Film on spy Col. Kuklinski premiered in Poland

Dariusz Jablonski’s eagerly awaited War Games documentary, about the life of Polish spy Ryszard Kuklinski, has been shown for the first time at the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall in Poland. The film, whose first official screening was attended by a number of Polish government ministers, will be shown at the CIA headquarters on Thursday, Polskie Radio reports. Kuklinski, a Polish Army Colonel, was an instrumental US and NATO asset during the Cold War, thanks to his crucial post as Polish General Staff’s liaison to the Warsaw Pact. From 1972 until 1981, Colonel Kuklinski supplied the US and NATO with microfilms of over 40,000 documents detailing Soviet tactical plans for Poland and the rest of Europe. In 1981, Polish counterintelligence began to suspect Kuklinski of providing the West with classified documents and began secretly investigating his activities. However, Kuklinski and his family were smuggled out of Poland in a successful CIA operation late that year. They resettled in the United States, where Kuklinski died in 2004. The Greenville News (South Carolina) has published an interesting editorial by Carlos Luria, a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, retelling Kuklinski’s story and reminding readers that the Polish Colonel was an ideological -not a financial- recruit for the CIA. Luria laments the “squander[ing] of core American values” by recent US Administrations, “from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo and secret renditions”, all of which have shattered America’s “moral high ground. That loss”, argues the former CIA agent, has affected the ability of US intelligence “to attract high-level, ideologically motivated walk-ins from around the world -including those who might exist within the terrorists’ ranks”. [JF]