Ryszard Kapuscinski. Photo: Irmi Long of Eichborn AG

So Ryszard Kapuscinski was at it as well! The famous reporter and prize-crowned author, whose books on the Orient, Africa, Latin America and the Soviet Union have been translated into numerous languages, also wrote reports for the SB, the Polish secret police, under the code name 'Vera Cruz' and 'Poet'. He is the last in a line of intellectuals who have recently been outed as informers: the novelist Andrzej Szczypiorski, the poet Zbigniew Herbert, the novelist, poet and dramatist Henryk Grynberg, and one of the greatest narrators of Jewish suffering and founder of the famous Wroclaw mime theatre Henryk Tomaszewski. The philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was even an officer in the secret police during the Stalin era, and kept very quiet about it.

The Kapuscinski case has added fuel to the Polish debate on lustration, the process of x-raying its citizens for evidence of secret police involvement. And there we were thinking it had all come to an end, with the recent decision of the constitutional court to squash great sections of the lustration law which the ruling Kaczynski twins were trying to push through. Now only civil servants can be subjected to examination, not, as the government intended, journalists of all types, from editors of local rags, to political chat show hosts. Foreign commentators celebrated the court's verdict as an end to the witch hunt – ignoring the thousands of informers and opportunists in the media, writers' associations and universities who stand to profit from the decision, including names that are famous in Germany.

The verdict will have a negligible impact on the practical handling of the secret service files, because lustration will continue unabated. The archives of the Institute for National Remembrance IPN, the Polish equivalent of the Gauck Authority which administered the documents of the Stasi in the former GDR, will continue to feed the press dirty files on public figures. This is accepted in Poland, one reason being that these publications help check the Kaczynski brothers' plans for lustration. Their idea was to establish a legal project which would pronounce social death on "the lustrated" on the basis of formal criteria alone. This concept made no exceptions for individuals who might have signed an agreement with the SB but refused to cooperate thereafter. Or who later even joined the opposition. The publication of the files does allow a more nuanced picture to emerge.

Ryszard Kapuscinski,who died in January 2007, would have been tarred as an all-out SB informer according to the failed draught. As a correspondent for the PAP news agency and later as a travel reporter, he reported on conversations abroad. Yet a closer analysis of his files reveals that he wrote with great reserve about his countrymen, writing all the more extensively about persons beyond the reach of the secret police, for example on the political views of Danish reporters which would have been evident in their own publications, on a British communist ("She is ugly and sleeps with niggers") or on the life of a wealthy Polish exile, all things that already existed in press reports. Ryszard Kapuscinski, in other words, as the evaluators of Kapuscinski's files agree 'harmed no one.' Yet he was obviously proud that the secret police took him so seriously.

Henryk Tomaszewski, whose mime theatre caused a furore throughout the world, used similar tactics to avoid the SB, but to less effect. Like every other artist, journalist or scientist he had to agree to write reports before every trip abroad. His homosexuality made him easier to blackmail, as it was forbidden under socialism. And indeed he did write reports on actors and actresses that cast them in an unfavourable light. Whether he actually caused them harm is not clear. Yet Tomaszewski was soon "disconnected" as a source because he was of very limited use to the SB.

The poet Zbigniew Herbert, who died in 1998, even succeeded in elegantly duping the SB. He filled his reports, for example, with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in exile and was hated by the regime, as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations which undoubtedly went well over the heads of the leading officers. It was his resistance against an insensate system. And he never harmed or betrayed anyone.

This is not the case with Andrzej Szczypiorski, writer of the bestseller "The beautiful Mrs. Seidenman", or with Henryk Grynberg, who defected on a trip abroad and has lived in the USA for decades. Or Zygmunt Bauman, who moved to England after Polish anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. All three were enthusiastic communists as young men. They worshipped Stalin, seeing in him a future guarantee for Poland after the war and the Holocaust. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that as a young man Szczypiorski was a ruthless, careerist zealot, who denounced his colleagues much to their detriment. But gradually it dawned on him that the regime could only stand as a result of a gigantic apparatus of repression. He became a dissident and an activist in the Solidarnosc union.

Henryk Grynberg, who survived the Holocaust as a child, and Zygmunt Bauman, who fled with his family to the Soviet Union ahead of the German occupying troops, left the party leadership because of anti-Semitic pressure, and went on to better things. Henryk Grynberg recently admitted that under the code name "Reporter" he had written reports for the SB. Zygmunt Bauman on the other hand denies the reports which say he was a major in an armed unit of the secret police, which was responsible for human rights violations and several hundreds of murders in the fight against the anti-communist resistance. And yet he has delivered no explanations for the high commendations found in his files.

The case of Kapuscinski, who was held in the highest esteem in Poland and was named "Reporter of the Year" in Warsaw, has now raised the question of whether it was really possible to elude the secret police. The former dissident Ernest Skalski, one of the founders of the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza, recently admitted that he too had signed a "lojalka" as a young man. He explained this saying that from the mid seventies onwards, in other words after the signing of Helsinki Agreement, it became clear that the SB had no right to call people to summons. And yet open resistance meant losing one's job. Kapuscinski by comparison, after the world success of his "The Soccer War" and "The Emperor", a parable about the fall of power using Ethiopia as an example, was already so prominent that the SB could no longer touch him."

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This article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 24 May, 2007.

Thomas Urban is the Poland correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: lp