Obituary: Ryszard Kuklinski, 73, key spy for U.S. in cold war (small overview and more)

IHT ^ | Friday, February 13, 2004 | James Risen NYT, AFP, AP

[gdyniawitawa]

WASHINGTON Ryszard Kuklinski, a former Polish Army officer who secretly served as one of the CIA's most important spies behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, died Tuesday in his adopted American homeland, U.S. government officials said. He was 73.

His death came at a military hospital in Tampa, Florida, following a stroke on Feb. 5, said Jozef Szaniawski, a longtime friend, The Associated Press reported.

During some of the darkest days of the cold war, when Moscow was trying to defend its East European empire against growing grass-roots demands for freedom and democracy, Kuklinski covertly provided the United States with critical information that may have staved off a Soviet invasion of Poland.

He also gave the CIA advance warning of Poland's plans to impose martial law in order to crack down on Solidarity, the dissident movement, in 1981.

George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, issued a public statement calling Kuklinski "a true hero of the cold war to whom we all owe an everlasting debt of gratitude."

An army colonel on the Polish general staff who also acted as a liaison with Moscow, Kuklinski spied for the CIA from Warsaw for nine years in the 1970s and early 1980s. Under the code name Gull, he became one of the CIA's most productive agents, handing over thousands of secret documents as well as insights into the plans and intentions of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-dominated military alliance then confronting NATO.

Kuklinski defected in 1981, just as the martial law that he had predicted was imposed. The CIA secretly resettled Kuklinski and his family in the United States, where he was still living under cover in 1989 when Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Solidarity came to power in Poland.

Late in his life, he was finally able to return to Poland, but some Poles still felt he had betrayed Poland, not just a ruthless Communist regime. Lech Walesa, as president of Poland from 1990 to 1995, never pardoned Kuklinski but said he had "achieved great things."

[Paleo Conservative]

Here's an earlier post from a different source.

A Polish officer who saved the World dies in Florida at the age of 74

[firewalk]

.