Jan Kowalewski – the genius of Polish intelligence

Jan Kowalewski /en.wikipedia.org

Jan Kowalewski – the genius of Polish intelligence

Jan Kowalewski was one of the most respected officers in Polish intelligence. It was he who set up a special cryptanalysis unit to break enemy cyphers during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921). Their successes contributed to the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ in 1920.

Jan Kowalewski was born in Lodz in 1892. He studied technical chemistry and initially worked as an engineer. He spoke several foreign languages. He took part in the First World War – initially compulsorily mobilized into the Russian army, and then as a member of Polish military formations at the side of the Entente. At that time he served as chief of intelligence of one of the divisions of Haller’s army.

As Jan Kowalewski had exceptional mathematical and analytical skills and knew the Russian military inside out, after Poland regained its independence (1918) he was given the task of setting up a special group at the General Staff of the Polish Army to deal with cryptanalysis. The group included professors from the University of Lviv and the University of Warsaw, leading representatives of the Polish school of mathematics.

Saxon Palace in Warsaw in 1930. This is where the headquarters of the Cipher Bureau was located (public domain).

By the end of the war, Jan Kowalewski’s group had broken more than 100 codes and read several thousand Soviet cyphers. In this way, Polish mathematicians and cryptologists played a key role in the victory over the Soviets. Their genius helped to save Polish independence and to protect Central Europe and parts of Western Europe from Soviet occupation and bloody terror.

Jan Kowalewski himself played a major role in this process, breaking the first Red Army codes in the summer of 1919. He was on night duty one August evening. His job was to sort out the radio messages from the surveillance. As he recalled, he was driven by curiosity to try to decipher the messages. He took a comb with broken teeth and ran it over the text of the messages. The rest is history.

A group of Polish officers during the Third Silesian Uprising in front of the palace in Slawentzitz (Sławięcice). In the foreground, from the right: Captain Leon Bulowski, Captain Robert Oszek (2nd from the right), Captain Jan Chodźko, Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski /en.wikipedia.org

The success of Jan Kowalewski and his colleagues was absolute. The Polish High Command knew the enemy’s plans at the same time as the Soviet staff – and often before. The Poles knew what was happening at the front, the mood of the Soviet army, its numbers and the quality of its weapons, as well as the balance of power in the civil war then raging in Russia (1918-1920).

No one else but Jan Kowalewski broke the new Soviet cypher code, codenamed ‘Revolution’, on 12 August 1920, just before the Battle of Warsaw. On this basis, the Supreme Command drew up a plan for defence and subsequent counterattack. In 1922 Kowalewski was awarded the Order of Military Virtues. General Władysław Sikorski is supposed to have said: ‘For winning the war, Lieutenant.’

After the victory over the Soviets, Jan Kowalewski was sent to Upper Silesia, where he served as Chief of Staff Intelligence for the insurgent troops in the Third Silesian Uprising. He was then sent to Tokyo, where he trained Japanese intelligence officers in breaking Soviet codes (1923). From 1928 to 1933 he was military attaché at the Polish embassy in Moscow and from 1933 to 1937 in Bucharest. After the outbreak of the Second World War and the evacuation of the Polish authorities to Romania, Jan Kowalewski organised aid for Polish refugees. He also carried out intelligence and diplomatic activities on behalf of the Polish government in exile. After the war, he remained in exile in London, where he worked with Radio Free Europe. He died of cancer in 1965. Jan Kowalewski was posthumously promoted to the rank of Brigadier General.

Patryk Palka

Source: DlaPolonii.pl