Kwasniewski: Poland received CIA money since early 90s

The Stare Kiejkuty facility was used by the CIA for interrogations (photo: PAP/EPA/Tomasz Waszczuk)

In a candid interview with Polish Radio, Kwasniewski said that he knew nothing of the money transfer, but admitted that the Polish Intelligence Service had the authority to accept such transfers.

Kwasniewski also said that CIA money had flowed into Poland on several occasions since the beginning of the 1990s.

The comments followed reports by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza quoting unnamed sources that the CIA paid 30 million US dollars to Poland in 2003 for “special operations”.

Earlier in 2014, The Washington Post had reported that the secretive US agency had transferred 15 million US dollars to Poland for providing sites used for interrogation following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s anonymous source said: “The figure wasn’t 15 million but 30 million dollars. They brought them to the [Foreign Intelligence] Agency [on Warsaw’s Milobedzka street in Warsaw] in three huge packages, carried on metal trolleys. The money was in stacks of 100,000, all in 100 dollar bills. They were old notes which were bigger and thus took up more space than the new ones. [The Agency’s] Deputy Chief Colonel [Andrzej] Derlatka called the head of the finance department, who promptly put his head in his hands in disbelief. He quickly wrote a letter to the head of the [National Bank of Poland] to set up a foreign currency account. The cashier drove it to the NBP [...]. It was a special case, in which we could fit exactly a million dollars. And so, over a year -- or perhaps 18 months -- a million a time, we deposited all the money into the account.” (rg)

Source: IAR, Gazeta Wyborcza