Establishment and use of operational groupsof Department II of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of thePeople’s Republic of Poland, with particular emphasison the Operational Group „ODRA

Abstract

The security of the People’s Democracy consisted in stopping the NATO countries’ intelligence from influencing the internal situation of individual countries. Countering the enemy’s intelligence activity was carried out by civilian counterintelligence – Department II of the Interior Ministry. One element of counter-intelligence cooperation was the posting of Operational Groups to the partner country in order to expand the possibility of combating foreign intelligence activities against its own citizens in cooperation with the partner country. The re-search problem of the article is to define the scope of cooperation of the counter-intelligence services of the Eastern Bloc countries in combating the intelligence of capitalist states and ideological diversion using operational groups. The aim of the article is to present the Operational Groups as an instrument of the counter-intelligence services of socialist states to combat the hostile activities of capitalist states. The specific questions concern the purpose and legitimacy of the establishment of operational groups by Department II of the Interior Ministry, with particular regard to the consequences of the establishment, the course of work and the grounds for the termination of the operational group in Bulgaria codenamed „ODRA”. In pursuing the objective of the work, a research hypothesis was laid out according to which the functioning of the Operational Groups was an important instrument for deepening cooperation between countries of popular democracy aimed at combating the intelligence activities of capitalist countries. The research was carried out by analysing the content of archival documents collected in the Ar-chives of the Institute of National Remembrance and on the basis of open sources (available scientific articles). In addition, a direct source analysis method, a comparative method and a progressive method were used.