Speaking to Polish Radio, the author of the article in Gazeta Polska, Dorota Kania, said that she “accidentally” discovered that Schnepf’s father, Maksymilian Sznepf, moonlighted as a Communist agent for the Kremlin in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era in the US, while officially working as an attaché at the Washington embassy of the Polish People’s Republic.
While browsing in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance for research on an upcoming book, Kania said she “stumbled upon the documents” revealing that Maksymilian Sznepf was a secret agent working for the communists.
“Maksymilian Sznepf’s travel documents very clearly described his duties within the United States,” Kania said.
“Some people might… say ‘of course, but, he was an attaché of the erstwhile authorities, and his duties fell under the then Polish General Staff’, and this is the official story. But we must remember that this was 1954: a very specific time in the middle of the Cold War, when the [Polish] General Staff included Russian agents. […] This means that the top echelons of the General Staff was full of appointees from the GRU,” Kania said, referring to Moscow’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
“The travel documents of Maksymilian Sznepf were signed off by Konstantin Ivanov, a GRU Lieutenant Colonel. Other Russians on the General Staff [also] signed off on the documents.”
Kania listed a number of duties which she said Maksymilian Sznepf was told to perform during his time in Washington. These included “to inspect the American army, to collect all kinds of available information on infantry, the air force, artillery; in short all the elements of the US Army.”
“Apart from this,” Kania continued, “he was to meet with – and he was very closely briefed on this – with local agents. This confirms what we had already known, that there were many Soviet agents at the time in the US.”
“The strong influence of the USSR on the realities of the Polish People’s Republic has been closely examined and documented. I would like to say that this was started by the Commission led by Antoni Macierewicz [Poland’s current Defence Minister], who was heavily criticised at the time for uncovering problems in the secret services… Now we have evidence that Poles were among those who were sent abroad to do intelligence work.”
US Ambassador Ryszard Schnepf presented his credentials to President Barack Obama in January 2013, when the Civic Platform party was in power in Poland.
When contacted by Radio Poland, the US embassy in Washington declined to comment on these reports.