Polish officer in NATO who brought more than 35 000 pagest of secret documents died

A Polish army officer who spied on his country for the CIA during the communist era and later fled to the United States has died, the U.S. government said Wednesday. He was 73.

CIA Director George Tenet hailed Kuklinski as "a true hero of the Cold War," and former President Lech Walesa said he had "achieved great things" despite being seen as a traitor by some of his countrymen.

Kuklinski was born June 13, 1930, in Warsaw and served as a liaison officer between the Polish military and the Soviet Army from 1976-81.

From behind the Iron Curtain, he passed some 35,000 pages of Warsaw Pact secrets to the CIA, telling them about the communist government's plan to impose martial law in 1981 and launch a bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity movement.

Kuklinski fled the country weeks before martial law was imposed in December 1981, and the government seized his house and other property.

"This passionate and courageous man helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious information upon which so many critical national security decisions rested," Tenet said Wednesday in a written statement. "He did so for the noblest of reasons - to advance the sacred causes of liberty and peace in his homeland and throughout the world."

Kuklinski was sentenced to death by Poland's former communist government in 1984. He visited his homeland for the first time since fleeing in May 1998, months after a court cleared him of the treason charges.

"It is in great measure due to the bravery and sacrifice of Col. Kuklinski that his own native Poland, and the other once-captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are now free," Tenet said.

STATEMENT BY GEORGE J. TENET
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTLLIGENCE
ON THE DEATH OF COLONEL RYSZARD KUKLINSKI

"I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a true hero of the Cold War to whom we all owe an everlasting debt of gratitude. This passionate and courageous man helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious information upon which so many critical national security decisions rested. And he did so for the noblest of reasons – to advance the sacred causes of liberty and peace in his homeland and throughout the world. It is in great measure due to the bravery and sacrifice of Colonel Kuklinski that his own native Poland, and the other once-captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are now free."

From Zbigniew Brzezinski

Col. Kuklinski has served Poland well. He dedicated everything he valued, including risking his own life and the wellbeing of his entire family, to the cause of Poland’s independence. Familiar with Soviet war plans which would have placed Poland in the greatest jeopardy, Colonel Kuklinski decided to help America better understand Soviet planning, thereby increasing America’s ability to deter Soviet aggression.

Col. Kuklinski now joins the pantheon of Polish heroes, many of whom not only sacrificed everything but were also often misunderstood or forgotten. In recent years, what had hurt Kuklinski the most was the vilification to which he was subjected from those who should have known better and who often also shared the same objective of an independent Poland. However, the fact that he was also vilified by those who so fervently served Soviet interests was of no consequence to him.

Col. Kuklinski was truly Poland’s first officer in NATO, the Alliance of the free.

UPDATE 3-Polish-born Cold War master spy dead at 74 (Updates with former CIA analyst quote, paragraphs 12-15)
By Marcin Grajewski
WARSAW, Poland, Feb. 11 (Reuters) - Polish-born Col.
Ryszard Kuklinski, who spied for Washington for years during
the Cold War before defecting with his family, died of a stroke
on Wednesday, the Polish news agency PAP reported. He was 74.
As a senior Polish military staff officer, Kuklinski passed
some 35,000 top-secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA between
1972 and 1981 before moving to the West.
A source in Washington said Kuklinski died in Florida. PAP
had reported he died in Washington.
"He was a tragic figure. On the one hand, he was a Polish
soldier, on the other an American spy," said Lech Walesa,
former Solidarity leader and Poland's president after 1989.
"He did great things, risked his head when few of us would
dare," Walesa told PAP.
When it appeared Kuklinski was in danger of being uncovered
as a spy, the CIA pulled him and his family out of Poland and
brought them to the United States.
CIA Director George Tenet eulogized Kuklinski as "a true
hero" who helped his homeland and other countries.
"This passionate and courageous man helped keep the
Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious
information upon which so many critical national security
decisions rested," he said in a statement.
A communist court sentenced Kuklinski to death in 1984 for
passing intelligence to the United States, including communist
authorities' plans to impose martial law in 1981 to crush
Solidarity, the old Soviet bloc's first free labor union.
Poland overthrew communism in 1989, but the sentence on
Kuklinski was lifted only in 1995 and he was not rehabilitated
fully until 1997.
Kuklinski visited Poland in 1998 and received a hero's
welcome by the then-right-wing government, which said that
thanks to people like Kuklinski the country had regained
independence after five decades of Soviet-imposed governments.
A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE
Some Poles felt Kuklinski had betrayed his country, and his
press agent said the colonel hoped a recently published
biography, "A Secret Life" by Benjamin Weiser, would earn him
respect among Poles.
James Simon, a former CIA analyst who knew Kuklinski, said
he gave the United States the "family jewels" of intelligence
on the planning of Warsaw Pact members.
"He clarified our perceptions so that we didn't make an
error in determining whether or not something that was
happening that was unusual to us was the precursor of an attack
in Europe," Simon told Reuters. "It kept us from going to war
on at least a couple of occasions."
Kuklinski volunteered to spy for the United States, Simon
said. "A lot of people who do these things do them because they
are mad at somebody. He wasn't," he said. "He just seriously
believed his country would never be free unless the West
triumphed."
Kuklinski joined the Polish army in 1947 soon after the
Soviets imposed communism in Poland after World War Two, and
rose rapidly.
He was appalled when the Polish army helped crush the
Prague Spring in 1968 -- a bloody Russian-led military
crackdown on Czechoslovakia's growing pro-democracy movement --
and when Polish soldiers were ordered to shoot at protesting
shipyard workers in the city of Gdansk in 1970.
Kuklinski is survived by his wife. His two sons died while
he was living in hiding under an assumed name for many years in
the United States.
(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington)

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