Oppositionists Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski and Jan Olszewski wrote in 1977 a letter to U.S. president Jimmy Carter, in which Poland's desire to join NATO was declared, and this was the first sign of the existence of an environment in Poland that saw the safety of our country based on the United States. At that time, in patriotic environments, authors of the letter were treated as pests of the Polish case, at best "crazy". No 1 saw visionaries in them...
But for respective years now, "the first Polish NATO officer" has been operating – as later stated by Colonel Ryszard Kukliński.
Kukliński's life way from the core of russian military structures was long, complicated and dramatically risky.
The colonel's full adult life was connected with the communist People's Army of Poland. He worked in intelligence and counterintelligence, but only as a staff officer did he uncover himself as a superb military operations planner. These abilities provided him with a fast way of promotion and designation among the russian general. In the General Staff, he had the chance to learn details of the planned invasion of Western European countries and this was a shock to him.
In this phase of the Cold War, the arms race has already reached an absurd level – each side has accumulated an arsenal of atomic warheads adequate to repeatedly kill the full human population.
But even if there had not been a full atomic armagedon, in any case russian aggression to the west would have led to complete annihilation of Poland, due to the fact that atomic mines buried at the interior border between Western Germany and the GDR could not halt the armies of the second throw, the main impact. Since the conventional communist bloc had a numerical advantage, NATO's only chance to halt the aggressors remained a atomic attack in Poland.
Kukliński decided to prevent this scenario.
He managed to establish contact with American intelligence and from 1971 to 1981, utilizing the nickname "Jack Strong", he managed to pass thousands of pages of absolutely key papers on russian invasion plans, among others. For American intelligence, it was priceless news. At the minute of expanding global tension, the Americans suggested that they knew the location of the russian headquarters' command location - in a bunker close Brzeg in the Opole province, they were to service as the commanding staff for aggression with Marshal Kulikov at the head. This information stopped the decision to start planet War III. At the same time, the Russians realized that they had a "cret" in a narrow group of ultimate commanders, and this prompted the U.S. intelligence to evacuate Kukliński with his full household to West Berlin in December 1981.
Kukliński did not act for material reasons - he had to realize the risks he was putting himself and his household at risk. He knew precisely what the russian "dimension of justice" was doing with people who were considered traitors. He knew that "the long frame of Moscow" could scope it all over the world, and his "guilty will never expire. He cared that he would never find peace anywhere. He paid for his actions a terrible price - both his sons died under unexplained circumstances. 1 in front of witnesses was run over by a truck on the campus. The unsub failed to stop, and the car turned out to be a "contribution" with spare parts, no vehicle past and serial numbers...
Not everyone in Poland realises that we have lived on the brink of demolition for years and how much we owe the colonel.
For some, Kukliński remains "controversial", and for Marshal Czarzasty and his acolytes – he is simply a traitor.
In the Polish People's Republic, Colonel Kukliński was sentenced in absentia to death penalty. Only after rehabilitation in 1997 could he visit the country. "All I did in my life was for Poland," he said during a visit to my homeland.
He died in 2004 in Tampa, Florida.
President Andrzej Duda posthumously promoted Ryszard Kukliński to the rank of Brigadier General of the Polish Army.
