A Secret Life (28 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
“Because of his highest esteem and admiration for you, he postponed his retirement several times in order to follow closely our activities and take an active part in them,” the CIA said. “Through this letter, he sends you his expression of highest respect and wishes you every success in all aspects of your life. His replacement is a long-time highly trusted colleague who feels honored to become a member of our small, exclusive group.”
In August 1979, Ted Gilbertson,
11
an amiable thirty-seven-year-old West Virginian with a small mustache and boyish face, arrived in Poland, joining Burggraf in Warsaw Station. Gilbertson, an eight-year CIA veteran, had two children and was in the midst of a complicated divorce, but was pleased that he could work out the assignment. He had an uncommon background for a CIA officer. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University, he worked as a reporter at WPSX, a local educational station, where he started an innovative children’s news program. After serving in the army, he applied to the CIA, and while waiting to hear from the agency, he became a traveling salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He seemed always to be in his car, making calls on offices and clinics, which turned out to be good preparation for Warsaw Station, where he spent hours on surveillance detection runs.
11
an amiable thirty-seven-year-old West Virginian with a small mustache and boyish face, arrived in Poland, joining Burggraf in Warsaw Station. Gilbertson, an eight-year CIA veteran, had two children and was in the midst of a complicated divorce, but was pleased that he could work out the assignment. He had an uncommon background for a CIA officer. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University, he worked as a reporter at WPSX, a local educational station, where he started an innovative children’s news program. After serving in the army, he applied to the CIA, and while waiting to hear from the agency, he became a traveling salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He seemed always to be in his car, making calls on offices and clinics, which turned out to be good preparation for Warsaw Station, where he spent hours on surveillance detection runs.
Before leaving for Warsaw, Gilbertson met with George Kalaris, the serious and at times mercurial chief of the Soviet Division at the time. Kalaris told Gilbertson that Gull was the most important case the Directorate of Operations had running against Moscow. “If you do nothing else, do not fuck up on this tour,” Kalaris said.
A third new officer, Michael Dwyer, thirty-three, arrived in Warsaw in early September for his first posting in a denied area. A native of Buffalo, New York, Dwyer
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was an Asian expert who had served in Vietnam in the navy and was fluent in Vietnamese.
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was an Asian expert who had served in Vietnam in the navy and was fluent in Vietnamese.
Some years earlier, Dwyer had been interviewed by Daniel about his next assignment. Dwyer was ready for a challenge and made clear that he wanted to be sent to Moscow Station. Daniel puffed slowly on a Camel, his lids half closed in the smoke, and sat silently. Dwyer watched the ash on Daniel’s cigarette grow longer and longer, as the smoke billowed upward. Daniel finally spoke.
“Warsaw would be a terrific assignment,” he said. “We
really
have some operations there.” He held out his palm. “In one meeting, you can pick up in your hand more intelligence than most guys could get in their hands in their whole career.”
really
have some operations there.” He held out his palm. “In one meeting, you can pick up in your hand more intelligence than most guys could get in their hands in their whole career.”
Dwyer landed in Warsaw on September 2, 1979, three months after the historic visit of Pope John Paul II, the former Bishop of Krakow, who had celebrated a mass in Victory Square with 250,000 Poles. He had declared to thunderous applause, “There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!”
As Dwyer drove around the city, he could feel the tremors of change. Buildings and walls were covered with slogans heralding resistance. Many signs displayed a “P” superimposed on a “W” for “Polska Walczaca” (Fighting Poland), the symbol of the Polish Home Army, and Dwyer was reminded of how proud and independent the Poles remained. Some of the slogans were quickly painted over by the Communists, but the paint never seemed to hold in the rain, and the slogans reappeared. On September 17, the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion, Dwyer and a colleague drove past the Russian trade mission in Warsaw, where someone had scaled a thirty-foot wall in front and painted in large Polish letters “We will never forget!”
Later in the year, on November 11, the holiday that commemorates Polish independence in 1918 after nearly 125 years of partition by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, Dwyer went to hear the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, give a homily before thousands of Poles in St. John’s Cathedral in the Old Town. Afterward, Dwyer moved with the crowd into the streets, where banners were unfurled reading “Freedom” and “Bread” and others quoting the pope’s challenge that there could not be a just Europe without a free Poland. As Dwyer watched, SB agents moved through the crowd, tearing down banners. Just as quickly more went up. Dwyer was deeply moved by what he was seeing―the Poles’ obvious courage in an evening of national defiance.
He joined the crowd as it marched in the chilly evening through the narrow streets of Old Town to Castle Square and up Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the main boulevard in Warsaw, to Victory Square and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a national symbol that predated the Communist regime. That night, Dwyer learned the historic Polish national anthem as the crowd sang it over and over.
In early September, Jaruzelski ordered that the General Staff comment on the Soviet draft of the wartime statute before it was presented to party chief Gierek and Prime Minister Jaroszewicz. When Siwicki and his top officers met to discuss it, the group remained silent when asked for its views. Kuklinski finally spoke up, saying he felt strongly that the proposal should be rejected. “We should turn it down in this form. We’re giving everything to the Soviets,” he said.
Asked to draft a response for Siwicki, Kuklinski produced a highly critical document but was ordered to soften it. Kuklinski revised the document several more times, but each time he was told to eliminate criticism of the proposal, and to find that the proposal was in the interest of Poland and should be accepted. Finally, Kuklinski drew up a version that included only marginal objections and reached the conclusion that his superiors wanted.
When Jaruzelski and his deputies met on September 10 to discuss Kulikov’s proposal, there was no dissent. Jaruzelski said that the issue was a difficult one that “requires comprehensive research and study.” Siwicki offered no criticism of his own, but handed Jaruzelski the paper Kuklinski had prepared.
On September 21, Marshal Kulikov returned to Poland to meet with Gierek and Jaruzelski. The Poles offered a muddled and weak compromise. Kulikov rejected the Polish ideas and said he would return for further talks. That day, Kuklinski began an angry letter about Kulikov’s rigidity and the cravenness of the East bloc, including Poland. In the General Staff, he knew there were officers who saw the proposal as “a brutal attempt to cancel the sovereignty of the member countries of the Warsaw Pact.” But it was clear that criticism would get nowhere. “All this week,” Kuklinski wrote to the CIA, “we were backing out of specific stipulations and positions, and finally a very trimmed-down version was presented to Kulikov.”
I’m certain that the leadership of the MON [Ministry of Defense] will be ready, if Moscow demands it, to back out of the rest of their proposals, and support the draft of the statute. . . . Kulikov has already discussed these matters in Czechoslovakia, and according to his words, he received full support there. From Poland, he will go to the German Democratic Republic for the same purpose.
Kuklinski noted that his responsibilities had also increased. While remaining chief of the General Staff’s First Department for Strategic Defense Planning, he would also assume the duties of deputy chief for the entire operational directorate. “Taking everything into consideration, I evaluate the situation as very favorable,” he wrote.
Writing separately to Daniel, Kuklinski recalled the loss of Barbara and offered a meditation on “the delicate nature of friendship, brutally disrupted by death.”
There is no parting with real, devoted friends. There is no way to part with them even when they are not among us anymore. I don’t know if I will ever be able to pull myself together from this loss....Dear Daniel, I agree with you that we cannot reverse irreversible events. From personal survival and experiences, I also know that time heals even the most severe wounds, strength and faith permitting. Despite my continuing state of depression, I see ahead many unattained goals, both the great ones related to Polish aspirations for liberty, and the lesser ones pertaining to family and myself.
Kuklinski said that he felt he enjoyed the trust of his superiors, as evidenced by his inclusion in the narrow circle involved in the wartime statutes and his apparent ability to openly criticize the proposal within the General Staff.
Even though I know that my efforts to reject this disgraceful document, in the end, will not be crowned with success, this work gives me much satisfaction because for the first time in over 30 years I can speak what I think on this subject and how I evaluate it. Not all the evaluations, conclusions and proposals are being accepted. However, I hope that the language which aims at finalizing the transfer to the hands of Moscow of the inalienable right of the Polish nation to reach decisions concerning how to use its own armed forces will be changed, and the other provisions of this document, which attempt to destroy what is left of Polish statehood, will be considerably moderated.Of course, preventing the destruction of one’s own statehood, and total subordination to Moscow, is the business of the concerned nation and its government.
Kuklinski added a note of appreciation to Stanley Patkowski, the retiring translator, and said he was including “a token of my remembrance”―the pen used to sign the resolutions of the defense ministers committee meeting in Budapest. “Daniel, shake his belabored hand for me,” Kuklinski wrote.
He delivered the pen, his letters, and twenty-seven rolls of film in an exchange on September 24.
Over the next few weeks, Kuklinski was assigned to coordinate the final negotiations regarding the wartime statutes with Kulikov and his staff, who were making visits to each Warsaw Pact capital, pressing for agreement.
In mid-October, Kulikov, accompanied by Gribkov, his chief of staff, and other deputies and officers, returned to Poland for two days of secret talks at Omulew, a town in the lush Mazurian Lake region in northeast Poland. As the sessions began, Kulikov made it clear that he considered any opposition to his proposal to be unacceptable. Bulgaria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia supported the draft “without reservations,” he said. Hungary had been more difficult to win over. In fourteen hours of negotiations, he said, Hungary’s defense minister had expressed numerous reservations, only to back down on every point, surprising even the Soviets, Kulikov said.
The biggest problem was Romania, Kulikov went on, accusing Romanian officials of leaking information to the West. He bristled as he described his visit to Bucharest. As his plane arrived, the Romanian air-traffic controllers had refused to communicate in Russian. Once on the ground, the Romanian secret police had surrounded him and followed him everywhere. Worse, he said, he was placed in a hotel room next to some Chinese officials. Kulikov said that he expected Jaruzelski to maintain the united front against the Romanians when the Warsaw Pact defense ministers met in Warsaw in December, in a session being led by Jaruzelski. The statutes were to be approved at the meeting. Gribkov added at one point that although he appreciated Jaruzelski’s general support for the statutes, it was time for the Poles to give their “detailed substantive and editorial agreement.”
During the meetings, Jaruzelski, Kulikov, and Gribkov went hunting, telling Kuklinski to work out the remaining disagreements between the Poles and the Soviets. When they returned a few hours later, Kulikov had killed three stags, Gribkov two, and the Polish generals none. Kulikov demanded to know what progress had been made.
When Kuklinski reported that the latest Soviet draft did not adequately deal with Polish concerns, Jaruzelski looked unhappy. But Siwicki said that the Soviets had to take Poland’s positions seriously, a stance that caught Kulikov by surprise. After another day of talks, compromises were worked out in all but two areas. The most important disagreement was over Moscow’s insistence on having unilateral authority to move the Polish air defense systems beyond Poland’s borders to protect Soviet troops as they moved westward in an offensive.
Kuklinski was told to go to Moscow with a two-star general who served as the Polish air defense commander to resolve the issue. Before leaving, Kuklinski met with Siwicki, who agreed that Poland should not surrender control of its air defenses in wartime. At the very least, Siwicki said, no such act should occur without Poland’s agreement.
In Moscow, Kuklinski and the Polish air defense commander met with a Soviet negotiating team led by the deputy Soviet air defense commander, a General Podgorney. After a day of talks, Kuklinski felt that they had won concessions on two points: The air defense of each Warsaw Pact country should be used to protect only that country, and if it became necessary to move air defense forces beyond the country’s borders, the decision should be made by the political and military leadership of that country, not Moscow. Second, the air defense commander of each Warsaw Pact country should have authority within that country’s territory.
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