SIS, wrote in November 1947 that if the FO was going to take the view that it had ‘inescapable obligations to all these people in the Iron Curtain countries’, then it might be necessary to consider setting up ‘a clandestine organisation on the lines of MI9 in the war,3 devoted solely to the evacuation of escapers and not concerned in any way with intelligence’. William Hayter, head of Services Liaison Department (the precursor of PUSD), agreed: ‘C’s organisation exists to provide intelligence. Its use for other purposes can only be justified in very exceptional cases of major importance.’4 Nevertheless, there were occasions when the FO pressed SIS hard for help in getting people out of Eastern Europe, and there was cooperation—sometimes fruitful, sometimes less so—on potential escapes, as the PUSD files show. One high-profile escapee was Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who got out of Poland following the fall of Warsaw to the Nazis in September 1939, and served in the Polish government in exile in London, becoming Prime Minister on the death of General Sikorski in 1943. Seen by the British as the best hope for standing up to the Communists in the Soviet-controlled government set up after the Yalta Conference in February 1945, he was encouraged to return to Poland in July 1945 by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who promised him that he ‘need have no fears for his personal safety’, and that the British government would ‘back him to the limit of their strength’.5 Churchill added that this guarantee was a non-Party matter, and when he was replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Attlee, shortly after Mikolajczyk’s return to Poland, the Labour government assumed responsibility for the promise Churchill had given. By 1947, Mikolajczyk, Deputy Prime Minister and the only non-Communist in the Polish government, knew it was only a matter of time before he was arrested. The FO received intelligence that if attempts to incriminate him and his Peasant Party through show trials were unsuccessful, the Ministry of Security was liable to arrange for him to have an ‘accident’. Though Mikolajczyk did not want to leave Poland— reports said he found the prospect ‘repugnant’—it was increasingly clear that he might have to do so if he wanted to stay alive. The FO asked SIS to consider how he might be exfiltrated, and several schemes were proposed using alternative routes. However, SIS insisted that a long period of planning could be needed, and that Mikolajczyk must be prepared to adopt without question whatever timing and method they proposed.
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