Ryszard Kukliński
Ryszard Jerzy Kukliński (born June 13, 1930 in Warsaw , † February 11, 2004 in Tampa , Florida ) was a colonel in the Polish People's Army and an agent of the CIA (code name: Jack Strong, code name: Gull) . In 2016 he was posthumously promoted to general .
Life
Family, beginning
Kukliński came from a working class family with socialist traditions. His father was arrested by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War and was killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . After the war he went to the Polish People's Army in 1947 , where he first graduated from the Infantry Military School No. 1 in Wroclaw . He then became a platoon leader in the 9th Infantry Regiment in Piła (Schneidemühl) and graduated from the Infantry School in Rembertów from 1951 to 1952 . This was followed by a deployment as a company commander in the 9th mechanized regiment. In October 1952 he married his wife, Joanna.
In May 1953 he became a staff officer in the 15th battalion of the 3rd brigade of the coastal defense in Kołobrzeg and in 1954 commander of the 18th battalion in Kołobrzeg. From 1956 he served in the 5th Pomeranian Infantry Regiment. and from 1958 in the 82nd mechanized regiment. This was followed by training in the Nicolaus Copernicus Lyceum in Kołobrzeg until 1960 and began his studies at the Academy of the General Staff in Warsaw in 1961 . Between 1967 and 1968 he worked for the International Commission for Compliance with the Decrees of the Indochina Conference in Vietnam . In 1968 he took part in the preparations for the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia .
Collaboration with secret services
After the bloody suppression of the labor unrest in Gdansk in December 1970 he decided to work with the CIA , the Foreign Intelligence Service of the United States . During a port stay on a reconnaissance voyage of the sailing ship "Legia" in Wilhelmshaven in West Germany from August 11, 1972, he sent an airmail letter to the US Embassy in Bonn on August 14, 1972 , asking for a meeting with a US officer in Amsterdam or Ostend asked. When he arrived in Amsterdam, he would call the US military attaché . On February 18, 1972, there was a meeting in the central hotel of The Hague with the employees of the foreign intelligence service CIA, who had come from Bonn, with the pseudonyms Colonel Henry Morton and Walter Lang from the fictitious "US Army Program Evaluation Group".
Further meetings followed in Rotterdam , Kiel and Hamburg . Between 1972 and 1981 he transmitted around 40,000 pages of top-secret information, in particular about the stationing of Soviet units in Poland and the GDR , plans for attack by the Warsaw Pact and the development of new Soviet weapons, such as the T-72 main battle tank and the Strela-2 infrared guided anti- aircraft missile ( NATO code name SA-7 Grail).
Shortly before the imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981, which Kukliński knew from information from Division General Tadeusz Hupałowski , he and his family were taken from Warsaw to West Berlin in a vehicle from the US Embassy on November 7, 1981 , from where they in the United States were flown, where he held a job as a military advisor to the Ministry of Defense of the United States accepted. In May 1984 a Polish military court sentenced him to death in absentia . In 1989 a court changed the sentence to a 25-year prison term.
The 1990s
William Joseph Casey , director of the CIA , wrote in a letter to Ronald Reagan : No other person in the world has harmed communism as badly as this Pole in the last 40 years . It is now known that US ambassadors regularly informed Pope John Paul II of their findings. In total, it is said, Kukliński has leaked 40,265 pages of documents to the Americans over the years - about planned Warsaw Pact command bunkers, new weapons and organizational structures. As Ryszard Kukliński later said, in 1970 he offered the CIA to work with seven like-minded Polish officers. But the Americans had focused on him for security reasons.
After his removal, the colonel was sentenced to death in a secret trial in Poland, and his house and yacht were confiscated. His son Waldemar was killed in a traffic accident in 1994 and the younger Bogdan is missing after a diving expedition in the same year. In 1990, the 1984 death sentence was commuted to 25 years in prison. In 1995 this judgment was provisionally overturned. A new version of the preliminary investigation came to the conclusion, among other things through the intervention of Zbigniew Brzeziński , that Kukliński acted out of "greater necessity". With the termination of this investigation, the judgment was finally overturned on September 22, 1997, so that in 1998 Kukliński was able to visit his homeland for the first time.
In the 1990s, a fierce dispute broke out in Poland over his person: some continued to see him as a traitor, others as a national hero.
Kukliński died of a stroke in Florida, USA, in 2004 . His body was transferred to Poland, together with that of his son, who, like the colonel's second son, had died under unexplained circumstances in the USA, and was buried in the military part of the Warsaw cemetery in Powązki .
Honors
After his official rehabilitation, the cities of Gdansk and Krakow made him their honorary citizens .
The Polish President Andrzej Duda posthumously promoted Kukliński to general on November 11, 2016 .
Film adaptations
In 2008 a documentary film about Kukliński's work as an agent was made entitled Gry wojenne - War Games , which was broadcast on arte on February 21, 2010 and March 10, 2013 . This was followed in 2014 by a feature film on the same topic entitled Jack Strong , directed by Władysław Pasikowski .
Web links
- Literature by and about Ryszard Kukliński in the WorldCat bibliographic database
- Deutschlandfunk - Traitor or Patriot? Retrieved March 2, 2010 .
- The CIA on Kukliński. Retrieved March 2, 2010 .
- 82 documents released by the CIA by and about Kukliński. Retrieved March 2, 2010 .
- Website about Colonel Ryszard Kukliński (Engl.)
Individual evidence
- ^ Rupert Cornwell: Ryszard Kuklinski - Cold War Spy for the West. In: The Independent. February 13, 2004, archived from the original on February 22, 2011 ; accessed on April 15, 2015 .
- ↑ Poland's president posthumously gives Cold War spy the rank of general. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on November 12, 2016 ; accessed on November 11, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Ryszard Kukliński in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Ryszard Kukliński in the Internet Movie Database (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kukliński, Ryszard |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kukliński, Ryszard Jerzy |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish military, colonel in the Polish People's Army and CIA spy |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 13, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Warsaw , Poland |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 11, 2004 |
| Place of death | Tampa , Florida , USA |