By Mark Kramer

F

rom 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."

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."l 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

was awarded honorary citizenship for his contribution to the restoration of Polish independence." In many other stops around the country he was hailed as a "true patriot." Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek met with Kuklinski for two hours and declared afterwards that the colonel's "decisions spared our country great bloodshed."18 The visit sparked complaints in some quarters, notably from Adam Michnik, who in recent years has become a frequent supporter of Jaruzelski.1 Jaruzelski himself lamented that the "praise for Kuklinski's actions automatically places the moral blame on myself and other generals."20 Public ambivalence about Kuklinski, which had been relatively widespread in the early 1990s, has steadily abated (though it has not wholly disappeared). Overall, then, the visit marked a decisive vindication for a man who only recently had been under sentence of death in his homeland.

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Almost all of the materials that Kuklinski supplied to the U.S. government, including thousands of photographed documents and a vast quantity of his own reports, are still sealed in classified CIA files. Efforts to pry loose those materials through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have run into frustrating bureaucratic obstacles. However, some of the reports that Kuklinski sent in 1980 and 1981 were released in the early 1990s so that he could use them in preparing for the judicial review of his case in Poland. Three of those dispatches are featured below in chronological order. Each is preceded by an introduction that provides a brief context for understanding what the report covers and what its significance is. Although these three items are only a minuscule fraction of the materials that Kuklinski provided to the CIA, they give some idea of the extraordinary contribution he made to Western intelligence analysis during the Polish Crisis.

REPORT No. 1: Early December 1980 — Warning of Soviet Intervention

This first report, headed "Very Urgent!," was sent in early December 1980 under the codename Jack Strong. It had a profound impact on U.S. policy. Kuklinski's message seemed to corroborate a number of other indications in early December 1980 that the Soviet Union was about to undertake a large-scale military intervention in Poland. On 3 December, a day-and-a-half before Kuklinski's report arrived at CIA headquarters, President Jimmy Carter had sent an urgent communication via the Hot Line to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Leonid I. Brezhnev. Carter promised that the United States would "not exploit the events in Poland" and would not "threaten legitimate Soviet security interests in that region," but warned that East-West relations "would be most adversely affected" if the Soviet Army tried "to impose a solution upon the

Polish nation."22 Kuklinski's report reinforced the sense of foreboding that had prompted Carter's use of the Hot Line, and it convinced U.S. officials that very little time was left before Soviet troops moved en masse into Poland.

There is no question that events in the latter half of November 1980 and the first few days of December had provided grounds for concern in the West about the prospect of Soviet military action. Tensions in Poland had steadily increased in mid- to late November, culminating in a two-hour warning strike on 25 November by Polish railway workers, who threatened to call a general strike unless their demands were met. These developments provoked alarm in Moscow about the security of the USSR's lines of communication through Poland with the nearly 400,000 Soviet troops based in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).23 Unease about Poland was even more acute in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where the media in late November had stepped up their condemnations of the "counterrevolutionary forces who are endangering Poland's socialist order."24 On 29 November, the commander-in-chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, Army-Gen. Evgenii Ivanovskii, suddenly informed members of the Western Military Liaison Missions in East Germany that they would be prohibited from traveling into territory along the GDRPolish border.25 A few days later, on 3 December, rumors surfaced that an emergency meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders would be held in Moscow on the 5th. This news, coming right after the conclusion of a meeting in Bucharest of the Warsaw Pact's Council of Defense Ministers (on 1-2 December), raised further apprehension among Western leaders about the possible use of Soviet troops.

Anxiety in the West continued to grow over the next few days as unconfirmed (and, it turned out, largely inaccurate) reports filtered in about a huge buildup of Soviet forces around Poland's borders. Dense clouds over Poland and the western Soviet Union prevented U.S. reconnaissance satellites from focusing in on Soviet tank and mechanized divisions based there.26 Not until the latter half of December, when the cloud cover temporarily receded, were U.S. satellites able to provide good coverage of Soviet forces in the western USSR. Before the photoreconnaissance became available, many highranking U.S. intelligence officials simply assumed that reports of a massive mobilization were accurate. That assumption seemed to be vindicated when reports also began streaming in about last-minute preparations by Soviet troops to set up emergency medical tents and stockpiles of ammunition.27

Against this backdrop, Kuklinski's dispatch was bound to spark great anxiety when it arrived at the CIA's headquarters in the early morning hours of 5 December. The CIA director, Stansfield Turner, promptly informed Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, that "eighteen Soviet divisions" would move into Poland on 8 December. Brzezinski immediately relayed the

information to Carter. At a meeting of top U.S. officials the following day, Turner repeated his warning.28 Although his estimate on 6 December of the number of Soviet divisions that would enter Poland "from the east" was slightly lower than it had been the previous day (fifteen versus eighteen), he averred that "more [Soviet] divisions will follow" the initial fifteen. On 7 December, Turner conveyed an even gloomier assessment, claiming that "all the preparations for a [Soviet] invasion of Poland were completed" two days earlier, and that a final "decision to invade" on the night of 7-8 December had been adopted by Soviet and Warsaw Pact leaders on the 5th.29 Turner made these predictions without any confirmation from U.S. reconnaissance satellites about a purported buildup of Soviet forces around Poland.

Under the circumstances, Turner's assumptions may have seemed reasonable, but a close analysis of the period from mid-November to early December 1980 suggests that he and most other U.S. officials misperceived Soviet intentions. A careful analysis also suggests that Kuklinski's message, written in great haste and with only partial information, unavoidably left out certain key points that bore directly on the question of Soviet intentions. U.S. intelligence officials who apprised political leaders of Kuklinski's message were remiss in failing to highlight the great uncertainty that remained about Soviet policy. (The uncertainty was especially pronounced in early December 1980 because so little was known at that point about the actual state of readiness of Soviet forces in the western USSR.)

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Newly declassified materials confirm that in the latter half of November 1980, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were preparing to hold Soyuz-80 military "exercises" in Poland in early to mid-December. The new archival evidence also suggests that these "exercises" were intended mainly as a cover for the Polish authorities to impose martial law. Documents from the East German military archive reveal that four Soviet divisions, two Czechoslovak divisions, and one East German division were supposed to join four Polish army divisions and the Polish security forces in introducing military rule. If these operations proved insufficient, another fourteen Warsaw Pact divisions (eleven Soviet and three East German) were supposed to move in as reinforcements, according to the documents. It is not clear when and how the second stage of Soyuz-80 would have begun-or where the Soviet forces would have come from-but the option of a second stage was clearly specified in the plans.

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for-though not yet to carry out—the “call-up of as many as 75,000 additional military reservists and 9,000 additional vehicles" to fill out at least "another five to seven [Soviet] divisions" that would be mobilized "if the situation in Poland deteriorates further." The number of additional reservists and vehicles was large enough to fill out as many as eleven extra Soviet divisions, if necessary, rather than just five to seven.

If final approval had been given for the Soyuz-80 "maneuvers" to begin as scheduled on 8 December, enough Soviet forces were in place to carry out the first stage of the operation, but not the second. In mid- to late December 1980, U.S. intelligence sources (photoreconnaissance satellites and electronic intercepts) revealed that only three Soviet motorized rifle divisions in the western USSR had been brought up to full combat readiness.33 These units constituted three of the four Soviet divisions slated to enter Poland on 8 December in the first stage of Soyuz-80. The fourth Soviet division, according to East German military documents, was to be an airborne division.34 (Soviet airborne divisions were always maintained at full readiness. The unit in question was based in the Baltic Military District.) There is no evidence that any of the additional eleven Soviet tank and mechanized divisions were ever mobilized. Although planning for the mobilization of these divisions had been under way since late August-something that presumably would have enabled Soviet military officials to proceed with the mobilization quite expeditiously if so ordered-the number of Soviet divisions actually available for immediate deployment was extremely limited.

Thus, the scale of what would have occurred on 8 December was very different from the impression one might have gained from Kuklinski's dispatch (not to mention from Turner's briefings). Kuklinski was not present when Soviet and Polish military commanders discussed the "exercise" scenario at a secret meeting in Moscow on 1 December. Instead, he had to rely on what he could hurriedly learn afterwards from a few documents (maps and charts) and from comments by the "very restricted group of people" who had seen the full plans, especially the officers who had traveled to Moscow. Kuklinski's dispatch accurately reported the projected size of the full operation (both the first and the second stages), but it did not mention that only four of the projected fifteen Soviet divisions would be used in the first stage. This omission obviously was crucial. Although Kuklinski can hardly be faulted, in the face of such extreme uncertainty and time pressure, for having inadvertently left out a key part of the scenario, the difference between his version and the real plan can hardly be overstated. Rather than being a single, massive operation, the projected "exercises" were in fact divided into two stages: a limited first stage, and, if necessary, a much larger second stage. There is no doubt, based on the East German documents, the Suslov Commission's memorandum, and the evidence from U.S. intelligence sources, that the number of Soviet

divisions slated to take part in the first stage of Soyuz-80 was no more than four. The much larger number of Soviet divisions cited by Kuklinski and Turner (i.e., at least fifteen) represented the combined total of forces in both the first and the second stages.

As it turned out, of course, even a limited intervention from outside-by four Soviet, one East German, and two Czechoslovak divisions—did not take place. This nonevent points to something else that is missing in Kuklinski's dispatch-an omission that, once again, is perfectly understandable. Kuklinski could not possibly have known that the Soviet Politburo was unwilling to proceed with the “maneuvers” unless the Polish authorities were ready to use the outside military support to impose martial law. Soviet leaders never regarded the entry of Warsaw Pact forces into Poland as being the same type of operation conducted against Czechoslovakia in August 1968. When Soviet and East European troops intervened on a massive scale in Czechoslovakia, they did so to halt the Prague Spring and remove the regime headed by Alexander Dubcek. At no point before the invasion were the military plans ever disclosed to Dubcek or the other Czechoslovak reformers. Nor did Soviet commanders in 1968 enlist Czechoslovak troops to help pinpoint entry routes and deployment sites for incoming Soviet forces. In 1980, by contrast, plans for the Soyuz "maneuvers" were coordinated very carefully with the Polish authorities, and Polish officers were assigned to help Soviet and Warsaw Pact reconnaissance units. Moscow's aim in November-December 1980 was not to move against Stanislaw Kania, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP), and Jaruzelski, but to offer them support. Soviet leaders did their best, using a mix of coercion and inducements, to ensure that the two Polish officials would seize this opportunity to impose martial law; but the fate of Soyuz-80 ultimately depended on whether Kania and Jaruzelski themselves believed they could crush Solidarity without sparking a civil war.

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The Soviet Union's desire to stick with Kania and Jaruzelski came as a disappointment to East German, Czechoslovak, and Bulgarian leaders, who tended to espouse a more belligerent position. On 26 November 1980, the East German leader, Erich Honecker, wrote a letter to Brezhnev urging the immediate adoption of "collective [military] measures to help the Polish friends overcome the crisis." Honecker emphasized his "extraordinary fears" about what would happen in Poland if the Soviet Union and its allies failed to send in troops. "Any delay in acting against the counterrevolutionaries," he warned, "would mean death-the death of socialist Poland." To bolster his case, the East German leader authorized a hasty search for possible hardline alternatives to Kania and Jaruzelski. On 30 November, the East German defense minister, Army-Gen. Heinz Hoffmann, assured Honecker that certain "leading comrades from the [Polish United Workers' Party] have expressed the view that a [violent] confrontation with the counterrevolution

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can no longer be avoided and [that] they expect to receive help from outside.' Evidently, Honecker helped encourage the leading Polish hardliner, Stefan Olszowski, to travel secretly to Moscow on 4 December for an emergency consultation. The East German General Secretary clearly was hoping that if he could come up with a suitable alternative in Warsaw, Soviet leaders would agree to install a new Polish regime once Soyuz-80 began. Honecker's perspective was fully shared in Sofia and Prague.

In the end, however, the only thing that mattered was what Brezhnev and the rest of the Soviet Politburo wanted. The final decision ultimately was theirs. Even though they heeded the concerns expressed by the other Warsaw Pact states, they were convinced that military action would be worthwhile only if the Polish authorities were ready and able to take full advantage of it. Up to the last moment, Honecker was hoping that Soviet leaders would change their minds. On 6 and 7 December, East German military commanders ordered units of the National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee, or NVA) to be ready to move into Poland at a moment's notice, just in case Soviet leaders decided that the intervention should proceed as originally planned. To Honecker's dismay, these preparations were all for naught. The Soviet Politburo had firmly decided by then that no Warsaw Pact troops should enter Poland unless a more propitious opportunity arose.

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None of this is to suggest that Soviet leaders were merely leaving things to chance. By actively preparing for the "exercise" scenario, they were seeking to force Kania's and Jaruzelski's hand, giving the Polish leaders little option but to move ahead with a crackdown. The impending start of Soyuz-80, it was thought, would compel Kania and Jaruzelski to accelerate their preparations for martial law. (It is even conceivable, albeit unlikely, that Soviet leaders were never actually intending to send troops to Poland and, instead, were simply using the preparations for Soyuz-80 as a means of pressuring Kania to implement martial law.")

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Whatever the Soviet Union's precise intentions may have been, it soon became clear that the fierce pressure from outside in November-December 1980 would not in itself generate a workable plan for the imposition of martial law. Kania and Jaruzelski constantly stressed the need for more time when they spoke with Soviet leaders in the latter half of November, both directly and through Marshal Kulikov, who served as an envoy for the CPSU Politburo. Kania continued to emphasize the desirability of seeking an "honorable compromise," rather than resorting immediately to violent repression. Although he did not rule out the eventual “use of force” and formed a new high-level staff to speed up the preparations for martial law, he was convinced that a "political solution" was still feasible.

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Kania's position on this matter was firm even though he initially had been willing to host the Soyuz-80 "maneuvers" and had even condoned the use of Polish troops to help Soviet and Warsaw Pact reconnaissance