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by far the most crucial element for them.

A couple of personal Polish views of our warnings to the Soviets give other insights. Deputy Premier Mieczysław Rakowski told me in mid-December 1980 that we were greatly exaggerating the danger. The Soviets had no intention of coming in. He welcomed the warnings nevertheless if only because they had the effect of slowing Solidarity down, making it behave more responsibly. Rakowski was pleased at this unexpected bonus. Bogdan Lis of Solidarity, on the other hand, was extremely unhappy with the US statements when I saw him not long afterwards. He complained they were exactly what the Soviets and the Polish regime wanted—here he corroborated Rakowski-in that they made the reform movement cautious at a time when it should have gone all out to exert maximum pressure on the regime. Lis, who gave the impression of being one of the hard men of Polish politics, went on to excoriate Radio Free Europe broadcasts for taking the regime's side-a view, I tried to convince him, I had never heard from any official Polish quarter.

I described Poland in 1980-81 as largely outside our ability to influence decisively. Some might think this less than red-blooded. The "can-do" strain in US policy-making runs strong, which is a good thing, too. Washington players conceptualize, sloganize—that goes with the scene. Warsaw again brought me up against the limits of US action on the ground in Eastern Europe. My judgement was that while there were useful things we could and should do to help the Polish reformers, we remained marginal on the basics: the power struggle in Poland itself and the Soviet intervention threat.

I was concerned that we not over-extend ourselves in a situation that could easily get away from us. I got a flash message from the Department in the summer of 1981 asking my views on a US military airlift of food (discussed in Romuald Spasowski's 1986 autobiography The Liberation of One). I argued strongly against it on various grounds, the most important being that a US Air Force airlift would raise Poland to a direct US-Soviet confrontation in a region that was much easier for them to control. If the Soviets challenged us, our options would be unattractive—either to back off with major loss of face, or hang tough and run serious risks. The Department did not return to the matter.

I cannot claim more than a general sense of the relations between the Polish government and Solidarity in the month or so before martial law-specifically, whether there was either room for compromise or the will on either side for a genuine search for compromise. The relations were highly complex. Negotiations covered the entire range of social, economic and political issues-virtually the whole life of the country. The inner workings on both sides were often opaque. I was impressed by the Poles ability to find ways out of a seemingly total impasse and to step back from the brink. Everyone realized it was a struggle for power, however. The stakes grew larger, the

room for maneuver smaller as time went on. Both sides knew their Lenin-there was no mistake, it was kto kogo. I went back to the US the last week of November [1981] on consultation, and did not return to Poland until after martial law was declared. Before leaving Warsaw I arranged to meet with (then) Archbishop Glemp, Jaruzelski, and [Solidarity leader Lech] Wałęsa in order to be able to give Washington a sense of how the three main Polish players saw things. The meetings remain vivid political snapshots practically on the eve of martial law. The Primate spoke of a seriously deteriorating situation and of how he was trying to mediate between the regime and Solidarity, to hold them together in negotiation. He was not optimistic. The overriding problem was that the party hardliners were in the ascendant. I was struck by the bearish tone, which contrasted sharply with my meeting with him the previous month. He told me then that there was a good chance of martial law. I reported this to Washington but without giving it particular weight.

Wałęsa was deeply concerned about the fate of the reform movement. Solidarity was entering an absolutely crucial phase in its forthcoming negotiations with the government. It was, as he put it, very near the top of the hill, but it would have to be careful or else it could go over the top and slide quickly down the other side a prophecy soon fulfilled.

He gave me a scheme for the next month or so, until the end of the year. Solidarity planned to drag its feet in negotiations during that time. In the meantime he wanted a massive economic aid offer from Western governments -to be made to Solidarity, not to the regime. This would be his trump card which he could produce in the latter stages of the negotiations, when he would make clear the aid was available to the government only on condition that Solidarity's basic demands were met.

I cannot say whether Wałęsa was giving a finished Solidarity position to which they were committed, or if he was floating personal views. Nor do I know if Solidarity actually followed the Wałęsa scheme in the time remaining before martial law-there was certainly no aid offer for him to work with. I tried to disabuse him of the idea that massive aid would be forthcoming quickly, if it could be realized at all. I knew the debate on aid on the US side was not particularly promising, and I did not see the West Europeans doing all that much. Wałęsa said the reform movement could still achieve its goals without major aid, but the struggle would last longer and the Polish people would have to endure even greater hardships.

Wałęsa was in tremendous form all evening-we had dinner at our house with our wives and a few other Americans and Poles. He completely dominated the conversation with rapid-fire delivery of ideas and opinions on everything under the sun, hardly letting the rest of us get a word in, moving from the very serious to quick wisecracks without any loss of pace or force. We talked about Jaruzelski, and I said I had only made it to

army sergeant and still had a queasy feeling when dealing with four-star generals. He came back immediately— sergeants were nothing much--it was corporals you had to watch out for he had been a corporal himself—and there was Napoleon-and then "there was that other corporal as well." We knew we were looking at one of the great political naturals.

I met with Jaruzelski the same day the Primate warned me there was a good chance of martial law. I still regret the professional goof of not telling the general I had heard martial law was coming and asking his views. I doubt he would have "fessed up" and given dates and times, but I should have had the wit to get him on the record.

By the time I saw him Jaruzelski must have assumed Colonel Kukliński, now missing from his duties for a couple of weeks, was in US hands, and we were fully aware of the planning for a military strike against Solidarity. He could easily have avoided a meeting. For all he knew I might have appeared armed with instructions to ask awkward questions about the regime's intentions. The US might have been about to launch a political campaign that could cause problems in the immediate run-up to martial law. Perhaps a reason for seeing me was to mislead deliberately by a pretence of business as usual even after the Kukliński affair. The hour was unusual— we met from eight-thirty till ten at night—but there was certainly nothing vastly new or different in what he had to say from our previous meetings.

Jaruzelski restated the government's commitment to broad national consensus. It did not have to follow this policy—it had reserves of power that had not been used. "Some people" accused it of being weak for negotiating with Solidarity "with the strike pistol aimed at us," but it intended to continue seeking agreement. However, the crisis facing the state could not continue indefinitely.

Not everything Solidarity did suited him, he said, but there were forces in the union that could be worked with. Marginal, radical elements were moving way from the mainstream. Solidarity realized it was not enough just to fight the authorities. It was essential to reach a settlement on the enterprise self-management law, otherwise all the other agreements would be useless.

On our bilateral relations Jaruzelski said the West Europeans were waiting for a positive US lead on economic aid, and he asked for a positive approach from us in advance of the EC summit which was to be held shortly. He stressed the importance of our agricultural deliveries within the Commodity Credit Corporation framework, and said he wanted to send the minister of agriculture to the US to discuss technology, fertilizers, pesticides and related matters. We had their list of requirements in industrial and semi-finished goods, spare parts, and raw materials. Vice Premier Zbigniew Madej's visit to Washington in December would be a good occasion to pursue these topics.

If this was all an act, the general did it well-worth an Oscar nomination. It sounded much the same in tone and

substance as I had heard from him before. He struck me again as moderate, realistic-the cool political soldier. Personally he seemed, as before, reserved, tense, basically a loner. Had he already set the date for martial law when he saw me? I am inclined to think the decision to strike was taken closer to the actual event, but I might only be trying to excuse my inability to see the cloven hoof sticking out at the foot of those razor-crease uniform pants with the broad red stripe.

Debate on Jaruzelski's patriotism strikes me as a more than slightly red herring. He was and is a Pole-I suspect more now than he was then. People who were in a position to know told me he thought the worst thing the US ever did to him was [U.S. Secretary of Defense Casper] Weinberger's one-liner on a TV show that he was a Soviet general in a Polish uniform. That really got to him. But if he was a Pole, he was the top Polish Communist power handler in a tight spot, completely devoted to maintaining party control of the system, and also completely committed to the Soviet connection. He may well have wanted to avoid Soviet military intervention, possible occupation, but he also wanted to put the reform movement back in its cage. My guess is the latter objective was the primary motivation in a convenient coincidence of goals and interests--but I was wrong on the Soviet politburo and I could be wrong again.

Colonel Kukliński was a very brave man. The operation to bring him and his family to the West-the planning and the action itself-made for an edgy week or so in the embassy, and no doubt it was an excruciatingly anxious time for the Kuklińskis themselves. The operation's success reflected much credit on the Kuklińskis for their courage and on the professionalism of those involved on the US side. My role was minimal-to support the people who were doing the work. I hope I looked calmer than I felt. If it had all gone wrong, if the colonel had been caught before he could get away, or if the extraction operation had been discovered while it was in progress, things would have been messy.

I am not sure it would have made all that much difference if we had tipped off the Solidarity leadership about the regime's planning for a strike against them on the basis of the information Kukliński provided. They would not have been much surprised to learn the generals were thinking nasty things about them. I believe they assumed that to be the case from very early on. What they would have wanted to know-as I would have-was the date of martial law, and Kukliński did not give us that so far as I know.

I say "so far as I know" because I did not see all of his reporting. The CIA provided me with summaries from time to time. I remember the material as largely technical-organizational in nature. It must have been of great use to our military analysts, but what I saw lacked broader political scope, and I lost sight somewhat of the colonel's reporting in the press of more urgent business in the months before martial law.

Francis J. Meehan retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1989. He was the U.S. ambassador to Poland from 1980-1983.

1 See Raymond Garthoff, "The Conference on Poland 1980-
1982: Internal Crisis, International Dimensions," CWIHP Bulletin
10 (March 1998), pp.229-232.

NEH SUMMER 1999 INSTITUTE

AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ON

"NEW SOURCES AND FINDINGS ON COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY"

The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, in association with the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archive, will hold a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on "New Sources and Findings on Cold War International History" from 12 July-6 August 1999. This four-week program, intended primarily for university and college professors teaching courses on the history of U.S. foreign policy, diplomatic history, and international affairs/ relations during the Cold War period, will offer an opportunity to study and assess emerging new sources and perspectives on the history of the Cold War, particularly those from the former communist bloc, and their potential for use in teaching.

Since faculty will be derived primarily from area studies specialists familiar with archival and other sources from the former Soviet Union, China, and other East-bloc countries, the summer institute will provide a forum for a dialogue between these specialists on the "other side" of Cold War history and participants who have researched, written, and taught from an American perspective, working primarily from U.S. and other Englishlanguage sources. The Director of the Institute is James R. Millar, Director of GWU's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES); principal faculty include James G. Hershberg (George Washington University), former Director of the Cold War International History Project and author of "James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age"; Vladislav M. Zubok (National Security Archive), co-author of "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev"; and Chen Jian (Southern Illinois University), author of "China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation."

Sections will cover new findings and interpretations on important Cold War history topics ranging from the conflict's origins to its ending, including major crises, regional flare-ups, alliances, and the nuclear arms race. Sessions will also be devoted to issues in teaching Cold War history, including the use of new technologies such as the internet as well as multimedia sources such as documentaries. Assigned readings for discussion will include important recent publications, including both secondary accounts and primary sources, as well as recently declassified documents from both Eastern and Western archives. Participants will also have an opportunity to tap Cold War history resources in the Washington, D.C., area, such as the National Archives, government agencies, research organizations, etc.

Under NEH guidelines, applicants (with limited exceptions) must be teaching American undergraduate students. Thirty visiting scholars will be selected. Those accepted will receive a $2800 stipend for a month's expenses in Washington. Applications must be postmarked no later than 1 March 1999.

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Colonel Kuklinski and the Polish Crisis, 1980-81

By Mark Kramer

F

From the early 1970s until November 1981, Col.

Ryszard Kuklinski was a crucial intelligence source for the United States. Having become profoundly disillusioned with Communism and the Soviet Union's heavy-handed presence in Poland, Kuklinski began supplying the United States with highly sensitive information about Soviet-bloc military planning and weapons developments. Altogether, he smuggled out photographs and transcribed copies of more than 30,000 pages of classified Soviet and Warsaw Pact documents, including war plans, military maps, mobilization schedules, allied command procedures, summaries of exercises, technical data on weapons, blueprints of command bunkers, electronic warfare manuals, military targeting guidelines, and allied nuclear doctrine. To ensure that his motives would not be questioned, Kuklinski refused to take any payment for his work. For roughly a decade, his efforts gave the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) an unparalleled look inside the Warsaw Pact.'

Kuklinski was in an especially important position when a prolonged crisis swept over Poland in 1980-81. Not only was he an aide to the Polish national defense minister (and later prime minister and Communist Party leader), Army-Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski; he also was one of a handful of senior officers on the Polish General Staff who helped draw up plans for the imposition of martial law. The Polish General Staff's formal role in planning the military aspects of martial law began on 22 October 1980, when Jaruzelski ordered the chief of the General Staff, Gen. Florian Siwicki, to set up an elite planning unit. This unit, which worked closely with a martial law planning staff at the Polish Internal Affairs Ministry, consisted predominantly of general officers, including all of Siwicki's deputies. Kuklinski, as the head of the General Planning Department and deputy head of the Operations Directorate of the Polish General Staff, was a key member of the martial law planning unit from the very start. Among other tasks, he served as a liaison with Marshal Viktor Kulikov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact's Joint Armed Forces, and with other highranking Soviet military officers from the Pact's Joint Command. Kuklinski also was frequently responsible for drafting operational plans, helping to design exercises, and compiling notes of secret meetings and discussions. These functions proved invaluable when he sought to transmit detailed information to the United States.

Until November 1981, when Kuklinski was forced to escape from Poland to avert arrest, his reports were indispensable for the CIA's efforts to monitor the Polish crisis. Kuklinski was not the only senior Polish military officer who was working for the CIA at the time—it is

known that at least four others, including two high-ranking Polish military intelligence officers, Col. Jerzy Szuminski and Col. Wladyslaw Ostaszewicz, a military adviser to Jaruzelski, Gen. Leon Dubicki; and a Polish military liaison in West Germany, Col. Antoni Tykocinski, were all supplying information to the United States—but no one was more crucial than Kuklinski. His voluminous dispatches and transfers of documents allowed the CIA to keep close track of the martial law planning, the status of the Polish army, and the dynamics of Soviet-Polish relations in 1980-81.

During the crisis, Kuklinski transmitted daily reports and operated with relatively few hindrances (albeit at great risk) until September 1981, when the Polish internal affairs minister, Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, was informed that Solidarity had learned many of the details of the planning for martial law, including the codename of the opening phase of the operation. That codename, "Wiosna" (Spring), denoted the part of the operation that involved mass arrests of Solidarity activists and dissident intellectuals all around the country.3 (The codename was promptly changed to "Wrzos," meaning "Heather.") Because the codename had been a very tightly-held secret-only a small number of people from the General Staff and the Internal Affairs Ministry were permitted to know it-Kiszczak immediately realized that a serious leak had occurred. He launched an investigation into the matter, which naturally focused on Kuklinski among others. Kuklinski managed to evade detection for another several weeks, but he had to exercise greater caution and to scale back the frequency of his reports.

By the beginning of November, the finger of suspicion increasingly pointed at him. On 2 November, the Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB) warned the Polish authorities that the U.S. government had obtained the full plans for martial law. It is not known how the KGB learned of this matter-whether it was through signals intelligence, a mole within the CIA, a leak from another NATO intelligence service, or some other means-but the disclosure clearly came as a great jolt to Jaruzelski and Siwicki. A much more intensive investigation began, which was bound to focus on Kuklinski. He and another deputy chief of the General Staff's Operations Directorate, Col. Franciszek Puchala, were the only ones who had had regular access to the full plans for martial law. Moreover, one of the speeches that Kuklinski had prepared for Siwicki, which Siwicki later amended by deleting a sentence about the possible use of deadly force, had been transferred by Kuklinski to the United States before the offending sentence had been removed. The discovery of the

original draft, with the sentence still in it, would be a telltale sign that Kuklinski was the source."

7

Facing imminent arrest in early November, Kuklinski finally decided he had no alternative but to escape as soon as possible. The precise way he and his family were spirited out of Poland has never been disclosed-one of the chief participants in the exfiltration described it as a "real cloak-and-dagger affair"--but it is clear that the operation was a great success. Kuklinski, his wife, and his two sons left Poland on 7 November 1981 and by the 8th were safely in West Germany. On 11 November, the colonel was flown on a military aircraft to the United States, where he has lived ever since. At least two attempts are thought to have been made by Soviet-bloc agents against Kuklinski's life after he left Poland." What has troubled him far more, however, are the tragic deaths of his two sons, both of whom were killed in 1994 in mysterious circumstances.10 To this day, Kuklinski is extremely reluctant to disclose his place of residence.

A few hints of Kuklinski's role in 1980-81 surfaced in the West in the early to mid-1980s (most notably when a Polish government press spokesman, Jerzy Urban, suddenly mentioned at a news conference that the U.S. government had known in advance about the martial law operation and had failed to warn Solidarity), but it was not until April 1987 that Kuklinski's name and exploits became publicly known. In a remarkable, 53-page interview that appeared in the Paris-based monthly journal Kultura, Kuklinski provided a fascinating account of what he had witnessed in 1980-81." This interview remains a vital source for anyone interested in the Polish crisis.

Despite the wide-ranging nature of the Kultura interview, Kuklinski refrained at that time from disclosing that he had been working for the CIA since the early 1970s, not just in 1980 and 1981. Details about his earlier work first came to light in September 1992, when a reporter for The Washington Post, Benjamin Weiser, published the first of two important articles on Kuklinski, based on some 50 hours of interviews with the colonel as well as many hours of interviews with some of Kuklinski's former colleagues, including Kiszczak and Jaruzelski.12 The two articles make a valuable supplement to the Kultura interview. (Weiser, who later left the Post to join The New York Times, has been working on a book about Kuklinski.) Further documents and information about Kuklinski's career and legal case, including interviews with him, have been published in Poland in three recent Polish-language books, and a fourth collection of newly released documents is due out soon.13

Back in Poland, nothing was said in public about Kuklinski for many years. In May 1984, after a secret court-martial in absentia, the Warsaw Military District Court sentenced Kuklinski to death on charges of high treason and stripped him of his citizenship and military rank. In March 1990, the District Court commuted his death sentence to a prison term of 25 years (under an amnesty bill adopted in December 1989, shortly after a

non-Communist government came to power in Warsaw), but the guilty verdict remained in effect for another five years. In May 1990, the Polish justice minister, Aleksander Bentkowski, who for many years had served under Communist governments, rejected an appeal of Kuklinski's conviction. Even though the founding leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, was elected president of Poland in December 1990, he, too, refused to exonerate Kuklinski of the charges.

Not until March 1995 did the Polish Supreme Court finally annul the prison sentence and send the case back for review. In passing down its verdict, the Court excoriated the District Court's "blatant violations of legal procedures," and left no doubt about one of the factors that influenced the decision to annul the sentence:

One must take into account the widely-known fact that the sovereignty of Poland was severely diminished [during the Communist era] and that there was an imminent threat of an invasion by the Soviet Union and other contiguous member-states of the Warsaw Pact. One also must take into account the fact that R. Kuklinski was fully informed then about the situation and, through his desperate actions, tried to head off the impending threat of invasion by conveying this information to the leaders of states that are strong enough to alter the world's fate. . . . The security of the [Polish] state unquestionably takes precedence over the disclosure of a secret, especially if the disclosure is intended to serve a higher cause.14

Col. Kuklinski's actions, the Court added, "were in the interest of [Polish] sovereignty and independence.”

Over the next two years, while the final review of Kuklinski's case was under way, some former Communist officials, especially Jaruzelski, led a bitter campaign to prevent the colonel from being fully exonerated. (Ironically, in 1996 Jaruzelski himself, the chief overseer of martial law, was absolved by the Polish parliament of all charges brought against him in the early 1990s for his role in 1980-81.15) Despite Jaruzelski's recalcitrance, Kuklinski cleared his final legal hurdle in September 1997, when, with the grudging approval of Walesa's successor, Aleksander Kwasniewski (a former high-ranking Polish Communist official), the Chief Military Procurator of the Warsaw Military District revoked the charges against Kuklinski, allowing him to return home as a free man. All his rights of citizenship and his military rank were restored. The basis for the Military Procurator's decision was that Kuklinski "acted out of a higher necessity" (w stanie wyzszej koniecznosci), and that his "cooperation with the American intelligence service" was "intended to benefit the nation.”16

Even after the Military Procurator's decision, Jaruzelski and his supporters kept up a rearguard action against Kuklinski. Their efforts were not enough, however, to deter Kuklinski from making an emotional visit back to Poland in April and May 1998. In Krakow, he

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