"The coup carried out on December 13, 1981, by General Jaruzelski and the Polish military quickly achieved its immediate aim--the destruction of the free trade union, Solidarity. While the highly effective operation was done under Soviet pressure, it was achieved by Poles acting against Poles. In the 15 months prior to the coup, Solidarity had eroded much of the communist power structure that had taken 35 years to build; however, the military and the police remained intact and loyal to communist authority. General Jaruzelski was able to pacify Poland, but even seven years after the coup, he has not been able to normalize Poland or to activate it. This paper describes the Jaruzelski regime, including characteristics of Jaruzelski's policy, struggles inside the regime, relations with the Catholic Church, and factors behind the "liberalization." It reviews the state of the Polish economy, describes the reform movement, and discusses the impasse between rulers and ruled."--Rand abstracts.

Despite the U.S. government's sophisticated intelligence capabilities, policy makers repeatedly seemed to be caught off guard when major crises took place during the Cold War. Were these surprises the result of inadequate information, or rather the use made of the information available? In seeking an answer to this question, former CIA analyst Douglas MacEachin carefully examines the crisis in Poland during 1980-81 to determine what information the U.S. government had about Soviet preparations for military intervention and the Polish regime's plans for martial law, and what prevented that information from being effectively employed Drawing on his experience in intelligence reporting at the time, as well as on recently declassified U.S. documents and materials from Soviet, Polish, and other Eastern European archives, MacEachin contrasts what was known then with what is known now, and seeks to explain why, despite the evidence available to them, U.S. policy makers did not take the threat of a crackdown seriously enough to prevent it. It was the mind-set of those who processed the information, not the lack or accuracy of information, that was the fundamental problem, MacEachin argues. By highlighting this cognitive obstacle, his analysis points the way toward developing practices to overcome it in the future.