Did British double agent Kim Philby murder Polish war hero General Sikorski?

Image 1 of 2

At Downing Street: [from left] Viscount Halifax with Gen Sikorski, Winston Churchill and the Polish foreign minister M Zaleski

GETTY

Kim Philby ran British intelligence in Gibraltar from 1941 to 1944

General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland's wartime government in exile, died 65 years ago this month when his plane plunged into the sea off Gibraltar.

A British inquiry in 1943 found that the crash was caused by the plane's controls jamming. But rumours persist of a plot to kill Gen Sikorski, whose defence of the Polish national cause threatened to derail Britain's relationship with the Soviet Union.

Now Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, and his prime minister, Donald Tusk, have demanded that Gen Sikorski's body be exhumed from its tomb in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, the traditional burial place of Polish heroes. "The tragic circumstances of the death of General Sikorski should be explained," said the president.

Moves to exhume Sikorski's body follow a long campaign by Polish historians, who claim that it was not examined properly before burial. They claim that he might have been killed before the crash, in which his daughter also died, and only the pilot survived. In particular, they want an examination of his skull to see whether he was shot.

The general's death has attracted a swarm of conspiracy theories, which variously accuse British, Soviet and even rival Polish factions of orchestrating his murder.

But the most insistent rumours suggest that his death was ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, incensed by Gen Sikorski's demand for an investigation into the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Soviet troops.

Stalin's accusers claim that Gen Sikorski's plane was left unguarded on the runway at Gibraltar, and could easily have been sabotaged. They also point out that on the day of the crash, July 4, 1943, a plane carrying the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky and a small retinue of Soviet troops parked next to the doomed Polish leader's aircraft.

Allegations of a plot by the Soviet Union, determined not to let Polish nationalism get in the way of communist expansion after the war, have been further fuelled by the presence on Gibraltar of Kim Philby.

The notorious spy was in charge of British intelligence operations in the territory from 1941 to 1944. The crash occurred 20 years before he defected to Russia, but he is thought to have been a double agent from the start of the war.

Investigators have also pointed the finger at the British wartime leader Winston Churchill. In 1967 the German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth suggested in the play Soldiers that Churchill was so anxious over Gen Sikorski's impact on ties with Stalin that he ordered the assassination.

Performances of the play were at first banned in Britain. Two years later Harold Wilson, briefed on the case, told the House of Commons such rumours should be "dismissed and brushed aside with the contempt they deserve".

In his defence, Mr Hochhuth referred to the memoirs of the Yugoslav vice-president Milovan Djilas, who said Stalin warned that the British might try to kill Tito as they had Sikorski.

However, in declassified papers from 1969, the former pilot Sir Robin Cooper reviewed the wartime inquiry into Sikorski's death and concluded that "the possibility of Sikorski's murder by the British is excluded".

"But," he added, "the possibility of his murder by persons unknown cannot be so excluded."