-intelli-gence; political intelligence work under the party; and internal anti-subversion intelligence under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Rosenthal added that, Colonel Monat had gone back to Poland after a tour of duty as military attache to Washington. He left Warsaw on a vacation trip to Jugoslavia this summer, stopped in Vienna, and disappeared with his family. Rosenthal said he learned of the Monat case two months ago, but to have published the fact would have meant immediate expulsion and possibly arrest.