NATO’s secret files see the light of day

Alicja Baczyńska reports

A selection of up to 70 notes, cables, reports and documents from meetings of NATO officials disclose the bloc’s backdoor politics regarding Poland during the Cold War era.

While tanks lined the city streets and Poles were speculating whether a Soviet invasion was in fact imminent at the time of martial law in Poland in the early 1980s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation had already been mulling over different scenarios for reacting to the invasion, yet none of them considered a direct military response, the declassified documents reveal.

Poland is the first new NATO member, which joined the alliance in 1999, to embark on the process of declassifying NATO documents in Central and Eastern Europe at the time of the Cold War.