Kuklinski had been just as impatient to make contact. He had returned to Poland on August 24 and had tried to go about his daily routine as he waited for a signal from the Americans. But as the weeks passed, he found himself preoccupied, nervous, and moody. Hanka could tell he was distracted. She did not press for an explanation, but he found it hard to keep the truth from her. They were extremely close, and he relied on her companionship, good instincts, and sense of humor. They had met in 1946, when Kuklinski was sixteen. He had been working in the town hall of Wroclaw, a town in Silesia in southwest Poland that had been taken back from the Germans after World War II. Kuklinski worked for Hanka’s father, who managed security for the town’s buildings. One day, Kuklinski heard the faint sound of a piano being played in the town hall, and he peeked into a room to find a slight, blond, thirteen-year-old girl practicing. Kuklinski introduced himself and asked her if she would teach him to play the song.
Hanka smiled shyly and began to show him the proper keys. She burst out laughing as he took over and deftly played the entire piece.
They began dating three years later, when she was sixteen and Kuklinski was in officers school. On July 16, 1952, they were married. Over the years, as Kuklinski’s career progressed, Hanka worked as a factory bookkeeper and took care of their sons. She did not gossip with neighbors and had only a few close friends. Kuklinski knew she was uninterested in politics, but he appreciated her independent streak and her spirited outlook on life. After he was punished in officers school for making the joke about communism, and feared he had jeopardized his career, Hanka dismissed his concerns. There would be other opportunities, she told him.
In the fall of 1972, as Kuklinski’s dark moods continued, she grew concerned and asked what was wrong. Finally, he told her that when he had been in Vietnam, he had become friendly with some American soldiers. While sailing in Germany that summer, he said, he had been surprised to run into them again. He had been sympathetic to the American effort in Vietnam and was pleased to know they survived the war, and he decided to pursue the friendship. But there were enormous risks in talking to the Americans, and the relationship had to stay secret.
The story was not entirely true, of course. Kuklinski had not linked up with Americans in Saigon, although he had tried to. But for Hanka’s protection, he decided not to tell her any more about what he was doing, and he said nothing to his sons.
Even though he had not heard from the Americans, Kuklinski began photographing secret documents that he planned to give the Americans in his first delivery. He used a Russian camera he owned called a Zorka, which the commander of the Warsaw Pact forces had presented him for his work on a military exercise. Kuklinski enjoyed the irony: The gift would be used against the Soviets.
He built a darkroom in a bathroom. He told his family and friends that he was taking up photography again, a hobby he had dropped years earlier. He bought an enlarger, trays, chemicals, and other supplies. And because a Polish lieutenant colonel and his Russian wife lived above them, Kuklinski took other precautions. He suspected the KGB used such couples to spy on Polish citizens, and he worried they could hear his camera clicks as he photographed documents in his bedroom. In what he called a “home remodeling project,” Kuklinski installed wooden paneling on his concrete ceiling to deaden the sound.
He took photographs at home, around the city, and on sailing trips. He shot nature scenes on long weekend walks with his family and their energetic sheepdog, Zula, a Hungarian puli. Her black fur was so long that it was sometimes hard to tell her front from her back.
At work, Kuklinski took classified documents out of the General Staff in a briefcase. The rules were strict: Documents removed from the General Staff vaults for delivery to another institution had to be carried in sealed envelopes and opened only by the official designated to receive the papers. Papers stamped “Secret―of Special Importance” could be removed only with the authorization of a commanding officer and under armed escort. Even tighter restrictions existed for “Series K” documents. But the rules were not always observed, and Kuklinski could find plausible reasons to remove documents, to make visits to other offices, or to take quick trips home during the day.
Zula sometimes posed a problem. She would bound to the door whenever Kuklinski arrived at home, barking loudly and scraping the floor. Kuklinski tried to train her to be quieter, so that his arrivals would not be noticed by his neighbors. Once, when one of his sons returned home with Zula after a walk, Kuklinski got down on his hands and knees and started barking and asking, “Is it nice if I welcome you this way?”
One day after Zula was taken out for a walk, the doorbell rang, and Kuklinski got down and began to bark. But as he reached up and opened the door, a repairman greeted him. “I was supposed to fix the refrigerator,” the startled visitor said. Kuklinski hastily tried to explain. “I wasn’t barking at you―I was barking at my dog.” A day or so later, a secretary teased him at work: “Ryszard, I heard you wanted to bite my brother.”
In October, Kuklinski was promoted to full colonel and told he was in line to become chief of staff for a mechanized division outside Warsaw. The two-year assignment would be valuable training for a higher position when he returned to the General Staff. But he demurred. His position in the General Staff gave him extraordinary access to Warsaw Pact secrets, and he had no desire to leave. He had not heard from the Americans and could not seek their advice. He thanked his superiors, but asked that the posting be delayed.
For some reason, Kuklinski did not find the first letter dropped into his car. But when he found the second, he returned to his apartment and tried to follow Henry’s instructions. He took an iron and pressed on the blank side of the sheet, waiting for the secret writing to appear. No message emerged. He ironed the page more firmly, again without success. Hanka entered the room. Kuklinski said he was trying to iron something, but that it wasn’t working. Hanka suggested he turn up the heat. He did and immediately he saw the words appear on the sheet: the time and place of the meeting.
Late on the night of December 17, as a mist settled over Warsaw, Station Chief Carl Gebhardt and his wife Nancy began a surveillance detection run to see if they were being followed by the SB. Like all CIA spouses being posted to denied areas, Nancy, who was not an officer, had been trained to assist in clandestine operations. Satisfied that that they were free of surveillance, they drove to the Powstancow Warszawskich cemetery and headed up the road to where Kuklinski was to be standing. As they approached him, they were shocked to see that he was in his full army uniform. He was waving energetically at them.
Gebhardt didn’t know whether to brake or speed away. He pulled up so that Gull was by Nancy on the passenger’s side of the car. They passed him a package, and he handed back a container that looked like a cigar box.
Gebhardt leaned over and made eye contact with Gull. He wrote later: “Gull looked like a first-rate person, honest and sincere, and a man we’d like to know under different circumstances. This is very subjective, but it is what comes through of the man’s character and is reflected in his face, and we think it is accurate.”
Gull’s package contained a letter and eighteen rolls of film―so many that Gebhardt had trouble finding enough lead-shielded containers to protect the film from airport X-ray machines when it was carried in the diplomatic pouch to the United States. At Langley the CIA discovered the film contained 300 pages of classified documents, including Soviet and Warsaw Pact war-planning materials. Kuklinski signed his letter “Jack Strong”―the pseudonym the Americans had given him.
The Americans also had prepared a letter for Kuklinski:
On behalf of our representatives who met you in the summer and at the special request of very senior officials of our government and senior officials in our military command, we wish to express our appreciation for your making contact with us and to welcome your cooperation in mutually beneficial undertaking in the cause of freedom. The worthy purposes and principles of our cooperation will endure and survive the yoke which now binds your nation, its government, and its military forces.
We understand and appreciate your concerns and your personal situation and are confident that your contributions to the cause of right and justice will benefit both our nations and the larger cause of world peace. We also wish to re-affirm to you the commitments we have made to you and our pledge and promise to assist you in any way which we can manage securely. . . .
We look forward to a long and valuable association with you and send you our best wishes for the future.
The letter was signed “Eagle.”
The agency provided Kuklinski with supplies that he would need for the operation, including water-soluble paper for messages, and two cameras. The first, an Olympus, resembled a camera that could be purchased in any shop, although it used special film canisters that held twice as many pictures as the commercial model. The second, a Tubka, was an example of the CIA’s advances in miniaturization. It could be configured into a dozen forms and was small enough to conceal inside the head of a ballpoint pen or the fob of a key chain. One case officer, aware of Kuklinski’s love of the sea, proposed inserting his Tubka in a sextant. Ultimately, because of Kuklinski’s smoking habit, he received one inside a lighter. There was also detailed information on how Kuklinski should communicate with his American friends through chalk signals, dead drops, and exchanges through car windows.
Within the Soviet Division of the CIA, excitement about the operation was growing. On January 8, 1973, a senior member of the Reports and Requirements Staff, which disseminated Gull’s material to the rest of the intelligence community, said in an analysis of the first documents he had delivered: “This source has made excellent choices of documents to copy. This sense of what is important information . . . promises to make him one of the two or three best sources we have had in Eastern Europe.”
On January 15, the Soviet Division sent a memorandum to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans
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on the status of the operation, which said that so far Gull had provided “a large quantity of very valuable, highly classified, documentary intelligence directly responsive to priority national intelligence requirements.”
Yet another briefing paper for top CIA officials called Gull “the best-placed source now available to [the U.S. government] in the Bloc, in terms of the collection of priority information.” It continued: “He has already reported on a Soviet air defense system on which there was no information other than interpretation of technical collection projects. His access affords [the U.S. government] excellent insight into the plans, actions and capabilities of the Warsaw Pact, including our best existing potential for early warning of Pact hostile action.”
A senior official in the Soviet Division also cabled Lang, Henry, and other officers involved in the initial stages of the operation commending them on their performance: “Although full impact of his intelligence info to date is not yet apparent to the community, it is already clear to me that if you can keep Gull alive and producing the case will be of historic significance.”
Blee was concerned that the sudden flood of Warsaw Pact materials from Kuklinski could tip off astute analysts in the intelligence community that the CIA had a new and highly placed source in the Warsaw Pact. He consulted with Katharine Colvin Hart, chief of his Reports and Requirements Staff, whose members were adept at masking the identity of sources before disseminating their contributions to the intelligence community.
With Hart’s assistance, Blee made it appear that Kuklinski’s intelligence was emanating from two longtime sources, who had recently become more active. Kuklinski’s classified Polish Warsaw Pact materials would be credited to a longtime Polish military agent, code-named QT-LUX, who lacked Kuklinski’s access to sensitive operational material but would be a plausible source of the information. Meanwhile, Kuklinski’s Russian materials would be attributed to a longtime Soviet source.
As Blee later described the masking of Kuklinski’s identity: “I cut him into two halves. Both halves already existed. Nobody ever doubted that these were the same sources that they had been reading for some time.”
There were also tight restrictions on access to Gull’s intelligence. Only a single photographic print was made from each negative. The print was sent to the Reports and Requirements Staff to be translated. The reports that resulted were disseminated in what was known as the “blue border” series (each page had a blue border down the right side). That meant they were issued as Top Secret, with full security controls. They could not be sent overseas or shown to a foreign national or a contract employee. The reports had to be stored in their own special walk-in vaults, which in turn were inside room-sized vaults that housed some of the most sensitive technical intelligence. Only a limited number of people were given access to the Gull material; each had to sign in to review it, and the review had to be done inside the inner vault. Any notes they took had to remain in the vault. Any reports they produced had to be sent back to Reports and Requirements for approval. In limited cases, the material could be hand-carried to a select group of senior government officials on the so-called bigot list. After being reviewed, the material had to be returned.