The best kept secret of the Polish People's Republic. How did "Typhoon" go through Okęcie?

For them, the secret of the correspondence did not exist. They stole diplomatic mail, broke even the most complex security measures, made copies and ... put everything back in its place. They disclosed the content of the most closely guarded documents, but no one ever found their trail. Former employees of the secret IX Department reveal the backstage of their activities in Okęcie.

Top-secret correspondence

Tourist:In the light of international law, diplomatic mail is inviolable, but no one is so naive as to believe that the services are not figuring out how to look at it. That is why each country tries to develop effective methods of securing it, from seals, through special belts, to metal cassettes equipped with some unusual locks and opening counters.

At the Warsaw Okęcie airport, the driver of a given facility always waited with a watch in his hand and moved with his feet. He was to make sure that the post office was not in the hands of Poles longer than necessary. It was reassuring to measure them.

They did not believe that the short time between the landing of the plane and the receipt of the mail by the driver is enough for us to crack down on security in the room under the floor, open envelopes, photograph all documents, and then restore the whole to its original state . And leave no traces.

And we did it. The same thing happened in ports and stations, wherever the post office appeared. This section of our department was formally called "Typhoon".

Precision work

Engineer:It was the late seventies, maybe early eighties. With a friend, I came to the Gdynia port warehouse belonging to the Hartwig shipping company. There was a box from Tokyo, a few meters long. The Japanese tied it with plastic straps, but not the ones you could buy from a meter on a roll. These were special products, printed, made to order.

There was no way we could cut it, we couldn't stretch it afterwards, we didn't have the proper heat sealer to clean it up. The security is solid, but I thought, "What if you open it without taking the tapes off at all?".

At three in the morning, we finally managed to remove the deeply driven nails (...) and went inside. There were loads of items for the facility, electronics, manuals, all secured, packed in tar paper to keep moisture out. We were most interested in the encryption machine.

The members of the airport group most often managed to make copies of the seals securing the diplomatic mail. Thanks to this, they could afford to damage the originals when opening the document bags, which significantly improved the work.

Details of its design were needed by colleagues outside the faculty who specialized in developing methods to control such communication. They were jumping for joy when they found out that we had opened this chest. They wouldn't be able to cope alone in life.

The saying goes, nails are easy to pull out, but they were machine hammered, deep. In order to take them out, the boards had to be folded open, and yet we couldn't leave any traces. The idea was that , even with a magnifying glass, no one would realize that someone was picking at it . In addition, the Japanese clearly deliberately used nails with square heads there. Everyone had to be hammered in the same position they were in before, because if you turned a bit, the wood would end up showing an asterisk, not a square. Precise work (…).

In Aether Vapors

Postman:The fun began when the plane landed. The diplomatic post at the airport was subject to the same control as other luggage - whether there is a bomb or a bomb. It was the key to our happiness.

Over the years, we have had a number of associates among the airport staff. There was, for example, a lady who signaled to us that the plane was already there and the luggage would be behind and behind. I also remember a retired military major, who made some extra money in Okęcie.

The text is an excerpt from the book by Tomasz Awłasewicz “Invisible. The greatest secret of the special services of the People's Republic of Poland ”, which has just been released by the Agora publishing house.

In theory, he was responsible for delivering the mail for this security check. So he threw the bags through the door into the room where it was supposed to take place - or so the airport workers thought. But we didn't do anything in this room, just opened our door on the other side, grabbed sackcloth and ran to our rooms.

The complexity of the digging, of course, depended on the security measures applied by a particular country. It is known that such parcels are normally sealed. Usually, you managed to make a copy of the seal, but sometimes we saw right away that there would be a problem with that. Back then, we used a primitive but effective method of tightening the strings closing the bag (...).

Any bigger problems? There were, for example, tapes with which the Finnish and Swedish mail were sealed. First of all, it was difficult to buy the same one, because it wasn't an ordinary tape, but an unusual one, with prints. Second, she was going down terribly hard. In order not to break the paper layer, it had to be heated, cut, some kind of nightmare (...).

Most of the tapes were peeled off with petroleum ether, which is unfortunately a poisonous substance. After sitting in these fumes for years, my pancreas has completely crumbled and I suffer from diabetes. And it probably could have been prevented, because there were other means by which the tapes could be unstucked (...).

It was a pity not to look

Bearded man:You must remember that we had very little time to check these shipments. Everything had to be perfectly synchronized so that no one would notice any delays. Anyway the institutions kept asking the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for permission to collect mail from the plane.

We had people there who informed us about such things, and of course we told them that there was no way and that they were to say that, in fact, there are even longer delays recently, traffic jams at the airport, one big chaos and that we are very sorry ( …).

Postman:You know, so many years have passed that now it's hard for me to say exactly how long it took us to open, photograph and close the bag. Certainly it was short enough for the driver not to notice (...).
We opened the post offices of so many countries that I am not even able to list them all now. Other sections of our department did not touch demoludes, but we even looked at their mail from time to time. Since there was an opportunity, it was a shame not to look at it, right?

As for the West, did you know that I received the golden cross of merit for copying the documents that allowed Gierek to prepare for negotiating one of the loans? When he went to the interviews, he already knew all the questions. I got them out of the German diplomatic post.

Farewell to Poland

Hunter:Okęcie is also a place of other actions. I remember once we got a signal that there would be a South American diplomat at the airport and that he had drugs in his luggage. Yes, that's real.

I went there with a friend and we grabbed his suitcase somewhere in the back. A friend of something could not open these combination locks, so I tried it - puff, puff, open both . So we look inside and there are T-shirts ironed and folded, just like straight from the factory. We pick up these clothes and there are indeed drugs.

(...) I took pictures of it all, we closed the suitcase and let it go on so that the client would pick him up normally. We also figured out the code, passed it to the customs officer and waited to see what happened.

The Americans hid the documents in addition to custom-made black plastic bags and then sealed the inlet. Division IX officers counterfeited the bags, which allowed for regular checks on American parcels.

The customs officer actually took the diplomat aside, says there are comments to the suitcase, that the smell is not that dogs are interested, and so on. So he asks if the guy will mind if he looks inside. To this the diplomat says that of course, no problem, but he forgot the combination.