04Jul43 General Sikorski, Polish leader's convenient death

[TonyGosling]

Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Sikorski#Controversy

The political context of the event, coupled with a variety of curious circumstances, immediately gave rise to speculation that Sikorski's death had been no accident, and may have been the direct result of a Soviet, British, or even Polish conspiracy.

Six weeks before the crash, while Sikorski had been at Gibraltar for the first time en route to his Middle East inspection, a Polish government office in London received a phone call stating that Sikorski had been killed in a crash at Gibraltar; the call had been discounted as a prank. It is often mentioned that two of Sikorski's previous planes had been subject to incidents. The November 30, 1942, forced landing at Montreal, Canada, was suspected to have been caused by sabotage. Another incident took place a few months earlier, in March.[23] At Gibraltar, because of the special treatment accorded VIPs, there was uncertainty about who had in fact boarded the plane and about the exact cargo manifest—all leading to uncertainty as to the identity of the bodies recovered from the crash site; some bodies, including that of Sikorski's daughter, Zofia, were never recovered.[24]

Memorial plaque dedicated to Sikorski located at the end of the Great Siege Tunnels in Gibraltar

Since five bodies were never found and the bodies of several members of Sikorski's entourage were never positively identified, some conspiracy theorists postulate that they might have survived and been kidnapped to the Soviet Union. Among the putative kidnap victims was Sikorski's daughter, Zofia Leśniowska, who was reported in 1945 to have been spotted in a Soviet Gulag by a member of the elite Polish commandos (Cichociemni), Tadeusz Kobyliński. According to an article by Jan Kozłowski, Kobyliński attempted in 1945 or 1946 to gather Armia Krajowa personnel for a mission to rescue Leśniowska, but was captured at the border by Soviet agents and never heard from again.[24]

Sikorski had requested a Czech officer, Eduard Prchal, to pilot the flight. Prchal, sole survivor of the crash, like many pilots who did not wish to tempt fate was known for never wearing his Mae West life vest – but on this occasion, when rescued from the sea, he was wearing one. During the inquiry he denied this, and later blamed the inconsistency on post-crash shock affecting his actions and memory – essentially, on amnesia. Later he explained that he must have instinctively put the vest on when he realised the plane was in trouble.[25]

At about the same time as Sikorski's plane had been left unguarded at the Gibraltar airfield, a Soviet plane had been parked next to it. It carried Soviet ambassador Maisky[1] and a retinue of a dozen or so unidentified officers and soldiers. It had been bound for the Soviet Union, with a stop at a rarely used African airfield instead of the nearby, commonly used airport at Castel Benito, near Tripoli. Eyewitnesses reported that at Gibraltar the Soviets had stayed at the same place as Sikorski, the Governor's palace; Maisky, however, in a 1966 interview said that he clearly remembered having stayed at the Gibraltar Fortress and not having been aware of Sikorski's presence on the Rock. Gibraltar's British Governor, Noel Mason-Macfarlane, who prior to appointment to Gibraltar served as Head of the British Military Mission in Moscow, reportedly withheld knowledge from Maisky about Sikorski's presence in order to prevent any diplomatic incident.

The recently erected statue of Sikorski on Portland Place, London

In a recently declassified briefing paper dated January 24, 1969, to the British Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, Sir Robin Cooper, a former pilot employed in the Cabinet Office, wrote, after reviewing the wartime inquiry's findings: "Security at Gibraltar was casual, and a number of opportunities for sabotage arose while the aircraft was there." Although Sir Robin doubted that sabotage had taken place, or that the pilot had crashed the aircraft deliberately, he went on to add: "The possibility of Sikorski's murder by the British is excluded from this paper. The possibility of his murder by persons unknown cannot be so excluded." The inquiry's finding about the jammed airplane controls, he wrote, seemed plausible. "But it still leaves open the question of what—or who—jammed them. No one has ever provided a satisfactory answer." It is worth noting that the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service's counterintelligence for the Iberian Peninsula from 1941 to 1944 was Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent who would defect in 1963 and later claim to have been a double agent since the 1940s. Before 1941, Philby had served as an instructor with the Special Operations Executive, an organization specializing in sabotage and diversion behind enemy lines.[25]

Suspicions that Sikorski had been assassinated continued to surface throughout the war and afterward, reaching their height in 1968 with the London staging of a play, Soldiers, by the German writer Rolf Hochhuth. The play contained the sensational allegation that none other than Winston Churchill had been in on the plot.[26] In early 1969 the Prime Minister of the British Labour Government, Harold Wilson, who was familiar with all the above evidence (much of which was then classified and unknown to the general public), asserted before the House of Commons: "There is no evidence at all that there is any need or reason to re-open the inquiry." Nonetheless the conclusion of the 1969 was that the 1943 investigation was politically toned down.[17]

Seated sculpture of Sikorski as a young officer, Inowrocław, Poland

None of the allegations of conspiracy have ever been proven. On the other hand, by 2000 only a small portion of British intelligence documents relating to Sikorski's death had been declassified. The reason why these documents continue to be classified and why British intelligence refuses to disclose the information and what it has to hide has not been answered. With the few documents currently available, most historians agree that it cannot be determined whether Sikorski died in a real accident or was in fact assassinated, or by whom. Speculations range from conspiracies involving the Germans,[17] Soviets,[17] Western Allies[17][26] and even the Polish political opponents,[17][26] and various combinations of these factions.

see also http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=126902#126902