Wałęsa). From 1981 to 1989, he was the Press Secretary and spokesman for the Council of Ministers and the Communist government. He created the tradition of weekly press conferences, transmitted by Polish television and attended by both Polish and foreign journalists. In September 1984, during the month before the murder of the priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, he wrote a column "Seanse nienawiści" (hate session); he criticized the priest as an anti-communist Savonarola. In 1986 Urban masterminded a media story that the United States had betrayed the Solidarity movement. He met with a Washington Post reporter and told him that a Polish spy for the CIA, who was later identified as Ryszard Kukliński, was aware of the plan to install martial law in 1981 and had passed that information on to the United States government. "The US administration could have publicly revealed these plans to the world and warned Solidarity," Urban said, "Had it done so, the implementation of martial law would have been impossible." At press conference Urban alleged that "Washington ... did not warn its allies. It did not boast of its agent as it customarily does." According to Urban, the Reagan administration had "lied to its own people and to its friends in Poland," when it denied having prior knowledge of martial law. After 1989 Urban ran for office as an independent during the semi-free elections in 1989 (he was never a member of the Polish United Workers Party PZPR). He suffered a landslide defeat and since then gave up attempts to actively participate in politics. In 1990 he established Nie, an anti-clerical tabloid-like politically-satirical newspaper, which often uses profanity. He subsequently served as its chief editor. Court case for offence to John-Paul II In 2002, Urban was charged with offence against the head of the Vatican state, Pope John Paul II, due to the publication in Nie of the article "Obwoźne sado-maso" (House-to-house sado-masochism); the article was published prior to a pilgrimage to Poland by the Pope. Among allegedly offensive terms used by Urban were "sędziwy bożek" (old worship idol), "gasnący starzec" ("fading old man") and "Breżniew Watykanu" (Brezhnev of the Vatican). The Youth Forum of the political party PiS and the Media Ethics Council took him to court. In court, Magdalena Bajer, the leader of the Media Ethics Council, testified as a witness that Urban "brutally mocked the suffering of a man who was a head of