Kazimierz Leski

Kazimierz Leski was born in Warsaw on 21 June 1912 to Maria Marta (née Olszyńska) (1886-1949) and Juliusz Stanisław Natanson-Leski (1884-1953).

His older sister was Anna Leska (1910-1998) one of three Polish women to fly in the British Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War.

Initially working as a draughtsman, Leski learned the Dutch language, enabling him to rise quickly through the ranks of the design bureau.

His career in Dutch shipbuilding was sped up by the Netherlands having won a contract to build two modern Orzeł class submarines for the Polish Navy.

He undertook additional studies at the Maritime Faculty of the Delft University of Technology and became one of the heads of the Submarine Division at NVSB, responsible for comparing the designs with the supplied machinery.

Thus Leski– still suffering from wounds received in September 1939 and unfit for front-line service in the Forest Units– became a leading intelligence officer with the Musketeers and later with the Home Army.

He and his cell also prepared detailed reports on the logistics and transport of German units bound for the Eastern Front, and on the state of bridges, railways and roads in German-held Europe.

Among them was his 1942 visit to the Atlantic Wall construction site, which was made possible because he convinced one of the passengers in his car that his superiors might want to build a similar line of fortifications in Ukraine.

[5] Apart from his service in intelligence and counter-intelligence, he also took over a cell focused on smuggling information and people in and out of German prisons in occupied Poland, notably the infamous Pawiak.

A member of the Wolność i Niezawisłość anti-communist resistance, under the false name Leon Juchniewicz he became the first managing director of the demolished Gdańsk Shipyard.

In August 1945 he received the communist regime's highest civilian award, but later the same day was arrested by the secret police, who had discovered his true identity.

Awarded a doctorate, for political reasons he could not receive the rank of professor for his work on computer analysis of natural language codes.