The head of Polish military intelligence dismissed concerns that the leaking of a list of communist-era secret police files had damaged the nation's security.
The index features the names of 240,000 people on whom the secret police kept files. Those include secret agents and informers as well as people under surveillance.
Poland's secret services were overhauled after the country became democratic, but many of the personnel are thought to remain the same. Prime Minister Marek Belka expressed concern on Saturday that the index might contain the names of current military intelligence officers.
Intelligence chief Gen. Marek Dukaczewski said Sunday that he is on the list but did not say whether other agents are. However, he told Radio Zet that ``there is no threat to active officers of military intelligence,'' adding that no material vital to the service had been disclosed.
The list was leaked from a state-run institute and appeared on the Internet last week. It sent Poles scrambling to find out whether they were on it.
The Trybuna daily reported Saturday that the list included the names of active agents who, it said, were being taken off missions as a security precaution.
While Dukaczewski said the leak posed no threat to security, he cautioned that offering broader access to the communist-era files, as opposition parties have urged, might create risks.
"We might lose control over whether operational materials important for Poland's intelligence services ... will be revealed,'' he said.
The list also has raised fears it will stain the innocent because it does not distinguish between those doing the spying and those spied upon.
The list came from the National Remembrance Institute, which makes communist-era files available to victims, historians and journalists.
Journalist Bronislaw Wildstein has acknowledged copying the non-public list from the institute's computer disks and distributing it among a few trusted journalists, but he denies being behind its appearance on the Internet.
Prosecutors were trying to determine whether any laws had been broken.
Wildstein has since been fired from the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, which said he was getting involved in politics. Some opposition parties had called for publishing secret police files on the Internet.
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