Ryszard Kapuscinski

Famed Polish writer spy for communists: report

Natalia Reiter, Reuters
The Gazette (Montreal)
Published: Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the late Polish writer often tipped for the Nobel prize, spied for the state's communist-era regime while producing chronicles of world trouble spots that made him famous, a paper said yesterday.

From 1959 to 1981, while Poland was ruled by the Soviet-backed communist regime, Kapuscinski, who died in January at age 74, covered the globe's poorest and most dangerous places as a correspondent for the state-run Polish news agency PAP.

The author of Emperor, an account of the downfall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie and Shah of Shahs, on the overthrow of Iran's Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, travelled across Africa and South America at the time of his alleged collaboration.

The Polish weekly Newsweek published extracts of Kapuscinski's files held by the Polish Remembrance Institute that expose him as an agent for the communist secret police in the years 1967-1972...