AT THE HEADQUARTERS FOR US Army Europe’s Intelligence division in Heidelberg, Germany, Gail Nelson was looking for serious warning signals that the Soviets were about to move on Poland. He was the senior analyst, responsible for interpreting the signs and signals of crises, providing warning of war and political intentions, and deciphering the complex code of relationships between the Politburo in Moscow and the Polish leadership in Warsaw, between the KGB and the Polish Internal Front.
In an era of satellite reconnaissance and signals intercepts, Nelson kept his most valuable insights on notebooks he stashed in safes. From European newspapers, Nelson had a good understanding of what was happening. But that wasn’t enough. Seeing a crack in the Warsaw Pact was one thing. But, as General Frederick Kroesen, his superior, had reprimanded his intel analysts the year before, his job was more pressing. “God damn it, Major,” he told one. “I know what the Soviets are capable of doing! What I want to know is what they are going to do!”
An internal conflagration in Poland raised the possibility of war in Europe. The Soviets had used military exercises as cover for pressure and eventual attacks before, most notably in Czechoslovakia in 1968. NATO had missed that one; its member states were irate and demanded better intelligence.
More generally, NATO’s conception of Soviet war doctrine assumed that the Warsaw Pact would use legerdemain to catch the West off guard. The disposition of forces arrayed on both sides of the border gave an edge to the pact if they managed to surprise NATO intelligence. So, NATO was always looking for surprises. There were a warning center at Ramstein Air Base with up-to-date information on the Soviet order of battle, an air defense intelligence center at Börfink, and a third 24/7 watch in Stuttgart, the headquarters of the European Command.1
Kroesen was responsible for the 7th Army, which needed seventy-two hours to prepare for a contingency. Nelson’s job was to give Kroesen advance warning of anything. The worst-case scenario would be an all-out Soviet invasion to break the counterrevolution. Ten thousand Soviet troops were already in Poland, integrated with Polish troops.2 The most likely scenario, according to Nelson’s estimates at the time: the Internal Front would impose some sort of martial law, responding to the dual pressures of Moscow to fix the situation and to the internal instigation from Solidarity. He believed that the threat from Solidarity was acute. Its success could embolden dissident and labor movements in other Soviet satellites, smash the lock that the Polish communist party held on power and mobility in the country, undermine confidence in the capacity of the Soviets to interact effectively with Warsaw Pact militaries. But the big catch: Unlike previous Warsaw Pact insurrections, the problem in Poland did not originate within the Communist Party. Any Soviet response that undermined the Polish Communist Party could empower Solidarity even as it threatened it militarily.3
Many of Nelson’s contemporaries in the intelligence community thought the Polish crisis would resolve itself. The Soviets would do anything to prevent the contagion from spreading, and the Northern Group of Soviet Forces was its most reliable bulwark; ergo, the Soviets would have to invade at some point. But Nelson’s analysis suggested the opposite. The Polish government could handle labor strikes, just as it had at least four times since 1956.
In Washington, the National Security Council was sorting through the aftermath of several crises. On June 10, Israeli warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and Reagan struggled to respond. Haig was about to depart for a crucial trip to China. But the Polish situation was “very dicey,” Richard Allen told Reagan. “You should know that there are deep splits within the intelligence community on what we think they are going to do. Some believe the Soviets will, and some believe the Soviets won’t.” Still, with only two divisions in Poland—the Soviets would need thirty to prosecute an invasion—dramatic action seemed far off.4 Reagan asked Allen to draw up a list of ways that the US could help Solidarity, quietly.
To outsiders, Andropov did not betray any panic about Poland. “For the most part,” he told an East German colleague in July, “the Polish events have had no impact on our country. In general, people hold negative opinions of those events. However, in the western regions of the USSR, there has been some influence. There was a small group of workers who went on strike. The situation was clarified with party methods. Still, other occurrences are possible. We must be prepared.” But the Politburo was obsessed with little else. Andropov wanted action. He felt the Poles had acted too rashly when they recognized Lech Walesa’s labor unions to ratchet down the crisis of 1980, and he thought his colleagues were dithering. There were military imperatives. Strategic communication lines and satellite ground stations in Poland were vulnerable to sabotage and terrorism, and if a revolution proceeded unchecked, East Germany would be cut off, physically, from the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was attending regular meetings again. His health had improved. But his anxiety about intervention was significant. He endorsed aggressive military exercises, a not-so-subtle attempt to “intimidate Polish authorities by implying that they would use both their own forces in addition to other Warsaw Pact forces if necessary to restore order,” Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a senior martial law planner, later recalled. The exercises had an edge to them: field hospitals staged along the Polish border.5
As the Polish crisis burned hotter, Reagan’s advisors saw a transformational opportunity. Poland’s economy was a “basket case,” and it owed $17 billion to Western countries.6 “The potential ripple effect throughout eastern Europe is of major strategic importance,” Deputy Secretary of State William Clark put it. Allen argued for a stronger response. “The Polish people and the West would lose if Solidarity were crushed.” Secretary of Defense Weinberger favored the bare minimum for now, which was $50 million in food aid. Reagan worried that economic problems of an essentially communist nation couldn’t be cured by Western aid, and he did not want to prop up the Polish government only to see it strengthened after Solidarity was crushed.7 “I question whether there is any benefit to the United States in bailing out the government of Poland, a government which may be as hostile to us as the Soviets,” he said. Allen suggested that the US wait to see whether the Soviets would invade. Reagan wondered whether an invasion would be met with any actual resistance. “Surely, the Poles would resist,” CIA Director Bill Casey said.8
As fall gave way to winter, Gail Nelson noticed that Wojciech Jaruzelski, the powerful Polish Defense Minister who was allied with Moscow, was using language in his speeches reminiscent of how the Polish government had responded to previous labor crises. His main source was the accurate Reuters news bulletins from its bureau chief in Warsaw. “I culled from the news and those innuendoes enough information, as well as my own readings, to see that they were going to repeat the same crackdowns as they had done five times before. The pattern was already there.”9
The Defense Intelligence Agency saw a different pattern. As data came in, its analysts looked for signs of rhetoric that matched the sequence of events before the external invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Three times during the fall of 1981, the DIA issued warning notices to the Joint Chiefs of Staff predicting an imminent Soviet invasion. Three times, the Soviets did not invade. The intelligence community lost confidence in the DIA director, Lieutenant General Eugene F. Tighe. In September, James A. Williams, an army veteran who had overseen intelligence operations in Heidelberg, replaced Tighe. Williams sent an all-hands memo to military intelligence analysts everywhere. Warning would be his priority. But it took a long time before the DIA was free of political influence. Nelson had signed his name to a memo predicting that the Poles would impose martial law. His job was on the line. Army analysts who failed to warn the government ahead of the 1968 Czech invasion had been fired. “I was not going to be played by guys in DIA who saw this crisis independent of historical precedent,” he said later.
Nelson had come to these conclusions without knowing that the CIA had a highly placed human source inside the Polish army: Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, the officer in charge of drawing up the martial law plans. Even the Polish crisis was not important enough for them to sacrifice their asset. Over nine years, he delivered more than 40,000 pages of top-secret Warsaw Pact military planning documents. The CIA did not allow any information he provided to be distributed to the hundreds of senior American policy makers who consumed the National Intelligence Daily.10 Only a select few, including Allen, knew of his existence.11 Even Weinberger was kept in the dark.
The CIA’s granular-level knowledge of Polish martial law planning helped prevent the Reagan administration from making rash decisions or overplaying its hand. Kukliński, who signed his reports “Jack Strong,” told the CIA in mid-September that when marital law came, “it will be introduced at night, either between Friday and a work-free Saturday or between Saturday and Sunday, when industrial plants will be closed. Arrests will begin around midnight, six hours before an announcement of martial law is broadcast over the radio and television. Roughly 600 people will be arrested in Warsaw, which will require the use of around 1,000 police in unmarked cars.”12 If the Soviets did invade Poland, the threat of nuclear war in Europe would rise, and overnight.