All Intensive Purposes

Even with all the Alan Furst and Phillip Kerr, I'm still open to some literary espionage, and so I recently picked up a copy of Benjamin Weiser's A Secret Life, an account of the career of Ryszard Kuklinski, a colonel in the Polish Army and for about a decade one of the West's most productive spies behind the Iron Curtain. In 1972, Kuklinski wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, and for the several years he passed an astonishing quantity of Warsaw Pact secrets to his U.S. handlers. Kuklinski was a patriot, motivated by Soviet hegemony over Poland, in particular by planning for an invasion of Western Europe which ignored Polish interests. Polish air-defense units were slated to follow Soviet units into Germany instead of protecting Poland, and NATO doctrine made it likely that an invasion would be answered by tactical nuclear strikes on Soviet forces on their way from the USSR to the front -- i.e., in Poland. With the rise of Solidarity, Kuklinski also gave the U.S. an invaluable view from the inside, until counterintelligence started to get close. Kuklinski and his family were then secreted to the West.

Weiser, a Washington Post writer, has done a tremendous job of working with materials from the CIA's archives, which he managed by arranging for a CIA veteran to do the research. (After this work passed through the CIA's security review, Weiser was then free to write his story.) Although I tired a little of reading the correspondence between Kuklinski and his handlers, one comes to appreciate the importance of the exchange to the spy, who can speak in candor to no one else. The CIA let Weiser explain far more of the tradecraft than I would have guessed. Notwithstanding the excitement of much spy fiction, the real thing involved an awful lot of tedious driving to lay the foundation for rare exchanges.

Kuklinski gained notoreity after his defection, and was sentenced to death by Jaruzelski's government. Well after the Berlin Wall came down, many Poles felt Kuklinski was a traitor. The last chapters of A Secret Life focus more on this controversy than on Kuklinski's life in the West, and it's good stuff, although perhaps these chapters warrant a book of their own. (Those who enjoy this part of A Secret Life might take a look at Lawrence Weschler's profile of the former spokesman for the Jaruzelski regime, Jerzy Urban, who makes a brief appearance, here and who has found unexpected financial success publishing a newspaper in recent years, in Weschler's Vermeer in Bosnia.)

A 1998 article from the Warsaw Voice about the controversy of Kuklinski is here. More coverage of him, including several pictures, is here. A memorial mass following Kuklinski's death is described here. Several obituaries are linked here.