Declassified: the Secret Soviet Documents of a Leading CIA Spy

Ryszard Kuklinski in 1981.

R. Kuklinski (standing) is shown handing papers to Soviet Minister of Defense Ustinov.

The historical value of the new documents—that is, how they may reshape a scholarly understanding of the Warsaw Pact and the Solidarity movement—has yet to be determined, says Christian Ostermann, director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Historians will need time to study the new items in depth.

Ironically, however, some of the information in the newly released documents has already been available to historians in the original Polish and Russian after the opening of former Communist archives.

But by any measure, the nature of the material Kuklinski passed to the West was stunning.

The CIA now acknowledges that the soft-spoken, chain-smoking colonel provided a full set of Soviet plans for attacking NATO; a systematic description of how the Warsaw Pact would mobilize for war; the exact location of command-and-control bunkers, along with details on their construction and military communications systems; information on some 200 weapon systems, as well as Warsaw Pact techniques used for evading U.S. satellite surveillance.

But the real reason the spy community celebrates Kuklinski more than, say, the handful of other high-ranking Polish officers who also passed information to the CIA, is for the nine years when he allowed the United States an unobstructed view of Soviet and Polish military decision making.

"No one else provided so much detailed information over such a long period of time. It allowed us to understand how the Warsaw Pact thought," says Aris Pappas, a former CIA official who analyzed much of Kuklinski's raw reports from the field. All told, Kuklinski photographed more than 40,250 pages of military secrets and passed them to Langley.

• Read the newly declassified documents.
• Read more about declassified Warsaw Pact nuclear war planning.