A Secret Life (12 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
Even the Polish and Russian translators in the Reports and Requirements Staff, who worked out of different vaulted rooms as they translated the thousands of pages of documents Kuklinski provided, assumed they were translating materials from different sources.
One Soviet Division translator was aware of Kuklinski’s identity― Stanislaw Longin Patkowski, who was known to all as Stan. He was a Polish-born CIA officer who was assigned to translate the personal letters Kuklinski wrote to the CIA and those the agency sent back.
A slight man in his fifties, Stan had unruly eyebrows, wore his hair combed straight back, and almost always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He often sat hunched over his desk, his reading glasses perched precariously on his nose, and his head cocked over a pile of messages that he would read slowly, scratching out words and scribbling in new ones. He would ruminate over how to translate a particular intelligence request, or “requirement,” before it was transmitted to a source. At times, he admonished case officers for the way they communicated with sources. “You can’t say that to this man,” he would say. “You have to put it in these words.” Stan immersed himself in the Gull case, trying to know him as any translator would―through his words. Throughout the winter of 1972-1973, Kuklinski continued to live his hazardous double life. He remained attentive to any sign, however circumstantial, that he might be under suspicion. One day, he learned that Poland’s Interior Minister, who oversaw the SB and counterintelligence, had claimed that the United States was collecting large quantities of intelligence on Poland. Kuklinski wondered whether that was a reference to his own activities.
At the General Staff, he photographed whatever he could lay his hands on. One day, he obtained thirteen past issues of the Soviet journal
Voyennaya Mysl
(Military Thought), a highly restricted classified publication. Kuklinski began photographing the journal in his office, but the job was too big, and he took several issues home. He worked late into the night but could not finish. Known for his early arrival at work, he was back in his office before dawn, where he completed the job.
Voyennaya Mysl
(Military Thought), a highly restricted classified publication. Kuklinski began photographing the journal in his office, but the job was too big, and he took several issues home. He worked late into the night but could not finish. Known for his early arrival at work, he was back in his office before dawn, where he completed the job.
In his apartment, Kuklinski was careful to hide all traces of his secret work, but he once made a critical error. The Americans had provided an emergency escape plan for him and his family, which included a key to the American Embassy compound in Warsaw and a detailed map and instructions. If he felt he was about to be arrested, he was to use the key to enter the compound on a side street, through the locked door of an apartment building that housed embassy employees. He was to leave through a rear exit and follow a path by a tennis court that led to a side entrance to the embassy. There, he was to identify himself as “Jack Strong.” The U.S. Marine guards had been briefed.
Kuklinski kept one copy of the plan, which he had not yet memorized, on a piece of microfilm and another on a sheet of water-soluble paper. He kept it taped to the underside of a kitchen cabinet and studied it each night.
One evening when he arrived at home, he found the paper on the kitchen counter. His nineteen-year-old son, Waldek, said it had fallen off the cabinet. Waldek said he assumed the document was his father’s and seemed to have no interest in it. Kuklinski was unnerved by his own sloppiness and asked Waldek not to discuss the paper with anyone. Waldek never brought it up again.
Still on edge, Kuklinski delivered a message to the Americans in January, saying he had a special request. He was convinced that if he were arrested, he would be tortured and executed. Even the strongest men confessed in such situations, he knew, and it was inevitable that the Poles would use his case as propaganda against the West, ruining his family’s name. He wanted to be sure he was not taken alive and asked for “a pill, which would help me to resolve the matter in a critical moment.”
“After this black paragraph, a bit of optimism,” he added, saying there was nothing to indicate that anyone suspected him of cooperating with the West.
Later, Kuklinski received a reassuring letter from the Americans about the Polish Interior Minister’s comments that U.S. intelligence was focusing on Poland. After investigating the matter, the Americans wrote, they had concluded that the comments had no connection to their activities, were general in nature, and were typical of what “the Soviet KGB provides to its counterparts within the Warsaw Pact.
“We are convinced that the Minister’s remarks had no significance for our relationship,” the letter said.
In March 1973, Kuklinski sent a reply to the Americans, thanking them for the “Eagle” letter of welcome. His message, like others that followed, was rendered in clear block print, with almost sixty lines to a page.
That spring, Kuklinski also told the Americans that the surveillance voyage the previous summer had been so popular that the General Staff would do it again, and that two yachts―
Legia
and
Opal
―would sail through West German ports in late June.
Legia
and
Opal
―would sail through West German ports in late June.
At CIA headquarters, Blee considered Gull’s request for a suicide pill. The issue had arisen in previous cases, and Blee tended to oppose such steps, mostly for practical reasons. In a moment of uncertainty or fear, even the most experienced agent might panic and ingest a pill unnecessarily. There was also a risk the pills would be discovered and held against the CIA, with the KGB denouncing the agency for trying to kill its citizens. In one earlier case, Blee had ordered his staff to prepare a phony pill for an agent.
As Blee explained, “Every time an agent asks for suicide material, headquarters is of two minds. They always used to say, ‘If this is what this man wants he ought to have it.’ And other people say, ‘No, it won’t help us in the long run.’ That’s where I often said, ‘Give it to him, but make sure it doesn’t work.’”
Blee added with characteristic bluntness: “He’ll go on working for us, confident that all he’s got to do is bite this thing and he’ll die. Meanwhile, I’ll get my production.”
Blee’s senior deputy for operations, Bill Donnelly, shared Blee’s reluctance about providing Kuklinski with “termination measures,” but he suspected Blee’s opposition was not as cold-blooded as Blee led others to believe. Donnelly believed that Blee, who was deacon of his church in suburban Maryland, had religious objections. No decision was reached immediately.
Meanwhile, Blee decided that if Kuklinski was going to remain in place, the agency would need a case officer who spoke fluent Polish to meet him on his annual voyages through Europe. Several officers were considered, and the search eventually narrowed to David W. Forden, an officer based in Mexico City. Donnelly, who knew Forden well, was sent to tell him.
“How is your Polish?” Donnelly asked when he arrived in Mexico City.
“A little rusty,” Forden replied.
“Well, find a tutor,” Donnelly said.
Forden was advised to prepare to fly to Washington in June, where he would review the files, and then to Europe to meet Kuklinski. He would keep his involvement secret, even from his colleagues in Mexico City, suggesting only that he was being recalled to Langley for training and consultations on his next assignment.
Forden found a tutor at the University of Mexico and began brushing up on his Polish. He was tutored at home, rather than at the embassy, in order not to arouse the curiosity of his colleagues.
Forden was an improbable spy. At forty-three, three months younger than Kuklinski, he had always wanted to enter public service, imagining that he might someday go into state or federal government. He often wondered how he had ended up working for the CIA.
Born in Buffalo, New York, he had joined the agency after the first generation of mostly Ivy League graduates who had served in the OSS and signed up at the CIA’s creation after World War II. Forden’s mother, Amy, had grown up on a farm, and his father, William “Ted” Forden, worked as a clerk in a boiler factory. After losing his job in the Depression, Ted worked in a succession of WPA jobs that included digging ditches, operating lift bridges, and working in a homeless shelter. As children, Forden and his older sister, Mary, never forgot their parents’ struggle to survive. On many nights, they lay in bed in their flat on Virgil Avenue, listening to their parents discussing how to pay the $15 monthly rent. In 1939 the family moved about seventeen miles south to the town of East Aurora, and in September, as the war began in Europe, Forden was entering fourth grade at East Aurora Elementary School. His father got his job back at the foundry, where he retired after twenty more years, only to be told that he had just missed qualifying for the company’s new pension plan. Outraged at his father’s treatment, Forden realized that the family would never have pulled through without the help of the federal government.
Forden was an industrious child. He would collect wood scraps at a nearby toy factory and drag his wagon around, selling them door-to-door to be used as kindling for furnaces. He later became an Eagle Scout, was elected president of his high school class, and was accepted on scholarship to Wesleyan University. He majored in government and was in the glee club and president of his fraternity. One day during a joint concert with Vassar College, Forden met a student named Sally Carson, who was in the Vassar glee club, and they began dating. After graduation, Forden, an unabashed Stevenson Democrat, was awarded a fellowship at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he obtained a master’s degree in public administration.
At Maxwell, he shared an off-campus flat with two students, one of them Peter Falk. The fiery Falk, a graduate of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and the soft-spoken Forden, who was known as Chip, reinforced each other’s enthusiasm for political change. Falk, three years older than Forden, had quit college after four months and been turned down by the U.S. Marines because he was blind in one eye. He eventually joined the Merchant Marine and later traveled to Yugoslavia with his girlfriend and dog after Tito invited left-leaning youth to help build railroads. In Falk’s opinion, Forden was smart, reserved, and well grounded. “There was something special about Chip,” Falk recalled. “He was connected to himself. He knew who he was.” They debated politics, particularly the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and listened to Billie Holiday records. Falk, who acted in university productions, even persuaded Forden to audition for a play, but Forden didn’t get the part.
In April 1953, Forden, Falk, and a group of other Maxwell students went to Washington, D.C., in search of work. The trips were a Maxwell tradition: The students met with prominent alumni in the State Department, Pentagon, and other agencies. It was the first few months of the Eisenhower years, the first Republican administration in two decades, and the students quickly learned that there were no jobs. One day, Forden heard that the CIA was seeking recruits. He and Falk decided to go for interviews. Falk recalled, “I thought, why not be a spy?”
Forden’s interview at the agency, then at 2430 E Street NW, went well, and he was invited back the next day. Falk was not. The CIA interviewer who met with him noticed the New School on his résumé and said, “That school is considered a little pink.” While Forden waited for clearance to be hired, he and Falk got jobs in the office of Governor Abraham Ribicoff in Hartford, Connecticut. In September, Forden was offered a job at the CIA. Falk stayed in Hartford, joined a theater group in New Haven, and eventually went on to a successful career as an actor, most notably as the gruff TV detective Columbo.
Forden sometimes wondered what qualified him for a life of derring-do, and he felt nervous taking the job. His other roommate at Maxwell, Alan Goldfarb, a strapping college football player who wrote poetry, recalled being surprised at Forden’s decision to join the agency. “I had this idea people like this were bold and adventurous types, and I never felt that that was his nature. Obviously, I was wrong.”
Like all new hires who lacked military service, Forden was placed in the junior officer training program; he underwent ten weeks of orientation, then was told to enlist in the army. After sixteen weeks of basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, he was accepted into Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. His yearbook photograph shows him in a white T-shirt with a military buzz cut and dark-rimmed glasses. The entry depicts him as a twenty-two-year-old straight arrow, who was nicknamed “the professor” and was known for “his sociability.”
“Dave woke up in time to save many a command conference with his spontaneous orations,” the entry says. It jokingly describes him as “author of that popular new book, ‘An Unbiased Account of the 1952 Election,’ written from a Democratic viewpoint.” Forden “corrected many a Republican junior candidate’s ‘misguided’ political views with an appropriate number of pushups,” the entry says. It concludes: “Basically not a drinking man.”
Forden graduated in October 1954, and was soon commissioned a second lieutenant. In the spring of 1955, after six months in the Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he was ordered to report to the CIA in Washington and told to maintain his cover. He was sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s training center known as “the farm” near Williamsburg, Virginia. There, in groups of three or four, the junior trainees, known as JOTS, learned the work of espionage, including recruitment operations, conducting and detecting surveillance, and mastering clandestine tradecraft. That summer, Forden also married his girlfriend, Sally Carson, who had graduated from Vassar and had become a journalist, working for the
Reporter Dispatch
in White Plains, New York.
Reporter Dispatch
in White Plains, New York.
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