Poland’s Spy Who’s Still Out in the Cold

Somewhere out there in America, one of the great unsung soldiers of the Cold War is still on the run.

Eight years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, which Ryszard Kuklinski risked his life to help topple. Will Kuklinski--Warsaw Pact colonel and CIA informant--have to stay on the lam forever?

His friends and admirers contend that in secret, from his position at General Staff Headquarters in Warsaw, Kuklinski did more than the most prominent Polish dissidents to weaken the Soviet grip on his homeland. They even credit him with helping to prevent the most dreaded specter of modern times, a nuclear exchange.

His critics--including Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last Communist strongman--insist that there is nothing heroic about spying for a foreign power.

From 1972 until 1981, while serving as a senior Polish military planner, Kuklinski spirited more than 30,000 secret documents out of his gray sandstone office building here in Warsaw and into the eager hands of the CIA, according to sources at the agency. The documents included everything from plans for advanced weapons systems to a tip that the Red Army was about to invade Afghanistan.

“Kuklinski was one of the most important CIA sources of information about the Soviet military during the Cold War,” former CIA Director Robert M. Gates said in a recent documentary on Polish television. When the CIA finally smuggled its perfect spy out of Poland, he was just one step ahead of discovery and summary execution.

Anti-Communist labor leader Lech Walesa went on to become Poland’s first democratically elected president. The former archbishop of Krakow now uses the papacy as a bully pulpit for humane values.

For the 67-year-old Kuklinski, however, the new world order has brought little but the bitterness of a life under an assumed name in America, 7,000 miles from the democracy for which he risked so much. The U.S. has decorated him and provided him with a pension and a series of well-fortified houses at secret addresses.

But Polish authorities have refused to let him cast an absentee ballot in the free elections his deeds helped make possible, and his treason conviction was lifted only in September. Like few other dissident emigres, he embodies the biblical wisdom: A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.

Meaning of Patriotism

It should come as no surprise that Poland remains uncertain today about the meaning of patriotism, and of personal responsibility within its public life. This is a country that has been partitioned, invaded, occupied and rearranged for hundreds of years. The national identity has not been reestablished automatically just because the Iron Curtain is gone.

And Jaruzelski--who sees Kuklinski as a clear and present danger to his reputation in history--still carries surprising weight in Poland. Opinion surveys show remarkable sympathy for the man who declared martial law in 1981, and one in four Poles still considers Kuklinski a traitor. The debate over Kuklinski now, which is intensifying this winter because his backers are trying to bring him back to Poland, offers a unique window on the paradoxes of post-Cold War Eastern Europe, where people have thrown off the Soviet yoke only to use their newfound ballot-box freedoms to return wised-up Communists to power.

“In Poland, this whole discussion about Kuklinski is really a discussion about communism,” said Jozef Szaniawski, a Warsaw journalist who was jailed by the Communist government for sending news reports to Radio Free Europe. “Today, in 1997, no one can say that communism was any more or less criminal than the Nazi regime. But a lot of people still say that at least in Communist times, we had enough kindergartens and there was order in the streets.”

For months, admirers have been lobbying to bring Kuklinski home in honor. But he dared not come. This state of affairs may, however, be about to change. After lengthy deliberations, Kuklinski recently said that he hopes to surface in early 1998 and return to his homeland in the relatively quiet period before the U.S. Senate votes next spring on Poland’s admission to the Warsaw Pact’s former enemy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This prospect thrills some.

“Poland has its new national hero,” Szaniawski exulted.

But others see no need to rejoice.

“Kuklinski served together with thousands and thousands of other officers in the Polish army,” Jaruzelski said in a recent interview. “If you come to the conclusion that Kuklinski’s act was the act of a hero--that he was helping Poland--then it’s logical to ask: Are all the others traitors?

“If you receive Kuklinski with all fanfares, then how are the others, who served in the Polish army and are still serving, supposed to feel?” said Jaruzelski, who has spent much of his time in the post-Communist era trying to ensure that he goes down in history as a Polish patriot, and not as a tool of Moscow.

Kuklinski’s sense of patriotic obligation may have been forged during Poland’s occupation by the Nazis. His father, active in the Polish resistance, was arrested, brutally beaten by the Gestapo and eventually killed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Kuklinski reacted by going into the anti-Nazi resistance himself at age 12.

“He was very short, and that helped him,” Szaniawski said. “He could fit through a crack in the wall and bring food to people in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

At the end of World War II, Kuklinski went into the Polish army, excelling at officers training school, only to be stripped of his Communist Party membership when he told a joke about the Soviet collectivization of the countryside. He was sent to the boondocks and allowed to languish for a decade in a minor post at the seaside, where he acquired a love of sailing and the sea that he retains. Finally, his mapping skills caught the eye of a colonel, and he was transferred to General Staff Headquarters in Warsaw.

Kuklinski then began a belated, but fast-track, climb up the military career ladder. He became a respected planner of army maneuvers, expert in troop movements, air defense, communications and other broad logistic and managerial skills. By the time he defected, he had become deputy chief of army operations and an advisor and speech writer for then-Defense Minister Jaruzelski.

His doubts about the Soviet regime first surfaced in 1968, when he was detailed to southern Poland for “military exercises” that turned out to be the preparations for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Appalled, Kuklinski feigned a family illness and escaped to Warsaw. But he couldn’t shake off the distressing questions that Poland’s involvement in the suppression of the Prague Spring raised: What fight did Poland have with Czechoslovakia? Why was its army being used to attack a nonbelligerent neighbor and military ally? Shouldn’t the Polish army be in the sole business of defending Poland?

“If I had been Kuklinski, I would have resigned at this point in my career,” said Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, chairman of the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “But then, I’m not a historical person.”

Far from resigning, Kuklinski redoubled his efforts on the General Staff, climbing within the system and acquiring more of the knowledge he would eventually put to what he considered to be the cause of a free Poland.

Plans for the defense of Eastern Europe in the event of a NATO attack, he learned, called for more than 2.5 million Soviet and Eastern Bloc ground troops to pour into the West with their tanks and rockets--the vast majority of them by way of Poland. The West would respond, Warsaw Pact planners assumed, with hundreds of nuclear strikes. And the missiles would rain down not on the Soviet Union--that would push things too far--but on the fields and forests, bridges and byways of Kuklinski’s beloved homeland.

This understanding prompted Kuklinski, in 1972, to get in touch with the U.S. military attache in Bonn, who linked him up with the CIA. Over the next nine years, Kuklinski conveyed to CIA headquarters such espionage trophies as the Warsaw Pact’s five-year strategic plans, 1971 through 1986; a 300-page manual on Soviet military electronics; precise locations and descriptions of Moscow’s three secret European command bunkers for use in case of war; the placement of nuclear missiles in Poland; a tip that the Soviets were about to invade a country to the south, which turned out to be Afghanistan; and warnings that the Soviet Union was considering an invasion of Poland in the early phases of Walesa’s Solidarity labor movement.

The end came in 1981, when tensions were running high in Poland over strikes initiated by Solidarity. For months, Moscow had been making the stakes clear: If Polish forces didn’t crush Solidarity, the Red Army would be glad to do it for them. Kuklinski was asked to help draw up the plans for martial law. He threw all his energies into this grim project--and then handed over what he’d created to the CIA.

That fall, the Polish brass realized it had a major leak. Fearful, Kuklinski alerted the CIA and was swiftly “exfiltrated” from Poland with his wife and two sons. Their escape route has never been revealed.

Life of a Hunted Man

Photographs of Kuklinski in exile show a slim, healthy-looking man with a graying beard. The pomaded Eastern Bloc hairdo and chest full of ribbons are long gone. But even in exile, Kuklinski has led the life of a hunted man. After Kuklinski’s defection, Jaruzelski mounted a three-year investigation that culminated in a death sentence in absentia for treason and desertion. Outside his suburban Washington, D.C., house in 1989, Kuklinski noticed a car with Soviet diplomatic plates lurking. His family moved.

Then, in 1994, tragedy struck: Both of Kuklinski’s adult sons died violently within months of each other, one in a hit-and-run accident, the other in a disappearance from a boat off the Florida coast. The nature and timing of the deaths have suggested to many Poles the hand of vengeful ex-KGB agents.

“Two sons in one year? It’s hard to imagine, from a statistical point of view, that this was pure coincidence,” Wnuk-Lipinski said. “It would be like having two independent bombs on board one aircraft.”

Szaniawski added that while Kuklinski and his wife live under an assumed name at a secret address, their sons openly retained the family name--perhaps dooming themselves, he said.

Compounding the bitterness, years passed and Poland’s new, democratic leaders showed themselves politically unable to rescind the Communists’ guilty verdict against Kuklinski. Other former spies and “traitors” were pardoned, including a number of Polish ambassadors who refused to come home after martial law was declared. For Kuklinski, the death sentence was reduced to 25 years in 1990, as part of a general amnesty, but the conviction stood.

“He realized there was a conspiracy of silence against him,” Szaniawski said.

In the end, it took NATO’s decision to expand eastward for the rehabilitation of Ryszard Kuklinski to commence. In 1994, when the U.S. and Poland held their first joint military exercises, Kuklinski’s conviction loomed as an embarrassing anomaly: How could Poland, a prospective NATO member, continue to condemn a man whose “treason” consisted of helping NATO?

In 1995, the Polish Supreme Court said it would review the Kuklinski case. For months, secret negotiations were conducted between Warsaw and Washington. Finally, a pair of Polish prosecutors flew to Washington to take the testimony Kuklinski was unable to give at his trial-in-absentia. Over four days, he explained his motives, swearing that he had acted out of love of country and had never asked for money.

Last July, Poland received confirmation that it was among the former Warsaw Pact signatories that would be allowed into NATO. In September, a Polish court issued a 47-page decision exonerating Kuklinski.

But even now, although he may no longer be a convicted traitor, Kuklinski remains reluctant to emerge from his American shadow life. This year, Krakow voted to make him an honorary citizen. Through his lawyers, he hesitatingly accepted an invitation to appear there last Sunday, the anniversary of the martial law declaration.

An Angry Backlash

But the prospect of a hero’s welcome for Kuklinski provoked an angry backlash from his critics--starting with Jaruzelski.

The former strongman has argued often in the last seven years that his declaration of martial law was, in fact, a patriotic gesture, one that saved Poland from the much bloodier alternative: a Soviet crackdown.

“I don’t feel that Kuklinski is an enemy,” Jaruzelski said at the offices of the publishing house that issued his memoirs. “I wish him long and quiet years. But let’s just see that he doesn’t behave in a way that forces us to accuse him of anything. I’ve never called him a traitor, and I will not sit back and let him call me, or the people close to me, traitors.”

In late November, Kuklinski abruptly canceled his December trip to Poland, saying he would try to come in early 1998 instead. By then, presumably, it will be NATO, and not Kuklinski, that is in the national spotlight.

“I don’t think he’s very comfortable under this halo,” Jaruzelski said.

Is Kuklinski a hero or a traitor? Will he come home in triumph or stay away in the shadows?

“I’m not denying that he is a heroic figure. He contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire,” Wnuk-Lipinski said. “But he has had to pay a certain moral cost. In my view, his role will be disputed for years.”