The Magdeburg Sting 1936

Poland's Marshal Piłsudski and his staff enjoyed a vast advantage from their military intelligence decrypting ("breaking") Red Army's radio messages. These were encrypted in primitive ciphers and codes, and often involved incredible breaches of security by soviet cipher clerks. The Polish cryptologists and commanders were thus regularly able to look over the shoulders of the soviet commanders, including Tukhachevski, Budienny, and their superior, Leon Trotsky.

One of the most important episode of battle for Warsaw was overtaking, by 203 Polish Battalion of Kalisk's Cavalry, of IVth soviet Army headquarters in Ciechanow on 15 August. Along with headquarters Polish took all stores of supplies, headquarters' archives and one of two radio stations used by soviets to communicate with commanders in Minsk. Polish were aware that the second radio station was switched off since it was moving to a new position. In the same time gen. Tuchaczewski sent an order to IVth Soviet Army to change it progress to south-west and attack the Army of gen. Sikorski which was fighting near Nasielsk. Quick decoding of this order allowed Polish commanders to analyse the situation and undertake a decision to use Warsaw Citadel's radio station to effectively interrupt soviet radio communications with IVth Army by sending on the same frequency, during 3 days, a continuous stream of Bible text - the only large enough text that radio-operators could find. The weak radio signals from faraway Minsk were overcome. It must be mentioned that Polish commanders were considering issuing false orders to lost units of soviet IVth Army but the idea was abandoned to protect Polish ability to decode soviet communications.

IVth soviet Army loosing its headquarters and the contact with front commanders become desorganised. Not being capable to listen to new orders changing its movment, the IVth soviet Army, with its six divisions, was continuing to progress along previously established direction reaching Torun in Pomorze, thus it was efectivly eliminated from the Battle of Warsaw.

On 16 of August 1920, Polish 4th Army initiated, from Wieprz, the attack on rears of soviet armies surrounding Warsaw. After breaking through weak defences of soviet Mozyrska Group, Polish units reach Bug line without encountering any significant resistance. In the same time, the remaining Polish Armies started counteroffensive on the whole front line. Polish 5th Army, from Wkry, attacked XVth and IIIth soviet Armies. Due to a lack of radio communication with commanders, exhaustion and lack of supplies, majority of soviet units surprised by Polish attack retreated in disorganized fashion. Two Divisions of IIIth soviet Cavalry Corp of Gaj-Chan brothers with six Divisions of IVth and XVth soviet Armies unable to brake out east crossed on 24 of August German border and took refuge on territory of Western Prussia.

A Polish Army "Cipher Section" (Sekcja Szyfrów) was created by Lt. Józef Stanslicki on May 8, 1919, and a few months later was renamed the "Cipher Bureau" (Biuro Szyfrów). Reporting to the Polish General Staff, it contributed substantially to Józef Piłsudski's defense of Poland in the Polish-bolshevik War (1919-1921). Soviet military cryptography at the time was primitive and, when actually used, was further weakened by Soviet cipher clerks' neglect of elementary security practices.

The commonest Russian cipher was broken as early as 1919 by a young mathematician, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, later vice rector of Warsaw University. Thanks to this, orders issued by Soviet commander Mikhail Tukhachevski's staff were known to Polish Army leaders. Under the auspices of Col. Tadeusz Schaetzel, chief of the Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence), the Polish cryptologists enjoyed generous support as they labored at Warsaw's radio station WAR, one of two Polish long-range radio transmitters.

Thanks to breaking Russian ciphers, the Poles discovered a large gap in the Red Army's left flank and drove a wedge into that gap during the August 1920 Battle of Warsaw. The cryptologists also subsequently determined that the 4th Red Army had lost contact with its headquarters; as a result, it continued its drive into Pomerania (Pomorze), on the Baltic coast - even after the bulk of bolshevik forces were in retreat - and was completely destroyed.

According to documents found in 2005 at Poland's Central Military Archives, Polish cryptologists broke intercepted Russian ciphers as early as September 1919. At least some Polish victories, not only during the Battle of Warsaw but throughout the campaign, are attributable to this. Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski, credited with the original breakthrough, received the order of Virtuti Militari in 1921.

Lt. Col. Jan Kowalewski (1892-1965) was a Polish cryptologist, spy, journalist, engineer and military commander, as well as the creator and first head of the Cipher Bureau of the Polish intelligence. He was responsible for breaking the bolshevik military ciphers during the Polish-bolshevik War, which made possible the Polish success in the battle of Warsaw of 1920.

Jan Kowalewski was born 1892 in Lódz, Poland, then under rule of the Russian Empire. After graduating from a local trade school, between 1909 and 1913 he studied at the University of Liège in Belgium, where he graduated from the faculty of chemistry. He returned to Poland in 1913, only to be mobilized for the Russian Army the following year, at the outbreak of World War I. He fought in various formations on the Belarusian and Romanian fronts as an officer of the Engineering and Signal Corps, and in December of 1918 he was allowed to join the Polish unit formed under command of Gen. Lucjan Zeligowski out of Poles living in Russia. As a chief of intelligence in the staff of the Polish 4th Rifle Division he crossed the border with Romania and, together with the rest of the unit, he reached Poland in May of 1919. A polyglot and amateur cryptanalyst, he was initially attached to the staff of Gen. Józef Haller de Hallenburg fighting in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland during the Polish-Ukrainian War for the city of Lwów. During his service there he managed to break the codes and ciphers of the army of Western Ukrainian National Republic and the White forces of General Anton Denikin. Although his discovery was caused by an accident and boredom (he had to spent all night segregating the intercepted radio messages and discard all the ciphered ones), it became a major sensation in the staff. Because of that, in July of 1919 he was transferred to Warsaw, where he became the head of the radio intelligence department of the Polish General Staff. By early September he gathered a group of mathematicians from the Warsaw University and Lwów University (most notably the founders of the Polish School of Mathematics Stanisław Lesniewski, Stefan Mazurkiewicz and Wacław Sierpinski), who were able to break the German ciphers as well. Although his contribution to the Polish victory in the Polish-bolshevik War remained a secret for more than 70 years, he was awarded the prestigious Virtuti Militari medal, the highest Polish military award.

After the war ended, he was attached to the staff of the Third Silesian Uprising as the commander of intelligence services. In 1923 he was sent to Tokyo, where he organized course of radio intelligence for Japanese officers. In 1928 he graduated from the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris and was promoted to the rank of Major. Although not directly involved in radio intelligence any more, he remained a Polish intelligence officer. Since 1929 he served as a military attaché at the Polish embassy in Moscow. In 1933 he was found persona non grata and was moved to a similar post in the embassy in Bucharest, where he remained until 1937. Upon his return to Poland he briefly headed one of the branches of the Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego political organization and became the director of TISSA company, a Polish intelligence-sponsored company importing rare materials for the Polish arms industry. He was also promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

After the outbreak of the Polish Defensive War of 1939 he was evacuated to Romania, where he headed a committee of relief for Polish war refugees. In January of 1940 he moved to France, where he joined the Polish Army in exile and became one of the authors of an Allied offensive in the Balkans. However, the German spring offensive and the fall of France made the plan obsolete and Kowalewski had to flee the German-occupied country. Through Vichy France and Spain he reached Portugal, where he formed yet another committee of relief for war refugees. Initially based in Figueira da Foz, soon he moved to Lisbon, at the time of the capitals of espionage and battleground for spies of all countries involved in World War II. There he entered in contact with his colleague Jean Pangal, a Romanian centrist politician and a former Romanian envoy to Lisbon. Although dismissed by the end of 1941 by Romanian leader Ion Antonescu for his pro-Allied stance, Pangal remained in Lisbon and became one of the collaborators of the Polish intelligence in Allied attempts to win over the allies of the Third Reich - Hungary, Romania, Italy, Finland and Italy.

The cooperation with Pangal proved vital to Polish and Allied war effort and Lt. Col. Kowalewski managed to convince Gen. Władysław Sikorski and minister Jan Kot to create a centre of Polish intelligence in Lisbon on January 15, 1941. Officially named Centre for Contact with the Continent (Placówka Wacznosci z Kontynentem), the Lisbon-based bureau was headed by Kowalewski and soon became the main centre of an extensive net of Polish resistance, sabotage and intelligence organizations throughout occupied Europe. Aside from similar groups in Poland itself, which were directly headed from London or Warsaw, the centre coordinated the efforts of dozens of groups in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Northern Africa, Spain and even Germany. The centre organized communication between the Polish Government in Exile and occupied Europe, as well as provided logistical and economic support for Polish resistance groups spread throughout Western Europe. The intelligence network led by Kowalewski was also helpful to the British government, as most of his reports were passed either to SOE or to Ministry of Economic Warfare. Among the most notable actions in Portugal was passing the information of the exact date of the outbreak of the Operation Barbarossa to the British who were informed of the fact at least 2 weeks prior to the actual invasion of Russia. Kowalewski also managed to neutralize a secret radio station used by the Germans to communicate with the U-Boots operating in the Atlantic Ocean. He was also crucial in allowing former Romanian king Carol II escape from Romania and then leave Spain for Lisbon.

However, despite the fact that Kowalewski had contacts with numerous politicians of Hungary, Romania and Italy willing to change sides, the situation changed after the Casablanca Conference of 1943, when the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of the Axis. The situation further deteriorated after the Tehran Conference, when it became clear that Hungary and Romania will fall under Soviet domination anyway and that the plan for a second front in the Balkans, which would allow the Hungarians and Romanians to break with the Nazi Germany was finally dismissed. According to recent research by a Polish-British joint history commission for investigation of Polish WWII intelligence service, at the latter conference the Soviets demanded that Kowalewski be withdrawn from his post to England. In late January of 1944 Frank K. Roberts, the head of the Central Department of the British Foreign Office informed Gen. Colin McVean Gubbins, the head of the SOE, that Kowalewski's network is not only aimed at the Germans, but also at creating a common Polish-Hungarian-Romanian Bloc, which was allegedly aimed at vivid Soviet interests.

On March 6, 1944 sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office informed the Polish minister of foreign affairs Edward Raczynski that Kowalewski's contacts with the opposing powers could be treated as treachery and that he should be dismissed. Although no proofs were presented, the Polish government felt forced to obey the British wish and Kowalewski was dismissed from his post on March 20 and on April 5 he was transported to London.

Kowalewski was named the chief of the Polish Operations Bureau at the Special Forces Headquarters. Among his task was preparation of the Polish resistance organizations in occupied Europe for the Operation Overlord. However, his post was mostly titular as it was already too late for any arrangements and Kowalewski could change nothing.

After the war Kowalewski remained in exile in Great Britain, where he started working as a journalist. Until 1955 he was the editor in chief of a East Europe and Soviet Russia monthly. In 1958 and 1959 he was also a tutor at an unofficial military school for the Polish diaspora. He also briefly collaborated with Radio Free Europe and other Polish exile organizations. In his late years, in 1963, he briefly returned to cryptanalysis and managed to break the codes used by Romuald Traugutt during the January Uprising. He died of cancer on October 31, 1965 in London.

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