Sławomir Petelicki was a Warsaw law graduate who spent the communist years in Poland's foreign intelligence service, in New York and Stockholm among other places. In 1990, as the old system collapsed, two Polish officers were murdered in Beirut, and Petelicki was the man sent to bring the bodies home.
The lesson he drew was that Poland had nobody who could go and get its people. That summer he was given the job of building someone: GROM — Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno-Manewrowego, the operational manoeuvre reaction group — formed on 13 July 1990 with the quiet backing of the United States and Israel, both of whom owed Poland a favour for Operation Simoom, the exfiltration of American agents out of Iraq before the Gulf War.
He selected for character as much as fitness, trained his men with Delta Force and the SAS, and equipped them well beyond the standard of the Polish Army of the time. Within four years GROM was in Haiti with the Americans, where its performance in the 1994 intervention was praised in terms that startled everyone at home. It has been in the front rank ever since — Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the seizure of the Iraqi oil platforms at Umm Qasr in 2003.
He commanded it until 1995, was brought back once, and then spent years in public argument with a succession of ministers whom he accused of wrecking the unit with politics and bad appointments. He was not a diplomatic man about it.
On 16 June 2012 he was found dead in the garage of his Warsaw apartment block with a gunshot wound to the head. The prosecutors ruled it suicide. A great many people in Poland have never accepted that, and the argument has never quite closed.
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