70 Year Magazine Archive

Pride of Poland

by Radek Sikorski

A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country, by Benjamin Weiser (PublicAffairs, 400 pp., $27.50)

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The subject of this remarkable book, Col. Ryszard Kuklinski, died in a Tampa military hospital on February 10. His had been one of the most dangerous—and successful—intelligence careers of the Cold War. Recipient of the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, he was the West’s most important source in the Warsaw Pact between the time of Oleg Penkovsky’s reports during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the Cold War. Although only a colonel, Kuklinski was more valuable than several generals put together: He was director of the operational-planning directorate of the Polish general staff and liaised between Warsaw and Moscow. Over nine years, he delivered 40,265 pages of documents, including plans of Soviet exercises of the invasion of Western Europe, the location of Soviet wartime command bunkers, plans for the imposition of martial law in Poland, and the details of numerous weapons. He gave successive U.S. administrations a direct

Mr. Sikorski is executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute.

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