Afera „Pocisk” (1935–1936): preludium do afery Rana
The “Projectile” Affair (1935–1936): a Prelude to the Ran Affair

Summary/Abstract: On 28 May 1936, a Polish military intelligence agent, Lieutenant Stefan Kasperski, working officially as a clerk of the Polish Consulate General in Kiev as Albert Ran, was arrested in Moscow. The case of Kasperski’s arrest and detention in Moscow prisons, and its repercussions on the activities of Polish military intelligence in the Soviet Union has already been quite well discussed. However, nothing was known until now about the “Projectile Affair”, i.e. establishing the cooperation by the Second Department of the General Staff of the Polish Army and its course with a key person in Kasperski’s affair, who was Hans Wieser, working in the Soviet Union German engineer, and a ballistics expert. It was only known that he was an agent of the Soviet counterintelligence and that he was arrested and shot in 1937. Nothing was known about the beginning of the Wieser’s cooperation and its course. This article discusses this issue in detail. The discovery of new archival sources makes it possible to present the complete picture of the events that led to the biggest failure of the Polish military intelligence in the USSR in the 1930s, which was the Ran affair.

• Details
• Contents