You only live twice
Among them was a rather special one, a mild Polish-born septuagenarian with a passion for sailing. A military veteran who had lost both his sons in mysterious accidents only a few years previously, it is not known who Colonel Ryszard Kukliński voted for in those elections, or indeed, if he voted at all. Even his address remained a state secret.
Cosmetic surgery is quite popular among Florida's older folk and the man in question did undergo a fair bit of it in his late fifties. His appearance was altered, his features smoothed and a tattoo with the word 'Atlantic' was removed from his arm. It was quite necessary, as many people may have wanted his death. For Colonel Kukliński, who died last Wednesday at the age of 74, in a Florida hospital at an unspecified location, had enjoyed a life rather more adventurous than many of even the most heroic vets.
A high-ranking officer who spied for a foreign secret service for more than a decade, and then defected, Kukliński had a death sentence passed on him in his absence. But to nearly half of his compatriots, he came to be a hero and a symbol of resistance to the half-century long Soviet domination of their country.
He became the first foreigner to be decorated by the CIA to which he passed more than 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents, including technical details of the T-72 tank and Strieła-1 rocket launch. But what made him a hero in the eyes of so many Poles was that he warned the CIA of the Soviet plans for an invasion of Poland in 1980-1981, at the time when it was gripped in the euphoria of the first Solidarity movement, when the Pope and Lech Wałęsa gave the nation the hope and dignity it had craved for decades.
Those exhilarating days came to an end on the night of December 13, 1981, when the then prime minister and Communist party leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, introduced martial law. Kukliński had by then been in the USA for just over a month, following his defection during a banquet at the Soviet Embassy to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution.
In a richly ironic development, Kukliński helped organize the martial law coup, even as he gave the Americans detailed knowledge of the preparations. For its part, the CIA did not pass that knowledge on to the somewhat anarchic Solidarity and it was only years later, when A Secret Life, a book on the colonel, was published in the USA earlier this year that the public learned the details of the planned Soviet invasion and the martial law preparations.
Solidarity leaders were caught unawares by the political police on that fateful December night in 1981 and for years they have kept pondering the question: was martial law, a war declared by the government on its own people, necessary? Kukliński seems to have vindicated the claim, made later by the coup's leaders, that the only alternative was Soviet intervention and possible slaughter at the inevitable protests that would have followed.
He had, in fact, helped to orchestrate just such an invasion, back in 1968, when the "brotherly" armies of the Warsaw Pact put an end to the "Prague spring," another brief eruption of freedom in the Communist bloc. Back then, the young and promising officer of the Polish People's Army, Ryszard Kukliński was responsible for organizing the invasion across Czechoslovakia's northern border and he claims that it was this experience that first made him think of "contacting the West," as he later put it. What tipped the scales was the massacre of the striking workers of the Gdańsk shipyard in December 1970. The following year, Kukliński claims, he contacted the military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Berlin during a cruise they were both on, off the Baltic coast.
It will probably never be known if this account is accurate or, as many of those who think him a traitor say, if he was in fact recruited back in 1967 during his service at the mediatory commission in Vietnam. The latter hypothesis makes the patriotic motivation for his actions a lot less credible and vindicates the view that he was just one more spy of the Cold War era.
So you might suppose that those who supported, and benefited from, martial law in the early 80s, would hold that view. But nothing is so simple in the history of this country which has seen democracy installed as a result of a peaceful compromise. Kukliński's death penalty for high treason was lifted at the instigation of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who were both promising young Communist apparatchiks at the time of Kukliński's defection.
Ex-President Lech Wałęsa, on the other hand, raged with indignation when the court ruled that the colonel had acted, "in the state of higher necessity," and was not, therefore, a traitor. The legendary Solidarity leader said that rehabilitating a man capable of breaking his military vows was a travesty and shameful for the country. Had the CIA warned Wałęsa that the political police would soon be knocking on his door back in those heady days of 1981, his judgment might be a little different now. Then again, it might not. It is just one of the many things we will never know about the man who lived twice; as a hero and a traitor.
Cosmetic surgery is quite popular among Florida's older folk and the man in question did undergo a fair bit of it in his late fifties. His appearance was altered, his features smoothed and a tattoo with the word 'Atlantic' was removed from his arm. It was quite necessary, as many people may have wanted his death. For Colonel Kukliński, who died last Wednesday at the age of 74, in a Florida hospital at an unspecified location, had enjoyed a life rather more adventurous than many of even the most heroic vets.
A high-ranking officer who spied for a foreign secret service for more than a decade, and then defected, Kukliński had a death sentence passed on him in his absence. But to nearly half of his compatriots, he came to be a hero and a symbol of resistance to the half-century long Soviet domination of their country.
He became the first foreigner to be decorated by the CIA to which he passed more than 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents, including technical details of the T-72 tank and Strieła-1 rocket launch. But what made him a hero in the eyes of so many Poles was that he warned the CIA of the Soviet plans for an invasion of Poland in 1980-1981, at the time when it was gripped in the euphoria of the first Solidarity movement, when the Pope and Lech Wałęsa gave the nation the hope and dignity it had craved for decades.
Those exhilarating days came to an end on the night of December 13, 1981, when the then prime minister and Communist party leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, introduced martial law. Kukliński had by then been in the USA for just over a month, following his defection during a banquet at the Soviet Embassy to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution.
In a richly ironic development, Kukliński helped organize the martial law coup, even as he gave the Americans detailed knowledge of the preparations. For its part, the CIA did not pass that knowledge on to the somewhat anarchic Solidarity and it was only years later, when A Secret Life, a book on the colonel, was published in the USA earlier this year that the public learned the details of the planned Soviet invasion and the martial law preparations.
Solidarity leaders were caught unawares by the political police on that fateful December night in 1981 and for years they have kept pondering the question: was martial law, a war declared by the government on its own people, necessary? Kukliński seems to have vindicated the claim, made later by the coup's leaders, that the only alternative was Soviet intervention and possible slaughter at the inevitable protests that would have followed.
He had, in fact, helped to orchestrate just such an invasion, back in 1968, when the "brotherly" armies of the Warsaw Pact put an end to the "Prague spring," another brief eruption of freedom in the Communist bloc. Back then, the young and promising officer of the Polish People's Army, Ryszard Kukliński was responsible for organizing the invasion across Czechoslovakia's northern border and he claims that it was this experience that first made him think of "contacting the West," as he later put it. What tipped the scales was the massacre of the striking workers of the Gdańsk shipyard in December 1970. The following year, Kukliński claims, he contacted the military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Berlin during a cruise they were both on, off the Baltic coast.
It will probably never be known if this account is accurate or, as many of those who think him a traitor say, if he was in fact recruited back in 1967 during his service at the mediatory commission in Vietnam. The latter hypothesis makes the patriotic motivation for his actions a lot less credible and vindicates the view that he was just one more spy of the Cold War era.
So you might suppose that those who supported, and benefited from, martial law in the early 80s, would hold that view. But nothing is so simple in the history of this country which has seen democracy installed as a result of a peaceful compromise. Kukliński's death penalty for high treason was lifted at the instigation of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who were both promising young Communist apparatchiks at the time of Kukliński's defection.
Ex-President Lech Wałęsa, on the other hand, raged with indignation when the court ruled that the colonel had acted, "in the state of higher necessity," and was not, therefore, a traitor. The legendary Solidarity leader said that rehabilitating a man capable of breaking his military vows was a travesty and shameful for the country. Had the CIA warned Wałęsa that the political police would soon be knocking on his door back in those heady days of 1981, his judgment might be a little different now. Then again, it might not. It is just one of the many things we will never know about the man who lived twice; as a hero and a traitor.
