A Secret Life (8 page)

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Authors: Benjamin Weiser

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage

BOOK: A Secret Life
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Under pressure, Kuklinski joined the Communist Party. At night, as he studied in bed, his roommate, Konstanty Staniszewski, a devout Catholic who ranked second in the class, prayed quietly beneath a blanket. Kuklinski, knowing that prayer was forbidden, won his roommate’s loyalty by saying nothing. They remained close.
 
In 1950, a few months from graduation, Kuklinski was made sergeant. “He was liked by everybody,” recalled Stanislaw Radaj, a classmate and friend who described Kuklinski as kind and generous. But it was around that time that Kuklinski also got his first taste of party discipline. He had repeated a joke to a classmate about Soviet attempts to force collectivization on Poland and was expelled from the party and later from the officers school. During a shooting exercise, his name was called out. Several sergeants pointed their rifles at him and escorted him off the field. One of his closest friends saw what was happening and turned away. Kuklinski was devastated.
 
Kuklinski was told to get his belongings and was given a document transferring him to the Eleventh Mechanized Regiment in Biedrusko, near Poznan, where he was to spend two years as a simple soldier.
 
“I’m a sergeant,” he protested.
 
“Not anymore,” one sergeant replied, telling Kuklinski he had been stripped of his rank.
 
As he prepared to leave, he was almost overcome with emotion when another classmate, a sergeant from a prominent Communist family, approached and expressed anger at what happened. He said he had passed a hat around and taken up a collection. “We know you are in trouble,” the soldier said. “This is from us.”
 
From his new post in Biedrusko, Kuklinski filed an appeal and was told to appear before a special Communist Party commission in War-claw. He was told to bring letters from people who knew him as a child, guaranteeing that he had not been a member of an organization that opposed Communists. As he waited outside the commission office, the door opened and a gray-haired colonel walked out sobbing. When it was Kuklinski’s turn, he was ordered to sit at a large table before a dozen people. He acknowledged that he had once tried to join the underground, to fight the Nazis, but had been rejected. He had done nothing more than put up posters. He was a teenager, he said, and not part of any formal organization that sought to undermine the Communist Party. The commission reprimanded Kuklinski and warned him, as he later put it, that he was “stupid, but not an enemy of the people.” He was told to return to school for his exams, and he finished at the top of his class. Still, he was promoted only to warrant officer, just below the rank of full officer.
 
In the fall of 1951, after a year-long stint with the Ninth Mechanized Regiment in Pila, Kuklinski began higher military studies in Rembertow, just outside Warsaw, where the Communists had converted Poland’s most famous war college into an infantry officers school with a Soviet commander.
 
In July 1952, at the age of twenty-two, Kuklinski married his long-time girlfriend Hanka, then nineteen. A month or so later, after graduating from Rembertow, he was promoted to first lieutenant, and was sent back to the Ninth Mechanized Regiment in Pila, where he was made a company commander. Upon his arrival, he ran into Konstanty Staniszewski, the roommate from officers school who had prayed at bedtime beneath the covers. Staniszewski, who had become a counterintelligence officer, had heard of Kuklinski’s troubles with the party. “Your file is thick with lies,” Staniszewski said. He led Kuklinski into his office in the Prussian-style barracks and said that he had gone to his superiors, described Kuklinski’s mistreatment, and vouched for him. Staniszewski had received permission to destroy his file. As Kuklinski watched, Staniszewski lit a coal stove, picked up the file, and threw it in.
 
In 1953, Kuklinski was promoted to captain and made chief of staff of the Fifteenth Anti-Landing Battalion, which had 300 soldiers, 100 horses, and 18 cannon. Based in Kolobrzeg, the battalion was part of Moscow’s new effort to bolster Poland’s coastal defense, undertaken after Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s daring fall 1950 amphibious landing at Inchon that changed the direction of the Korean War. Moscow, realizing that superior offensive operations could be undermined by failure to defend the rear, had created nine battalions along the length of the 500-kilometer Polish coast.
 
While Kuklinski was in Kolobrzeg, Hanka remained in Pila, working as a bookkeeper. In September 1953 their first child, Waldemar, nicknamed Waldek, was born. Hanka and Waldek joined Kuklinski in Kolobrzeg, and they moved into an apartment building that had been German barracks before the war. Hanka took a job as a bookkeeper with a government fishing enterprise. In 1954, Kuklinski was made commander of the Eighteenth Anti-Landing Battalion, one of the three battalions that composed the brigade in Kolobrzeg. In March 1955, Bogdan, their second son, was born.
 
Kuklinski doted on his children, and in his spare time, he loved to sail. He and a group of friends―an architect, a judge, a doctor, several artists, and the local harbormaster in Kolobrzeg―organized the Joseph Conrad Yacht Club, which Kuklinski named after his favorite author. The harbormaster was named president, and Kuklinski was made vice president. The club created a marina in an old Napoleonic fort situated on the Parsenta River, where it enters the Kolobrzeg harbor.
 
In the face of friendly skepticism from his colleagues, Kuklinski also began to rebuild a wrecked twenty-eight-foot German sailboat that had been sunk in the war. Working on the rusty cast-iron keel in his basement, he reattached the planks in the oak hull with copper nails that he formed out of snips of telephone wire.
 
In September 1956, Kuklinski began a regimental commander’s course in Wesola, near Warsaw, just months after a workers uprising in Poznan had been violently crushed by the Polish Army, leaving dozens dead and hundreds of others injured. In October a government shakeup led to the naming of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a previously purged official, as party secretary. Tensions between the Soviet Union and Poland escalated, with Russian troops even marching on Warsaw. Gomulka, who had tried to respond to the Poles’ demands for more freedom, ordered Soviet Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski and other Russians holding senior Army posts to leave the country.
 
In his first few months in Wesola, Kuklinski was thrilled by the prospect of change, and what it might mean for the Polish Army. “Maybe the Army was not the best institution for democracy,” he said, “but we were part of the society, and we wanted to serve the nation, not the party.” He asked a local newsstand owner to save him copies of
Po Prostu
, the weekly reformist newspaper, and other periodicals. Many of his military colleagues were also upset at Poland’s unequal relationship with the Soviet Union, the presence of Soviet generals in the Polish Army, and the lack of freedom of expression. Kuklinski attended meetings where resolutions were passed calling for change.
 
But Moscow’s suppression of the Hungarian uprising in November 1956 changed everything. Hearing that Poles were being asked to donate blood for the Hungarians, Kuklinski asked for permission to go to Warsaw to give blood, but was told he could not leave the barracks. And Gomulka quickly turned back what seemed to Kuklinski to be a burgeoning revolution in Poland. Although the Russians were largely out of the picture in the Polish Army, Gomulka shut down
Po Prostu
and imposed a hard-line Socialist agenda on the country. It all led Kuklinski to conclude that true liberalization in Poland was doomed.
 
In September 1957, Kuklinski was made a battalion commander in the Fifth Mechanized Regiment in a division based in Szczecin. Several weeks after his arrival, he was told that the division was getting a new commander, Wojciech Jaruzelski.
 
One night in the forest, while Kuklinski and several other officers were sitting on tree stumps around a fire, Jaruzelski appeared. Seven years older than Kuklinski, he was one of the youngest generals in the Polish Army. An older officer rose and offered Jaruzelski his seat, but Jaruzelski waved him off, saying, “Please sit, General.” Kuklinski was impressed with Jaruzelski’s gesture, which he believed showed character.
 
But Kuklinski had mixed views of Jaruzelski. He knew that Jaruzelski had long argued that the Russians should be allowed to continue to stay in Poland and run the Polish Army, and that Jaruzelski was extremely pro-Soviet. Kuklinski found this surprising, given Jaruzelski’s harsh wartime experiences. Jaruzelski, his sister, and his mother had all been imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp, where he had suffered permanent injuries to his back and eyes, which forced him to hold himself stiffly and to wear dark glasses.
 
At Szczecin, Jaruzelski had ordered a complete cleanup of the barracks, which were decrepit and dirty. He had the walls painted white, and the driveways and sidewalks cleared. Jaruzelski clearly was attentive to aesthetics and detail, but Kuklinski wondered whether the shine was only on the surface.
 
Kuklinski performed well in his assignment in Szczecin, but was unhappy about the continued suppression of democracy in Poland. For a while, he considered leaving the military and looking for a civilian job or going to school to study architecture. In the end, he stayed at his post, but after four months, he obtained a transfer back to Kolobrzeg, where his family remained. He remained there until the end of the decade. Even with the move, he continued to question his career choice. His ambivalence stemmed in part from events in Poland that seemed to herald change, yet never deliver it.
 
In 1959, Kuklinski finished rebuilding the German sailboat, which he and Hanka christened
Legend
. They launched it into the Baltic from the marina used by the Joseph Conrad Yacht Club.
 
He also continued to read voraciously. He found inspiration in the works of Conrad, the son of a Polish rebel from an earlier age who had also despised the Russians. (Conrad’s father had been jailed and then exiled with his mother to Vologda in Russia.) Conrad, a seaman for twenty years, was passionate about the sea, and Kuklinski identified with his use of ships and seamen as moral symbols. Kuklinski was entranced by Conrad’s 1917 novel
The Shadow Line
, in which a young sea captain attains emotional maturity and a sense of his own identity. Kuklinski was much taken with Conrad’s existential message and his depiction of that moment in life when “one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.”
 
Conrad had written:
 
 
 
Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
 
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness―and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation―a bit of one’s own.
 
 
Kuklinski read and reread the book, and he pondered the question: In a police state, how does one reach the enchanted garden?
 
 
 
 
In 1960, Kuklinski was accepted into the General Staff Academy in Warsaw, where he was introduced to Boleslaw Chocha, a Polish general who specialized in territorial defense issues. Chocha’s philosophy, which he shared with Kuklinski, was that the war of the future would be different, with no clear front lines and with armies suffering major casualties because of the effectiveness of long-range missiles. In such a scenario, he felt, Poland would be particularly vulnerable. Kuklinski was fascinated by Chocha’s views and appreciated his candor.
 
Kuklinski graduated in 1963. Cited for superior performance, particularly in writing and mapping, he was offered a position on the General Staff, the central command-and-control organ of the Polish armed forces. Kuklinski, by then a major, was given an office at the General Staff headquarters in Warsaw and assigned to work on major military exercises concerning strategic operations. Thus he began his ascent in the Polish Army.
 
That winter he got his first important assignment―to devise an exercise to show how Moscow would deliver nuclear warheads to Polish armed forces in wartime. A Polish colonel who had served as a rocket brigade commander had been given the assignment, but his work was found unsatisfactory, and Kuklinski was asked to take over.
 
The exercise was jointly managed by the Soviet and Polish defense ministers, and it would be observed by a select group of Polish generals. It was the height of the Cold War, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination―and at one point, Kuklinski went deep into a Polish forest and put his hand on an actual warhead, an object that officially did not exist on Polish soil.
 
Despite a severe blizzard, the exercise went flawlessly, and Kuklinski was recognized as an imaginative officer who could get a job done. Over the next nine years, he became the leading author of the military exercises conducted by Poland with the Warsaw Pact. He also worked closely with Jaruzelski, who was elevated to chief of staff. Fluent in Russian, Kuklinski regularly visited his Warsaw Pact counterparts in Moscow, Eastern Europe, and the western part of the Soviet Union. He became an expert in troop movements, combat readiness, air defense, communications, and chemical and electronic warfare. His mission, he was told, was to prepare for war with the West.

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