RETINGER

His father – Józef senior, a Kraków lawyer, veteran of the January Uprising, city councillor; it was he who won for Count Zamoyski the famous Morskie Oko border case. His mother – daughter of a rector of the Jagiellonian University. Both died early: Józef junior was left an orphan among five siblings. His upbringing and education were taken over by Count Władysław Zamoyski – his father’s client, one of the richest aristocrats of Galicia.3

The boy was gifted and fervently religious; the family – as he later wrote – “ardent patriots and very ardent Catholics”. Around 1906 he was sent to Rome, to the Academia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici, the forge of Vatican diplomats, under the protection of Cardinal Rampolla. The clerical career lasted a few months: Retinger resigned. That pattern – a quick entrance into an institution and an equally quick exit – would repeat throughout his life.

The Sorbonne, a doctorate in literature – reputedly the youngest in the university’s history, financed by Zamoyski. His cousin Misia Godebska-Sert – a model for Renoir and Vuillard, later Coco Chanel’s mentor – introduced the twenty-year-old to the salons of Paris: Ravel, Satie, Giraudoux, Mauriac. André Gide told him to his face: “Joseph, you will never be a writer”.

In London, through Arnold Bennett, he met Joseph Conrad in 1909 – the beginning of one of the most important friendships of his life. Conrad admired his “almost unlimited political and diplomatic talent”; in the summer of 1914 Retinger arranged Conrad’s first journey to Poland in twenty years. War broke out – the two barely escaped the continent.1 In 1911 he founded the one-man “Polish Bureau” in London – the office of a state that did not exist.

In the Great War Retinger became a self-appointed ambassador of the Polish cause in London and Paris. His 1914 mission to the USA he summed up himself: “the greatest debacle for me… entirely through my own fault. I was too cocky. I did everything wrong.” It was then that the pattern emerged which would follow him to the grave: nobody knows whose agent he really is. The Germans called him an English spy; Harold Nicolson of the Foreign Office noted: “I am inclined to regard Dr. Retinger as an international spy.”6

The peak of the period was the Sixte affair (1916–1917): prompted by the marquis Boni de Castellane, Retinger tried to broker a separate peace between the Entente and Austria-Hungary, using his contacts with Sixte de Bourbon-Parma, brother of Empress Zita, and the Jesuit general Włodzimierz Ledóchowski. The plan collapsed. In 1918 Retinger was expelled from France – nervous breakdown, the end of his marriage, a suicide attempt. He fled through Spain and Cuba to Mexico.1

In revolutionary Mexico the European salon habitué became adviser to the union boss Luis Morones (compared to “a Chicago gangster of the Prohibition era”) and to successive presidents – Obregón and Calles. He advised on oil policy; years later he would admit: “I had partial responsibility for nationalization, but only for the idea.” He was entangled in the affair of five thousand documents stolen from the US embassy and a plan to use them against Washington.1

In 1925 he was arrested on a train in St. Louis – as he put it, “for not being Józef Retinger” – and spent some four months in jail. The conditions were recorded by his partner of those years, the writer Katherine Anne Porter: “Very hot… full of cockroaches, and the food abominable.” It was in Mexico that Retinger formulated the thought on which he would build the rest of his life: the world’s great problems are solved by an informal network of influential people – “a sort of mafia and open conspiracy of people in various countries”.

Back in Europe in the 1930s – years marked by the death of his second wife, Stella Morel – Retinger entered Polish politics through the side door, as usual. He became the liaison between the anti-Sanacja opposition of the Morges Front – Sikorski, Paderewski, Witos, Korfanty, Haller – and the British Labour Party, trying to persuade London to make loans to Poland conditional on democratisation.9

It was then – through the trade-union movement and Edo Fimmen – that the key relationship of his life took shape: the friendship with General Władysław Sikorski, a politician then shunted onto a side track. Three years later Sikorski would be prime minister and commander-in-chief.

On 30 September 1939 Sikorski became prime minister of the government-in-exile. Retinger received the only official post of his career – adviser on propaganda – and unofficially became the premier’s chief political adviser and interpreter, present at nearly every conversation with Churchill, Roosevelt, Eden, Stalin. The British investigated him; minister Dalton called him “a sewer rat”, yet conceded he had Sikorski’s full trust and “must be reckoned with”. In the Foreign Office a Churchill bon mot made the rounds – “le cousin du diable”, the devil’s cousin – together with a piece of practical advice: “It is no good trying to circumvent Retinger.”6

In June 1940, as France collapsed, Retinger reached the fleeing premier in Bordeaux. Asked why he had come, he replied: “To have lunch with you” – and took Sikorski to England. In August 1941, after the Sikorski–Maisky pact, he went to Moscow as chargé d’affaires to negotiate the fate of the deported Poles; his enthusiastic reports on Soviet treatment of Poles Biskupski calls plainly “nonsense” – “probably because that is what London wanted him to say”. In parallel, Retinger was the architect of the plans for a Polish–Czechoslovak confederation – torpedoed by Beneš and Moscow.1

On 4 July 1943 Sikorski’s plane crashed off Gibraltar. Retinger was to have flown on it – there was no seat left. Summoned by Churchill at midnight, he found the British prime minister in tears. “All our schemes came to nothing,” he noted.

The most cinematic and also the darkest episode of this biography. In April 1944 the 56-year-old Retinger, with no parachute training and in poor health, jumped by night into occupied Poland. The mission was formally ordered by premier Mikołajczyk; in practice it was mounted by the British SOE – probably at Retinger’s own initiative. Its purpose is disputed to this day.12

More dangerous than the Gestapo proved his own underground: Home Army counter-intelligence classified him as “an English agent and international racketeer” and planned his liquidation. The sequence below – step by step, from eyewitness accounts and historians’ findings.5

After the war Retinger redirected all his energy and his whole network towards one idea: a united Europe as insurance against another war. He founded the European League for Economic Cooperation (1946), built the Liaison Committee joining the rival federalist movements (1947), and finally organised the Congress of Europe in The Hague (7–10 May 1948): 740 delegates, Churchill as speaker, Retinger as spiritus movens.8

“Everything began at The Hague,” Denis de Rougemont would say, calling Retinger “the spiritual father but also the obstetrician of the Council of Europe”. Out of the Congress grew the Council of Europe (Treaty of London, 1949) and, indirectly, the whole process of integration down to today’s EU. The darker side: the movement was largely financed by American foundations and the CIA (via the American Committee on United Europe) – by 1958, 53.5% of the European Movement’s budget.10

In 1952 Retinger left the European Movement and began to assemble something new: confidential meetings of leading politicians, businessmen and intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic, meant to defuse the growing transatlantic mistrust. As titular chairman he chose Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands; the engine of it all remained himself. Ambassador Quaroni recalled: “Ideas poured forth from Retinger like a burst from a machine gun… The old intriguer had such an appealing manner, that we agreed with everything that he wanted.”

The first conference: May 1954, the Hotel De Bilderberg in Oosterbeek – hence the name. Retinger remained secretary general until his death; from the start the group chose complete discretion (no office, no speakers’ names, no quotation) – fuel for conspiracy theories for decades to come.14

In 1958 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Two years later he died of lung cancer – in utter poverty, in a small flat above the Harrods department store. Generals Anders and Kukiel attended the funeral at East Sheen Cemetery. His library he bequeathed to the Jagiellonian University.1