Born: June 13, 1930
Died: February 11, 2004, Tampa, Florida
Early days. Kuklinski was born in Warsaw in a working class family with socialist traditions. During WWII his father was a member of the resistance and died in the Sachsenhausen German concentration camp
Career. After the war, Kuklinski began a successful career in the (communist) Polish People's Army. He took part in the preparations for the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Kuklinski was the chief of a planning division of the Polish army, and was a liaison between the Polish army and the Soviet military. After the December 1970 massacre of Polish workers in Gdynia by communist forces, Kuklinski contacted the CIA and offered his services as a spy. (According to another version, he was approached by the CIA in Vietnam as early as 1967.) Between 1971 and 1981 he passed 35,000 pages of mostly Soviet secret documents to the CIA. The documents described Moscow's strategic plans regarding the use of nuclear weapons, technical data about the T-72 tank and Strela-1 missiles, the distribution of Soviet anti-aircraft bases in Poland and East Germany, the methods used by the Soviets to avoid spy satellite detection of their military hardware, plans for the imposition of martial law in Poland, and many other matters. Kuklinski found out details of Soviet plans for attacking and conquering Western Europe. These anticipated that Poland would be sacrificed and would be expected to take from 400 to 600 nuclear hits from Western forces. Kuklinski's information had a major impact on NATO's military plans in Europe, which were adjusted based on his suggestions; the changes would have reduced the nuclear attacks on Poland in the event of a war. Facing imminent danger of discovery the CIA evacuated colonel, his wife and two sons from Warsaw in the middle of the night of November 7, 1981 and flew them to safety in the United States. The colonel's wife did not know about his cooperation with the US intelligence until that day. On May 23, 1984 Kuklinski was sentenced to death in absentia by a secret communist military court in Warsaw. After the fall of communism, the sentence was changed to 25 years. In 1995 the court canceled the sentence and said that Kuklinski was acting under special circumstances and in higher need. Kuklinski visited Poland again in April 1998. He was buried June 19, 2004 in the honor row of the Powazki military cemetery in Warsaw, Poland, along with his son Waldemar who died in the 1990s at the hands of persons unknown. His other son died several months earlier, also under circumstances not fully explain.
Opinions- some ominous. 1.Statement by George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, on the Death of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski , February 11, 2004.
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." < br>
2. Opinion of Krzysztof Wroblewski, a PennState employee and an immigrant from Poland; Wed, 24 Sep 1997 22:33:38 …From: krzyszto@hotmail.com
In article <60chc4$ee8@panix.com> jp@panix.com (Jerzy Pawlowski) writes:…
[and Wroblewski responds RS] ... „Kuklinski powinien wisiec... Wydaje mi sie
jednak ze o ile nasze wladze mu odpuscily to Rosjanie napewno nie i po jego
przyjezdzie do Polski szybko to sie skonczy jakims wypadkiem samochodowym.” [Kuklinski should be hanged ...I believe that even though our authorities forgave him the Russians certainly won’t and soon after his arrival to Poland this will end with a car accident]. [Prophetic ?: Kuklinski’s two sons perished in accidents- one in a car accident the other in a boat accident RS].< br>
3. In a statement on Colonel Kuklinski's death, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Carter, praised Colonel Kuklinski and said that he ''decided to help America better understand Soviet planning, thereby increasing America's ability to deter Soviet aggression.''< br>
4. Has Ryszard Kuklinski saved us from World War III? By Jolanta Jablonska-Gruca
…We met in the American home… and there we talked at length. I will remember this as an extraordinary experience. Mr. Kuklinski is an extraordinary person. The sacrifices he made and personal courage he exhibited are incomparable. Very few people in the world are faced with those kind of choices and become real heroes.< br>
5. At the funeral mass.US Ambassador Hill said that Col. Kuklinski was a hero for the Americans. "Thanks to him the Cold War remained cold," he noted.
Honors. Kuklinski has been given honorary citizenship of several Polish cities, among which most notable are Krakow and Gdansk. The Polish political group Centrum (at the time headed by Zbigniew Religa) requested in 2004 that President of Poland posthumously award Kuklinski the rank of a general.
Book. A Secret Life By Benjamin Weiser (Reviewed by Thomas M. Troy, Jr.) from the Central Intelligence Agency
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