A Secret Life (38 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
“Ryszard, where do you keep the fourth copy?” Szklarski asked, holding out the third copy that had been in Kuklinski’s safe. He said the fourth copy had to be delivered to General Jasinski immediately.
“Where’s the fire?” Kuklinski asked sarcastically, pretending to be annoyed. He asked the major searching the safe to leave. He then strode toward the safe and grabbed the first document he could find.
“It’s right here,” he said briskly. He quickly placed the document in a folder. “I will deliver it.”
He was almost paralyzed by fear, but his bluff seemed to work. After the other officers left, Kuklinski returned to his office, opened his briefcase, and exchanged the document in the folder with the copy he had taken home.
Although Kuklinski did not attend the KOK session on June 19, he was given a full account of what happened, which he described in his next letter to the CIA. Jaruzelski had criticized the United States, blaming “American imperialism” for Poland’s troubles. Kuklinski also noted that the latest documents showed how differently the Poles and Soviets viewed the crisis.
“In the leadership of the General Staff,” Kuklinski wrote, “the opinion prevails that the Russians would want at all costs to avoid military intervention in Poland.” But Soviet activity showed that “very intensive concrete preparations” were being made in this direction.
He cited the increasing number of Soviet troops in Poland and the revealing comments of Soviet and Polish officials. In one heated exchange, Soviet Marshal Kulikov had demanded to know why martial law had not yet been implemented. General Siwicki blamed the Interior Ministry, saying it had “fallen apart.” Kulikov retorted that it was the whole government, not the Interior Ministry, that had fallen apart. Kulikov added that the ministry wanted to take action, but was being blocked by Jaruzelski’s unwillingness to make a decision.
Kuklinski described the incident involving his safe, which had almost resulted in “an immediate tragedy.” He said he had been elected Communist Party delegate from the General Staff and the Defense Ministry, and some of his colleagues were suggesting he stand for election as a delegate to the big party congress in July. “Of course,” he added sardonically, “all this takes place without any say on my part.”
At 10:37 P.M. on June 21, Kuklinski passed the letter to the CIA, along with twenty-one rolls of film that held some 880 pages of documents, including a map of Soviet Army communications sites in Poland.
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It is likely that few people appreciated the secrets spilling out of Warsaw Pact and Soviet vaults more than Aris Pappas, a junior CIA analyst who had been assigned to monitor martial law. In his job, he saw a broad array of information. Much of it came from satellites, electronic eavesdropping, diplomatic cables, and even foreign news reports. The human intelligence was different. Pappas would get calls as new documents arrived.
You’ve got to come down and look at this now.
It was, as he liked to say, intelligence that was “hot and wet.” He had no idea who the source was, or if there was more than one. But after months of immersion, he appreciated its value. The details were intimate, the observations incisive, and the tensions palpable. It was clear the Polish General Staff was in emotional turmoil, and a source was among them, deeply engaged.
You’ve got to come down and look at this now.
It was, as he liked to say, intelligence that was “hot and wet.” He had no idea who the source was, or if there was more than one. But after months of immersion, he appreciated its value. The details were intimate, the observations incisive, and the tensions palpable. It was clear the Polish General Staff was in emotional turmoil, and a source was among them, deeply engaged.
Pappas had been with the CIA for five years, in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of Soviet Analysis, commonly known as SOVA. He worked in the Theater Forces Division, an office that along with the rest of SOVA had been moved to a nondescript building in northern Virginia because of construction at the CIA compound. One day in the spring of 1981, Ben Rutherford, the tall, gaunt, and highly respected division chief, assigned Pappas to focus exclusively on martial-law developments. Other analysts were following the issue, but no one else had primary responsibility for the military’s preparations.
A tall thirty-five-year-old with a mustache, glasses, and dark hair, Pappas was born in Astoria, Queens, to a family of confectioners. As a child, he would sit on Rockaway Beach, Queens, watching the airplanes leave from Idlewild Airport. He became familiar with the markings on each plane―Air France, BOAC, Alitalia―and he liked to imagine their destinations. He read everything he could about airplanes and built models as a hobby. His friends liked building gas-powered models, but they often had to make compromises, such as distorting the shape of a wing, so that the planes would fly. Pappas appreciated the fineness of scale and the precision of detail and preferred constructing models that did not fly, since they could be built as precise replicas. There were no compromises.
Over the years, Pappas constructed and painted hundreds of models of fighters and passenger planes (some were later displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.). He spent hours in the library researching their assembly and history. He attended conventions of the International Plastic Modelers Society and judged their contests. After graduating from City College in New York, he would have joined the Air Force ROTC, but was not qualified for pilot training because he had imperfect vision. So he joined Army ROTC, and later earned a commercial pilot’s license.
Army service took him to Korea and Germany, where he was introduced to military intelligence. An extroverted and amiable man, he was offered a job in CIA operations when he was hired in 1975. But he turned that down, knowing even then that he wanted to be an analyst. He liked nothing better than immersing himself in documents. After joining the CIA, he was thrilled when he was shown the trove of materials provided by Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet spy who provided critical intelligence during the Cuban missile crisis.
Pappas and his SOVA colleagues were divided into three sections: political, economic, and military. The military group was, in turn, separated into two areas. The first was strategic forces, which focused on Soviet nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could directly threaten the United States. The second area was theater forces, which dealt with the threat of the Soviets launching a massive war in Europe. In theater operations, where Pappas worked, the analysts were responsible for such issues as command-and-control matters, chemical warfare operations, General Staff theory and doctrine, and large-scale armor, artillery, and infantry exercises.
His job sounded a good deal like Kuklinski’s.
Pappas had studied Russian in college and kept a Russian grammar book on his desk, for he occasionally found it useful to do his own translation of a word in a Soviet document. Like many analysts, he looked beyond words; he studied how articles were grouped in Soviet journals, whether they were ghostwritten, and how they were footnoted. Analysts learned to take a holistic approach; frequently what they found was not what they had been searching for.
In his early years with the agency, which were also the early stages of the Gull operation, Pappas came to realize that a steady stream of documents was giving the CIA the best insight it had, in documentary form, of the structure and intentions of the Warsaw Pact and, by extension, the Soviet Union. The materials had allowed him to see how powerfully Moscow controlled its Warsaw Pact allies; the fact that they were puppets of the Soviets made them no less important. For one thing, Moscow could not mount a successful war in Europe without their participation. And because of the nuclear parity between the superpowers, a sudden attack remained the Pentagon’s greatest fear. If Moscow started a conventional war, the Warsaw Pact countries, particularly the Poles and East Germans, would play a critical early role. Indeed, the only elements of Soviet war plans that did not involve Eastern Europe were Moscow’s strategic operations, such as the use of nuclear weapons or launching long-range missiles from deep inside Soviet territory. Almost everything else would involve the Warsaw Pact, whose armies would have to be trained, equipped, and accounted for at the front. As Pappas and his fellow analysts saw it, the more the United States knew about the Warsaw Pact, the more it understood Soviet intentions and capabilities.
Gull’s intelligence had been incorporated into national estimates, used to counteract Soviet weaponry, and employed to help the Pentagon determine where it needed to spend money for weapons and where it did not. “We have a critical need for information on the armor of the T-72 tank,” the CIA wrote to Kuklinski one day in 1981, “inasmuch as several billions of dollars of our defense programs are contingent on acquiring this information.” Gull’s intelligence had allowed the United States to direct satellites with extreme precision at Warsaw Pact military exercises in order to check the accuracy of other sources and to understand not just what the Soviets were doing, but why they were doing it. As Pappas later put it, Gull’s material on the Soviet and Warsaw Pact militaries “virtually defined our knowledge. It was the touchstone. It was the basic standard.” One of Pappas’s colleagues said of Gull: “He held that window open for a long, long time, and gave us a look at the entire landscape.”
In Pappas’s mind, everything returned to the central question faced by all intelligence analysts: the difference between secrets and mysteries. Secrets were facts that existed somewhere―like the nature and wiring of the Warsaw Pact air defense system or the thickness of the skin of the T-72 tank. But analysts also had to divine mysteries. What events would trigger the westward movement of the Second Strategic Echelon? Some answers lay in knowing the sequence of events that led to war, events that could be observed and measured. So when Pappas was assigned to focus exclusively on martial law, he continued to rely on the stream of intelligence from the Warsaw Pact. Wherever it was coming from, it was affording the CIA an exceptional insight into mysteries as well as secrets.
By the summer of 1981, Sue Burggraf had completed more than two years in Warsaw, and she saw the city as a profoundly tragic place. In the winter, women shuffled through the snow wearing sandals and two or three pairs of socks. Meat shortages were also acute: Poles often waited in long lines at grocery stores only to find bare hooks hanging from the ceiling and the shelves empty except for vinegar and fish paste. Polish citizens who worked in the American Embassy had been fired for stealing toilet paper. There were long lines at bread and fabric shops. But the current political crisis, the Gull operation―and the arrival of summer―had instilled in her an intense loyalty to the country, and she would not have considered leaving.
In the normal rotation of officers, Sue Burggraf had succeeded Ted Gilbertson as deputy chief to Tom Ryan. She and Ryan were joined by a third case officer, Evan Davis,
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who was in his first tour abroad; a fourth operative, Jason Wilcox,
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soon joined them.
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who was in his first tour abroad; a fourth operative, Jason Wilcox,
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soon joined them.
All but Davis worked from a spartan suite in the embassy’s political section. Ryan, whose cover was first secretary, had the largest office, overlooking the front plaza, the public entrance, and a large American flag. Burggraf, who had an adjoining office, had just enough room for a metal desk and a chair, and she hung a reproduction of a Matisse print on the wall. Davis, who had a different cover as a consular officer, worked on the ground floor where Poles applied for visas. Cables were hand-carried to a CIA communicator in a restricted part of the embassy.
Given the troubles with the Iskra device, Warsaw Station remained concerned about obtaining timely intelligence from Kuklinski. The CIA had noticed an increase in the number of “casuals” where exchanges with Kuklinski were scheduled, and several exchanges had to be aborted. The heightened security also meant that officers had to extend their surveillance detection runs.
One Sunday, Burggraf was scheduled to make a car exchange with Kuklinski at 10:30 P.M. at the Gdanski Bridge, which spanned the Vistula River. She packed a lunch and took with her a bottle of water, a book, a travel guide, and maps. By late morning, after driving through the countryside, she arrived in Zelazowa Wola, the birthplace of Chopin, about sixty kilometers from Warsaw. Burggraf enjoyed the pastoral setting, where piano concerts were held in the summer and people sat on blankets on the lawn. She stayed through the afternoon, eating her lunch and reading. Then she set out in her car again, winding through the countryside before she drove back to Warsaw. She had seen no signs of surveillance all day. As night fell and the streets grew quieter, she continued to act like a tourist, but maintained her vigilance, frequently checking her rearview mirror and stopping occasionally.
As the hour of the exchange approached, Burggraf had been free of surveillance for more than twelve hours. The exchange was to occur at the base of the bridge on the west side of the river. Gull was supposed to be on the bridge above and would descend a flight of steps to the roadway below as she cruised by.
But as Burggraf arrived, she spotted a man sitting on the wall, right by the base of the steps. She circled the block, cursing under her breath. He was still there when she returned.
Will you go home?
she muttered. She knew that any pedestrian had to be treated as hostile surveillance, and she aborted the exchange. She never even saw Gull.
Will you go home?
she muttered. She knew that any pedestrian had to be treated as hostile surveillance, and she aborted the exchange. She never even saw Gull.
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