A Secret Life (14 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
In June 1965, David Forden flew to Vienna to meet with Bill Donnelly, whom Forden would succeed as Warsaw Station Chief. Forden wanted to debrief Donnelly, who knew Poland thoroughly and who, like Hav Smith in Prague, had been experimenting with techniques to defeat surveillance.
Forden described in detail the brush-pass concept being developed for use in Prague. “You try that here,” Donnelly warned, “and you’ll be caught and PNG’d.”
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They talked for several days as they strolled through parks. “I picked his brain from morning to night,” Forden recalled. “About Poles. About surveillance. I had a million questions, and he had a million answers.”
Forden knew there would be no margin for error in Poland; you had to think like a clandestine operator all the time, or sources would lose their lives, and officers would be always burdened with those losses.
Donnelly shared this view, driven by the belief that the greatest danger in his profession lay not in betrayal by a Soviet mole, as Angleton would have it, but by simple mistakes in tradecraft and a failure to maintain proper compartmentalization of information. After studying the classified histories, Donnelly had reached the conclusion―not universally shared in the CIA―that the Soviet Russia Division had not been prepared to handle agents in Moscow such as Penkovsky.
Donnelly was a quiet Ohioan who could discuss the intricacies of Polish politics as easily as he could miniaturization techniques for cameras. A Korean War veteran who had joined the CIA in 1954, he had risen in the agency through East bloc assignments, culminating in Warsaw from 1959 to 1965, including the past three years as chief. At that point in the agency’s history, Donnelly had probably spent more time in Eastern Europe than any other CIA officer.
In his six years in Poland, Donnelly, like Hav Smith in Prague, experienced opposing surveillance for so long that he perversely came to enjoy manipulating it. On long drives through the countryside, he found that he could pull just far enough ahead of the SB so that when he turned a curve at fifty to sixty miles per hour or disappeared over a small hill, he was able to create ten- to twenty-second gaps during which he could throw a soda can or bottle out the window and into a ditch by the road. In such “car tosses,” beepers might be placed inside the object along with a message, so that an agent with a small radio could find it easily.
In his conversations with Forden, Donnelly tried to convey his passion for Poland. From the day Donnelly arrived under cover as an agricultural attaché, he had tried to understand Poland, its people and its history. More than any other country under Communist control, he felt, Poland was rich in one asset the CIA should constantly try to exploit: the rage of its people toward the Soviet Union.
It was clear to Donnelly that Poles were passionate about two great institutions―the church and the army. Donnelly remembered how he would take drives outside Warsaw and see daughters of Communist officials receiving church weddings. In June and July, wedding parties would be lined up on the roads outside the rural churches.
Religion influenced even the most sophisticated and educated urban Poles. Once, Donnelly and his wife, Margery, were invited by one such Pole to visit a church near the edge of where the ghetto had once stood. When they arrived, Donnelly and his wife found the churchyard crowded with people, almost all of them kneeling. “Do you see it?” Donnelly’s friend whispered, asserting that there was a halo around the top of the church’s spire. To Donnelly, it seemed like a mass psychosis. But out of politeness, he and Margery also dropped to their knees.
Another time, as he and a colleague were driving a white Ford toward Poznan, several hours west of Warsaw, they could see two Mercedes cars following about a mile away. Donnelly and the other officer were certain that they were being followed by the SB. They turned quickly onto a side road and parked behind a barn. Moments later, the two cars screeched to a stop. From behind the barn, they could see SB officers leaping out of their cars and yelling at two peasants, “Which way did the white Ford go?”
One peasant replied, “What white Ford?”
The police shoved the man into a ditch, jumped into their cars, and sped off. As the peasant got up and dusted himself off, the CIA officers drove out from behind the barn, saluted the peasants, and drove in the opposite direction.
In August 1965, Forden arrived in Warsaw. He, Sally, and their two children moved into a small duplex on Zawrat Street, not far from the Vistula River. Forden worked as a second secretary in the embassy’s political section, while Sally took care of the children and studied Polish. They went out frequently at night, attending diplomatic functions and other events.
As he expected, he came under frequent surveillance by the SB as he moved around Warsaw. At one point, he compared notes with Ron Estes, who had used the brush pass with great success in Prague. (By Estes’s count, he “clicked off ” thirty-two brush passes in seventeen months in Prague.)
Forden pondered the possibilities for Warsaw, where the CIA had used dead drops and clandestine mailings to communicate with agents. As Forden drove, walked, and biked around the city, he found only one area with street configurations similar to those of Prague. It was the Old Town, a small crowded section that was full of tourists and heavily patrolled by the SB and the police. That was the last place he would want to carry out a risky operational act. Elsewhere the city lacked the twists and turns necessary for a brush pass and an agent’s quick escape. But Forden had an idea that might work: a car pass.
Forden had noticed as he drove around Warsaw that the SB tended to stay sufficiently behind him that if he made a right turn, there was a short gap before he saw the SB car make the same turn. Within that gap, he felt, there was enough time to make a quick handoff to a source through the car window. As a precaution, he would monitor the SB through his rearview mirror. If the trailing car was too close, he would continue driving, aborting the exchange while the agent disappeared into a courtyard or alley. Forden called the technique a “moving car delivery,” or MCD. He found two sites in Warsaw that seemed suitable. His favorite, which he code-named Morze (sea in Polish) was down the hill from the Polish Sejm, or parliament, toward the Vistula River. The site had an escape route and was in an area that was virtually deserted at night. Forden submitted both sites to the agency in early 1967. But his MCD plan was rejected by headquarters as “too risky, dangerous, wouldn’t work.” Forden left detailed notes about the sites in the files of Warsaw Station, in the hope they might be used someday.
Forden completed his tour as Warsaw Station Chief that year and was reassigned to the Polish desk at Langley. One year later, he was named chief of the branch responsible for Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In 1968 he and Sally had their third child, a daughter, Caty.
In August 1970, Forden was sent to Mexico City to run Soviet and East European operations there. His boss, Chief of Station John Horton, found him to be serious and organized. On his office wall, Forden hung the passport photographs of Soviet intelligence officers stationed in Mexico―his own rogues’ gallery. On May 3, 1973, Forden got a message from Donnelly that he was needed for a temporary assignment in Europe.
In June, Forden flew to Washington for briefings on the Gull case. He was pleased to learn that Warsaw Station had dusted off his moving-car delivery proposal, which had finally been approved, and made its first exchange with Kuklinski at Morze, the site Forden had found near the Polish parliament. In reviewing the files, though, Forden concluded that Gull, in his dedication to his cause, was moving too fast and turning over too much information. Fatigue could cause mistakes.
Forden also had to select an alias for himself. He chose the name of his son: Daniel.
On June 22, 1973, Colonel Henry walked around the harbor area of Kiel, looking for Kuklinski, whose yacht was supposed to arrive that morning. Henry had arrived at 8:00 A.M., and he combed the area until about noon. He saw three other Polish vessels but not the
Legia
. At 12:10 P.M., he went to a prearranged meeting place a few blocks away and waited twenty minutes, but did not see Kuklinski. At 2:10 P.M., he returned, but again did not see the colonel. Finally, at 3:00 P.M., he saw the
Legia
moored by the harbor police station and soon was able to make eye contact with Kuklinski, who was still aboard. Kuklinski froze when he saw Henry. Then he gathered himself, disembarked, and strolled along a water-level catwalk below the pier, following Henry for forty or fifty yards, until he was out of sight of the yacht.
Legia
. At 12:10 P.M., he went to a prearranged meeting place a few blocks away and waited twenty minutes, but did not see Kuklinski. At 2:10 P.M., he returned, but again did not see the colonel. Finally, at 3:00 P.M., he saw the
Legia
moored by the harbor police station and soon was able to make eye contact with Kuklinski, who was still aboard. Kuklinski froze when he saw Henry. Then he gathered himself, disembarked, and strolled along a water-level catwalk below the pier, following Henry for forty or fifty yards, until he was out of sight of the yacht.
They talked for thirty seconds, barely able to hear each other over the din of a helicopter landing at the nearby police station. Speaking in Russian, Kuklinski told Henry that he was pleased their conversation was being drowned out by the helicopter’s background music, and that he hoped to make their meeting that evening.
At 6:15 P.M., Henry went to the block where he had arranged to meet Kuklinski, but did not see him. Kuklinski did not appear two hours later or at 10:15 P.M., the third backup time. About half an hour later, Henry returned and saw Kuklinski having a party with some people on his boat. After an hour passed, it became clear that Kuklinski would not be able to get away, and Henry left for his apartment.
Kuklinski had seen Henry, but he decided not to risk leaving the boat that evening. There had been a series of unusual incidents, and he did not want to raise suspicions. The problems began when the
Legia
, trailed by the
Opal
, left Gdansk and sailed for two days to Swinoujscie, the westernmost town on the Polish coast. At the border, the passports of all the crew members were taken and not immediately returned. Six hours passed. Finally, crew member Stanislaw Radaj, an old friend of Kuklinski’s who was acting as the counterintelligence officer for the trip, was summoned to a harbor office to talk by phone with Warsaw. Radaj disappeared for an hour. Kuklinski wondered why he, as commander of the voyage, had not been called. When Radaj returned, he told Kuklinski that the boat had been held up because of concerns about another crew member, a naval officer who was suspected of having contacts with foreigners. Feigning alarm, Kuklinski said that they should keep an eye on him. Radaj seemed reassured, and they were soon allowed to sail. But Kuklinski knew that if the boat was being closely monitored, it would be hard to carry out his clandestine activities.
Legia
, trailed by the
Opal
, left Gdansk and sailed for two days to Swinoujscie, the westernmost town on the Polish coast. At the border, the passports of all the crew members were taken and not immediately returned. Six hours passed. Finally, crew member Stanislaw Radaj, an old friend of Kuklinski’s who was acting as the counterintelligence officer for the trip, was summoned to a harbor office to talk by phone with Warsaw. Radaj disappeared for an hour. Kuklinski wondered why he, as commander of the voyage, had not been called. When Radaj returned, he told Kuklinski that the boat had been held up because of concerns about another crew member, a naval officer who was suspected of having contacts with foreigners. Feigning alarm, Kuklinski said that they should keep an eye on him. Radaj seemed reassured, and they were soon allowed to sail. But Kuklinski knew that if the boat was being closely monitored, it would be hard to carry out his clandestine activities.
At the docks in Kiel, Kuklinski and his crew were surprised to hear a German man call out Kuklinski’s name. Kuklinski told his crew that he had no idea why someone was shouting his name; perhaps someone had seen it on the crew list, which had been sent ahead. The explanation seemed to satisfy his crew, but the incident left Kuklinski unsettled.
That night, Kuklinski had decided to have a party for the crew to celebrate their arrival in Kiel. As the crew drank through the night, Kuklinski listened carefully, hoping that loose tongues might reveal whether his crew was in any way suspicious of him. He learned nothing, however, and, dropped into bed, exhausted, at 3:00 A.M.
On Saturday, June 23, at about 8:00 A.M., Henry returned to the harbor area and waited on a bench about 200 yards from the
Legia
. Almost two hours later, he saw Kuklinski, who left the boat and met Henry at his car. Henry handed Kuklinski a hat and a pair of sunglasses.
Legia
. Almost two hours later, he saw Kuklinski, who left the boat and met Henry at his car. Henry handed Kuklinski a hat and a pair of sunglasses.
At the safe-house apartment, Kuklinski apologized for missing the meeting the night before, describing the incidents on board and explaining that he had instigated the crew’s drinking spree “to find out whether there are any suspicions.” Kuklinski admitted that he was feeling very nervous.
Kuklinski said that their meetings had been “well conceived” and that his crew usually dispersed for several hours to shop. “I can break away from my colleagues most often in big department stores,” Kuklinski said. After discussion about their communications in Poland, Kuklinski moved to more substantive areas.
He said he had flown the previous fall to a Soviet base in Kazakhstan north of Astrakhan to observe a missile-launching exercise. He had been struck by the contrast between the Soviet Union’s high-tech weaponry and the poverty of its soldiers, who were crowded into squalid shacks with four to five men sharing a single straw bed. Kuklinski and his colleagues had been put up in a hotel that lacked toilet paper. The toilets were broken, and water leaked onto the floor. Rather than fix the toilets, the Soviets had placed concrete blocks on the floor so their guests could keep their shoes dry.
During the return flight, Kuklinski had spoken to General Jozef Urbanowicz, Poland’s first deputy defense minister. “Urbanowicz left the other generals, came to me, offered me a glass of cognac,” Kuklinski said. At one point, Kuklinski had made a comment about the abject conditions of the Soviet soldiers―“these people who are building communism,” as he put it.
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