Warsaw Voice - Patriot or Traitor?

KUKLIŃSKI IN POLAND
Patriot or Traitor?
10 May 1998

The spy who came in from the cold received a mixed reception, with people still asking many questions surrounding his CIA role.

Col. Ryszard Kukliński, the former Polish Army colonel turned CIA spy, came to the end of his 25-year-long "road to a free Poland" on April 27 with a handshake from Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek.

Kukliński received honorary titles and commemorative medals on his triumphal return to his native country, after being sentenced to the death penalty here in 1984. However, on top of this, Kukliński also faces accusations and questions.

Kukliński brought some of these accusations on himself when, despite his initial declarations that his visit to Poland was apolitical, he went on to criticize what he called the continued existence of old arrangements in the military and the weakness of current Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz.

Kukliński's visit, postponed many times, coincided with the U.S. Senate vote approving NATO enlargement. Kukliński's supporters, most of them linked with radically anti-communist circles, see this as a symbolic coincidence. They stress Kukliński's contribution to the fall of communism and the regaining of Poland's independence.

For Kukliński's opponents on the other hand, most of them Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) voters, he remains a man who broke the military code and cheated his colleagues and supervisors. President Aleksander Kwaśniewski indirectly supported this opinion recently when he confirmed that he will not meet with Kukliński because "as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, I cannot applaud activities which are contrary to the principles of soldierly loyalty and discipline."

Kukliński's supporters gave him a hero's welcome to Poland. They believe that Kukliński, who established cooperation with the CIA in 1972, chose the only realistic means of opposing Poland's political and military dependence on the Soviet Union. In an interview for Paris-based Kultura magazine in 1986, Kukliński gave the ideological motives behind his decision to spy for the CIA. These included the clearly aggressive character of Soviet war plans and also the role played by the Polish Army in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crackdown on the workers' revolt on the Polish coast two years later. Kukliński referred to this crackdown when he received honorary citizenship of Gdańsk several days ago. He also received honorary citizenship of Cracow during his visit.

According to information from the United States, Kukliński, while working in the Polish military's General Staff, transferred about 35,000 pages of secret documents to the Americans between 1972 and 1981. These were chiefly documents concerned with the planned Warsaw Pact invasion of NATO countries and documents on the introduction of martial law in Poland. The acquisition of these last documents, say Kukliński's supporters, led to an unprecedented move by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his Polish-born National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński in December 1980 when they warned the Soviet Union against carrying out its plan to stage military intervention in Poland. In November 1981, Kukliński, under threat of being unmasked, was spirited out of Poland by the CIA along with his family. Since then, he has been living in the United States.

Many believe that Kukliński should have warned either Solidarity or the Catholic Church about the plan to impose martial law. However, he has always claimed that it was too late to warn anyone and that to do so could have only led to greater bloodshed and perhaps even the intervention of Soviet, Czech and East German troops. He reiterated this claim recently after a statement by Kazimierz Świtoń, a Solidarity activist at the time, who called Kukliński a traitor.

There are other doubts surrounding Kukliński's activities. The date when Kukliński actually began his cooperation with the CIA, for example, is now being disputed. His opponents argue that Kukliński began collaborating five years earlier than he is ready to admit. This would mean that Kukliński lied about his motives for spying (resulting from the 1968 and 1970 events). Moreover, some suggest that Kukliński did not begin spying for the CIA as a volunteer, but was forced to do so by blackmail.

Gen. Władysław Pożoga, former head of the Interior Ministry's counterintelligence service, suggested that the Americans gained compromising materials on Kukliński during his service in the International Control and Supervision Commission in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He suggested that in 1972, Kukliński, a "dormant" agent, was reactivated. Pożoga even argued that documentation of Kukliński's recruitment was preserved on a disk carelessly left behind by Americans fleeing the Saigon embassy. However, no such evidence was produced during the in absentia trial against Kukliński three years after his escape (the death penalty handed out at the time was converted into 25 years in prison in 1990).

"Kukliński was never accused of spying for money, even though counterintelligence examined the origin of every brick in the Kuklińskis' house," said lawyer Piotr Dewiński, Kukliński's legal representative, during the visit. "Accusations exclusively applied to the period after Nov. 7, 1981, which would mean his crime was high treason and desertion."

However, these explanations do not dispel the doubts of Kukliński's former superior at the General Staff, Gen. Wacław Szklarski. "He could not possibly have passed any Soviet documents in the early 1970s because as an employee of the operational training department, he didn't have access to them. He only had access to Polish Army documents," Szklarski says. He also doubts Kukliński's version of his first contact with the CIA.

In Poland it has been speculated that Kukliński was in fact a double or perhaps even a triple agent misinforming the Americans. However, this theory is crushed by CIA head William Casey's infamous comment that nobody harmed communism in the last 40 years more than "this Pole," and also by checks on the information passed by Kukliński which the CIA made after 1990.

Many officials have become involved in the issue of Kukliński's rehabilitation, including former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Richard T. Davies and Brzeziński, who demanded that the verdict against Kukliński be repealed and that he be made a general. Kukliński was referred to as "the first Pole in NATO." His supporters point to the absurdity of the verdict's validity in a situation where Poland is seeking admission to the alliance. However, succeeding justice and defense ministers, and ex-President Lech Wałęsa, were reluctant to overturn the verdict. Wałęsa actually suggested that Kukliński was a double agent but later changed his mind. He now reproaches Kukliński for not coming to him with the matter and instead approaching people from the former communist party. The Kukliński court case was, in fact, reopened in 1995 when the Democratic Left Alliance-Polish Peasants' Party (SLD-PSL) coalition was in power. The motion to reopen the case was submitted in 1995 by Adam Strzembosz, then a presidential candidate and chairman of the Supreme Court. Two years later, the General Military Prosecutor's Office dropped the renewed investigation after it was decided that Kukliński had acted in a state of higher necessity. However, part of the substantiation remains secret, which has caused protests from a group of retired generals. Kukliński's case continues to divide opinions, even those of people in the same political camp. When Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SdRP) leader Leszek Miller met with Kukliński in the United States before his visit to Poland, it caused a small storm among the ranks of Miller's party. Even politicians from the Solidarity camp have been watching the ceremonies of Kukliński's visit with mixed feelings. Wałęsa said that "communism was broken by worker protests, not by a spy," while Bronisław Komorowski, chairman of the Sejm Defense Committee, warned that the issue is not just black or white.
Piotr Golik

25 February 2004

Prof. Zdzisław Najder, Prof. Paweł Wieczorkiewicz, Gen. Stanisław Koziej and Dr. Antoni Dudek talk about Col. Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish soldier who worked for the CIA from 1972-1981 and who recently died in the United States, with Paweł Lekki and Krzysztof Renik.

Do we know today the importance of the documents that Kukliński passed on to the CIA?
Stanisław Koziej: What he passed on I do not know, of course. But as his former subordinate, I can share what I know about what he had access to. The strategy and defense planning office at the General Staff was not just the centerpiece of the Staff, but the most important place in the country when it came to national defense. It was the point where three operational areas met: questions of the junction Poland-Warsaw Pact, questions of the armed forces in Poland's state system and issues of advance planning for armed forces. The office would work out crucial guidelines for state defenses-the defense doctrine, the most important attack plans etc. Finally, the office prepared concepts for the most important strategy games conducted by the highest ranking state officials.

To cut a long story short, Kukliński's job was like that of no other representative of the military and political establishment. It was a place which gathered detailed information from the country's entire defense system in the form of plans, assessments and analyses. As an agent, Kukliński could not have worked at any better place.

Zdzisław Najder: Gen. Koziej said something very significant. Kukliński's position must have made him feel extremely responsible, politically and morally. He knew all the dangers Poland faced in case the aggressive plans of the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union had been carried out. It was a tragedy of an officer feeling responsible for his country. The man knew that by committing himself to work for intelligence, he could help defuse the dynamite laid under Poland.

Antoni Dudek: The war that could result from the aggressive Soviet plans, which would be carried out by the Warsaw Pact, never broke out. But the Cold War continued all the time, won by the Western countries in the end. The Soviet Union suffered a defeat. This leads to the following question: to what extent did Kukliński contribute to the victory of the democratic world? For example, what was the cost that the Soviets had to pay for the information that Kukliński revealed about central strategic objects located in Poland? When he fled in 1981, the Soviets had to spend enormous amounts of money on changing a lot of plans and ideas. These were measurable costs which to a certain extent contributed to the West's victory. Perhaps it was also thanks to Kukliński that when Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s, it turned out that the Soviet Union was bankrupt. The country was unable to maintain its military spending.

S.K.: Information passed on by Kukliński was part of the Cold War game. The Americans obtained more information in the game and from some point, the Russians were aware of that. Eventually, that might have reduced the threat of the outbreak of World War III.

In Poland, the assessment of Kukliński's work in intelligence is still a controversial issue. To some in Poland, he is a hero, while others regard him as a traitor. There is something tragic about this discrepancy. Is Kukliński a tragic character, then?
Z.N.: He is, in three meanings of the word. First, as an officer in the Polish Army he understood that in those times, the destiny of Poland depended on Moscow. He was perfectly aware of that. If he wanted to use his knowledge for the good of Poland, he had to share it with somebody else. Second, he worked on his own. In his situation, it was totally impossible to work in a group and thus he freely doomed himself to absolute loneliness. He also sentenced himself to never-ending discussions in the future as to whether he was a patriot or a traitor. Since he collaborated with a foreign superpower, he left himself at the mercy of fortune. Third, after 1990, he realized perfectly well that he was a controversial individual to Poles. It hurt him that those he felt ideologically tied to-Poles-who also struggled for an independent Poland, frequently approached him with suspicion.

Paweł Wieczorkiewicz: I share this opinion. Any choice of that kind, acting on the quiet front, is sentencing oneself to loneliness. When it comes to intelligence, in turn, any certainty about the facts is only possible-if ever-after one or two hundred years. Before then, all we have is our faith in what the special services are willing to reveal to the wider public. To me, for example, it is unclear whether Kukliński worked solely for the Americans. He could have been a double agent, working for Moscow as well. Today, historians are unable to provide a full assessment of the colonel's work.

A.D.: Of course, it is hard to disagree with Prof. Wieczorkiewicz that in a century or two, we can learn more new facts. We will know more then. But when I, as a worker of the National Remembrance Institute, read Polish intelligence files, I come to the conclusion that reality is much simpler than is shown in spy stories and that the number of double or triple agents is higher in action movies than in the real world of intelligence. So, I would not try to find any second or third bottom to Kukliński's work. For example, I would not support the claim he was a double agent.

S.K.: As somebody who knew Kukliński as a person, I cannot pass an unambiguous judgment on his work. I don't know the objective, real motivation behind what he did. I don't know if he was the initiator or, from a certain point, an instrument used by external powers. I worked with him. To me, he remains an ordinary human being. I can see neither a great hero nor a traitor in him. I see him as a soldier and I only ask myself the question whether a soldier can make a decision like he did on his own. In other words, does a soldier, regardless of the situation, have the right to start collaborating with foreign intelligence? Perhaps he should have support in some broader resistance movement. Then I would find it easier to accept that he works for some higher cause. Today, we cannot provide a full judgment on Kukliński's work.

Personally, I believe he was honest in what he did. I do not believe he was guided by any material reasons, but I don't rule out the possibility that at some point, he became an instrument of foreign intelligence services instead of a creator of the struggle for Poland's independence. I'm torn in my assessment of Kukliński's activities. Probably for the same reasons, military circles in Poland are still critical of his attitude.

Z.N.: Gen. Koziej has presented the best argument I know to show that Ryszard Kukliński was a tragic character. Kukliński chose between two values: either choice was burdened with disloyalty to the other. He really became an instrument at one point, as when you start collaborating with another country, the country first and foremost attends to its own interests. It decides the way the information is used.

To me, a very important assessment of Kukliński's work was formulated by Zbigniew Brzeziński, an American but also a Polish patriot. Brzeziński has access to a lot of American intelligence files. His assessment of what Kukliński did is very positive. He said: "Kukliński did a service to Poland, not just to America, but to Poland as well." This, however, does not change the fact that as a human being, Kukliński was a tragic individual.

A.D.: The dispute concerning Kukliński is, in fact, a dispute about what People's Poland really was. Since it is a still an ongoing dispute among Poles, the dispute about evaluating what Kukliński did will continue as well.