A Secret Life (27 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
A former high school librarian from Ogdensburg, New York, Brerewood had joined the CIA in 1963. As the Polish desk officer, she played a quiet but critical role in support of the Gull operation. After Daniel went to Vienna, for example, she helped to coordinate the preparation of “Daniel” letters that were sent to Gull. She read the final version of each draft to make sure the secretaries had matched word for word what the translator, Stanley Patkowski, had written. When Kuklinski’s film was shipped to Langley, Brerewood hauled the special lead-lined containers to the photo labs run by the Office of Technical Services, and soon there was so much film coming in that the lab technicians taught her how to make prints. After the rolls were developed, she logged in each negative, matching it with its corresponding print. Although she could not read Polish or Russian, she could usually determine by examining a series of images where each document began and ended.
And because Brerewood was privy to the dates of exchanges with Kuklinski, she experienced them vicariously. On Sundays, when she knew Warsaw Station would be meeting him in the evening Polish time, she grew tense in the afternoon, waiting, wondering, looking at her watch, knowing the exchange was taking place. She did not relax until she got into work the next morning, had checked the cables, and knew Gull was safe.
That night, as she and her colleagues sat in the Duck restaurant, she did not realize how close she would come to encountering Gull. As she and her friends studied the menu, her CIA colleague suddenly looked up and remarked, “You know, I don’t think I want duck tonight.” He glanced at a nearby table occupied by a group of men wearing the khaki uniforms of the Polish Army. The Americans got up and left. Later, the colleague told her that one of the officers at the nearby table was Gull.
In early March, Sue Burggraf joined Warsaw Station, the first woman to serve as a full-time CIA operations officer in Poland. She had initially turned down the job. A single woman in her early thirties, she had assumed that Warsaw would be a grim and lonely place, and she did not relish the notion of being the target of constant surveillance, in her apartment and car and on the phone.
Burggraf loved to travel, had visited every state except Alaska and Hawaii, and had spent a summer working as a chambermaid in a tiny village in the Black Forest in Germany. She craved adventure. As a senior at Ohio University in 1967, when she heard a CIA recruiter was on campus, she went to meet him. He told her she’d “be doing some spy-type things,” she recalled. “It sounded pretty sexy to me.” She wasn’t told she would be hired as a secretary. Burggraf, whose father worked as a postman and whose mother was a church organist, was the first member of her family to attend college, and she felt out of place as the only college graduate in her training class of about two dozen secretaries-to-be. By the time she completed her training, about half of the women in her class had become pregnant and dropped out. Burggraf persisted and was sent overseas as a CIA secretary. She eventually returned to Langley and worked her way up.
But even as an officer, she encountered resistance. When she was first offered the Warsaw posting, the job was described as “station support,” one step below an officer’s slot. She would have no interaction with sources and would be allowed only to scout new operational sites and to watch for chalk marks and other signals on her way to and from work. Infuriated, Burggraf refused to take the position. One CIA official reminded her that she had signed a commitment to go anywhere the agency sent her, and another supervisor, Peter Earnest, urged her to reconsider. Earnest made some calls and assured her that she would be a full case officer by the time she arrived in Poland. Burggraf was given six months to prepare. She spoke no Polish and immersed herself in language classes, pausing only on Friday afternoons, when she would go to headquarters to familiarize herself with the Polish case files.
After her arrival in Warsaw, she bought a white Polski Fiat for $2,500, figuring it would be easier for sources to see in the dark. But like all new officers, Burggraf was told she would have to wait six months before she could carry out an exchange on the street. She would have to get to know the city and establish daily driving patterns to get a feel for surveillance. As she had expected, life in Warsaw was challenging. For months, her home phone rang repeatedly, and when she answered, she would hear different female voices, speaking in Polish. Burggraf didn’t yet know the language well enough to converse with the callers, but she knew how to say “wrong number.” When she hung up, the phone would ring again.
On March 23, after several aborted exchange attempts with Kuklinski, the CIA drove by the phone booth near the fish shop, where he had agreed to appear for a signal, but he was not there. A month later, Warsaw Station left a chalk mark signaling Kuklinski to appear for an unscheduled exchange, but again he did not show up. “Disappointed but not yet alarmed,” Warsaw cabled Langley. The CIA decided to wait for a signal from Kuklinski.
At 8:30 A.M. on April 30, an officer spotted a chalk mark, an indication that Kuklinski would leave a message at ten o’clock that night. Warsaw Station retrieved the message, in which Kuklinski requested a car exchange on May 6.
Kuklinski had skipped the March 4 exchange because he had nothing significant to pass on to the CIA. He had intended to visit the phone booth on March 23, but the night before, he learned that one of his closest friends, Barbara Jakubowska, had died of ovarian cancer. She and her parents had been close friends of Kuklinski and Hanka. Barbara’s father, Czeslaw, doted on Kuklinski, and reminded him of his own father, who had the same slow walk and temperament. Barbara, who was in her late twenties, had been employed by an electronics company and was studying economics. She was close to Kuklinski’s son Bogdan, loved their dog, Zula, and enjoyed sailing with the family. In the early 1970s, when Barbara became ill, her parents asked Kuklinski for advice about the best doctors. His mother had died in 1963 from the same illness. Kuklinski accompanied Barbara to the hospital and stayed involved in her case. When her cancer went into remission, her parents, who were deeply religious, credited Kuklinski with performing a miracle.
Barbara continued her recovery, but one day her parents called Kuklinski to say she had suffered a stroke and lost her speech. In mid-March, after a second stroke, she had died. Her death, which saddened Kuklinski enormously, came at a time of difficult family issues for Kuklinski as well. Hanka’s arthritis and back pain, which had been diagnosed as spinal degeneration, had forced her to quit her job as a factory bookkeeper. Bogdan had gone to trial in the case involving the pedestrian he had struck. He was convicted, fined, and received a suspended sentence of one year.
On May 3, Soviet Marshal Kulikov led a highly classified training exercise that involved small teams of Warsaw Pact officers and was intended to simulate the transition of Warsaw Pact military forces from peacetime to wartime status. Kuklinski was outraged that his superiors were not resisting Kulikov’s proposal to place the Polish General Staff under Soviet control in wartime, and within the General Staff he openly expressed his hostility. He had heard scuttlebutt that the proposal also deeply offended Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz, who was apparently unwilling to say so publicly.
On the night of May 5, as the exercise ended, Kuklinski wrote to the CIA describing the materials he had photographed under tight security. “It was forbidden to take any typists or draftswomen. All documents had to be executed by hand by generals and officers,” he wrote. In a delivery the next day, he provided more than seventy documents, which filled more than 800 film images. One twelve-page report, dated January 12, 1979, was about Soviet chemical warfare training; a memo from Polish intelligence was about the collection of data on an advanced U.S. communications satellite system called Marisat. There was new material on the battle-readiness plan for the Warsaw Pact militaries, sent by Kulikov’s staff.
Kuklinski said he felt secure enough to criticize Kulikov’s proposed wartime statutes, and he suspected some of his colleagues silently agreed with him.
I continue to belong to the circle of persons who are favored with the greatest trust in spite of my opposition to all solutions which menace the sovereignty of the state which I serve. Words of disapprobation about my bitterness toward pro-Soviet and servile attitudes are swallowed. It is possible that in the majority of cases, we all think the same but differ only in tactics of action.
Kuklinski, unaware that Daniel was no longer at headquarters, wrote him a separate letter, in which he expressed his fury at Kulikov’s aggressive and presumptuous approach to the wartime statutes. The training exercise, which lasted up to twenty hours a day, had made clear that for the first time in a thousand years, Poland’s leaders were to approve a procedure that would deprive the nation of its sovereign rights and relinquish them “to the hands of a foreign power which is stretching its greedy paws into all corners of the world in order to reign supreme over it.” Kuklinski found it deplorable that except for Romania, no Warsaw Pact leader was objecting to “this shameful decision.”
Daniel: The purpose of activities I assumed on my own free will seven years ago was and still is active counter-action against such a development of events as is described above. Facing you with these matters I wish to hope that knowledge of them will allow the highest authorities of the United States to take appropriate blocking counter-measures. I do not feel competent to voice any proposals in these matters.
Kuklinski described his sadness at Barbara Jakubowska’s death. “She was extremely modest and inconspicuous, but a woman of enormous generosity who offered everything and asked nothing in return.” He said he had visited her grave at Wolski cemetery, which was only fifty meters from the cemetery where he had first met the Americans. “Passing by there, I feel at this moment my only encouragement that our road, which had its good beginning at this very spot, has still not ended,” he wrote.
Daniel―ending this, I would like to thank you cordially for your last letter, and for everything that you have done for me lately. I am grateful to you for your friendship, which you invariably sustain, caring about and doing everything for my security. I do not lose hope that it will be given to us not only to shake friendly hands but also to establish closer contacts, either in your or my country. Everything indicates that last year’s tensions have been completely conquered and that there is a chance for continuation of a secure and effective cooperation.Yours,P.V.
The CIA considered the nineteen rolls of film Kuklinski provided on May 6 highly significant. One CIA memo said that one document, a fourteen-page letter from Jaruzelski to Kulikov on the proposal to place Polish forces under Soviet control in wartime, would be held in strict secrecy. Outside the CIA, it would go only to the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Eugene F. Tighe Jr.; the director of the National Security Agency, Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman; and the Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, Major General Edmund R. Thompson.
Over the next two months, the General Staff continued to feel pressure from Kulikov and his staff on the wartime proposal. “I feel as if I were in the eye of a cyclone,” Kuklinski wrote to the CIA in a letter he delivered in an exchange on July 8. He also turned over fourteen rolls of film, including a twenty-seven-page Russian draft of the proposed wartime statute that had been given to Jaruzelski. Only Jaruzelski, Siwicki, and one other officer were aware of the contents, Kuklinski wrote. “Please use information on this subject very sparingly.”
He also provided a detailed analysis of Soviet weapons systems, including the T-72 tank, “which I obtained during a demonstration of this tank for the leading personnel of the Polish General Staff.” He had photographed a table that compared the combat capabilities of Soviet aircraft, including the Su-24, Su-17 M2, and MiG-27. Most had not yet been introduced into the Polish military. “I copied these tables from a notebook of one of the Russian generals participating in bilateral talks at the Polish General Staff (of course without his knowledge).”
He noted that Colonel Putek, the counterintelligence officer who had visited him so frequently, had been transferred to Egypt. “He even sent me a postcard from Cairo,” he noted wryly.
In the exchange, he received a sympathetic response from “Daniel” to the news of the death of Barbara. The CIA also told Kuklinski that Stan, the officer who had translated the correspondence between him and Daniel, was retiring, so Kuklinski therefore might notice some differences in style and expressions in future letters.
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