Americans who came of age after the cold war might look back and wonder: Who were these people we supported? What did we win in the end? Where is democracy triumphant today? In this harsh light, the long struggle might seem like folly.
It didn’t look that way at the time to a great many people who waged political warfare on behalf of the United States. Americans had allied with Stalin against Hitler, and if now they struck a devil’s bargain with the likes of the shah and Mobutu against the Kremlin, it was all for the greater glory of God and country. They believed that they were engaged in a battle between good and evil, pure and simple. If their faith ever faltered, they could find consolation in an old Balkan proverb often quoted by FDR: “My children, it is permitted in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.” And they believed that one day they would cross over into a new world.
But they learned to their sorrow that their enemies could not be defeated by military might alone. Vietnam was the most bitter lesson: it was a political war, and it could not be won by force of arms. American leaders, at least some of them, would come to understand that victory or defeat in political warfare depended less on American power and statecraft than on the spirit of the people in the lands where they were waged. The longest and most glorious of these struggles took place over more than forty years in a country that had seen more war in its thousand years than any place on earth, and whose national anthem begins: “Poland has not yet perished.”
Once, in the seventeenth century, Poland had been the largest country in Europe. Attacked on all fronts by the Swedes, the Turks, and the Russians, then carved up by Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian monarchy, it was wiped off the map for 140 years, until the end of World War I. Hitler and Stalin invaded it together in 1939. Then the Nazis stormed eastward through Poland on their way to Stalingrad, and the Red Army stormed back on the way to Berlin. Polish divisions fought under the command of General Eisenhower from 1943 to 1945, but they could not save their nation from near-total destruction. At the end of the war, hardly a stone stood upon a stone in Warsaw, and every stone was stained by Polish blood. Cities, towns, and villages vanished. Six million Poles died in the war, a fifth of the population. Three million of the dead were Jews annihilated by the Nazis; Poland was the epicenter of the Holocaust. One and a half million Poles suffered and died in the gulags of Siberia. Yet the Poles were never conquered, even after the Soviets seized them. “Communism does not fit the Poles,” Stalin said in 1944. “They are too individualistic.”
The Poles saw their history through the prism of Christ’s martyrdom and resurrection. They were beautiful losers, romantic visionaries, the Irish of Eastern Europe. Their link to America was immutable: five million Polish immigrants lived in the United States at the end of World War II, ten million more in the years thereafter. Polish exiles in Europe were desperate to serve as a resistance army for the fledging CIA—and the CIA was determined to use them. If the United States were to achieve its dream of rolling back communism, Poland looked like as good a place as any to start.
The CIA had believed from its beginnings in 1947 that it could mobilize an underground army known as the Freedom and Independence Movement—the initials in Polish were WiN—through a council of exiles in London. The covert-operations czar Frank Wisner envisioned arming and equipping 20,000 paramilitary fighters and 100,000 sympathizers who could rise up in rebellion against communist oppression. A Pole had turned up in London with photos of Soviets tanks that WiN had destroyed; he gave them to a former Polish general who asked the CIA for help. The London exiles and the CIA received a constant stream of messages from inside Poland depicting a growing rebellion in the making. From 1950 onward, the CIA responded by parachuting at least three dozen Polish patriots—along with weapons, clandestine radios, spy gear, and about $5 million in cash and gold—over the Iron Curtain to support WiN. And then, on December 28, 1952, in the last days of the Truman administration, Polish state radio went on the air with a devastating bulletin.
WiN was a sting—a creation of the Soviet and Polish intelligence services. They had controlled and managed the deception all along. It constituted one of the biggest American intelligence catastrophes of the early cold war—“a monumental disaster,” John McMahon, then a young CIA officer in Germany, said fifty years later, after he had retired as deputy director of central intelligence. WiN was the first mission for a freshman CIA officer named Ted Shackley, and the sight of his colleagues wrestling with the realization that five years of plotting and millions of dollars had been lost to a double cross was seared into his memory. Soon he would have a chance to strike back.
When the American embassy in Warsaw relayed the gloating Polish state radio reports detailing the deception to Washington, the news enraged Robert Joyce, who had succeeded George Kennan at the State Department’s policy planning department. He had worked closely with Kennan and the CIA from the outset as they had inaugurated political warfare—and this was what they had wrought. “I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback,” he wrote on New Year’s Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the “perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching ‘1984’ efficiency to a degree where ‘resistance’ can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.”
The battle for the minds of the people was on in full. Six months later, in Munich, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Zbigniew Brzezinski met another Harvard man named Paul Henze at the headquarters of Radio Free Europe, where Henze served as the deputy political adviser. The two men began a lifelong friendship, an alliance that would continue a quarter-century later at the National Security Council, where they formed their own resistance cell. Brzezinski, born in Warsaw in 1928, was the son of a Polish diplomat who had been posted in Germany as Hitler and the Nazis seized power. His doctoral thesis dealt with the evolution of Stalin’s empire, and the suffering of Poland shaped his perception of the world. Henze, born in 1924 in the minuscule Minnesota hamlet of Redwood Falls, had served in Eisenhower’s army and earned a master’s in Soviet studies under the GI Bill at Harvard; the program served as a CIA incubator, and he entered duty June 21, 1950, four days before the Korean War erupted. Brzezinski and Henze were ambitious and adventurous men in their twenties, thrilled to be at the heart of a huge political warfare operation. Brzezinski thought the world of his colleague: “I was struck from the very beginning by his devotion to the cause of freedom for the East Europeans then under Stalin’s rule, and by his realization—novel at the time—that truthful radio broadcasts could eventually negate the communist monopoly of power.”
George Kennan conceived Radio Free Europe, Frank Wisner midwifed it, and Allen Dulles raised it. Kennan wanted to harness the energies and intellects of exiles and émigrés who had fled Eastern Europe. Wisner and Dulles helped to gather them in American-occupied West Germany, put them on the air, and beam their voices back beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1949, Dulles, then a private citizen, a powerfully influential White House consultant, and in effect the shadow CIA director in the absence of a strong leader at the agency, had created the National Committee for a Free Europe as a public entity in New York with a giant covert component overseas. The committee received many millions from the CIA to finance Radio Free Europe; the agency paid the salaries of hundreds and then thousands of employees, built the Munich headquarters at the edge of the city’s elegant English Garden, and developed the themes that went out over the airwaves. The first programs had gone out on July 4, 1950, and by 1951 they had reached Poland and four other nations under Stalin’s bootheels. Over the years, the broadcasts, at their best, became a brilliant blend of news and entertainment, political satire and propaganda. At their worst they could be venomous—a poison factory, as one top RFE official put it. Free Europe committee directors in the fifties spoke longingly of creating chaos; they saw the radios first and foremost as weapons of the most militant political warfare, and they wanted the spears sharpened.
“During the first broadcasts, they really didn’t know what they were doing,” said RFE’s Richard H. Cummings, later director of security at the Munich headquarters. “It was all hit or miss. They didn’t care. They were just putting something out there. I would say it was propaganda. You could call it ‘fake news.’”
The Poles nonetheless listened religiously; Radio Free Europe created a cathedral in the air. They were ecstatic to hear the voice of Jan Nowak, a hero of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis and the new director of RFE’s Polish-language service. In his first commentary to listeners in May 1952, he captured the spirit of the time: “The struggle is being waged not in the forest, streets, or in the underground, but in Polish souls—within the four walls of a Polish home. It is this struggle that we wish to join here on the airwaves of Radio Free Europe.” His American overseers wanted less poetry and more vitriol. “Why don’t we advocate sabotage in Poland?” one Free Europe committee director in New York asked bluntly in July 1953. In Munich, Paul Henze railed against the “psy-warriors” in Washington and their “stupid” and “hare-brained” incitements to violence. This battle ebbed and flowed but never ended.
The most startling voice in the history of Radio Free Europe’s Polish service went on the air in the fall of 1954. It belonged to Josef Swiatlo, a senior officer of the Polish secret police. As the deputy director of Department Ten of the Ministry of Public Security, charged with rounding up enemies of the state, Swiatlo had earned a fearsome reputation. He had arrested Wladyslaw Gomulka, the former secretary general of the Polish Communist Party, who had fallen out of Stalin’s favor, and Poland’s Catholic primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. Then, in December 1953, fearing for his own future after Stalin’s death, he defected to the United States in occupied Berlin.
The CIA sent Ted Shackley to meet him. They talked in a safe house near Frankfurt for four months, and the defector described in detail the dirty work he’d done under orders from his Soviet overseers. The litany was long. Shackley wanted to know if Gomulka was alive. Swiatlo said he was comfortably ensconced in a Department Ten villa—and that an anti-Stalinist faction in the Polish Communist Party was alive and well, too. This was sweet music to the CIA. “If there was turmoil in the Polish leadership,” Shackley wrote a half century later, “we wanted to keep the pot boiling.” So the CIA flew Swiatlo to the United States, and after a far more intense interrogation, it sent him to Radio Free Europe’s New York office. It intended to play back his testimony to Poland. The first tape arrived in Jan Nowak’s office in Munich on September 17.
“The Inside Story of the Secret Police and the Party” went on the air in October 1954 and ran for seventy-seven weekly installments. In February 1955, the CIA and RFE began printing eight hundred thousand brochures with the text of the programs and sending them into Poland on a flotilla of balloons. Warsaw and Moscow treated this operation as a major threat and formally protested to Washington that it constituted a violation of Poland’s sovereignty. The Swiatlo story shook the Polish Communist Party to its core; it led to the abolition of Department Ten, the jailing of secret police commissars, the disgrace and dismissal of the internal-security chief, and a wave of panic in the ministries of fear. A twenty-first-century Radio Free Europe historian wrote that the programs were arguably “the most successful case of influencing an adversarial regime in the history of international broadcasting.” Then the CIA struck fire in June 1956 by broadcasting Khrushchev’s secret speech and his denunciation of Stalin. It was replayed endlessly, along with pointed commentary, and the effect in Eastern Europe was electrifying. It sparked an uprising in the Polish city of Poznań on June 28.
The Poles knew how to organize an underground resistance; the Warsaw Uprising was only twelve years in the past. And this resistance had an audience: hundreds of foreigners were in town for the annual international trade fair in Poznań, among them Richard E. Johnson, an economics expert at the American embassy in Warsaw. Johnson and an embassy colleague found themselves at a nightclub, drinking at the table of a black marketeer, on the night of June 27. “Further on in the evening, as things warmed up and we had a bit more champagne, he whispered to us, ‘You know, this place is going to blow sky high tomorrow.’ We said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Yep, they’re going out on the streets and they’re gonna raise hell.’” Early the next morning, workers at the Zispo manufacturing plant proclaimed a general strike and marched into the city center, where legions of workers from other factories joined them.
“As the crowd swelled to a hundred thousand people,” Johnson recounted, “some attacked a prison and freed inmates; others destroyed equipment on the roof of a government building used to jam Western radio broadcasts.” The demonstrators who sabotaged the jamming antennas chanted, “We want to listen to the outside world!” and “We want freedom!” America showed the flag: in the absence of the ambassador, the chargé d’affaires in Warsaw rode to the embattled city in the embassy’s limousine, adorned above each headlight with the fluttering Stars and Stripes. His instructions were to be as ostentatious as possible. He drove back and forth through the streets of Poznań to make the American presence felt. That gesture was the extent of American support.
Late that afternoon, the Soviet general who commanded the Polish army sent two armored divisions and two infantry divisions into the city. Ten thousand soldiers backed by the KGB and the Polish secret police brutally suppressed the uprising; they killed at least fifty-seven demonstrators, wounded six hundred, and arrested many hundreds more before they took back control of the city. Poznań was on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and a resounding headline on Radio Free Europe. At the National Security Council, the consensus was that the blood of Polish martyrs was a boon to the United States. Allen Dulles, somewhat in the spirit of Stalin, observed that one couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Nixon said that “it wouldn’t be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of U.S. interest, if the Soviet iron fist were to come down again on the Soviet bloc.”
The Polish Communist Party, to the great surprise of the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, cracked down on itself and not the people. Fifteen thousand copies of the secret speech had circulated among the Polish ministries and the nation’s intelligentsia; many among the elites also listened in secret to Radio Free Europe, if and when they could. Taking the great risk of a military invasion from Moscow, the party sided with the dissidents. “Polish regime thoroughly shaken by unexpected Poznań riots which must have raised urgent questions both here and in Moscow,” the American embassy in Warsaw reported to Washington; its leaders had been forced to “redress worker grievances and woo general public.” The party itself took a step in an agonizingly long march to freedom in Poland by purging its most devout Stalinists, rehabilitating the old guard’s political victims, restoring them to the Polish Politburo, and removing a hated Soviet marshal from his post as the nation’s defense minister.
In October, the party elected a new leader—Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been freed from house arrest a few weeks before, following the broadcasts of Khrushchev’s secret speech. Khrushchev himself arrived unannounced in Warsaw, put Soviet forces stationed in Poland on alert, and tried to block Gomulka from gaining power. He failed. On October 20, the new leader described Poznań as the workers’ rightful response to “the distortions of the fundamental principles of socialism.” He denounced the “clumsy attempt to present the painful Poznań tragedy as the work of imperialist agents.” The cause of the upheaval was “to be found in ourselves, in the leadership of the Party, in the Government.” He had gone beyond Khrushchev’s speech to denounce the evils of the Soviet system itself. And, remarkably, he stopped his government’s attempts to jam the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe.
In Washington, the White House, State, and CIA leaped at the chance to encourage Polish independence. On October 23, they agreed to propose a robust program of economic aid. President Eisenhower, addressing a convention of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America at a campaign rally that evening, said: “A people, like the Poles, who have once known freedom cannot be for always deprived of their national independence.… The memory of freedom is not erased by the fear of guns and the love of freedom is more enduring than the power of tyrants.” The president told Foster Dulles that the Poles “need have no fear that we might make an effort to incorporate them into NATO or make them part of our alliances. We want to see them have a free choice.” Allen and Foster Dulles agreed that the president should back a mini–Marshall Plan for Poland. It would encourage the Poles “to persist in the political attitudes which emerged openly last summer and fall,” Allen wrote to his brother, and it would serve as “tangible evidence of American support for Polish efforts gradually to reduce Soviet influence in Polish affairs.” The Eisenhower administration quickly approved $55 million in loans and $138 million in agricultural surpluses. This wasn’t charity but part of a bigger endeavor: the United States was going to work with Gomulka to weaken the monolith of the Soviet Bloc, using formal diplomacy, intensified information warfare, economic and technological aid, most-favored-nation status for trade, cultural programs, and more.
In the decade since George Kennan had proclaimed the inauguration of political warfare, few countries in the world had experienced its impact more profoundly than Poland. Kennan toured the nation in July 1958 in his capacity as a CIA consultant and recorded his impressions in a letter that Allen Dulles passed on to President Eisenhower. Kennan was impressed by “how much the Poles are getting away with”—including their “complete freedom of speech.” He saw that the Polish intelligentsia was unencumbered by any “illusions about the nature of Soviet power.” He perceived that the government was now “firmly oriented towards the West.” But at the end of the day, he was struck by “how little any of this means that Poland is, or will be in any near future, in a position to shake off communist political control.” When Kennan smelled flowers, he looked around for a funeral.
There was one immensely powerful element of American political warfare he had missed, a phenomenon inexplicable to the unhip. And that was jazz.
“The Voice of America had a disc jockey called Willis Conover who played jazz from 10 at night until 1 in the morning,” remembered David J. Fischer, then a young officer at the Warsaw embassy, later an American ambassador. “Everyone—and I mean everyone who counted—listened to that program.” Conover was a superstar in the communist world and utterly obscure in America.
The Voice of America first went on the air after Pearl Harbor; its first director was John Houseman, a Romanian immigrant who had gained fame as a producer of the staggeringly realistic Orson Welles radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” and later became an Oscar-winning actor. He put American popular music, predominantly big band jazz, on the air around the world, as far as its signal could reach. The Nazis had banned jazz—they called it Negermusik—as a cultural poison produced by African Americans and promoted by Jews. Houseman later reflected: “We found ourselves using music as an instrument of propaganda.” In 1953, the VOA became the broadcast arm of the United States Information Agency, newly created by President Eisenhower; other branches included press services, libraries, and documentary films, and Ike wanted it to be the friendly and open face of American political warfare, the smiling soldier who handed out food and sweets to the hungry in the form of information and entertainment.
Conover went on the air in 1955 for a run that lasted forty years until his death, his whiskey- and tobacco-cured baritone becoming instantly familiar to the citizens of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and beyond. More than one American who visited these capitals in those days fell into a conversation with a stranger who spoke an unusually idiomatic English, and upon being asked how he learned it, heard the answer: Villis Conofer. The television newsman John Chancellor, a future director of the Voice of America, called Conover “the single most effective instrument we had at the Voice.” Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” opened his show, a tune of boundless optimistic energy. He featured the music of—and, importantly, interviews with—the Duke, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, among many other creators of an art form as powerful and as mind-altering as moving pictures. Their music was a force of liberation in an America still trying to segregate and scorn them. Jazz was the sound of freedom; it told the world more about America than most Americans knew.
By early 1959, Conover had received sacks of fan mail from Poland, begging him to come visit. He flew into Warsaw that June. He looked out the window of the plane when he landed, and he saw hundreds of people, some with cameras and tape recorders, girls carrying flowers, and he thought, I’d better wait until whoever that’s for gets off. Then he saw that he was the last person off the plane. The crowd went wild. That night, and the next, musicians came from all over Poland, at their own expense, to perform for him at the National Philharmonic Hall, to show him what they had learned from listening to his show. If this wasn’t winning hearts and minds for America, they could not be won.
Jazz, Conover explained for the unattuned, had the virtues of vitality, strength, social mobility. The musicians agreed on a song, its key, tempo, and harmonies; and “once they’ve agreed on that, on the range of their performance, they’re free to perform whatever they want. And that’s parallel to the structure of the U.S.A.” Jazz was “a musical reflection of the way things happen in America,” he told the New York Times upon his return from Poland. “We’re not apt to recognize this over here but people in other countries can feel this element of freedom. They love jazz because they love freedom.”
A few weeks after Conover came to Warsaw, at the start of August 1959, a very different visitor arrived: Vice President Richard M. Nixon was touring the world in preparation for his presidential campaign. He had a five-hour talk with Gomulka, who gave him an earful. The Polish leader had changed his tune on Radio Free Europe, which had helped him rise to power but now poured vitriol upon him. “RFE is not advocating ideas,” he said. “It simply piles abuse on everything and everyone in Poland.” But Gomulka was only warming up. His voice rose, his face reddened, and the history of centuries in which no generation of his people had been spared war, or foreign rule, or both, came pouring out. He said he and his nation lived in fear of the rising power of West Germany, implicitly backed by the political and military force of America. “The Poles have seen their relatives and friends shot by Germans, blindfolded before a wall,” he said. The war had been over for only fourteen years; he and his people lived with the memory every day. “We do not want to be trampled over,” he told Nixon. “I do not believe in war and neither does Khrushchev. Any war will be suicide. But there are people who want to commit suicide. Eventually there must and will be one world. It is useless to discuss now whether that world will be socialist or capitalist.”
Nixon, who thought the Polish leader was cold as steel, tried to warm him up. “Maybe it can be both,” Nixon said. “Things change.”
Ike’s brother and most trusted adviser, Milton, who had accompanied Nixon, drove Gomulka’s points home for the president. Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts were strengthening the hands of Poland’s communist leaders by stirring up anger and fear, he wrote to the president. The Poles wanted to live in peace. Between the Germans, whom they hated, and the Soviets, whom they merely feared, they believed they had no choice but to depend upon Soviet power.
The president read this warning, agreed with it, and forwarded it to Allen Dulles, who did next to nothing to change the radio’s tone and tenor. He assured Eisenhower more than once that “Radio Free Europe had to walk a tightrope to avoid, on the one hand, fomenting outbreaks in Poland that would cost Polish lives and, on the other hand, to avoid giving the Poles the impression that the United States had abandoned hope of their ultimate liberation”—and that he would keep walking that rope.
“We have been doing our best to break Poland away from Moscow,” Eisenhower told congressional leaders convened at the White House in August 1960. “We do a little here and a little there, as we can.” But those efforts soon slowed to a near-halt. The United States kept political warfare in Poland at a very low boil in the 1960s. Warsaw had its annual jazz festivals, Poznań its trade fairs, and American embassy officials drank Scotch and vodka with their Polish counterparts, but little had changed by the time Nixon ran for president again in 1968, and won. By then, Radio Free Europe’s ties to the CIA had been exposed by investigative journalists, compromising its credibility. The head of Poland’s formidable secret police had started working in lockstep with the new chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, to run joint operations against the main enemy, the United States, and the “centers of ideological-political sabotage in the West”—especially Radio Free Europe. And the United States had turned away when the people of Poland rose up once again in an early wave of the widespread student rebellions that shook the world in 1968. The president’s primary concern as he prepared to return to Warsaw in the spring of 1972 was not the fate of the Polish people but of the Polish vote. A third of the Polish nation now lived in the United States. “Look at what it will mean to us to go into Warsaw and with any kind of a break get a hell of a reception,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “[It] affects Pennsylvania, it affects Ohio, it affects Illinois, and it affects Michigan.”
The presidency of Richard Nixon was consumed by the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, the disastrous prosecution of the foredoomed war in Vietnam, and at last by the pernicious crimes of Watergate. By the time he fell in August 1974, the cancer on his presidency had metastasized into the institutions of national security and the instruments of political warfare. The Senate investigated those institutions and instruments in 1975, and uncovered the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba, the orchestration of coups against freely elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran, the appalling mind-control experiments with LSD. And they found that the CIA and the FBI had, by turns, spied on Americans, opened their mail, broken into their homes: on orders from every president from Truman to Nixon, they had conducted political warfare against their own people. Beyond the impact that these revelations had on Americans, they were heaven-sent gifts for the KGB. They would provide a decade’s worth of fodder for political propaganda and carefully crafted disinformation aimed at destroying America’s image in the eyes of the world.
In the face of the Senate’s scarifying public reports, the White House all but shut down American political warfare in 1976, and when President Gerald Ford tried to mount a major covert operation of armed support to guerrilla forces in Africa, Congress found out and cut off the funds. On January 13, 1977, the storm-tossed survivors of the Nixon administration—Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, and Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush—gathered with Ford for a final meeting of their National Security Council. They surveyed the battlefield in dismay.
The CIA’s capability for covert action was crippled. “We are unable to do it anymore,” Kissinger lamented.
“Henry, you are right,” Bush said. “We are both ineffective and scared in the covert action area.”
“Many things are not even proposed these days because we are afraid to even discuss them, much less implement them,” Kissinger mourned. Bush’s reply remains classified to this day.
President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated a week later. He had won a narrow victory in the November 1976 election, and one big factor was a blunder Ford made in a presidential debate. Ford had declared that Poland and Eastern Europe were not dominated by the Soviet Union. He had probably meant to say that the Polish people and their neighbors did not consider themselves to be subjugated, that they had retained their strong spirit and their sense of identity in the face of oppression. If so, the nuance was lost on the American people.
Like Truman, and like Eisenhower, Carter sought to undermine the Soviets’ control of Poland and Eastern Europe, and to do it in the name of human rights. He was ready and willing to use political warfare to advance that goal. Carter signed almost as many covert-action orders as did Nixon and Ford combined. He looked at political warfare against the Warsaw Pact through the lens of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and all the nations of Europe save Albania. It spoke in clear language of the free movement of people and ideas across borders. Stated simply, Carter thought he could use American ideas to crash the Soviet system of subjugation, and to employ the CIA to transmit those ideas, and he meant to do it in ways his predecessors had not conceived. Bob Gates, the future CIA director and secretary of defense, then a CIA analyst serving on the NSC staff, saw him as the first president since Truman to directly challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet government.
The president had the perfect man to pursue that aim: a Polish patriot. Zbigniew Brzezinski was his national security adviser, and Brzezinski hired his old friend Paul Henze, then the CIA station chief in Turkey, to join him at the NSC. They were delighted to find that at least one CIA covert-action program had survived the upheavals of the era: under Ford, in 1976, about $4 million a year had been spent supporting dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, chiefly by smuggling banned books and literature across the Iron Curtain. “The activity of dissidents fighting for greater civil liberties in Poland … has greatly increased in the past year,” the CIA noted in February 1977. This fired Brzezinski’s imagination. He asked the agency’s analysts for a full report. They delivered it in April. “The situation in Poland is by far the most volatile in Eastern Europe. A major blow-up could come at any time,” they said. “The leadership is acutely aware that … a direct confrontation, with the potential creation of martyrs, must be avoided.” Brzezinski highlighted that passage and sent the report to the president.
The volatile situation stemmed in no small part from a covert operation overseen by Irving Brown, the longtime Brussels-based European representative of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the United States. Brown had been the CIA’s point man when the United States was shipping wheat and weapons to Western Europe in 1947, hiring muscle-bound dockworkers to protect the operation from being sabotaged by communist union organizers. Brown had been on Kennan’s short list of candidates to run the CIA’s clandestine service in 1948, losing out to Frank Wisner. For decades since, he had run what might be called the AFL-CIA, working to bolster anti-communist labor unions in coordination with American intelligence officers. “I don’t believe I ever saw Irving without a nickel in his pocket that didn’t belong to CIA,” remembered Tom Braden, who ran the agency’s international organizations division in the 1950s and kept Irving and his underground support for labor unions around the world well financed.
By early 1977, Brown was handling a conduit of cash and communications gear for KOR—the Komitet Obrony Robotników, or Workers’ Defense Committee—a new underground group formed to aid protesting workers who had been jailed or fired by the government. The money and materiel helped KOR run an underground publishing house and the Flying University, a series of lectures organized by students, who discussed ideas about freedom that were dangerous to debate in public. KOR’s leaders had a network of contacts with Radio Free Europe’s Polish staff in Munich. They kept RFE informed about their work and the government’s attempts to suppress it by telephoning Polish exiles in London and Paris. The exiles, in turn, called Munich, and RFE broadcast the information back into Poland, immensely widening the circle of knowledge about the resistance. Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO’s longtime president, saw this as the seed of the movement that became Solidarność—the Solidarity movement. “There was a precursor in Poland to Solidarność,” he said, “sort of a covert organization called the KOR in Poland, with which we had contacts through Irving in our Paris office.” KOR became the intellectual core of Solidarity. And Solidarity became a force that almost no one could have imagined.
Brzezinski reminded President Carter in June 1977 that Poland was ripe for political warfare: “A blow-up there,” he wrote hopefully, “cannot be ruled out.” He asked what the CIA was doing to stir the pot. It took months for the traumatized agency to comply with a presidential order to step things up, but over the next year, the CIA shipped hundreds of thousands of books and periodicals. “A program such as this contributes as much to our national defense as any of our weaponry—besides which its costs are chicken feed,” Paul Henze noted.
On October 18, 1978, Brzezinski was delighted to learn that one of the beneficiaries of the CIA’s literary program had sent a thank-you note to his distributor, a postcard expressing gratitude for many mailings of books and magazines in Polish and English. The card came from Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Kraków. Two days earlier, the cardinal had been elected as the new pope—an electrifying event. Richard Virden, the press attaché at the American embassy, remembered “watching the nightly news broadcast on state television—that’s all there was, broadcasting was a state monopoly—when the announcer said, ‘And in Rome today Karol Wojtyla of Kraków was selected as the next Roman Catholic pope.’ Pregnant stop, then on to something like, ‘And now, here’s the latest tractor production news.…’ The announcer didn’t have any instructions yet, no one telling him what to make of the news, what it might mean for the party and the country,” Virden said. “The Polish people didn’t have any doubts though; in Kraków they poured into the streets and squares, and church bells—including one that had rung only once before in a century, at the end of the Second World War—pealed all that night.”
Millions greeted the pope when he returned to Poland for a nine-day visit in June 1979. His message was simple and profound: be not afraid. He stood next to the Communist Party leader Edward Gierek and said the role of the church was to make people more confident, more courageous, more conscious of their human rights. He supported the rights of workers in a speech in the industrial city of Nowa Huta, condemning the idea “that man be considered, or that man consider himself, merely as a means of production,” a direct attack on communist doctrine. Leaping through that opening, Carter visited Poland at the end of the year and insisted on meeting leaders of the church and the dissidents along with Gierek and his ministers. Doing his part, Brzezinski established covert contacts with the leaders of the growing radical workers’ movement in Poland.
The Polish economy slumped from the start of 1980, in part a consequence of a global oil shock following the Iranian revolution that had overthrown the shah and threatened decades of American domination in the Persian Gulf. On July 1, the Polish regime raised food prices nationwide, sparking a series of strikes, stoppages, and slowdowns that swept the country. Radio Free Europe kept listeners in Poland up to date on the demands of ad hoc workers’ committees as they bargained with their management and the government, pressing their petitions for more money and more power. RFE now reached almost half the homes in Poland. It also kept the Polish government informed. At an August meeting of Poland’s Politburo, the defense minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, accused the civilian leaders of the government of deceiving themselves, and the people, about the nature of the long-simmering economic crisis. “Two years ago,” he contended, “we said that our debt has reached 17 billion, but we knew about it from Free Europe.”
A strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk began on August 14; for the first time, workers demanded that they be allowed to form trade unions independent of government control. They were led by a thirty-six-year-old electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who had worked closely with KOR for four years, work that had gotten him fired, arrested, jailed, and watched over by the secret police. The government tried to keep news of the strike from spreading by instituting a news blackout and cutting off the telephone lines connecting Gdańsk to the rest of the country—a futile gesture. “It was thanks to Free Europe that people in Gdańsk, in all Poland, and across the world found out that we were on strike,” said Bogdan Borusewicz, one of the main organizers, who would one day serve as the marshal of the Polish Senate and, for a few hours, as the acting president of the nation.
Almost overnight, Wałęsa had inspired strikes all across Poland, and the workers and their allies in universities and churches joined forces. “What is going on in Poland could precipitate far-reaching consequences for East-West relations, and even for the future of the Soviet Bloc itself,” President Carter wrote to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on August 27. The best possible outcome, Carter continued, “would involve accommodation between the authorities and the Polish people, without violence. Such an accommodation could well transform the character of the Polish system.” Three days later, to the astonishment of the world, the regime accepted most of the rebellious workers’ demands. They had not only won the right to form an independent labor union, and the right to strike—revolutionary ideas in a nation under Soviet control—but access to the media, a relaxation of government censorship, and the television and radio broadcasting of mass on Sundays for shut-ins. A formal accord, agreed upon in Gdańsk, was shown on national television. Wałęsa signed with a huge pen. On September 17, three dozen newly independent Polish unions representing some three million workers joined forces under the name of Solidarity.
Brzezinski saw Solidarity as a direct threat to Soviet power. Would the Red Army invade Poland to reestablish Moscow’s authority, as it had in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979? He posed that question at a White House meeting with the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of state, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, on September 23. He wanted to review the intelligence on Soviet troop movements and American contingency planning for a military intervention. Turner said American spy satellites could detect the readying of Soviet military divisions in time to provide perhaps two weeks of warning—unless cloud cover prevented them from getting a clear picture. The CIA, like Brzezinski, viewed events in Poland as a challenge to the entire communist system. Its analysts said the Kremlin feared “a ripple effect” reverberating throughout Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union itself.
On Election Day in November 1980, when Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter at the polls, the CIA was riveted by a frightening report from its most highly valued source behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA station in Warsaw had received a warning from Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, who had been working in secret with American spies for nearly a decade. The colonel served as an officer on the Polish General Staff, as an aide to Defense Minister Jaruzelski, and as a liaison with Soviet marshal Viktor Kulikov, the commander of the Warsaw Pact’s joint armed forces. He was fifty years old, a chain-smoker, and a tireless reporter. He had delivered copies of more than thirty thousand top secret Soviet and Warsaw Pact military documents—from war plans to weapons data—to the CIA. He treaded very lightly, like a man walking across a frozen lake in a spring thaw. If caught, he would be hanged as a traitor.
He had sent a six-page letter alerting the Americans that he and a small group of fellow officers had been ordered to make plans for the imposition of martial law in Poland. He delivered the letter and photos of draft decrees suspending liberties to a dead drop, a secret hiding place, where a CIA officer in Warsaw found them. In November, CIA analysts pored over spy satellites’ photoreconnaissance images of Soviet troop movements—fragments of a mosaic, as impenetrable cloud cover often obscured the terrain—and they tried to read between the lines of the colonel’s dispatches. At Thanksgiving, they told the White House without equivocation that it was increasingly likely that the people of Poland would suffer the blows of repression; Bob Gates, newly appointed as the CIA’s top analyst on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, wrote that Moscow had found the new freedoms won by the Poles intolerable. On December 2, CIA director Turner told the president: “I believe the Soviets are readying their forces for military intervention in Poland.”
And then, early on the morning of December 5, a flash message from Kuklinski headlined Very Urgent! came to CIA headquarters: he reported that the Soviets had decided to invade Poland with fifteen divisions, two Czechoslovak divisions, and one East German division—more than a quarter of a million troops—within seventy-two hours. On the afternoon of December 6, a Saturday, Turner told the nation’s top national security officials that the Soviets “will go into Poland on Monday or Tuesday.” On Sunday, he said that all the preparations for a Soviet invasion of Poland had been completed and that a final “decision to invade” that very night had been made. The president issued a public statement echoing those words.
But none of that was true. The skies over Poland and the western Soviet Union weren’t the only cloudy element that weekend. The minds of the president and his national security team were occluded. These were exhausted and humiliated men. American hostages had been held in Iran for 399 days. A rescue mission had ended in disaster. When the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the CIA had given no warning. Turner and the CIA had been justly criticized for failing to see clear evidence of the impending Soviet military action—and they weren’t going to make that mistake twice. They made a different mistake instead. For if the Soviets ever did consider an invasion in December 1980, it had already been called off by the time of Turner’s call. The Soviets had decided to let the Polish generals handle Solidarity on their own. Significantly, perhaps decisively, KGB chairman Andropov, now a dominant voice in the Politburo, opposed an invasion. The Kremlin did indeed have plans to hold military exercises in Poland, but these maneuvers were always intended as a cover for the imposition of martial law. When the skies briefly cleared two weeks later, American intelligence satellites revealed that only three Soviet motorized rifle divisions in western Russia were at combat readiness.
The military exercises began in Poland on March 23, 1981. The CIA again reported that a Soviet invasion was imminent—another false alarm, and not the last intelligence failure on developments in Poland. The situation in Poland cast a deepening sense of dread in Washington—“a global shadow of tension, the danger of miscalculation, and even possible military conflict between the superpowers,” Bob Gates wrote. The Reagan administration rushed to complete contingency plans for a buildup of American troops and the deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe. Kuklinski reported on April 26, in a letter to his longtime CIA case officer, Dave Forden, that the political situation in Poland was gloomy, and the military situation was hopeless. “We Poles realize that we must fight for our own freedom,” he wrote. “I remained convinced that the support your country has been giving to all who are fighting for that freedom will bring us closer to our goal.”
That support now came from many sources. President Carter had increased financial assistance to $715 million a year, making Poland the largest recipient of American economic aid in the world. Solidarity and KOR had received increasing support from the AFL-CIA. Radio Free Europe gave the Polish people daily reports on the travails of Lech Wałęsa and the nation, and it worked to expose the shortcomings of the regime. American embassy officials maintained close and constant contact with civilians in the upper reaches of the government as well as the leaders of Solidarity and in the Catholic Church. The pope counseled Solidarity on strategy and tactics. And the Communist Party of Poland started shaking up its ranks, elevating liberal and moderate members, and introducing electoral reforms. Such small green shoots, however fragile, made Gates, a devout pessimist, see a ray of light in the shadows that spring. “In my view,” he wrote to Casey, “we may be witnessing one of the most significant developments in the post-war period which, if unchecked, may foreshadow a profound change in this decade in the system Stalin created both inside the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe.”
Kuklinski continued to report that the imposition of martial law was imminent: the decrees were ready to go to press and a list of six hundred people who would be jailed had been prepared. And then, on September 15, he sent a fresh alarm to the CIA. The secret police had infiltrated Solidarity and learned that the government’s plans, including its code name, Operation Spring, had leaked to the dissidents. The number of people privy to that secret was small, and a search for suspects was under way. On November 2, he was confronted by his superiors. They told him that they had learned from their own sources that the CIA had the plans. He was not arrested on the spot, but he feared he would be soon. He asked the Warsaw station to save him, his wife, and their two sons. Casey sent a message to Ambassador Francis Meehan advising him that an evacuation was imminent. Five days later, the station chief picked up the Kuklinskis in a Volvo, drove them to the embassy, and loaded them into packing crates inside a van with diplomatic plates. The van drove through Poland and East Germany into West Berlin, and then a military aircraft flew them to the United States. By the time they landed, General Jaruzelski knew the colonel was a spy, that the United States had to have his martial law plans in hand, and that the CIA, the State Department, and the White House must therefore know that he was ready to carry them out.
Yet when the crackdown came on December 13, it was a shock to almost everyone in Washington. The CIA—despite Kuklinski’s warnings—did not believe the Poles would impose martial law. Astoundingly, the agency seems to have shared his reporting with no one at the State Department and only one man at the White House: the national security adviser, Richard Allen, who had taken a leave of absence after he was enmeshed in a bribery scandal. No one at the CIA ever analyzed the evidence, its ranking Soviet analyst Douglas McEachin found after an exhaustive retrospective review, and in that absence, “the human failings of mindset, bureaucratic turf-guarding, inadequate communication, and simple distraction were free to wreak their damage.” These flaws were hardly unique in the annals of intelligence; the 9/11 Commission would cite the same failures as crucial to the success of the attacks. American intelligence had not turned knowledge into foresight, and foresight into action. Had it had that wisdom, it might have forewarned Solidarity, and perhaps forestalled the suppression of democracy in Poland and the human misery that flowed from it. By the end of the winter, more than ten thousand people became political prisoners in Poland, dozens of activists and striking miners had been murdered by the security forces and the secret police, and the Solidarity movement had been driven deep underground, its leaders jailed, its property and funds confiscated, its offices shuttered.
At Christmastime, Reagan sent a letter to Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev that radiated anger: “The recent events in Poland have filled the people of the United States and me with dismay,” it began. “Since the imposition of martial law on December 13, the most elementary rights of the Polish people have been violated daily: massive arrests without any legal procedures; incarcerations of trade union leaders and intellectuals in overcrowded jails and freezing detention camps; suspension of all rights of assembly and association; and, last but not least, brutal assaults by security forces on citizens.” The Soviet leader’s response was as cold as the prison camps.
In fits and starts over the next year, the Reagan administration conceived and began to execute a major covert operation to support Solidarity, building on the foundation laid by Carter and Brzezinski. The full story remains to be written. Key documents—the minutes of National Security Council meetings, the records of the State Department, the files of the CIA’s clandestine service—remain classified nearly four decades after the fact. But the essential elements are evident. The United States began pumping tens of millions of dollars into a political warfare campaign to free Poland, using almost all the means at the nation’s disposal short of bloodshed.
The turmoil at the top of Reagan’s national security team—the swift resignations of two national security advisers, the deputy director of central intelligence, and the secretary of state—was matched by the money and energy it invested in covert action. Bill Casey held cabinet rank, the first CIA director to do so. He was an amoral man, bending rules and laws until they broke. He had been Reagan’s campaign manager and held his trust, though he was not a man to be trusted. In the first months of the administration, he won authority to launch aggressive covert operations aimed at Cuba and Nicaragua, all of Central America, much of Africa, and an audacious plan to sabotage the energy pipelines of the Soviet Union, which led to a malware attack in Siberia that set off an explosion seen from space satellites. But he held off on secret aid for Solidarity at first. In time, the United States would develop what Thomas W. Simons Jr., later the American ambassador to Poland, called “a very robust program of covert assistance to Solidarity … very much using the AFL-CIO.”
Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO’s president since November 1979, was the first to leap into action. In coordination with Casey, he reinvigorated the covert apparatus of the AFL-CIA.
“We developed channels and we got some material and some funds into the underground, and we had several alternative ways of doing it, including financing the Brussels office of Solidarność,” Kirkland recounted. “And we kept them alive during the underground years.” The AFL-CIA poured at least $4 million into a pipeline of communications gear flowing to Poland’s resistance—video cameras, cassette recorders and tapes, printers, copying machines, carbon paper, newsprint, and printers’ ink concealed in bottles of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. By the summer of 1982, it was underwriting dozens of newly circulating underground newspapers that constituted a direct challenge to state-run television, where uniformed military officers robotically delivered droning reports. Irving Brown recruited an exiled Solidarity activist, Miroslaw Domińczyk, gave him a code name—Coleslaw—and financed his efforts to smuggle equipment into Poland. Coleslaw in turn paid supporters to travel to London as tourists, take apart a printing press, and spirit it piece by piece back to Warsaw. “The printing presses we got from the West during martial law might be compared to machine guns or tanks during war,” said a key member of the underground named Viktor Kulerski.
Martial law in Poland led to a revitalization of Radio Free Europe. RFE had been publicly funded by Congress since 1974, after the White House acknowledged the open secret of the CIA’s support. Reagan signed a secret national security directive in June that pumped $21.3 million into RFE and its Russian-language partner Radio Liberty. The money beefed up their programming, boosted the power of their transmitters, and enhanced their ability to defeat jamming by Warsaw and Moscow. It was now a powerful amplifier for liberation, relaying calls for strikes and demonstrations and broadcasting underground bulletins that reached a surging audience. Wałęsa later said that Radio Free Europe served as Solidarity’s ministry of culture and its ministry of information. The newly appointed director of RFE’s Polish-language service, Zdzislaw Najder, was a Solidarity collaborator. Solid documentary evidence suggests that he smuggled money, laptops, hard drives, and tape recorders into the hands of Solidarity couriers, an operation that bore all the hallmarks of a CIA clandestine program. The regime tried him for treason and sentenced him to death in absentia. His work posed an existential threat to martial law.
Prominent Catholics in the Reagan administration frequently flew to Rome to keep the pope informed on the political, military, and intelligence situation in Poland. These envoys included Casey, who often stopped in at the Vatican while on covert flights to Europe and the Middle East; the roving ambassador, General Vernon Walters, deputy director of central intelligence under Presidents Nixon and Ford, who visited the pope a dozen times and spoke impeccable Italian, the pontiff’s working language; the national security adviser, William Clark; his successor, Bud McFarlane; and the chief nuclear arms negotiator, Edward Rowny, a Polish American. They delivered, among other intelligence data, reports on support for Solidarity and spy satellite images of Soviet nuclear arms in Eastern Europe. When the United States beefed up its strategic arsenals and audaciously placed powerful nuclear weapons systems in Western Europe, the pope, who often spoke out against the arms race, did not object.
President Reagan met the pope one-on-one on June 7, 1982. Both men had survived assassination attempts the year before, six weeks apart. Reagan believed that they had a mystical bond, that they had been spared death for a divine purpose. No official transcript exists, but according to Thomas P. Melady, later the American ambassador to the Holy See, they discussed the fates of nations. “The President brought up to the Pope that he had read that the Pope had said that one day Eastern Europe will be free, and Eastern Europe will join with Western Europe. And President Reagan said, ‘Your Holiness, when will that be?’ And the Pope said, ‘In our lifetime.’ The President sort of jumped out of his chair and … grabbed his hand and said, ‘Let’s work together.’”
Much has been made of a supposed grand strategy allying the White House, the CIA, the pope, and Solidarity, but in reality, it was at root an intelligence-sharing relationship. Americans gave the pope secrets about Poland and its struggles and the Soviets, and armed with that knowledge, he passed it on to the leaders of Solidarity and their supporters in the church. No less than Radio Free Europe, he was a relay station for political warfare.
In May and in September 1982, Reagan signed secret orders that guided covert action and foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were forceful reiterations of George Kennan’s doctrines dating back to 1948. The first proclaimed that the United States intended to “contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence” across the world. The second aimed to support Eastern European nations that “show relative independence from the Soviet Union” by reinforcing “the pro-Western orientation of their peoples,” reducing their political dependence on Moscow, and strengthening their ties with the free nations of Western Europe. Poland clearly was the leading candidate for that support. The regime was tightening the screws on the opposition. In October, the government outlawed Solidarity and charged key members of KOR with treason.
On November 4, the president met in the White House Situation Room with the National Security Planning Group, the body that authorized major CIA operations, whose members included Casey, Bush, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and Secretary of State George Shultz. Reagan’s diary for that day shows that Poland was on the agenda. The group weighed and approved a secret political warfare program to support Solidarity, in order to help it seek an end to martial law and to win the release of political prisoners. Unlike the CIA’s global operation running arms and ammunition into the hands of the Islamic holy warriors in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, it had to be subtle, and it had to be truly clandestine. These directives inaugurated the CIA operation code-named QR/HELPFUL.
Reagan had the bit between his teeth, said Secretary of State Shultz, and he needed a checkrein: “In the case of Solidarność you had to tell him, ‘Now be careful, because we are not going to start World War Three. So don’t push the edge of the envelope too far, but push.’” Solidarity would be destroyed if it were linked directly to a gung ho CIA covert action. Lech Wałęsa and his allies didn’t need guns. They couldn’t mount an armed insurrection; they would be crushed. They needed the means to create an alternate world, a counterculture that could challenge authority by printing and broadcasting sharp prose, cutting commentary, pungent satire, democratic ideals, truthful propaganda, and hard facts, along with the occasional hack of the government-controlled media. The weapons of underground political warfare in Poland would be the tools of a free press. Starting in January 1983, the CIA spent no less than $20 million on that arsenal, as best as can be determined. The agency provided Solidarity with the money along with sophisticated printing and broadcasting capabilities, using overland supply routes to Warsaw from major Western European cities—Paris, London, Rome, and West Berlin among them—and establishing an overseas link from Stockholm to Gdańsk.
The first great success was a new wavelength for free speech. The AFL-CIO had provided start-up funds and equipment for an underground Radio Solidarity, which began in 1982 with roving low-wattage broadcasts from moving cars and vans that avoided easy detection by the secret police. The CIA expanded that capability by providing technology and passing along expertise for more ambitious print and broadcast operations in 1983. The infuriated authorities struck back by stepping up surveillance and raids. The scale of their searches—and the scope of the resistance—was revealed in secret police records showing that in those two years, the government seized 1.3 million leaflets, 828,050 books and journals, nine offset presses, seven Xerox copiers, and close to half a million sheets of paper. They never did find the transmitters. Suspecting the CIA was supplying Solidarity, the government started expelling American intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover at the United States embassy. This proved futile, for the CIA always used cutouts—third-party intermediaries—when delivering money and materiel to the underground resistance.
The regime recalibrated its rule in the summer of 1983. The pope had returned to Poland in June, welcomed by crowds of millions in Warsaw and Kraków, saluted by Solidarity banners flying amid the seas of people, and meeting with Lech Wałęsa. As always when he visited, the repression vanished for a few days. This time his power lingered. A few weeks after he left, the government lifted martial law, though its ban on Solidarity and its control of the media and the masses still remained. Wałęsa won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, and the United States used the occasion to step up its support for his cause. In November, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution designed to apply “soft power” in support of the principles of democratic rights abroad. Kirkland, who now sat on the governing board overseeing Radio Free Europe, was a driving force behind the endowment’s creation and a confidant to its director. The endowment’s initial funding included $13.8 million for the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which had supported Solidarity from the start and worked in close coordination with QR/HELPFUL. The money flowed freely and continuously. Over time, the endowment pumped roughly $40 million into the cause of a free Poland.
Solidarity struck a series of subversive blows with CIA technology starting in late 1984 and early 1985. It now had a network of mobile clandestine television transmitters with a one-mile range, guerrilla stations that could break into the government’s broadcasts, wave the Solidarity flag on the air, report the real news, and announce the next protests. The New York Times Warsaw bureau chief Michael Kaufman was invited into an activist’s home one evening as the state-run seven o’clock news began, and he watched in amazement as the words Solidarity Lives appeared onscreen, followed by an announcement asking viewers to listen to Radio Solidarity on a certain frequency in thirty minutes. “We could hear the sirens of many police cars and from the windows we could see a blue truck go by with a small disc direction-finder on its cab. ‘It’s driving the police crazy,’ said one of my hosts,” Kaufman reported. “‘They can’t believe we can penetrate their television. They are trying to pinpoint our transmitter, but they won’t find it.’”
The CIA smuggled several million dollars’ worth of VCRs, video cameras and cassettes, radio scanners and transmitters, computers and floppy discs, photocopiers, and offset duplicators into Poland in the mid-1980s. The deliveries got through despite the best efforts of the Polish, East German, and Soviet spy services. Some four hundred underground periodicals now flourished in Polish cities; the most popular were printed in editions of thirty thousand, and they helped to spread the slow-burning fire of resistance.
The counterculture scored an epic victory in September 1986, when Jaruzelski amnestied most of the jailed underground activists; Solidarity now began to seek ways to work in the open. By the spring of 1987, Radio Solidarity reached audiences across Poland; Solidarity TV broke into the nightly news to urge public demonstrations on the eve of another papal visit. And when the pope held an open-air mass before a great crowd in Gdańsk on the second Sunday of June, he spoke out in a bold new way. “Every day I pray for you,” he said. “Every day, I pray for my country, and I pray for men at work, and I pray for this particularly significant Polish symbol, Solidarity.”
In Moscow, a new leader was starting to change the political landscape in the Warsaw Pact nations, in the Soviet Union, and around the world. The terrible dilemma that faced Mikhail Gorbachev was how to change the Soviet system without destroying it. His program of perestroika, reforming and restructuring that system, began at the start of 1987 by opening government positions to people outside the Communist Party and holding multicandidate elections by secret ballot for key posts. That was only a beginning. Gorbachev began trying to address some of the severe economic, cultural, and political contradictions of communism. Bob Gates, now the acting director of central intelligence, told Congress that the changes were creating tension and turmoil in the Soviet Union and its satellites, but the CIA didn’t know the half of it: Gorbachev had told the leaders of Poland and the rest of the Warsaw Pact nations in a secret May 1987 meeting that the Soviets would never again intervene militarily to crush an uprising in Eastern Europe. And now the people of Poland were rising up again, as they had in 1944, 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980, and in centuries gone by. But this time no one could crush them.
The year 1988 brought the biggest strikes and protests in eight years. Starting with demands for better salaries, they grew into petitions to make Solidarity legal again, and they became running battles in the streets. General Jaruzelski realized the Red Army was not going to keep him in power. He saw that the Polish regime had to talk to its enemies. Before the end of the year, Wałęsa was debating the head of the communist trade unions on national television. And by January 1989, Jaruzelski was threatening to quit if the party didn’t legalize Solidarity at once. Then Czesław Kiszczak, the interior minister, the commander of the secret police, and the second-most powerful figure in the regime, began talking things over with the people he had long oppressed. On February 6, 1989, he convened the Roundtable group at a Warsaw palace. Fifty-five people gathered, half of them party leaders, the other half Solidarity members along with a handful of church observers. Jaruzelski soon joined in the talks, which continued until April 5, and he invited Wałęsa to join him. He saw that the people he had despised as criminals and counterrevolutionaries were his fellow countrymen.
This was a revolution of the mind. In The Haunted Land, the journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote that it was hard, looking back, “to remember how shocking the Roundtable was. In April 1989 a non-Communist Poland was inconceivable. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union still appeared indestructible.” The government legalized Solidarity that month, and it agreed to hold an election, and to share power. The June 4 vote was not truly free: the party was guaranteed nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Sejm, the lower house. But Solidarity won 160 of the 161 seats it contested and 92 of 100 seats in the newly created Senate. The warm talk of compromise had led directly to a peaceful revolution. In August 1989 the two sides created a coalition government. Solidarity now held real political power. And it resolved to share that power with like-minded souls throughout the Soviet empire. It linked up with independence movements in the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Moldavia. It directly supported striking Soviet coal miners. Its style, swagger, strategies, and tactics inspired democracy movements from the mines of Siberia to the capitals of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and in the cockpit of the cold war: the divided city of Berlin.
The CIA didn’t see it coming, but the KGB did: days after the Solidarity government took shape in Poland, the Soviet intelligence service created a new directorate to combat “hostile elements that are planning to bring about the forcible overthrow of the Soviet government.” A senior Soviet party official already had warned the Politburo that “if you look at the ‘experience’ of Poland you can see where our own country is heading”—and that was “toward disaster.” The Soviet embassy in Warsaw told the Kremlin that “Solidarity has been actively playing up its experience and putting forth the ‘Polish model’ as the most effective means of struggling against the ‘obsolete socialist system.’” A senior KGB officer added ominously that “Solidarity pursued this strategy, with American support, to undermine socialism in Poland, and the Americans now want the Poles to do the same in our country.”
When the ripple effect of Solidarity’s resistance to the Kremlin’s rule rose into a great wave and breached the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. On that day, Vladimir Putin was a thirty-seven-year-old KGB lieutenant colonel in Dresden, East Germany, working out of an elegant house on Angelikastrasse, across a greensward from the local headquarters of the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, the loathed and feared intelligence and security service. Soon the people of East Germany turned their wrath on their oppressors. On January 15, 1990, some two thousand protesters broke into the Stasi building at Dresden, ransacking it. They then turned on the KGB station. Putin stood between them and the secrets of the Soviets.
“All right, the Germans tore apart their own MGB [Ministry of State Security],” Putin told his biographers a decade later, as he prepared to take power in Russia. “That was their own internal affair. But we weren’t their internal affair. Those crowds were a serious threat. We had documents in our building. And nobody lifted a finger to protect us.
“After a while, when the crowd grew angry, I went out and asked people what they wanted. I explained to them that this was a Soviet military organization,” Putin remembered. “And someone shouted … ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ It was if they were saying, ‘We know what you’re up to.’ … These people were in an aggressive mood.” Putin called his superiors and asked them to send a contingent of armed soldiers to defend the building. “And I was told: ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’
“After a few hours our military people did finally get there. And the crowd dispersed. But that business of ‘Moscow is silent’—I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared.”
Over the course of forty-five years, American political warfare had sought this victory. It was a time of triumph, and of glory, and a sense that anything was possible. But that was a transient impression, as fleeting as a Moscow summer. Putin would seek his revenge on America, and in the twenty-first century, he would have it.