Though the first official Polish government service entrusted with espionage, intelligence and counter-intelligence was not formed until 1918, Kingdom of Poland and later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had developed networks of informants in neighbouring countries.
During the period when Poland had been partitioned (beginning in 1772, until 1918) by three adjacent empires, intelligence played an important role in patriotic Poles' surveillance of their occupiers and in their planning and conduct of successive Polish uprisings.
Additional intelligence was obtained from Russian defectors and prisoners of war who crossed the Polish lines in their thousands, especially after the 1920 Battle of Warsaw.
The Eastern Office (Referat "Wschód") had several dozen bureaus, mostly attached to Polish consulates in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Kharkov and Tbilisi.
The most important result of the subsequent information-sharing was the disclosure to France and Britain of Polish techniques and equipment for breaking German Enigma machine ciphers.
With the help of fellow mathematicians Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, Rejewski developed techniques to decrypt German Enigma-enciphered messages on a regular and timely basis.
After the 1939 invasion of Poland, practically all of the General Staff's Section II (Intelligence) command apparatus managed to escape to Romania and soon reached France and Britain.
Following the personal intervention of Churchill and Sikorski in September 1940, cooperation between British and Polish intelligence organizations entered a new phase.
Agents working in Poland in the spring of 1941 supplied extensive intelligence about German preparations to invade the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).
Agency Africa was set up in July 1941 in Algiers by Mieczyslaw Zygfryd Slowikowski, Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki; using the codename "Rygor" (Polish for "Rigor").
Polish spies also documented German atrocities being perpetrated at Auschwitz (Witold Pilecki's report) and elsewhere in Poland against Jewish and non-Jewish populations.
Polish intelligence gave the British crucial information on Germany's secret-weapons projects, including the V-1 and V-2 rockets, enabling Britain to set back these German programs by bombing the main development facility at Peenemünde in 1943.
[2] The SOE planted Polish agents disguised as British Liaison Officers in operations Desford and Windproof to strengthen intelligence gathering and coordinate with Hungarian and Slovak groups in spite of the imminent Soviet occupation.
The truth, which had previously been disclosed in Bertrand's book and would later be detailed in papers by Marian Rejewski (who had survived the war and lived to 1980), made slow headway against British and American obfuscations, mendacities and fabrications.
[6][7][4] According to Marek Ney-Krwawicz [pl], for the Western Allies, the intelligence provided by the Home Army was considered to be the best source of information on the Eastern Front.
Weapons, ammo and medical supplies were smuggled into occupied Poland from Japan, through neutral nations, using Japanese diplomatic offices along the way.
At the same time, in NKVD-NKGB schools all over the USSR, hundreds of Germans, Romanians, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians had also undergone the same training in order to prepare them for work in future special services in their respective countries.
One of them was the Department of Public Security (Resort Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego), or RBP, headed by long-time Polish communist Stanisław Radkiewicz.
It was then transformed into the Provisional Government of Republic of Poland (Rząd Tymczasowy Republiki Polskiej, or RTRP), and the departments were renamed as ministries.
From September 3, 1955, to 28 November 1956, the Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army (Główny Zarząd Informacji Wojska Polskiego), which was responsible for the military police and counter-espionage agency, was also controlled by the Kds.BP.
The MSW was responsible for the supervision of local governments, Militsiya, correctional facilities, fire rescue and the border and internal guards.
First organ that dealt with military counterespionage was called Directorate of Information by the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army (Zarząd Informacji Naczelnego Dowódcy Wojska Polskiego, or ZI NDWP).
In November 1956 the GZI Kds.BP separated from the Committee for Public Security, and returned to its previous role, becoming again the Main Directorate of Information of the Ministry of Defense.
After the reform instituted by Władysław Gomułka in 1956, and the role the GZI played in repressions and executions, the Main Directorate of Information of Ministry of Defense was canceled in 1957 and replaced by the Military Internal Service (Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna, or WSW).
Odział II Szt Gen WP was established on July 18, 1945, but its origins can be traced to May 1943, when the first reconnaissance company was created in Polish Army units in the USSR.
Between July 1947 and June 5, 1950, the Second Section of General Staff of the Polish People's Army operated within the structure of the Ministry of Public Security together with the civilian intelligence branch as Department VII.
Internal organization was transformed from sections to directorates and intelligence work among the United States, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria was expanded to countries such as Norway, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Israel.
In 1991 the Second Directorate for Intelligence and Counter-intelligence was transformed into Military Information Services (Wojskowe Służby Informacyjne, or WSI), and continues to function under this name.
Most of the time the agency evaded public attention, although it was dragged into political fighting over appointments of its chiefs, lustration and some perceived failures with organized crime cases.
The new Polish conservative government declared dissolution of the WSI and creating new services in October 2005, since the agency skipped serious external reforms after the collapse of communism in 1989.