KGB Wojciech : THE WIRE <i> by Nik Gowing (St. Martin’s Press: $22.95; 550 pp.; 0-312-02671-4) </i>

Deadline pressure, limited news-hole space and the need to confirm a sensitive story with multiple sources all too often force conscientious journalists to scrap their best material, retire their best hunches.

British journalist Nik Gowing--who in December, 1981, broke the award-winning story of the imposition of martial law in Poland--has managed to have his reportorial cake and eat it too: first, by filing dispatches from Warsaw about the dissolution of the Solidarity labor union and, now, by writing a remarkably ambitious, fast-paced, can’t-put-it-down thriller mining much of the same ground. As a novelist, Gowing has let himself go, providing detail, flavor and fictional scenarios that plausibly account for the deadly, terrifying “iron noose” in which Poland found itself caught during those years and, to a lesser extent, to the present day.

True to his newsman training, Gowing jam-packs his novel with facts, figures and background information, which, by and large, serve his story rather than weighing it down. The narrative--which spans a six-month period--begins on the bitter cold night of Dec. 12, 1981, as military vans descend on Warsaw’s ominously deserted streets, and about 750,000 policemen and military troops disperse throughout the country to begin their mass arrests of Solidarity leaders. Telephone and Telex lines are cut, and Soviet-printed announcements declaring a state of war are posted everywhere. As martial law settles in to stay, food supplies grow shorter, lines for scant products grow longer, nightly curfew and travel restrictions are imposed, and every Polish citizen--including Catholic priests and nuns--must watch their step.

Although his sympathies are clearly with the Polish people to whom the book is dedicated, Gowing nonetheless draws realistic, multidimensional characters here. His dramatis personae includes a mix of actual and fictional personages--from Polish Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski, whom Gowing treats sympathetically, to Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, who saw the clampdown handwriting on the wall; from heroic union activists to enemy agents--so-called wires--who infiltrated Solidarity, sometimes just to gather information, sometimes to sabotage the union by urging it on the ultimately destructive course of radicalism.

The plot is driven by an intriguing, disturbingly plausible premise: a KGB plot to assassinate Jaruzelski and pin the blame on the CIA. In the tradition of Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre, Gowing intercuts from Moscow to Warsaw to Washington and points in between to show string-pulling power brokers moving men in an East-West game where Poland serves as a kind of political football.

Andropov, Gowing writes, “disapproved violently of the way the Polish crisis had been handled by President Brezhnev and the aging cronies of his Old Guard leadership. . . . (He) was determined to impose his own solution on Poland in secret and without Politburo approval.”

Despite his years of Soviet military and ideological training, Jaruzelski is nonetheless a Pole whose loyalty to the Soviet brethren is therefore suspect. Eliminating him would “create a lawlessness necessary as a pretext to move Soviet forces into Poland,” says one KGB mastermind of the “Amber Monkey” operation. Another seconding voice mentions that Jaruzelski once outmaneuvered Brezhnev by threatening to sic the Polish Army on the Soviets should they move into Poland.

At moments like this, the reader cannot help but wonder whether Gowing, the journalist, is presenting theories that he couldn’t touch in newsprint but believes to be true. Whatever the case, such verisimilitude enhances the story line, making the reader believe that he or she is privy to the inner workings of global power politics in the early-Reagan, late-Brezhnev era.

Probably the novel’s most compelling character is Andrzej Sulecki, a Polish-born, Russian-bred KGB agent who is charged with the task of taking down Jaruzelski. Because the KGB has planted the impression that Sulecki is a counterrevolutionary CIA agent, Sluzba Bezpieczentswa (SB)--the Polish secret police--is on Sulecki’s trail with shoot-to-kill orders. The razor-sharp SB commander suspects Sulecki’s true identity but feigns innocence with Moscow, so that he can prevent Jaruzelski’s assassination.

Passing himself off as an underground Solidarity member, Sulecki gains sanctuary in a Warsaw church and with various families as he finalizes his plans. The reader looks on in dread fascination as Sulecki systematically manipulates, then murders, individuals when their usefulness has expired and their suspicions have been piqued.

Gowing writes as an insider, showing how the Solidarity movement had as its antecedent the Polish underground during the Nazi occupation 40 years earlier, and how bitter war memories have strengthened the well-entrenched Polish resentment against the Soviets. Gowing also allows as how Reagan’s intelligence reports gave advance warning of the coming of martial law, but the former President did nothing to forewarn the Poles since the imposition of martial law reinforced his “Evil Empire” doctrine.

In the end, Gowing the novelist joins hands with Gowing the journalist to create a captivating dramatization--more engaging than journalism and far more authentic than most fiction in this genre. “The Wire” is the single most compelling piece of popular fiction to emerge from Poland’s martial-law period, rife as it was with violence, intrigue and betrayal, disillusion, despair and small hope.