“Nielegalni” (The Illegals) – novel (2011)

Work

The first edition of “Nielegalni” appeared in 2011; the November 2019 edition runs to 816 pages and the fourth, from 2025, to 808 pages. It is the first of the four volumes in the series.^1,4

Konrad Wolski, head of the elite Department Q of Polish intelligence, returns to Warsaw after a failed mission in the Middle East, where he was tracking al-Qaeda’s Polish liaison, Safir as-Salam. Buried in Brest Fortress is a chest containing the files of a Polish section of the NKVD; Polish and Russian services race to find it, and a mole in the Polish government passes on the search plans. In Sweden, the elderly Hans Joergensen, a retired Russian illegal, decodes messages hidden in newspaper advertisements.^1,4

According to the publisher’s synopsis, the Russians believe the chest holds evidence that the father of Poland’s sitting president was an agent. The recovered files turn out to be so damp that they would fall apart if opened.¹

The real background

The illegals of the title are – as the publisher’s description explains – agents who live abroad for years under a false identity and an invented life story, that is, a legend.⁴

The Katyń thread is based on a real crime. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) approved the shooting of Polish prisoners of war from the camps at Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov and of NKVD prisoners from the eastern provinces; the executions were carried out in spring 1940 at sites including Katyń, Kharkiv and Kalinin. The USSR admitted the NKVD’s responsibility only on 13 April 1990.⁵

According to the author’s note in the 2019 edition, he served in Department I of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW), then in the Office of State Protection (UOP) and the Foreign Intelligence Agency (AW); he left the service at his own request in 2007 with the rank of colonel. The dates of his work in communist-era intelligence are confirmed by the IPN catalogue (see the Vincent V. Severski card).^6,7

What is accurate

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesSeverski said on tvn24 that former intelligence officers do not reveal state secrets, although a fictional story may sometimes coincide with real events.³

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn an interview for Audioteka (2026) he added that everything in his books is meant to be “possible”: the places are authentic because he has been to them himself, and the characters often have prototypes among his former colleagues, whose lives he alters so that they cannot be recognised. His first texts were read by old colleagues from the service.⁸

Dominik Smyrgała, reviewing Col. Andrzej Kowalski’s book on illegal intelligence, notes that Kowalski counts “Nielegalni” among the few Polish-language texts about illegals.⁹

What is invented

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe author deliberately leaves out names, dates and details that would allow real cases to be identified – he is bound by a code of ethics and by criminal law.³

The characters, Department Q and the affair of the chest are fiction. The Act on the Internal Security Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Agency defines the tasks of the Foreign Intelligence Agency but not its internal structure; we have found no official source on a unit of that name. Smyrgała points out that there are few reliable sources on illegals – the novel can give a general picture of such work, but it is no evidence about specific operations.^9,10

Paweł Kaczyński lists Severski among the authors who after 1989 revived the Polish spy novel with contemporary themes, free of the propaganda tasks the genre had under communist rule.¹¹