Poland summons ambassador home over spy claims

Poland called its ambassador to Austria home for talks on Monday after an official report identified him as a collaborator with a disbanded intelligence agency that the government says worked for Russia.

Ambassador Marek Jedrys was named on Friday in a 400-page government report that accused hundreds of Poles in positions of authority of working for Poland's Military Intelligence Service (WSI), disbanded last year by the conservative-led government.

The government says the agency, staffed by Soviet-trained agents, kept close ties with Moscow even after the fall of communism in 1989, allowing Russian spies to work on Polish soil and controlling many of the levers of power.

'We have called Mr Jedrys to Warsaw for consultations,' Pawel Zalewski, head of parliament's foreign policy committee, was quoted by Poland's national PAP news agency as saying.

It was not clear what Jedrys's alleged relationship with the WSI was. He himself was not available for immediate comment.

A campaign by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to root out former communists and their associates from public life has already affected several senior officials.

Earlier this month, Andrzej Krawczyk, foreign adviser to President Lech Kaczynski, the prime minister's twin brother, resigned amid accusations he was an informer for the communist secret police before 1989. Krawczyk has denied any wrongdoing.

In a major embarrassment for the Vatican, the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, resigned in January after files showed he had collaborated with communist secret police.

Critics of the government say Friday's report contained plenty of innuendo but little evidence and that it failed to back up claims by Kaczynski that ex-communists had too much influence on Polish public life.

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