In the spotlight: Ryszard Kukliński

During a special ceremony held in Kukliński's honor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, CIA director Michael Hayden called the agent a hero and patriot whose activities had helped save many lives.

During his 11 years of cooperation with the CIA, Kukliński provided the agency with invaluable information on the deployment of Red Army units in Poland and Eastern Germany. He also reported on the Warsaw Pact's military technology and its strategic plans concerning the possible outbreak of war with NATO countries. In 1982, then-CIA director William Casey wrote to President Reagan that no one had done more than Kukliński to undermine communism over the previous 40 years.

The CIA has now disclosed around 1,000 out of the approximately 35,000 pages of information that Kukliński drafted during his service for the agency. A substantial portion of the newly revealed documents concerns the planning of the martial law period, although as WBJ went to press it was too early to know if the information would significantly alter modern understanding of the era.

Born in 1930 inWarsaw, Kukliński joined the Polish military in 1947. He began cooperating with the CIA after the bloody suppression of workers' strikes in Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin in December 1970. In 1981, Kukliński and his family left Poland with the help of the American intelligence community.

Kukliński was sentenced to death in absentia in 1984, a sentence that was later commuted to 25 years in prison and finally overturned in 1997. He died in 2004 in Florida.