“MRR”: His Life

In April he returned to his headquarters, the MBP building in Warsaw (now the seat of the Ministry of Justice). Reich was given ever greater responsibilities. For a time he was the head of the secret service responsible for Germany, and then for Great Britain. At the start of 1948 he was sent to London on his hitherto most important job abroad. The Cold War had begun, London was not only the capital of the then strongest military power in the Western world, but also the major city for Polish exiles and the headquarters of the (non-Communist) exile government.

However, during preparations for the new job he was told that it would be impossible for him to represent Poland with the name “Reich”. As with several Jews in post-war Poland, above all those who worked in the Party or for the State, Reich gave himself a “Polish sounding” name that was more than just a pseudonym. From now on the name in his passport was Marceli Ranicki. Years later he said that he had accidentally got to know a girl by the same name. This was possibly a young colleague called Janina Ranicka who worked in the censorship office for foreign postal communications.

This time it was crystal clear that Ranicki would have two main duties in London. He was to be the Resident, i.e. the top Polish secret service agent in the whole of Great Britain: and because he was a “legend” he was also given a job in the Foreign Ministry with whose deatils he had to acquaint himself as quickly as possible. Thus Mr. Ranicki was initially a Vice-Consul and later the Consul and Head of the Polish consulate general. At the age of 28 he was the youngest diplomat in London with such a rank. 

Alongside his everyday consular duties Ranicki worked on other jobs for the Security Ministry. In his autobiography, he tries to play them down in an amusing manner: “I have neither a false beard nor a toupee.” He also had “no contacts whatsoever with exile Poles.“ Nonetheless he does not deny that he employed “10 to 15 members of staff, most of whom were jobless or pensioned journalists”, who informed him (and therefore Warsaw) “regularly about Polish emigrants”. [5]

To tell the whole truth, it must also be stated that Ranicki kept a file on over 2,100 Poles living in Great Britain. Spying on the leading opposition politician, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, was a matter for the boss – Ranicki himself. He had regular meetings with Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz, the publicist who was later to become prime minister of the government-in-exile, on a bench in Waterloo Park, where he was unsuccessful in trying to recruit him to work for “security”. The idea was to reward Cat-Mackiewicz for his collaboration by allowing him to return to Poland.

The first person to make public Ranicki’s work for the Ministry of Security, (in 1991), was his one-time assistant in London, Krzysztof Starzyński, who changed sides in 1950 and remained in the West. Ranicki has often been faced with accusations that he helped to “move home” Polish immigrants and members of the Armed Forces, who were then thrown into prison in Communist Poland – or whose fate was even worse. That said, there is no concrete evidence to support these accusations. After 1989 Reich-Ranicki justified his actions by saying that he had “believed in Communism at the time”. He did not regret his actions.[6]