The Head of the Chancellery of the Sejm, Marek Siwiec, does not hold a security clearance. The information revealed today by Niezalezna.pl is all the more shocking given that – as previously reported by Gazeta Polska – Siwiec had been considered for the position of… deputy coordinator for special services.
The close associate of Włodzimierz Czarzasty and current Head of the Chancellery of the Sejm, Marek Siwiec, has not applied for a security clearance granting access to classified NATO and EU information, issued by the Internal Security Agency (ABW) – the portal Niezalezna.pl has learned. He has had time to do so since late November, when he assumed office.
These revelations are particularly striking because as early as December, Gazeta Polska reported that Siwiec had previously been considered for a role in Donald Tusk’s government. The Left had sought, as part of the coalition division of posts, for him to take the position of deputy coordinator for special services, overseeing the intelligence agencies. That role is directly connected with access to classified information.
Marek Siwiec – Who Is the Head of the Chancellery of the Sejm?
After Włodzimierz Czarzasty became Speaker of the Sejm following the “rotation,” he appointed Marek Siwiec as Head of the Chancellery of the Sejm.
Marek Siwiec was born in 1955 in Piekary Śląskie. As Piotr Nisztor wrote in Gazeta Polska, Siwiec’s father was one of the directors of Siarkopol Tarnobrzeg, while his mother was a district prosecutor there. Siwiec himself was an influential activist in the Socialist Union of Polish Students and an active member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR).
According to registry records preserved in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), in March 1986 Siwiec was registered by the Kraków Security Service (SB) as a secret collaborator under the codename “Jerzy.”
Sławomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, in their book “SB a Lech Wałęsa. Przyczynek do biografii” (“The SB and Lech Wałęsa: A Contribution to a Biography”), noted in one of the footnotes that in November 1987 Siwiec was taken over by Department VII of Division III of the Ministry of the Interior, which dealt, among other things, with operations targeting journalistic circles. At the time, Siwiec was editor-in-chief of the biweekly Student, and later of the weekly ITD. The same security unit registered Aleksander Kwaśniewski – later President of Poland and for years one of Siwiec’s closest associates – as a secret collaborator under the codename “Alek.” In both cases, only registry entries have been preserved in the IPN archives; the files themselves are missing. Siwiec has denied cooperating with the SB.
In 1996, Siwiec moved to the Presidential Palace and became head of the National Security Bureau (BBN). As head of the BBN, he stated that “Poland supports cooperation between NATO and Russia.” Siwiec left the Presidential Chancellery in 2004 after winning a seat in the European Parliament, where he served for two terms.
“During that time, he was also briefly head of the Ordynacka Association, an influential organization bringing together figures linked to the post-communist left. In 2006, he was replaced by Włodzimierz Czarzasty,” Nisztor wrote in GP.
In 2014, Siwiec failed to win re-election to the European Parliament. As a result, he left politics – but, as it turned out, only temporarily…