A documentary film about Ryszard Kuklinski, who passed top secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA during the communist period, has been premiered in Warsaw. The screening was held at the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall under the honorary patronage of Polish Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Defense and Culture.
The film, titled War Games, took Dariusz Jablonski five years to make. It was shot in Poland, the United States and Russia and includes interviews with high-ranking CIA generals, former US presidential security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Polish president Lech Walesa, Polish generals Jaruzelski and Kiszczak, commander of Warsaw Pact forces Soviet Marshal Kulikov, and Kuklinski’s widow.
On Thursday, War Games will be shown at the CIA headquarters. President George W. Bush has been invited to attend.
Polish army colonel Ryszard Kuklinski passed over 40, 000 pages of mostly Soviet secret documents to the CIA between 1971 and 1981. They described, among other things, plans for the imposition of martial law in Poland. Shortly after the declaration of martial law in December 1981, Kuklinski was extracted from Poland by the CIA, along with his family. In 1984, a military court in Warsaw sentenced him to death. The sentence was annulled after the fall of communism. Kuklinski visited Poland in 1998. He died in Florida in 2004.
Cold War hero will get well-deserved honor
By Carlos D. Luria • December 9, 2008,
Greenville Online
In August 1972, a sleek 54-foot yacht nosed into its berth in Wilhelmshafen, West Germany. Its decks gleamed in the late afternoon sun, and its brightwork shone. The skipper grabbed the ship's papers, attended to the formalities of entry and then gave his crew shore leave. They were dressed as wealthy tourists, but all in fact were spies.
Now alone on his vessel, the skipper sat down and penned a note to the American ambassador in Bonn, offering his services to the CIA. His name was Ryszard Kuklinski. He was the Polish General Staff's liaison to the Warsaw Pact Council, headed by Leonid Brezhnev, and he was appalled by Brezhnev's plan for a surprise military sweep across Western Europe. We tend to think of the Cuban missile crisis as the defining Cold War incident that, more than any other, brought us to the brink of World War III. It wasn't; this one was equally as serious.
Because of their overwhelming numbers, Brezhnev reasoned that his Warsaw Pact troops would quickly overwhelm Western opposition and mingle with the local population. The Americans would not be able to use tactical nuclear weapons because of the high civilian casualties, and Brezhnev did not believe that we would launch a full-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union over an incident in Europe. Kuklinsky's letter was the first move in a long clandestine relationship in which he was responsible for scuttling Brezhnev's audacious plan.
Because he spoke little English, his letter was at first dismissed as a clumsy attempt by a low-level Polish seaman to earn a few dollars as an intelligence peddler. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and headquarters sent a Polish-speaking officer to meet him. For the next nine years, he provided us with over 40,000 photographs of Soviet plans, training tactics and equipment manuals until the element of surprise was gone, and Brezhnev's plan was abandoned.
Despite stringent measures taken to preserve his security, Polish intelligence began to zero in on him in the ninth year. In a hairy exfiltration operation, we were able to get him and his family out of Poland, and resettled them in the West. He died here of natural causes a few years ago.
This month CIA will honor his contributions in a four-hour symposium at its headquarters in Langley, Va. It is open to the public. More about Col. Kuklinski can be found in Benjamin Weiser's book, "A Secret Life."
Speaking personally, I do not believe that we were particularly stellar at initiating recruitments during the Cold War. But because of what America stood for and represented, we attracted many high-level and well-placed Soviet and satellite officials that, like Kuklinsky, "walked in" and recruited themselves. It was that group of walk-ins that gave us the edge in the intelligence skirmishes.
Since the Soviet Union's collapse, we have steadily squandered those core American values, and from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo and secret renditions, have given up the moral high ground. That loss has affected our ability to attract high-level, ideologically motivated walk-ins from around the world -- including those who might exist within the terrorists' ranks.
now@ on-line marzec 2004 From a Journalist’s Laptop
Mariusz D.Dastych
Colonel Kuklinski’s Sacrifice
A motto: Śpij żołnierzu w ciemnym grobie, niech się Polska przyśni tobie..
[Sleep, my soldier, in a dark grave; let Poland appear in your dreams..]
Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski is no more with us. On Tuesday, 10 February 2004, he died at the Tampa Military Hospital, Florida following a stroke suffered on February 5.
Born in Warsaw on 13 June 1930, in 1945 when the second World War ended he was only 15 years old. His father fought in the Polish Home Army (AK), was captured by Gestapo in 1943 and died in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1947, young Ryszard joined the Polish Army “and then realized that Poland’s oppressors had only changed uniforms and language” [as Josef Kubit wrote about him in 1998]. But he stayed on in the military service and his talents gradually promoted him to the rank of colonel and to the Polish Army General Staff, where he became involved in the planning of the Warsaw Pact future war against the West. It was this special task that made him think of Poland as of an eventual nuclear battleground.
In 1967 he was sent to Vietnam in a peace-keeping mission (ICSC). A year later, in August 1968 he witnessed a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and two years later, in December 1970, Polish soldiers had to fire on rebellious workers at the Polish Baltic Seaside cities of Gdansk and Gdynia. All these events and his first-hand knowledge of the Soviet offensive military plans including about 600,000 Polish troops to attack Germany, Holland, Belgium and Denmark – with a prospect of a NATO response of 400 – 600 nuclear strikes against Poland – prompted him to contact “the other side”.
According to his own words, Colonel Kuklinski used one of his sailing trips, in August 1972, to write a strange (Polish-German-English) letter posted in the port of Wilhelmshaven, then West Germany, to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He wanted to meet secretly with “a U.S. Army officer” and signed his letter “P.V.” Instead, two CIA officers were sent to meet the mysterious “P.V.” that turned out to be “Polish Viking”. They soon learned that the offer was very serious and came from a senior military officer, an employee of the General Staff of the Polish Army. Kuklinski volunteered to cooperate with the C.I.A., as any other idea (like a secret opposition group in the Polish Army) had no chance of success.
His opponents, higher officers of the Army and the Military Intelligence whom I asked about him later on, contested his motivation, as well as the particulars of his recruitment by the CIA. They claimed, Kuklinski had been recruited in South Vietnam (1967 or 1968) and then (in the 1970’s) he resumed the contact with the American intelligence.
Between 1972 and 1981 (until his secret rescue from Poland in November 1981), Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski (code name: GULL) provided over 35,000 pages of documents on the Polish, Warsaw Pact and Soviet military planning, as well as on the Pact’s European battle strategy and many other Soviet military secrets. In 1980-1981 he passed over to the U.S. complete plans of the martial law, then imposed on Poland by the Jaruzelski regime on December 13, 1981.
This information helped the Carter and the Reagan Administration to fend off Soviet plans to invade Poland in the same way as Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The Warsaw Pact troops (USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany) certainly intended to invade Poland in 1980 and 1981, and a plan for a temporary occupation had been worked out (under the code name of “Polish Autonomy”). The smooth execution of the General Jaruzelski’s military take over surprised the Kremlin, but a threat of an intervention hanged over Poland at least until Summer of 1982.
By that time Kuklinski lived in hiding in the U.S.A., under a false name, with his wife and two sons who were also helped to secretly leave Poland with him after November 7, 1981.
At this point, allow me to add a personal recollection: I had never met with Colonel Kuklinski, in spite of the fact that we both served terms in Vietnam (1967) but I learned about him on a very unusual occasion. It was in the late November 1981, when a Polish counter-intelligence officer, Lt.Col. Andrzej Dudzinski, called me up and asked if I knew or met Ryszard Kuklinski. I said: “no, never”. I knew several people named “Kuklinski”: a printing-house manager, a journalist (now in London), a famous dancer Ewa. But not the colonel of the General Staff. Later on, in 1982, the same officer warned me of a possible secret police (SB) operation against me, and – finally – he tried not to harm me too much, as I called him as a defense witness during my trial at the Military Court in 1988, where I had been accused of “spying for the CIA and Japan” and of “acting against the allies of People’s Poland”.
I had lost the case and ended up in jail with an 8-year verdict, served 3 years in prison where I met and befriended Mr. Josef Szaniawski, later on Colonel Kuklinski’s most devoted friend and spokesman, the author of hundreds of articles and two major books on him (the last one: “A Lonely Mission”, 800 pages). Recently, Mr. Szaniawski reported about Col. Kuklinski’s death to the Associated Press.
Professor Josef Szaniawski never expressed any doubts about Colonel Kuklinski’s patriotic motivation and honesty. But many Polish politicians (Lech Walesa included, not to speak about General Wojciech Jaruzelski) and a large portion of the ordinary people in Poland still call Ryszard Kuklinski “a CIA agent”, an “ordinary spy” or a “traitor”. I also admit to having had mixed feelings about him, until I learned more about his life and his secret mission. The dispute about Kuklinski probably will never end, at least until the opening of the top secret archives of the United States and of the former Soviet Union. But in spite of all the doubts we might raise, the present knowledge about the achievements of Ryszard Kuklinski is sufficient to call him “AN ORDINARY PATRIOT” [as Tomasz Lis wrote for “Wprost” magazine), a man well motivated and well prepared to fulfil the most dangerous task of his life, for the benefit of the West and of his own country – Poland.
Many years had been lost, before this brave man was freed of the death sentence (pronounced in 1984) and – in a strange way but at last – the charges against him were dropped by the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Poland (in 1997). His country did not welcome him until 1998. In America, he had to live in permanent fear for his life and the life of his family (his two sons deceased in mysterious circumstances). The price he had to pay for his unmatched bravery and fidelity was just too high. All words of praise after his death offer no compensation to him and to his surviving wife – Mrs. Joanna Kuklinska.
Serious American and British military sources confirm that thanks to Col. Kuklinski’s true and reliable information, the U.S. and NATO avoided going to war at least two times. “Kuklinski’s material was pure gold. He ‘virtually defined our knowledge’ of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact military”, wrote of him some analysts. The former U.S. Ambassador to Poland (1973-1978), Richard E. Davis recommended Colonel Kuklinski to the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if Kuklinski had no chance to get it, it’s worth to remember the words of this recommendation: “the quality and quantity of the information Colonel Kuklinski provided the West and the risk he ran in the course of his work, his devotion to highest ideals, and his resolute rejection of any mercenary gain, fully qualify him for the Nobel Peace Prize”.
Too late. But his country can do something for him: to arrange a decent funeral and to put his funeral urn to a soldier’s grave at the Powazki Military Graveyard in Warsaw, where many Polish heroes rest forever.
Mariusz Dawid Dastych
david.dastych@aster.pl
February 19, 2004
Useful liks:
1)
VIDEOFACT.COM, NEW YORK CITY, DOCUMENTS
2)
Reuters, FEBRUARY 11, 2004
3)
AFP, FEBRUARY 11, 2004
4)
GEORGE J. TENET, DIRECTOR CIA, FEBRUARY 11, 2004
5)
BOSTON GLOBE, OBITUARY, FEBRUARY 12, 2004
6)
THE WASHINGTON POST, FEBRUARY 13, 2004
7)
THE INDEPENDENT, LONDON U.K., FEBRUARY 13, 2004
8)
WARSAW BUSINESS JOURNAL ONLINE, FEBRUARY 16, 2004
powrót do strony głównej
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