history file
by Reg Reynolds
the mystery of the
black satchel and other things Last month I was lucky enough to happen upon a television documentary on the death of Polish President in-exile Wladylaw Sikorski in an airplane crash at Gibraltar. The programme was part of a series titled Infamous Assassinations and appeared on the television channel Yesterday. It was 30 minutes long and there were excellent black and white photographs and film of Gibraltar along with Sikorski, Governor Noel Mason-Macfarlane and Russian Ambassador to Britain Ivan Maisky. I have written about the Sikorski incident on numerous occasions but this programme provided new information that adds to the mystery — was it an accident or was it sabotage? As most readers will be aware General Sikorski and 15 others were killed when the B-24 Liberator he was flying in crashed on take-off at Gibraltar. The sole survivor was the Czech-born pilot, Max Prchal, who was rescued by a RAF launch. Prchal blamed the crash on the controls of the Liberator jamming and a court of inquiry found “…the aircraft became uncontrollable for reasons which cannot be established. The pilot having eased the column forward to build up speed after take-off, found that he was unable to move it back at all, the elevator controls being virtually jammed somewhere in the system.” So officially the crash was put down to an unexplainable accident but there are several inconvenient coincidences to fuel the sabotage theory — Maisky was on Gibraltar at the same time as Sikorski and his
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plane was parked right next to the Liberator; traitor spy Kim Philby was also in Gibraltar; and a Polish courier named Jan Gralewski had arrived at the Rock the previous night with a black leather satchel containing highly sensitive information destined for British Intelligence. I had heard of the Polish agent and the black satchel before but what this television programme revealed I found intriguing. The day after the crash a British dive team headed by Lt. Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb retrieved the black satchel and turned it over to MasonMacfarlane. According to the programme the black satchel then
‘disappeared’. One would think Mason-Macfarlane would have made the protection and safe delivery of the satchel a top priority. What information did it contain? What did MasonMacfarlane do with it? Most likely the satchel held evidence of the murder of thousands of Polish Officers by the Soviets. When the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 thousands of military officers, policemen and intellectuals were taken prisoner. Lavrentiy Beria, head of Soviet Intelligence, proposed that the entire Polish officer corps be wiped out and as a result more than 4,000 were executed in what is Mason-Macfarlane with Churchill
known as the Katyn Massacre. The Germans pushed the Russians out of Poland in 1941 and in March 1943 discovered a mass grave in the Katyn Forest. The Germans blamed the Russians and in turn Russian President Josef Stalin said it was the Germans who had committed the atrocity. Much to Stalin’s displeasure Sikorski was publicly demanding the International Red Cross carry out an investigation. Stalin would have been highly embarrassed if the truth had come out and it is conceivable he would have done anything possible to keep from being exposed for the butcher he was. The timely death of Sikorski, the most powerful and influential of the Poles, meant it wouldn’t be until many years later that it would be confirmed it was the Soviet NKVD who exterminated the Polish Officers. Supporters of Stalinist Russia preferred to believe the Soviet leader rather than the equally despicable Nazis but clothing worn by the victims, documents they carried and letters they had written to loved ones conclusively proved the Russians were the killers. After the fall of the Soviet Union a document (dated March 5, 1940) ordering the executions of the officers came to light and it contained the signature of Stalin and all members of the politburo. Another curious coincidence of this whole gruesome affair is that
GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • DECEMBER 2009