Event: Launch of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee Report
Location: London
Speech Date: 04/07/05
Speaker: Jack Straw (British Foreign Minister)

Let me welcome you all very warmly to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I want to say a particular welcome to those veterans of wartime intelligence and their family members who are here today, including - I gather - several relatives of the Polish Enigma code-breakers.

This report is special for two reasons.

First, it covers an area of history whose very nature is secret. Even 60 years after the end of the Second World War, much of the story of wartime intelligence remains untold, and its heroes unsung.
Thanks both to the access they had to secret archives, and to their own perseverance and dedication, the members of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee have succeeded in finding material which had lain undiscovered for many years. Much is both fascinating in itself and of enormous help to future scholars.
I pay tribute to the authors and all the members of the Committee for their work.
I particularly want to thank the joint chair-women, Tessa Stirling and Daria Nalecz. And I want to pay a special tribute to the Committee's Honorary Chairman, Jan Nowak Jezioranski, who so very sadly passed away earlier this year. There was no better or more passionate supporter of this Committee's work; and I believe that if he were with us today he would have every reason to feel
satisfied and proud of what it has achieved.

The second and most important reason why this report is so timely is that it leaves absolutely no doubt about the crucial role which Polish intelligence played in winning the War. It helps to set the historical record straight - something which we all know is of great importance 60 years on.
Many of us are already aware of how Polish mathematicians were the first to break the Enigma codes: that knowledge gave the Allies a decisive advantage in the crucial battles of the War. But not everyone is aware of the role that Polish code-breakers continued to play throughout the war - many people in this country assume, wrongly, that all those that worked at Bletchley Park were
British by birth.

This report brings other tales of heroism to light - of Polish officers who collected and passed on information on Hitler's V-weapons; of work by the Polish underground to report on German movements before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; of a Polish double agent known only as 'Brutus', who passed his-information to the Germans about the D-Day landings.
In the words of Commander Wilfred Dunderdale of the Secret Intelligence Service's Polish liaison section, 'The Polish intelligence service made an invaluable contribution to the ultimate victory of the Allied forces in Europe'. Over 130 Poles were decorated for their part in that.
Inevitably and tragically, the human cost was heavy. Hundreds of thousands of Poles suffered capture, torture and death in the fight against Nazi tyranny and for the freedom of their homeland. On behalf of the British Government as a whole, I pay tribute to them today, and
to their families, for their courage and their sacrifice.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Unlike the UK, Poland had to wait 45 years after the end of the War to win for itself the freedom and democracy for which those heroes fought and worked. But as Winston Churchill said in the dark days of 1939, 'the soul of Poland is indestructible'. Today a free, independent, democratic Poland has taken its rightful place as a full member of the European family. The United Kingdom and Poland enjoy the closest of partnerships, and we are proud of the longstanding,
strong - and growing - Polish community here in the UK.
Without the contribution of Polish intelligence throughout the War, the victory of peace and democracy on our continent would have been far less certain. This report brings the full extent of that contribution to light. I commend it to you all.