The Interior Ministry directive from which this document is excerpted ordered an investigation into how a confidential regime survey of attitudes toward the Catholic Church could have been leaked to RFE. In a follow-up report almost two years later, the Interior Ministry conceded on June 25, 1987 that many people had access to the report and it was impossible to determine who had provided RFE with the material.

These two Interior Ministry documents indicate Edvard Gierek’s concern with uncensored information (“rumors” and “gossip”) challenging his policies, and his focus on RFE as a key instrument of “Western subversion.”

This document is an early reflection of concern with RFE’s impact in Poland. Particular attention is given to the broadcasts of Jószef Światło, the senior Interior Ministry official who defected in December 1953.

This May 1983 document draws on Polish intelligence service reporting to detect a hidden CIA hand behind RFE broadcasts (although the CIA connection had been severed twelve years earlier). It is representative of Polish intelligence reports on RFE in those years, which were usually far less accurate than Soviet and other East European intelligence reports.