It was important to proceed with caution, but the information was too enticing. The French authorities had known for a long time that a Polish intelligence network, codenamed ‘Armand', was operating in France. Indeed, DST agents had even believed they had identified the network's chief a few years earlier, when a diplomat they had been watching, who was suspected of being a Polish agent, had held a furtive meeting with a stranger. The DST had decided to follow this stranger, and discovered that he was a suburban bookseller called Hermann Bertele, whose political past was very interesting.
Born in Austria, he was a former member of the International Brigade27 and a communist. He had belonged to an FTP group during the war, and after the Liberation, had chosen to remain in France and take French citizenship. What is strange is that this former communist then began to sell religious books in his bookshop. Bertele was identified as the head of the Armand network and placed under surveillance. But he was clever: on permanent alert, he often managed to outsmart the agents who were tailing him.
Nothing could be found to incriminate him and the only way for the DST to reveal the truth would be to catch him in the act of delivering secret documents. After years of surveillance, the police eventually gave up. However, one day they suddenly decided to search both Bertele's bookshop and his apartment. The year was 1959, which by a curious coincidence, was the same year in which Mroz arrived in France. It is clear that Mroz was well-aware of the steps taken by the French authorities.
The raid proved successful as the DST officers discovered an array of spy equipment at Bertele's apartment: a radio to pick up shortwave message, codes and deciphers, white carbon etc. Hermann had to be Armand and he was forced to admit as such. But being the experienced agent that he was, he tried to minimise his role, claiming that he only served as a go-between.
As Bertele was the head of a network that was essentially spying on NATO, whose headquarters at the time were in Paris, as well as other French military institutions, this discovery lead to further arrests. Many agents were unmasked, especially those working as engineers, with the latest being revealed just ten days before the assassination of Mroz. This agent was a Hungarian-born aristocrat who had first worked at the arsenals in Toulon. Caught while photographing secret documents, he was fired and then decided to work independently, without ever appearing to be worried about what had happened. He was then hired by a specialist metal company and continued to transmit trade secrets to the Polish authorities. Unfortunately, he was a victim of his own greed and was always in need of more money to repay his severe gambling debts.
It would seem then that Mroz was shown loyalty, but in appearance only. If indeed Mroz had dismantled the Armand network, it is also clear that he did not reveal everything to the French authorities. There was, at the time, another Polish network operating in France known as ‘Beatrice', which was in fact far more dangerous than the one headed by Hermann Bertele. It is not impossible to believe that Mroz gave up the information on ‘Armand', in an attempt to protect ‘Beatrice'. ‘Beatrice', AKA Joseph Bitonski, was actually unmasked in 1963, three years after the death of Mroz, although he had been an object of interest for the DST for some time beforehand.
However, Bitonski, a holder of the Legion d'honneur, had some of the best references you could imagine. As a Pole, he arrived in France after his country had been defeated by the Nazis and immediately signed up with the French Army. After France surrendered to the Germans in 1940, he joined the Resistance. Like Bertele, he remained in France after the war, but unlike his Polish counterpart, kept his national identity. He was the leader of the French branch of the PSL,28 an exiled anticommunist party. However, when de-Stalinisation began to happen in Poland, Bitonski approached Warsaw and not liking what was taking place, broke with the PSL, creating a new party in the hope of rallying the Polish immigrants in France to the communist regime. This was reason enough to suspect Bitonski, who after all, had contact with not only politicians, but also journalists and diplomats.
When he was eventually arrested, like Bertele, he was found to own plenty of espionage equipment. Bitonski had been paid by the Polish authorities to supply general and economic policy information and, of course, discrete information about the Polish community in France.
It is fairly certain that Wladyslaw Mroz knew about the existence of ‘Beatrice'. Nevertheless, there are several factors that help to prove his loyalty: he provided the DST with valuable information regarding the techniques used by the Polish authorities and the other eastern countries in general. These included how desk officers organised meetings without risking their field agents, or how to lose your tail if you were under surveillance. DST officers learned that eastern spies had systematically identified all the exits in the important buildings in Paris, in order to escape whoever it was who might be following them.
Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop
29
[The authors explain some of the methods used by eastern spies to escape their pursuers, including those that Mroz may have revealed to the French authorities]
The Czechs gave the DST a hard time. The agent of the STB, the Czech secret service, would only move during off-peak times, rushing to the metro station at La Motte-Picquet (near the embassy, towards the Dare d'Austerlitz station) and always chose the middle carriage, which was First Class. The DST agent had to
