Free The Third World War by John Hackett Page A

before his press conference next day was urging an unwilling candidate to find some way of recanting.
    By a misfortune which had dogged US politicians’ microphones on other matters Polish, a microphone inadvertently left live passed on to waiting pressmen Mr Thompson’s reply: ‘Goddammit, Art, I’m not going to say that I wish to make it clear that if the brave Polish people rise against their Russian oppressors, then a Thompson Administration would most certainty leave them in the…’ Suddenly, realizing that his words were being overheard by newsmen, Thompson ended with a grin and the words, ‘expletive deleted’-
    There was a ripple of amused applause from the newsmen. In subsequent statements, Mr Thompson was at pains to emphasize that he was threatening nobody. Nonetheless, he was now to some extent saddled with this overheard statement—and it would have been politically damaging for him to retreat too abjectly from it. Indeed, under questioning at a meeting of minority groups in Chicago, he attempted a counter-attack. He accused the Carter Administration’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (himself a Pole by birth), of being “altogether too ready to sell his native country down the river’, Nobody who analysed Thompson’s statements could seriously suppose he was encouraging a Polish insurrec-tion, but there were a good many people (including some in Poland) who feared that restless Poles who heard what he had said repeated in garbled form might suppose that that was just what he was doing.
    After Mr Thompson’s election as president on the first Tuesday in November, a memo from the Polish Ministry of Home Security ordered the political police, assisted where necessary by the army, quietly to round up potential strike leaders from factories in Polish towns other than Warsaw. The Ministry had heard a rumour that otherwise some sort of provincial general strike might be called to mark President Thompson’s Inauguration Day on 20 January.
    The rumour was untrue, but the arrests caused a crisis.
    The political police and the army tried to arrest workers’ leaders on 11 November, and met with resistance. In some places shots were fired. In more Polish troops were reluctant to obey orders and continue with the arrest of workers.
    By 12 November factories in several provincial cities of Poland were under workers’ control, flying the prewar flag of Poland with the communist insignia torn out. Dramatic visual evidence of these events was provided by a group of dissidents working in Polish television. In Gdansk, the television station was taken over and held for some hours by technicians whose sympathies were with the strikers. Though the government reacted promptly, ordering the police to storm the station regardless of casualties, the staff were able in the time available to them to beam pictures of the riots out to Denmark and Sweden. In Sweden the authorities yielded at once to the threats which swiftly followed both from the Soviet Union and from Poland. They forbade both the use of the material in Sweden and its onward transmission. The Danes, on the other hand, passed it at once to Eurovision. From there it reached stations all over the world, affording striking and ineradicable proof of the intensity of feeling in Poland against the regime. One sequence in particular, showing Polish troops standing by while strikers wrecked a Soviet cultural centre in Szczecin, was more damaging to the Soviet Union than any.
    In Wroclaw and Szczecin, communist party leaders went into the factories to ^negotiate’. in both places they then tried to break the promises made in the negotiations and arrest the workers’ leaders. In Wroclaw they failed, and the communist mayor was shot by the strikers, who also took other communist leaders as hostages. In Szczecin the Party soon regained control.
    The central government then entered into negotiations. It promised no punitive action against those who had made even