Vincent V. Severski: “Odwet” (“Retaliation”, 2019)

The work

The Polish Literary Bibliography (Polska Bibliografia Literacka, PBL) lists “Odwet” (2019, 635 pp.) as the sequel to “Zamęt”, with the subject headings: Foreign Intelligence Agency, corruption, espionage, special services, parliamentary elections, Polish intelligence; setting – Poland.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to naEKRANIE.pl (2023), it is the second volume of a series named after the Section, a top-secret unit of the Foreign Intelligence Agency.²

The real background

The story is set in Poland around a parliamentary election. In reality the head of the Foreign Intelligence Agency (AW) reports directly to the Prime Minister, and the agency’s activities are overseen by the Sejm (Article 3 of the Act on the Internal Security Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Agency); a change of government after an election therefore means a change in who supervises intelligence – and that is the axis of the conflict in the series.³

The author lived through the systemic changes in the service himself: he began in Department I of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW), and after 1990 worked in the Office of State Protection (UOP) and the Foreign Intelligence Agency.^4,5

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesA review of the first volume singled out, among other things, the political changes in Poland and the portrayal of the service’s bureaucracy as a credible backdrop.⁶

What is accurate and what is invented

We have found no publisher’s description or review that would allow a detailed comparison of the plot with reality; we give only the bibliographic data. The characters and events are fictional.¹