A Secret Life (9 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
As his responsibilities grew, he won the respect of the Operations Directorate, which was staffed by 80 to 100 officers, and coordinated the work of other directorates, such as intelligence, armament planning, and mobilization. As Kuklinski’s access to Soviet and Warsaw Pact secrets increased, he began to discern flaws in his country’s military relationship with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet and Warsaw Pact military strategy was exclusively offensive. Every military exercise began with the pretense that it was a response to a NATO attack. But Kuklinski, who was writing the exercises, knew the plans called for a massive first strike by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces. More than 600,000 Polish troops would participate in a first wave that would sweep west and north to attack West Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark. A few days later, the second wave, the Second Strategic Echelon, would follow. This huge force, consisting of 50 divisions, 2 million soldiers, and more than 1 million armored vehicles and rockets, was stationed in the western Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic republics. It was in many ways, Moscow believed, the key to a victory in Europe.
On the General Staff, Kuklinski worked near Jaruzelski’s office and did assignments for him, although they did not have daily contact. He worked more closely with General Chocha, who had risen to become deputy chief of staff for operations. General Chocha, who had a deep voice and firm manner, was an astute and demanding boss and was well liked and respected. Born in Grodno, he had come from a family of Polish intellectuals and had been attending college in 1940 when the Soviets expelled him and his family to Kazakhstan, where he was put to work in a wood-processing combine. He was drafted in 1943 into the First Mechanized Division of the Soviet-backed Polish First Army and eventually worked his way up the ranks, becoming Jaruzelski’s deputy on the General Staff.
One day in 1967, Kuklinski and Chocha took a train to Berlin for a meeting with the leadership of the German and Soviet troops in Germany. After some drinks, Chocha began to open up, and he complained to Kuklinski about Poland’s vulnerability in the Soviet war scheme. Why was it an offensive strategy? Chocha asked. Why were Polish troops attacking NATO? Shouldn’t they only defend Poland?
Chocha said he had raised the issue with Jaruzelski and other top generals, but had gotten nowhere. Kuklinski decided he had an important intellectual ally on the General Staff.
In the summer of 1967, Kuklinski was considered for the post of military attaché to Washington, but instead was sent in October to Vietnam for about six months as a member of Poland’s delegation to the ICC, the body created to ensure compliance with the Geneva accords. The experience served to reinforce Kuklinski’s views of the superpowers. He admired the American soldiers in Vietnam, and he knew growing up that the Americans had bombed the Germans and helped to destroy the Nazi war machine. He also worried that antiwar sentiment in the United States might cause it to reassess its commitment to fighting the Soviets around the world, or worse yet, to withdraw its troops from Europe.
In Saigon, Kuklinski found himself in close proximity to Americans. One evening during the January 1968 Tet offensive (the major surprise attack by the Communists in towns and cities throughout South Vietnam), as he was watching the fighting from a hotel roof with several other Polish officers detailed to the ICC, an American who was known to be of Polish descent appeared before them. He was in civilian clothes, and greeted Kuklinski in Polish. Kuklinski, who was in his uniform, suspected that the American was a CIA officer. Kuklinski’s delegation had been warned not to speak to Americans, but Kuklinski started to make small talk. He definitely wanted to meet this man, and as a pretext, asked if he would buy an item for him in the American Post Exchange (PX). The man said he would be delighted to, and he invited Kuklinski to visit him anytime at his hotel. Kuklinski was never able to make the visit and felt he had missed an important opportunity.
In 1968, Kuklinski’s career received a boost when Jaruzelski was named defense minister and Chocha was appointed chief of the General Staff.
In August 1968, a few months after he returned from Vietnam, Kuklinski’s suspicions about Soviet intentions were reinforced dramatically after he got an order to go to Legnica, a city in southwestern Poland, to assist in planning the Polish role in military exercises, code-named “Danube,” being conducted by Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, commander of the Warsaw Pact forces. When Kuklinski arrived, he found representatives from each Warsaw Pact country except Czechoslovakia and Romania. He knew Czech forces were marked on their military maps in blue, the color usually reserved for the enemy. Kuklinski was confused at first, then realized he was seeing plans for an impending invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down “Prague Spring.”
Around the command post, no one spoke of armed intervention―those words were reserved for describing the Western imperialist forces. These were “training exercises.” Kuklinski was astonished and angry about the participation of Polish troops in the plans. He had been monitoring foreign radio reports and had heard nothing to suggest that the West was aware of how close an invasion really was. At one point, he drafted a short, anonymous letter to Radio Free Europe and had a driver take him along a highway outside Legnica, hoping to find a car being driven by a Western diplomat. He would make up some story to his driver and try to pass along the note. But he had no luck. He then feigned a family illness and succeeded in getting recalled to Warsaw, where he hoped to try again. But he ended up working around the clock in a special operations center in the General Staff as a member of the small group of officers who were to monitor the activity of Polish forces in Czechoslovakia. It was impossible to get away and approach a Western diplomat.
On the night of August 20, 1968, Soviet paratroopers landed at the Prague airport, and Polish troops crossed the border, along with other Warsaw Pact armies. In the command center, Kuklinski served as the communications link between Major General Florian Siwicki, the commander of Polish forces in Czechoslovakia, and Jaruzelski and party chief Gomulka. From his unique vantage point, Kuklinski learned that Jaruzelski had told Siwicki, one of his closest friends, “Florian, be gentle. Don’t harm anybody.”
Later, Siwicki radioed Kuklinski, telling him to convey to Jaruzelski that Polish troops had arrived in designated areas in northern Czechoslovakia, and that he had driven to Prague to report to the Czech president, Ludvik Svoboda. “Our troops are at his disposal,” Siwicki said.
Kuklinski ultimately did not regret the assignment because it allowed him to see raw reporting from Siwicki and other commanders, which Kuklinski summarized in reports for Jaruzelski and Gomulka. As Kuklinski wrote later, “I had a unique opportunity for gaining insight into our contribution to this disgraceful postwar history.” But his inability to send out an alert led him to conclude that “some kind of communication with the West should be established―
must
be established,” particularly if his own country was ever at risk.
must
be established,” particularly if his own country was ever at risk.
Jaruzelski organized a symposium in Warsaw to review Poland’s role in the “exercise.” In attendance were senior military officials and representatives from the Warsaw Pact command in Moscow. Kuklinski later described the “gala occasion”:
The symposium participants competed in complimenting the activity of the Polish units. It is true that they did not encircle the Czech garrisons as quickly as did “the world’s best―Soviet―” units, but they compensated for it later through their exceptionally successful persuasion of Czech commanders to back changes at the highest levels of their party and government.Recognized for exceptional achievement was the fact that, despite the hostile attitude of the Czech population, which formed live barricades in front of the tanks and armored cars, we had actually managed to avoid any greater human and material losses; that under the Polish tanks perished only a single child and that only because of an accident.In general, the symposium acknowledged that Operation Danube had been a great military and political success of the community of Socialist countries to which the Polish Peoples’ Armed Forces made a significant contribution.
But Kuklinski added that in informal conversations, people had reached different conclusions.
Participation of the Polish Armed Forces in the invasion of Czechoslovakia was estimated almost generally to have been an inexcusable blunder of the then political and military leadership of the Polish People’s Republic, for which we will pay dearly once Poland matures and claims its inalienable right to live in dignity and to make democratic-social changes unacceptable to the USSR. My own views were very much along this line and that probably affected my future orientation.
Kuklinski was enraged at his superiors’ enthusiasm for the invasion. Although there were no formal legal agreements requiring Poland to participate in such a venture, Jaruzelski said he was proud to send Polish troops across his ally’s border. He, too, spoke in euphemisms. Of course, he did not want to do it in the brutal Soviet way, as Kuklinski put it, but with white gloves.
Early the following year, Moscow decided to mount a large military exercise, “Spring 69,” to demonstrate how a war would be conducted in central Europe, known as the “Western Theater of Military Operations.”
The Poles were assigned to manage the exercise under the supervision of the Warsaw Pact command in Moscow. Chocha assigned Kuklinski to prepare the offensive scenarios for the Soviets and each Warsaw Pact army. At the time, Kuklinski knew little of the Soviet wartime mission and troop structure in Germany, so he and two communications officers went for consultations to Wunsdorf, East Germany, where Soviet troops were based.
Kuklinski received a warm welcome there from the Russian commander. While the two Polish communications officers went to meet their Russian counterparts, Kuklinski was granted access to senior Soviet operational officers and was soon reviewing some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive war-planning documents for Europe.
He immersed himself in the material and consulted with Soviet officers. “They shared the basic concepts of running the war with me,” he recalled. He took careful notes and drew his own map.
After returning to Warsaw, Kuklinski worked three more weeks on the plans, re-creating the operational scenario for a Soviet-run war in central Europe. When he was done, the Polish General Staff’s intelligence division, which had sophisticated printing equipment, produced several high-quality copies of the map for a presentation to Soviet officials. One map was ordered destroyed because the color was slightly off. Kuklinski took it and placed it in his safe. At the time, he could justify doing so, for war planning was within his area of assignment.
Kuklinski and a general in charge of Polish communications troops were sent by train to Moscow for a formal presentation to the Warsaw Pact commander, Marshal Yakubovsky. They were received by his chief of staff, General S. M. Shtemenko, the legendary former head of operations on the Soviet General Staff under Stalin.
Kuklinski had studied history’s great war-planners, from Clausewitz to Moltke, but he would never forget meeting Shtemenko, a hero to him, the man who had planned the Soviet strikes against Hitler. As they shook hands, Kuklinski noticed that one of Shtemenko’s fingers was disfigured or slightly broken, perhaps an old war injury.
Kuklinski displayed his map and documents before Shtemenko and explained the operational scenario for Spring 69. He left a second copy of the map at the Soviet General Staff, where he made a second presentation. Soon the original copy, signed and approved by Marshal Yakubovsky, was returned to him. Later, in his presence, a Polish general named Sliwinski, who served as representative to the Warsaw Pact command, called General Chocha in Warsaw, saying the plan for Spring 69 had been approved. “The colonel is on his way back, waiting for his next promotion,” Sliwinski said.
Some time later, hundreds of Warsaw Pact officers met in a town in western Poland to carry out the exercise, which also included the use of coded radio communications. At one point, Chocha, who was managing the exercise, summoned Kuklinski to his office.
He made clear that there had been a complaint from Moscow. Chocha said he was pleased with Kuklinski’s work, but Soviet officials were upset that Kuklinski’s plans for the exercise included too many similarities to the Soviet war plans. “There is a cable from the Soviet General Staff,” Chocha said. “Get all documents back from people who participated. Destroy everything.”
Chocha then said in Russian, “Molodets!” (which translates roughly as “attaboy”). Chocha seemed proud that the Russians were unnerved and said sarcastically that perhaps Moscow would now realize that the Poles were not as stupid as the Soviets thought.
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