POLAND: Valuable Catch

After a tour of duty in Washington in what seemed an innocuous job, Poland’s Colonel Pawel Monat returned to Warsaw in May of last year. In the half-world of intrigue, he was a man to reckon with. His next official job was to coordinate the work of all military attaches in Polish embassies throughout the world, which, in a Communist country, meant that Monat had access to political as well as military intelligence and espionage, and presumably knew all there was to be known. Hard-working and trusted, Monat apparently had no trouble last summer getting permission to take his wife and child on a vacation in Communist Yugoslavia.

The Monat family took the 11:32 p.m. Warsaw-Vienna express, sped through southern Poland and Czechoslovakia during the night, entered Austria at the tiny border town of Bernhardsthal. Since the Monats were traveling on diplomatic passports, Austrian customs of cials merely passed them by. Arriving at Vienna’s East Station at 2:50 the next afternoon, the Monats had ten hours to kill before their train departed for Yugoslavia. Some time in that ten hours, they vanished.

It took a while for the Polish intelligence service to react. Then discreet inquiries began to be made. The Yugoslavs reported that the Monats had never reached Belgrade. Austrian authorities professed total ignorance. Thoroughly alarmed at last, Poland sent hordes of agents converging on Vienna from Warsaw, London and Paris, ostensibly to attend the Communist Youth Festival there. They began prowling the cafes and clubs frequented by anti-Communist Polish emigrés. There was no trace of the colonel.

In Warsaw, embarrassed intelligence agents concluded that Colonel Monat had turned himself over to U.S. agents in Vienna and had been shipped out secretly with his family. They glumly conceded that he might even have planned the entire operation during his 1958 tour of duty in Washington. Last week this educated guess proved correct. The story was broken from Vienna by the New York Times’s Correspondent A. M. Rosenthal, who was recently expelled from Poland (TIME, Nov. 23) for “probing” too deeply into Polish affairs and was now free to report what he had not felt free to file at the time. At first, Monat’s defection to the U.S. was flatly denied by the State Department, then officially confirmed.

While U.S. agents were keeping Defector Monat under wraps, Poland’s Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka reacted swiftly by appointing tough Lieut. General Kazimierz Witaszewski deputy chief of staff in charge of army intelligence. A fiery pro-Stalinist who had supported the Russians in 1956 in their attempt to overthrow Gomulka himself, General Witaszewski might not be able to improve the quality of Polish espionage, but he could be counted upon to make the apparatus more escapeproof.