An Honorable Soldier; Cold-war spy Ryszard Kuklinski had patriotic motives.(Book Review)

Byline: Anne Applebaum, Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her latest book is "Gulag: A History."

Tell me what you think of Colonel Kuklinski, and I'll tell you who you are." That was the phrase being bandied about in Warsaw political circles following the Feb. 10 death of Ryszard Kuklinski, a trusted member of the Polish communists' inner circle in the 1970s--and the greatest of all cold-war spies. Over nine years, Kuklinski microfilmed 40,265 pages of secret information, including documents describing the Soviet Union's plans to invade Western Europe, the location of Soviet command bunkers, details of numerous weapons and the Polish government's plans to declare martial law. Only in 1981, just before the communist regime actually declared martial law, was Kuklinski finally "exfiltrated" out of the country, after a leak from the U.S. government--possibly via the Vatican--had compromised him.

In the two decades that have passed since those dramatic events, lucidly chronicled in Benjamin Weiser's new book, "A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country" (383 pages. Public Affairs), Kuklinski's name has become, in Poland, a byword for the country's continued confusion about its communist past. The former American national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski once tried to describe the uncertainty that Poles still feel about the years when their country, nominally independent, was in fact a part of the Soviet empire: "Was it an authentic Polish state or an imposed satellite? Was opposition to it therefore legitimate or illegitimate?"

As a result of this ongoing and still bitter debate, opinions about Kuklinski remain divided. Former communists consider him a traitor, a man who was disloyal to the Army whose uniform he wore. Former opponents of the communist regime consider him a hero, whose betrayal of what one called a "Polish-speaking unit of the Army of the Soviet empire" was a deeply patriotic act. When the colonel visited Poland in 1998, he was greeted by cheering crowds and was declared an honorary citizen of the cities of Gdansk and Krakow.

Weiser's book, the first to make use of the CIA's extensive documentation of the Kuklinski case, might help straighten out the record. Using transcripts of emotional conversations Kuklinski had with CIA officers, Weiser ...