By Jeremy Druker in Prague for ISN Security Watch (24/11/05)

Reports surfaced last week that Pentagon officials were already scouting possible locations in the mountains of southern Poland for a base that would be part of the US missile defense system - a base that would serve to defend Europe against attack. Since then, however, both Polish and US officials have asserted that a final decision was not imminent. And the road toward public approval in Poland may end up being much rockier than any agreement between the two governments.

The story broke on 12 November, when Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s respected daily newspaper, reported that secret negotiations had taken place last year about the installation of an anti-missile base in Poland. The paper also said the Polish base would be the only part of the US Missile Defense Initiative that would not be located on US territory.

The US Missile Defense Initiative - dubbed the “Son of Star Wars” by the US media in reference to the Reagan-era place to create a high-tech shield to protect the country from attack - was originally scheduled to be operational by last year, but testing failures shelved those intentions.

After the news of a possible Polish role emerged, Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz confirmed that talks had been going on for several years. “We will analyze everything thoroughly and at the appropriate moment say whether it is good or not for Poland,” he told the private television station TVN. He also pledged to launch a public debate on the issue before anything was decided.

According to a 16 November article in Britain’s the Guardian, Pentagon officials have been scouting the mountains of southern Poland, looking for suitable sites for several radar stations. The paper also reported that the authorities wanted more than just radar stations, but were hoping to host a missile interceptor site that would house missiles that could shoot down incoming rockets.

The next day, the Pentagon confirmed that talks, labeled in the “conceptual stage”, had been taking place and did concern more than just a radar base. Air Force Lt. Col. Tracy O’Grady-Walsh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the installation would be capable of shooting down long-range missiles launched from the Middle East or Africa that could endanger Europe, Reuters reported. The base would not be operational before 2010.

Poland does have growing local expertise in the missile defense area. Przemyslowy Instytut Telekomunikacji (PIT), Poland’s leading defense electronics company, last year signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Lockheed Martin to work together on missile defense development, starting with radar technologies. At the time, Dave Kier, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and managing director for missile defense programs, said the memorandum “paves the way for our companies to cooperatively develop technologies and systems that will improve the effectiveness of our nations’ defenses against the growing threat of ballistic missile proliferation”, Spacedaily.com reported.

ISN Security Watch’s queries to Poland’s Defense Ministry concerning plans for the public debate and other details were referred to the Foreign Ministry, which also declined comment. Those reactions, coupled with other statements from Polish and US officials, indicate that the newspaper revelations likely caught the new government off-guard and that any strategy for launching a real discussion of the issue must still be conceived.

Government’s position clear

There is little doubt, however, about where the government, approved just two weeks ago, stands. The prime minister and the ruling conservative Law and Justice party have, however, apparently already made up their minds about the merits of such missile defense systems, if not yet about the stationing of a base in Poland.

“We back the participation of Poland in what has been called the third stage of the anti-missile system, related to the radar identification and destruction of enemy missiles,” the government said in a statement carried by Agence France Presse.

The government’s clearly positive opinion about participation in the missile initiative contrasts with that of the previous government, led by the Social-Democrats, who were worried that a Polish role would further sour relations with Russia.

US statements that any shield would be employed to thwart attacks from the Middle East rather than from Russia have failed to assuage Moscow.

In any public debate, newly elected Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski will likely emerge as a champion of the plans. From 2002 to 2005, he was a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a conservative think tank viewed as close to the Bush administration. Many American conservatives have pushed for a missile defense system to counter rogue states and terrorists, although the original “Star Wars” refers to a space-based system proposed by President Ronald Reagan during the Cold War to repel a Soviet attack.

Andrzej Kinski, a defense analyst who edits the Polish monthly Nowa Technika Wojskowa (New Military Techniques), agreed that a public discussion was necessary, but said the basis for such a discussion was still lacking.

“There has been no breakthrough in the whole story to provoke any substantial debate,” he said. “This is all speculation at the moment, except for one fact, that some talks about this anti-missile system were held. Note that no representative of the US administration has spoken on the issue."

If and when the debate gains momentum, Poland’s role in Iraq will certainly play a major role. The previous Social-Democratic government, as well as outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski, supported the war in Iraq, and Poland has contributed one of the largest troop totals, overseeing a multinational force in south-central Iraq. But opinion polls have long indicated that around three-quarters of Poles oppose the continued presence of their troops in the country. Many Poles have also been frustrated about the lack of new business contracts in Iraq and the US refusal to lift visa requirements for Polish citizens.

“The basic issue here is whether this is going to be presented as something crucial to Polish raison d’etat or in more business-like terms, with concrete gains projected,” said Olaf Osica, a security and international affairs expert at the Warsaw-based European Centre Natolin.

“The problem might be that after Iraq it may not be so easy to convince people there is anything to gain from this, because the popular feeling about Iraq is that Poland has not gained too much.”

Another complicating issue is the ongoing inquiries into recent reports in the US media about secret CIA prisons in Central and Eastern European countries created in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks. The Washington Post broke the story on 2 November, but withheld naming the countries that had allegedly housed the installations. Soon afterwards, however, Human Rights Watch claimed to have evidence suggesting that the CIA had detained suspected terrorists apprehended in Afghanistan in Poland, an EU member state, and Romania, a candidate country.

Although Poland and Romania have denied the existence of such prisons or that the CIA had sent prisoners to their countries for interrogation, some members of the European Parliament have been pushing hard for a thorough investigation. One of them, Austrian Hannes Swoboda, told the BBC recently that any evidence that these countries were not telling the truth would be a “bombshell” and that the European Commission would have to immediately push for their abolishment of detention areas and to send “a clear signal to all the governments that this is unacceptable”.

Calls for clarification have intensified in recent days. During a meeting of EU foreign ministers on 21 November, several countries called on Britain, which currently holds the EU presidency, to write to Washington for information about the prisons, a diplomat told the Associated Press. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, which monitors human rights violations across the continent, is also conducting its own investigation, led by a Swiss senator, Dick Marty. Marty has acknowledged that he currently lacks concrete evidence, but cited “many hints, such as suspicious moving patterns of aircraft” that he was looking into.

Should any of the investigations reveal Polish collusion, leading to condemnation from the EU or the Council of Europe, the idea of assisting Washington again may prove a difficult sell - no matter how enthusiastic the government in power.

Jeremy Druker is ISN Security Watch’s senior correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe. He was one of the founders of Transitions Online (TOL, www.tol.org) in 1999 and has been the executive director and editor in chief since then. Mr. Druker has contributed to publications such as US News & World Report, TI's Global Corruption Report, and Oxford Analytica. He is also the author of the chapter on the Czech Republic in the forthcoming Freedom House book, "Nations in Transit 2005". He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a master's in international affairs from Columbia University.

Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw assisted with the reporting for this story.

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