Another fear that haunted the spy was how the information they had collected should be transmitted. A diplomat could easily use a diplomatic bag or encrypted radio links between the embassy and the ministry. Naturally, the task was much more difficult for an illegal, despite the advances in transmission technology that could encrypt message during flash radio broadcasts. A long message could now be sent in one or two seconds, meaning the job of monitoring these radio exchanges was becoming increasingly difficult: the shorter the radio exchanges became, the harder it was to locate the position of the person sending them.
After this long theoretical preamble, let us come to the story of Wladyslaw Mroz, a character who has long attracted the attentions of the French secret service and whose role remains a mystery.
One evening in October 1960, Paul Prudhon returned to his home in Argenteuil. Prudhon was a man of no particular interest, who worked at a quarry close to his home, a situation that had proved difficult, as too many people had often used this isolated place as a dumping ground. That night, Mr Prudhon saw a car parked up on the road that lead to the quarry. He began to approach it, hoping that it was not full of more people intending to dump their rubbish. As he got closer, he noticed that there were two men near the car, who upon seeing him, jumped into the car and sped off. Furious, Prudhon attempted to follow them in his own car, but it was too late.
However, before returning home, he wanted to make sure that the men had not had time to throw anything into the quarry. Upon investigation and to his great surprise, he discovered the body of a corpse!
Early investigations revealed that the body was that of a man in his 30s, who had been shot three times in neck. It looked like a professional execution, but was certainly not a robbery, as the man's watch and gold pen had not been stolen. The letters, invoices and Polish newspaper found on the body allowed the police to identify him as Wladyslaw Mroz, a photographer who lived in Epinay-sur-Seine with his French wife and two children. From what they knew, Mroz had led a relatively quiet life: taking the bus to Argenteuil train station at the same time every morning before boarding a train to Saint-Lazare. He spent his days working at a photography shop in Paris before returning home for 8 o'clock. There was nothing here that could account for his apparent assassination.
Yet a few days later, the press headlines announced that this quiet man had actually been a Soviet spy and had worked at the head of a network, which had just been dismantled by the DST.
There was some truth in what the papers said: Mroz really had been a spy for the
East, but the rest was just a smokescreen that had been carefully crafted by the French counterintelligence-espionage agencies. So who was this little photographer without a history?
Mroz had actually worked for the state security services in Poland and had first worked as the secretary to the head of the organisation. He rose through the ranks after completing missions in Britain and Israel whilst working under diplomatic cover. His career came to a halt when a Polish defector, Michael Golonievski, told the western authorities that the diplomat Wladyslaw Mroz was actually a captain in the Polish state security service.
At this time, Kim Philby24 held a high ranking role in MI5. Upon learning that Mroz's identity had been revealed, Philby immediately informed the KGB, who then passed this information on to their Polish counterparts. Like all other countries in eastern Europe at the time, the Polish secret service was entirely subservient to the KGB. However, the reverse was not always true. In fact, the Soviets believed that the intelligence agencies of the ‘brother countries', as they were called at the time, were there to act as satellites and gather any information. Moscow, working alone, would then centralise and collect everything together.
After Warsaw had been informed that his cover had been blown, Mroz logically expected that he would no longer be entrusted with missions to the West. However, some time later, in 1959, he was allowed to travel to France, and what's more, under his real name.
Marcel Chalet [former head of the DST] and Thierry Wolton:
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Some illegals were sent on a mission simply to establish themselves in the target country, in anticipation of subsequent events.These sleeper agents would be inactive for a certain number of years and were content to maintain contact with their bosses only at rare intervals. These agents would have had a pretty good idea of what their future goal might be and for this reason, made sure that they settled in strategically important areas. In principle, they were designed to be activated in case of tensions between the state where they presently lived and the one who sent them there. Their mission may even involve staying put should a particular conflict occur, which thankfully, never did.
When Wolton asked his interlocutor if the DST had already discovered this type of sleeper agent, the former head of the agency replied, ‘Yes it has, but I don’t want to go into too much detail as it is a delicate subject. I do wonder, however, if in France as well as in other countries, some of these agents were in some way “given” to us. By capturing our attention that way, it meant that we were prevented from finding others who were working in a similar role.’
Surely the entry into France of this Polish spy must signal a special operation on behalf of Warsaw? How else do you explain his being
