Three former senior officers for Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) have been charged with maintaining ties with Russia’s security service and face up to 10 years in prison, according to a report.

The three former top SKW officials, Piotr Pytel, Janusz Nosek and Krzysztof Dusza, are suspected of maintaining contacts with a Russian security service officer and of acting for the benefit of a foreign intelligence service, the niezalezna.pl news website reported on Wednesday.

Dusza as well as Pytel are also suspected of falsifying the data of a representative of Russia’s FSB security service who was based at the Russian embassy in Warsaw, thus enabling him to stay in restricted zones in Poland and gain access to Polish military secrets, niezalezna.pl said.

The FSB is Russia’s principal security agency and the main successor agency to the KGB.

Relations between Moscow and Warsaw are tense while Russian intelligence services are widely seen in Poland as hostile to this country.

Poland’s Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said last week that the former heads of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) were suspected of “the worst type of betrayal a Pole can commit."

"This is about fully conscious and illegal cooperation with Russian spies, about the worst type of betrayal a Pole can commit," Macierewicz told public broadcaster TVP Info last Wednesday.

"We are dealing with people who have very serious allegations against them,” he added.

Poland’s Gazeta Polska weekly reported last year that Pytel, at a time when he worked as director of the SKW's Operational Board, and Dusza, in his role as Pytel’s chief of staff, had met with a representative of the Russian intelligence service in Poland who was identified only by his initials as W.J., niezalezna.pl said. The meetings took place at a time when the SKW was headed by General Janusz Nosek, and the government was headed by the Civic Platform party, according niezalezna.pl.

One of the meetings took place in the village of Ułowo in northeastern Poland, not far from where the country borders on Russia’s Kaliningrad region. Several other Russian intelligence officers also took part in that meeting over dinner with heavy alcohol consumption, niezalezna.pl said.

The niezalezna.pl website quoted Warsaw prosecutors as alleging that the suspects overstepped their powers by “cooperating, without the required consent, with representatives of the Russian Federal Security Service, whose goals stand in contradiction with those of NATO.”

Nosek said last Wednesday that all allegations against him were "untrue" and politically-motivated.

(gs/pk)

Source: niezalezna.pl, Gazeta Polska