The Secret War of Intelligence: The Mysterious Mission of "Jack Strong" and its Impact on the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s

For nearly a decade, a colonel on the Polish General Staff, Ryszard Kukliński, provided invaluable information about Soviet and Warsaw Pact military activities to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the codename "Jack Strong." Along with Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who cooperated with the CIA in the late 1950s and early 1960s until he was arrested and executed by the Soviet regime, Kukliński has gone down in history as one of the most valuable U.S. intelligence sources in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This essay examines Kukliński's case in light of three recent Polish-language books written from divergent perspectives.