Museum of Polish CIA spy declared national hero

A museum devoted to colonel Ryszard Kuklinski has been opened in Warsaw’s Old Town district. The ceremony has been hosted by Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who stressed the need to cherish the memory of such patriots as the late colonel Kuklinski. He belonged to that group of Poles who put moral obligations toward their nation above duties to the state, said minister Sikorski.

Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski had been one of the top officers of the General Staff in the Polish armed forces during the 19 Seventies in communist Poland, during which period he co-operated with the CIA. He defected to the United States on the eve of the introduction of martial law in December 1981, supplying the Americans with plans of the operation as well as other secret documents of the Warsaw Pact, including information about the Soviet Red Army. Kulkinski was given a death sentence in absentia by a court martial in 1982. It was not until the late 19 Nineties that in a free and democratic Poland colonel Kuklinski’s sentence had been reversed and his honor recalled. Ryszard Kuklinski remains a controversial figure in contemporary Polish history and in the opinion of his compatriots. For years, even former president Lech Walesa – the icon of Solidarity - had been hesitant in assessing the colonel’s patriotism.

Some background on this true hero of the Cold War:

Has Ryszard Kuklinski saved us from World War III?

By Jolanta Jablonska-Gruca

Translated into English by Eliza Sarnacka - Mahoney.

I met Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski for the first time 3 years ago, in April 1998. He was on his visit to Poland, the first in 17 years. Until then, he had been haunted by a death sentence issued by the PRL (People's Republic of Poland) military court. During that visit Colonel Kuklinski visited many places and participated in many events organized in his honor, including those in Krakow, Katowice, Zakopane, Trojmiasto and Warsaw. I saw him in Warsaw, but at that time I did not have a chance to talk to him personally. It was not until last year, coincidentally, on the anniversary of the imposing martial law in Poland on December 13,1981, that we finally had a conversation.

We met in the American home of my friends Marta and Wojciech Kolaczkowscy, and there we talked at length. I will remember this as an extraordinary experience. Mr. Kuklinski is an extraordinary person. The sacrifices he made and personal courage he exhibited are incomparable. Very few people in the world are are faced with those kind of choices and become real heroes.

Unfortunately, the average Pole still does not comprehend what Colonel Kuklinski did for Poland, Europe and maybe for the entire world. During the PRL era, Poles were society was heavily indoctrinated and never realized that during the cold war, and especially during different phases of the escalating crisis, there was a real danger of looming over their heads. Had it occurred, it would have the most profound consequences in Poland's thousand-year history a nuclear war. Few knew how very real a WW III scenario was, let alone any details of it. An invaders' war - for such was the name the Soviets had given it - was to fulfill one of the most menacing dreams encrypted in the Marxist ideology - to make communism a winner on a global scale.

Colonel Kuklinski was the person who revealed those plans to the West. He was responsible for making it known that Soviets had envisioned a quick takeover of the European NATO member states and planned to use Polish territory as a marching ground for more than 3 million Soviet soldiers, a million tanks and 3,200 military trains transporting weapons and explosives, all aimed at Western Europe.

According to the Soviet plans, two of the three Polish armies were to cross Germany to invade Holland, Belgium and France. The remaining third was to attack and conquer Denmark. Colonel Kuklinski realized that being outnumbered in the arsenal of conventional weapons, the West would have no choice but to resort to nuclear warheads. In his decision to expose Soviet strategic plans to the West, he believed he was giving NATO a chance to answer Soviet attacks without a nuclear offensive on Polish communication targets.

Today, it has been confirmed that Soviet generals lied when they argued they had only planned a conventional war in Europe. Documents confirming the USSR's readiness to go into a nuclear war have been found in the East Germany's archives. The Soviets had planned to launch about 60 nuclear weapons, each of them 10 times as powerful as the one the U.S. had dropped on Hiroshima.

Experts have no doubt that Colonel Kuklinski has twice saved Poland from a Soviet invasion. In December 1980 and then from March 1981 onward, Poland played a host to the Warsaw Pact military exercises named "Sojuz 81." At the time when social unrest in Poland peaked (November 1980) and when half a million Warsaw Pact's soldiers waited ready for action at the Polish border, a brief order from Moscow could have easily turned these exercises into a military intervention. Secret strategic planning documents also revealed that late in 1981 there were 15 Soviet division together with two German and two Czechoslovakian ones, ready to enter Poland. The invasion was scheduled for December 8. Moscow was getting ready to gain political control and to crush "Solidarity" by means of extensive arrests, quick trials and death sentences for the movement's leaders.

Quickly, the information was passed on and just few days before the planned military action it landed on the desk of professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to then-President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski, who had been an avid advocate for Poland's independence, advised President Carter to take a decisive step. On December 3, President Carter sent Brezhnev a message demanding that Poland be given a chance to independently solve its problems. Carter also warned that in case military force were used against Poland, the U.S. would have to consider serious sanctions, including a more severe blockade on Cuba and increased arms shipments to China in case of an upsurge of Russian-Chinese conflict. Finally, the president informed the Soviet leader of an end to the politics of meltdown.

The result was immediate. The Soviets relinquished their plans to invade Poland, even though they were not ready to totally surrender to the pressure of foreign diplomacy .

Brezhnev advised the PZPR (Polish United Workers' Party) to elect General Jaruzelski as Prime Minister and to use the Polish army to stifle "Solidarity". It is obvious that without Colonel Kuklinski's report, the US would not have been able to react so quickly, nor would Brezhnev, in addition to President's Carter ultimatum, receive a letter from the Pope John Paul II urging him to leave Poland alone. Around the Vatican there was a rumor that the Pope was ready to go back to Poland if that would stop the Soviet attack.

A Decision to Cooperate with the US

Kuklinski began working at the Warsaw General Headquarters for the Strategic Defense Planning in 1964 and was always highly re-garded for his intelligence. His responsibilities included preparing and reviewing plans of military exercises. With time, however, as he became more and more exposed to the secret Soviet military strategies, he became more aware and horrified by the possibility of a war. He realized that the only thing powerful enough to successfully curtail the Soviets' aggressive thinking was pressure from the most powerful country in the world - the U.S. An idea to cooperate with America had been born.

His first contact with US intelligence was initiated sometime in 1970, two years after the infamous Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Kuklinski had witnessed how Polish soldiers participated in that aggressive attack, contrary of the patriotic interest of the Polish nation, and to him that was enough proof that the Polish army had finally lost any independence it might have had. It was nothing more than a part of Moscow's combative scheming against the world.

It should be underlined that during Kuklinski's many years of cooperation with the U.S. he never signed any official contract (though it is standard for this type of cooperation), nor did he ever receive any compensation for his work. This fact has been officially proven by many sources, including Kuklinski's sworn enemy -- the PRL's military court, and Richard T. Davies, an American ambassador in Warsaw.

It it also important to remember that it was not the CIA that sought Kuklinski out. He chose to turn to the CIA, considering such action the only way to stop the most macabre war scenarios from happening.

"I myself decided to take that risk," said Kuklinski. "I put in jeopardy everything I had: my family, my career. And yes, I realized how highly dangerous it was to be a spy in communist Poland."

Since then his everyday life was to resemble a walk in a minefield. There was no way of knowing which of his next steps might be his last. Anything he did had to be done in utter silence and solitude, never forgetting the risk involved.

Kuklinski quickly climbed the career ladder. As his rank improved, so did the scope of information he passed on to the CIA. For a long time, nobody suspected him of leading a double life. No one knew that he carried a mini camera in his pocket and that every day, after his colleagues had gone home, he remained in his office, analyzing and copying important documents. During his ten years of cooperating with the U.S., he delivered more than 35,000 pages of classified information on a wide range of So3iet military strategies. They included valuable data on how the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact armies would attack the European NATO states, how the Soviets had positioned their nuclear weapons, and where the nuclear arsenals together with underground command quarters, had been located. Kuklinski even managed to hand down information about the three most secret spots for the Soviets' command bureaus, in case it really came down to World War III.

In the summer of 1981 Kuklinski realized that disaster was approaching. Social unrest among the Polish people peaked while the conflict between the more and more powerful and better-organized Solidarity movement and the PRL government escalated. But just then in September 1981 during a secret meeting with the PRL Secretary of Internal Affairs Kiszczak, Kuklinski heard frightful news. Kreml's secret agents operating in Poland had found out that someone was leaking classified documents. They confirmed that accounts of any PZPR session found their way into the hands of "Solidarity" and the West within just several hours after they had ended. Kiszczak underlined that the Moscow Politburo was absolutely furious and there would be a detailed investigation in the Warsaw General Headquarters.

For Kuklinski that meant his secret activity had been detected and he could be uncovered at any moment. He contacted his American courier and the U.S. arranged for his immediate evacuation. In the middle of the night on November 7, American intelligence forces in Warsaw organized taking Kuklinski, his wife and two sons out of Poland. Four days later they landed in the U.S. Almost exactly a month later, on December 13, Gen. Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland and used Poland's Special Forces to crush Solidarity.

The Colonel's wife did not learn about her husband's double identity until the actual evacuation. She was in a state of shock, but she endured everything bravely. Later, however, she did pay a price - she developed health problems. I have talked to her, and to me, she also is a hero. In spite of her dramatic, turbulent life, she kept her inner strength and is a person with a kind, warm heart.

Martial law

As I have mentioned, I met Colonel Kuklinski on the anniversary of the December 13th tragedy. I wanted to know what he thought about that time now, when he could reflect on it from a timely perspective. I also asked him why, after he had been evacuated, nobody warned "Solidarity" of a pending martial law and repression. He must be aware of the fact that for a decade now, this has been of great interest to enemies and friends alike. Left without a clear answer, it stands as a backlash not only against him, but also President Reagan and the U.S.

Kuklinski answered calmly. "Had I based my actions on emotions only and ruled out common sense, then indeed one should have forewarned "Solidarity" and the Polish society of the danger. But I am convinced that at that point it was impossible to alter the decision about martial law."

He is convinced that revealing all the details of the Soviet and Polish governments' plans would have only sped up their execution. Had that happened, one could try to imagine a possible "Solidarity's" response. Most likely it would have come in the form of a general occupational strike undertaken in all major factories across the country. The government would then have sent troops and force would have been used to end the strikes. But what would have happened had the Polish army failed in stifling the strikes or the Polish soldiers refused to follow their orders? It is difficult not to assume that the command would have been handed over to the Soviet, Czechoslovakian and German divisions stationed in Poland and at its borders. And then? Well, perhaps a massacre on the scale that happened in Hungry in 1956, in which over 20,000 people were killed?

As it turned out, Poland managed to avoid a similar gruesome finale, partly because of Cardinal Wyszynski's address to the nation. "I had to control my emotions," explained Kuklinski. "It was because the information about the martial law did not reach a wide public that Poland has managed to avoid the worst."

Talking to the colonel and seeing his tranquil eyes, slight smile and calm behavior, I felt an overwhelming sincerity in what he was saying. His words bore no pretense and his body did not try to assume a pose of someone exceptional. It was almost hard to believe I was talking to a hero. But that made me realize even more what a modest and amiable person he was.

Colonel Kuklinski also gave me details on why President Reagan had not spread the news of the pending martial law, even though he had been well informed of it. As it became evident later, Reagan chose a solution far more becoming than just a "warning" to the Solidarity leaders.

Reagan understood that Poland had become the weakest link of the communist chain and that the rest of the communist leaders were running out of ideas on how to fight Polish opposition. Having been introduced to the Soviets' most secret plans - due to Colonel Kuklinski's work -- he decided he would use this knowledge to keep his enemy in the check position. When he met Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1985, he told him the U.S. was well aware of the Soviet military plans, including their scheme to start nuclear war, but also that Moscow did not have much chance to gain economically on the U.S. in terms of "Star Wars" technology. He also warned the Soviets of so called "horizontal confrontation." Nobody knew exactly what that meant, but that, of course, was one of the biggest reasons why Reagan's game proved to be so successful in the long run.

The question one can't keep from asking is: Did the disclosure of the Soviets' plans to the U.S. by Colonel Kuklinski stopped nuclear war from happening? Many political specialists and historians have already said yes. More answers are likely to come from a soon-to-be-published book by an American publicist Benjamin Weizer. According to Kuklinski, who worked with Mr. Weizer on the book, the accounts presented there are fully trustworthy and should cast light on many events surrounding the Cold War era. Judging from our interview, Kuklinski is also hopeful that the book would put an end to many unjust judgements about his work and life.

No one has done more damage to communism than this Pole...

In 1984, the Polish Military Court deranked Kuklinski, confiscated all his property and issued him an absentee death sentence. The trial did not happen earlier because there were plans to capture the Kuklinski and make the trial truly spectacular. Because the kidnapping attempts failed, the trial itself was made into a secret affair with no information released to the media or the general public. Kuklinski's major charge was that he had broken his soldier's oath. One ponders, however - has he really? He would have, if both Poland and the Polish Army were independent beings free of outer influences. But of course they were not. They were Soviet subsidiaries headed by a government that allowed Moscow such privileges as picking candidates for the positions of the Polish Prime Minister, The Minister of Defense and the PZPR's First Secretary. It is wrong then to try to make an equation between what was patriotic and what was simply servile. If Kuklinski did ever betray, he betrayed the servile PZPR that participated in the Soviet plans to conquer the West. He never betrayed the ideal of Poland's independence.

Jozef Szaniawski, author of the book "Colonel Kuklinski - in Interviews, Opinions and Documents" wrote: "The sentence imposed on Kuklinski was one of the most shameful in the history of Polish judiciary.

The Polish government punished a Pole for disclosing not Polish but Soviet secrets, for working against an emporium hostile to Poland. Disputed documents were even written in Russian, yet in spite of all that, the judges who wore Polish Army uniforms sentenced Ryszard Kuklinski to death." Documents proving Kuklinski's innocence are still being kept secret, even though he has said many times he had nothing to be afraid of, and he would like the truth to be revealed.

In his letter to President Ronald Reagan, the director of the CIA, William Casey wrote: "In the last forty years, no one has done more damage to communism than that Pole."

Casey even awarded Kuklinski with a special medal. There were only eight such medals given out during the agency's nearly century long history, and Kuklinski was the first foreign recipient of such honor. The CIA said of Kuklinski: "For nine years, in the face of greatest personal danger, Colonel Kuklinski has continued to pass on documentation of extraordinary importance regarding Soviet military forces and plans, as well as the plans made by the rest of the Warsaw Pact. In doing that, he has greatly contributed to the upholding of the world's peace, especially when crisis struck."

He has done so much for Poland

After coming to the U.S., a new era began in Kuklinski's life. He was nominated as a defense analyst and a professor teaching seminars to high-ranking NATO officers. For security reasons, his family had their names changed, received a classified telephone number and a house in an unrevealed location. But governmental protection did not mean they were out of danger. Kuklinski knew that Moscow would never forgive him for his actions. So over the years his family has continued changing addresses and only a small group of close friends know the name they use.

For the first five years he had to live with a "no-countrymen" status. Then his family re-ceived American passports. Kuklinski said that the day he received that passport was a day of relief, but also bitterness. His work has been recognized and rewarded, but to get to that point he had to lose his native country. Back then there were no signs present to give him hope he would ever be able to return to Poland or regain his lost Polish citizenship. He valued being an American citizen, but in his heart he would always remain a Pole.

American soil did not spare him tragedy. In 1994, his younger son Bogdan became lost on the Florida coast during a diving trip. Kuklinski suspected that his son had been captured by the Cubans and that they would like him in return for his son. Bogdan's body was never recovered, the tragedy has remained unexplained. Just half a year after Bogdan's disappearance, Kuklinski's other son, Waldemar, was hit by a car. The driver fled the scene, leaving no fingerprints inside the vehicle.

When will the archives open?

During my conversation with Colonel Kuklinski, I also spoke of the necessity to give competent researchers on the Cold War access to various archives. Since Poland is now a NATO member state, it shouldn't have any more secrets about the Warsaw Pact era. Moreover, it is this precise "secrecy" that makes the average Pole still misinformed about Ryszard Kuklinski and his contribution to Europe's and the world's peace, much as it makes a considerable part of the Polish society still exhibit a communist mentality.

One must not rule out that those archives may contain documents damaging to General Jaruzelski and his circle. Jaruzelski had always seemed too loyal to Moscow, his servility at its best when he agreed to completely subordinate the Polish Army to the Soviet. As a leader, Jaruzelski should have realized that in case of WW III Poland would be the first to take blows from retaliating NATO forces. He should have, but instead he blindly followed Moscow's orders, ready to sacrifice even his own nation.

There surely is a peculiar paradox in the discussion about Colonel Kuklinski's work that is now going on in Poland. Ex-communists and all who do not know enough facts call, the man who tried to prevent World War III, a traitor. On the other hand, conformists and real traitors who have caused Poland numerous misfortunes get on with their lives, enjoying freedom and relatively good names. It seems that the work that has to be done in order to straighten out the facts and to present the truth as it should be is going to be enormous. But it will be worth every effort, for the matter concerning Colonel Kuklinski is not just about giving him back his name, but about restoring a system of values which is based in truth.

Yes thanks very much. There was even a book published on this fellow in the 1960's and some wierd claims that he was in reality the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich.

Goleniewski does appear briefly in context of another of the great mysteries of the Cold War; the fate of Getapo Mueller:

http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-mueller.html
Mueller and the Nazi Regime

Mueller was born in Munich on April 28, 1900. After serving as a pilot in World War I, he joined the police in Munich, soon acquiring a reputation as a skilled anti-communist investigator who did not feel bound by legal norms of police investigation. As such, he would draw the attention of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, leaders of Hitler's SS. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Himmler and Heydrich consolidated German regional police units while creating a national political police, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). Mueller entered the SS in 1934 and quickly rose through the ranks of that organization as a police official. In September 1939, when the Gestapo and other police organizations were consolidated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Mueller was made the Chief of RSHA Amt IV -- the Gestapo.

As Gestapo chief, Mueller oversaw the implementation of Hitler's policies against Jews and other groups deemed a threat to the state. The notorious Adolf Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs, was Mueller's immediate subordinate. Once World War II began, Mueller and Eichmann planned key components in the deportation and then extermination of Europe's Jews.

Mueller was involved in other criminal affairs as well. He helped plan the phony Polish attack on Gleiwitz radio station in 1939 (used to justify Germany's attack on Poland). He signed the "Bullet Order" of March 1944 (authorizing the shooting of escaped prisoners of war) and authorized the torture of officers who had conspired to kill Hitler in July 1944. Mueller's zeal in countering the 20 July plot earned him the rare military decoration of the Knight's Cross to the War Service Cross with Swords in October 1944.

Mueller also managed security and counterespionage operations. His most spectacular counterespionage success was the development of a double-cross network that fed disinformation to the Soviet intelligence services between 1942 and 1945. Located in Berlin and a few other Western European capitals, this network had been extremely successful in sending sensitive political and military information to Moscow. Mueller's Gestapo team was able to capture a number of these agents and "turn" them. Codenamed Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), this Gestapo operation was among the greatest Soviet intelligence setbacks of the war.

Mueller and the End of the War

In the war's final year, it seems that Heinrich Mueller stubbornly believed in a Nazi victory. He told one of his top counterespionage case officers in December 1944 that the Ardennes offensive (known in the U.S. as the Battle of the Bulge) would result in the recapture of Paris.1 Mueller also reportedly redoubled efforts to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the Western allies by using his double agents.

Not everyone was convinced of his sincerity. There were rumors among German intelligence officers that Mueller had himself been turned by the Soviets. Walter Schellenberg, chief of the RSHA's Foreign Intelligence Branch (Amt VI) and a bitter rival of Mueller, was the source of some of this speculation. When interrogated by OSS in 1945, Schellenberg claimed that Mueller had been in friendly radio contact with the Soviets, and Schellenberg's postwar memoirs contain verbatim exhortations from 1943 by Mueller on Stalin's superiority to Hitler as a leader.2 SS-men close to Mueller considered such rumors unfounded and illogical. Mueller's immediate superior Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Chief of the RSHA), later insisted under Allied interrogation that Mueller could never have embraced the Soviets. Similarly, Heinz Pannwitz, Mueller's Gestapo subordinate who ran Rote Kapelle, categorized the notion that Mueller had turned as "absolutely absurd" in a 1959 CIA interrogation.3

The First Search for Gestapo Mueller

Months before the fall of Berlin, Anglo-American counterespionage officers began their postwar planning. Under the combined leadership of British MI 5 and MI 6 and the X-2 (counterespionage) branch of the American Office of Strategic Services, the SHAEF G-2 Counter Intelligence (CI) War Room began operating in February 1945. Using Allied lists of Nazi intelligence officers, the War Room supervised the hunt for the remnants of Germany's military and police intelligence services. Initially, the chief concern of the officers of the CI War Room was that Nazi intelligence units would survive the war and, financed with looted assets, launch paramilitary operations in the Bavarian Alps. Intelligence reaching the War Room in the last months of the war did not mention Mueller as a possible leader of postwar Nazi operations, but given his command of the Gestapo, Mueller remained an important man to capture.

On May 27, 1945 the Counter Intelligence War Room issued a statement about its priority targets for interrogations in what it called the German intelligence service. At the top of the list were Nazi intelligence officials involved in foreign intelligence (RSHA Amt VI). Next in priority were security police and SD units in occupied countries. Gestapo officials came farther down the target list. A War Room instruction to interrogators of captured RSHA officers listed the top missing persons: interrogators were to ask: "Where are: SCHELLENBERG, OHLENDORF, MUELLER, STEIMLE, SANDBERGER?"4 (All but Mueller were subsequently located and interrogated.) A War Room fortnightly report covering the period ending June 18, 1945 stated that no leading officials of the Gestapo had yet been arrested, and "it seems clear from most reports that Mueller remained in Berlin after the collapse."5 His fate was contrasted with that of other Gestapo personalities who fled south. A separate OSS X-2 (counterintelligence) report at the end of the month repeated that no highranking Gestapo officials had yet been captured and that Mueller had remained in Berlin.6

A War Room monthly summary in late July 1945 reported that Amt VI officials had largely surrendered, while most Amt IV (Gestapo) officials remained at large. Mueller's fate was still unknown: "Some of our evidence, though it is by no means conclusive, suggests that Mueller himself may have remained in Berlin until the last [while]… the greater part of Amt IV collected itself at Hof, near Munich, and at Salzburg and Innsbruck.7 A War Room intelligence arrest target list, dated August 21, commented about 'H. Mueller, head of the Gestapo': "Last reported Berlin, Apr. 1945."8 A later revision to the arrest target list reported the arrest of several Gestapo officials, including Walter Huppenkothen who was part of the Red Orchestra team. But not Heinrich Mueller.9

Ultimately the Allies would find many Heinrich Muellers in occupied Germany and Austria, but not the right one. Heinrich Mueller is a very common German name. By the end of 1945, American and British occupation forces had gathered information on numerous Heinrich Muellers, all of whom had different birth dates, physical characteristics and job histories. Documentation on some of them is included-one might say mistakenly jumbled together-in the "Gestapo" Mueller Army IRR file, which the National Archives released in 2000. Part of the problem for U.S. record-keepers stemmed from the fact that some of these Muellers, including Gestapo Mueller, did not appear to have middle names. An additional source of confusion was that there were two different SS-Generals named Heinrich Mueller. In at least one instance, an index card purporting to collate information on Gestapo Mueller, which was prepared by an American official after the war, actually contains two different birth dates, as well as data about a third man of the same name. A Heinrich Mueller was held briefly at the Altenstadt civilian internment camp in 1945.10 Another killed himself along with his wife and his children in April 1946.11

Throughout this period the Counter Intelligence War Room functioned as the ULTRA/top secret collecting point for information about the locations of the Allies' top intelligence targets. Although the occupation forces had encountered quite a few men named Heinrich Mueller, the War Room's verdict was unambiguous: Gestapo Muller had not been found.

In the initial period after the Nazi surrender U.S. counterintelligence attempted to track down all leads to Mueller. Information reached U.S. army intelligence that Gestapo Mueller had taken the assumed name Schwartz or Schwatzer and had gone south from Berlin with another Gestapo official Christian A. Scholz. But no traces of either man were ever found.12 In 1947, British and American authorities twice searched the home of Gestapo Mueller's mistress Anna Schmid for clues, but found nothing suggesting that Mueller was still alive. With the onset of the Cold War and the shift of resources to the Soviet target, the assumption took hold in U.S. intelligence that Gestapo Mueller was dead.13

The West German Investigation

The dramatic Israeli abduction of Mueller's subordinate Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in May 1960 created new interest in Nazi war criminals and particularly in Mueller. Imaginative theories that Mueller (along with Eichmann) had escaped Berlin and were still alive had been in the press for some time, as well as in the best selling memoir by Wilhelm Hoettl, himself a former SS officer.14 Eichmann himself helped to fan speculation about in Mueller, when during his Jerusalem trial, he voiced his belief that Mueller survived the war. Already in July 1960, the West German office in charge of the prosecution of war criminals [Zentralle Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen] charged local police authorities in Bavaria (Mueller's family still lived in Munich) and Berlin to investigate. The West Germans were skeptical that Mueller was working for the Soviets, but did think it possible that Mueller was corresponding from somewhere with his family or possibly with his former secretary Barbara Hellmuth. All of these West German citizens were closely watched, and in May 1961 the Bavarian police asked the U.S. occupation forces to put Mueller's relatives and Hellmuth under surveillance. West German police also searched the Berlin home of Anna Schmid, Mueller's former mistress, and spoke with her. Schmid told the West German investigators that she had not seen Mueller since 24 April 1945, when he gave her a vial of poison and then disappeared. Her own efforts to find him in the subsequent days and weeks had been fruitless.15

According to various witnesses interviewed by the West German police in 1961, the last time Mueller was seen alive was the evening of May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler's suicide. Several eyewitnesses placed Mueller at Hitler's Chancellery building that evening while recounting his refusal to leave with the breakout group that night. Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot and an old friend of Mueller's, recounts Mueller as saying, "We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of … being taken prisoner by the Russians." Another claimed that Mueller refused to leave with the rest of Hitler's entourage, and was overheard saying "the regime has fallen and…I fall also." He was last seen in the company of his radio specialist Christian A. Scholz. And while the bodies of others that remained that night were recovered and identified, no one in the final group witnessed the death of Mueller or Scholz.16

West German authorities pursued three major leads in an effort to confirm Mueller's death and burial in Berlin in 1945. First, there was the testimony of Fritz Leopold, a Berlin morgue official who had reported in December 1945 that Mueller's body was moved (along with many others) from the RSHA headquarters at Prinz Albrecht Strasse (2000 feet from the Chancellery) for reburial in a local municipal cemetery on Lilienthalstrasse (Berlin-Neukoelln) in the Western half of the city. Leopold was later deemed an unreliable source, but the burial was officially registered with the Berlin authorities and a headstone would be placed at Mueller's "grave" which read, "Our loving father Heinrich Mueller - Born 28 April 1900 - Died in Berlin May 1945." A second story came from Mueller's ex-subordinate Heinz Pannwitz, who had been captured by the Soviets and returned to West Germany in 1957, whereupon he told the German Secret Service [Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND] that his Soviet interrogators revealed to him that "your Chief [Mueller] is dead." The body, they said, had been found in a subway shaft a few blocks from the Chancellery with a bullet through the head and with its identity documents intact.17

The final story came from Walter Lueders, a former member of the German Volkssturm (civilian fighters) who maintained that he had headed a burial detail in the summer of 1945. Of the hundreds of bodies buried by the detail, only one, said Lueders, wore an SS-General's uniform, and it was found in the garden of the Reich Chancellery with a large wound in the back. Though the body had no medals or decorations, Lueders recalled with certainty that the identity papers were those of Gestapo Mueller. It was moved to the old Jewish Cemetery on Grosse Hamburgerstasse in the Soviet Sector, where it was placed in one of three mass graves. In fact, in 1955 the German Armed Forces Information Office (Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle - WASt) inquired with district authorities in East Berlin and received confirmation that Gestapo Mueller was buried at the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse cemetery in 1945. Since the grave was a mass grave, however, there was no actual plot.

The Fritz Leopold story was checked first, and in September 1963, the Mueller "grave" at the Lilienthalstrasse cemetery in West Berlin was exhumed. Investigation revealed that in fact, the grave contained the remains of three different people, none of whom were Mueller. The skull, moreover, belonged to a man ten years younger than Mueller would have been in 1945. The German authorities had no means by which to verify either Pannwitz's or Lueders' story. Pannwitz's information had come from Moscow, and there was no official liaison between Soviet intelligence and the West Germans on the Mueller case. Lueders's story could not be checked since Grosse Hamburgerstrasse was on the other side of the two-year old Berlin Wall. Adding to the confusion was the mystery of Mueller's effects. WASt, according to its own records, returned to Mueller's family in 1958 not only the Gestapo Chief's papers, some of which Lueders claimed to have found on the body, but also Mueller's decorations, which neither Leopold not Lueders claimed to have found. These items were never checked for authenticity.18

The CIA investigation

The CIA started its involvement in the hunt for Mueller at roughly the same time as the German search, albeit from a different source base. The January 1961 defection and interrogation of a Polish intelligence officer brought Western counterintelligence tips that led to several Soviet and Polish agents active in the West, including George Blake, a mole in the British MI6, Harry Houghton, a clerk in the British navy, and Heinz Felfe, a highlevel West German intelligence officer. The defector surely was Lt. Col. Michal Goleniewski [TN], the Deputy Chief of Polish Military Counter Intelligence until 1958, who had also operated as a mole for the KGB in the Polish service. In recounting his work as an interrogator of captured German officials in Poland from 1948 to 1952, Goleniewski revealed information about the fate of some Nazi intelligence officials, including Gestapo Mueller. Goleniewski had not actually met Mueller. However, he had heard from his Soviet supervisors that sometime between 1950 and 1952 the Soviets had picked up Mueller and taken him to Moscow.19 There was little with which to evaluate this claim, and some reason to be skeptical of this hearsay. Pannwitz, after all, had recently dismissed as "nonsense" to CIA interrogators the idea that Mueller worked for the Soviets while claiming that his own Soviet interrogators repeatedly said that Mueller was dead.20

The CIA tried to track down the men Goleniewski named as having worked with Mueller in Moscow. The CIA determined that Jakob Loellgen, the former Gestapo chief of Danzig, was alive and resided in West Germany. In 1945 the Soviets had captured Loellgen but then released him, whereupon he returned to West Germany, working as a local police chief and as a private investigator. The CIA turned this information over to the Germans and the BND located Loellgen in 1961.

The Germans dropped the ball. Although the BDN apparently began assembling material for his arrest, Loellgen was never arrested. The CIA never quite figured out what had happened. The BND seemed to be preoccupied throughout 1961 with another of Goleniewski's leads, Heinz Felfe. Felfe was a highlevel BND officer, who had already provided thousands of West German secrets including names of agents, cover names, addresses, and documents, to Moscow. In the midst of the Felfe scandal, West German investigation of Loellgen just fell between the cracks.21

The CIA did collect some information on its own that bore on the "Mueller in Moscow" thesis. In June 1961, another source was asked to assess Goleniewski's information on Soviet contacts with former Nazis. The source, who appears to have been a KGB officer, reported having read a "Mueller file," in which Mueller is described as having been captured by Soviet intelligence at the end of World War II. The identity of this source is not given in the CIA file, but is likely Petr Deriabin [TN]. (Deriabin had worked on counterintelligence matters in the Austro-German department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.) The defector wrote in a 1971 memorandum for the record that in 1952 he had heard from his own superiors that Moscow had recruited Mueller and that he himself had read excerpts from an interrogation. He even included the names of four Soviet officers who had once debriefed Mueller in 1951.22

Despite the partial corroboration of the information from Goleniewski, the CIA appears to have relied on the West Germans to take the lead in the investigation of Mueller's whereabouts and did little follow-up in the 1960s. The remainder of the decade saw various news reports that Mueller had escaped to various points in the West (Argentina, Cuba), as well as tragicomic episodes. In 1967, a false sighting of Mueller in Panama led to the arrest there of one Francis Keith, who was released once fingerprints revealed he was not Mueller. Later the same year, two Israeli operatives were caught by West German police in an attempted break-in at the Munich apartment of Mueller's wife. Reams of newspaper copy were produced by such episodes, but there was only limited CIA interest.

Yet one particular report did catch CIA's attention. In the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, the West German weekly Stern ran two articles by the journalist Peter Staehle that appeared in January and August 1964. Staehle said that after having followed a path after the war that included the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, and South Africa, Mueller became a senior police official in Albania before fleeing for South America.23 From the very start, CIA suspected that Staehle's articles were a "plant" - part of a "clever bit of [disinformation] work" to mislead the public, as well as intelligence agencies.24 The CIA checked - and disproved Staehle's claim that Mueller was in fact an Albanian police official named Abedin Bekir Nakoschiri.25 The BND and CIA also discovered that Staehle had failed to get his articles printed in the more respected weekly Die Zeit thanks to a suspect source base about which Staehle had reportedly lied.26

In May 1970 a Czech defector, very likely Ladislas Bittman [TN], a disinformation specialist himself, weighed in.27 Bittman said that the Stern article was planted from Prague in order to neutralize rumors that Mueller might in fact be in Czechoslovakia. Bittman added for good measure that within Czech intelligence circles, it was common knowledge that the KGB had used Nazi war criminals for intelligence purposes and that key sections of Nazi archives had also been captured by the Soviets for use in "operational aims."28

These comments caught the eye of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence (CI) Staff, headed by the legendary James Angleton. If Mueller really had been in the USSR or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and if he had taken RSHA central files with him (many of which had indeed vanished after the war), then numerous leading West Germans (presumably on the political right) could still be compromised. It was crucial to discover what had happened, not necessarily to Mueller, who well might have been dead in any case, but to the files. Angleton also had a special interest in Soviet disinformation. The CI Staff undertook a through-going inquiry of Mueller starting in late 1970, and it is likely that this inquiry resulted in Mueller's name file (along with the above-mentioned material on the West German search) being assembled by CIA at all. It certainly resulted in a forty-page Counter Intelligence Brief - "The Hunt for 'Gestapo' Mueller" - which was circulated as an internal report of the Directorate of Plans in December 1971. A memo in the file dated 9 December 1971 explaining the purpose of the report states that:

Our principal original objective in preparing the attached study of the MUELLER case was to produce a training aid illustrating the vagaries and pitfalls of protracted investigations. In the past, MUELLER had been viewed mainly as a missing war criminal. As the material was collected, however, we became aware of another important possibility: that MUELLER had defected to World War II Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) and had taken with him a large assortment of files. (The central files of the German National Security Service (RSHA), of which Mueller was de facto chief…in the last weeks of the war, were never recovered by the Western Allies….) If SMERSH actually seized MUELLER and the best part of the RSHA records, Soviet capabilities to control important Germans and some other Europeans would far exceed those heretofore attributed to them."29
In the process of putting together the report, the CI staff undertook some new inquiries of its own. A re-reading of a 1963 article in the German weekly Der Spiegel, which discussed the exhumation of Mueller's West Berlin "grave" that year, revealed that a mysterious woman in Berlin unrelated to Mueller had purchased the headstone. 30 Perhaps this purchase too was part of a disinformation campaign designed to hide the fact that Mueller was used by the Soviets after the war.31 In December 1970 the West Germans allowed CIA to examine the exhumation records for the identity of the mysterious woman who had purchased the Mueller tombstone, albeit with no results. CI also hoped that the West German government would locate and interview Walter Lueders (who had found the body buried in the Grosse-Hamburgerstrasse cemetery) and verify, if they could, the authenticity of the personal effects returned to Mueller's family in 1957.32 German memoirs from the 1950s with cryptic clues on Mueller were reread.33 CI also asked Soviet defector Peter Deriabin to write a memorandum for the file in November 1971.

The CI team found fault with how Goleniewski's leads had been handled in 1961 and wanted to return to that trail. Loellgen, wrote one CI investigator, "must have an interesting tale to tell about what happened to Heinrich Mueller and how the [Soviet] operation to penetrate the Nazi stay-behind operation fared"34 "How do we get Loellgen to talk?" asked another. "Have we [an] interviewer that might 'accidentally' look [him] up?" But reasons for skepticism remained. "It seems to me," the same agent said, "that [Soviet intelligence] would never have let LOELLGEN go back to the West if in fact they had MUELLER. The scandal of sheltering this number one war criminal would have been too risky."35 In any event, Loellgen was not questioned.

The 40-page CI report ended on a note of skepticism. "No one appears to have tried very hard," it said,

to find MUELLER immediately after the war while the trail was still hot, either in the West or the East….The presumption is that Allied officials searching for MUELLER soon stumbled over the…holdings of his effects and the…burial record and considered these sufficient proof that he was dead….There is little room for doubt, however, that the Soviet and Czech services circulated rumors to the effect that MUELLER had escaped to the West. These rumor were apparently floated to offset the charges that the Soviets had sheltered the criminal….There are strong indications but no proof that MUELLER collaborated with [the Soviets]. There are also strong indications but no proof that MUELLER died [in Berlin]….One thing appears certain. MUELLER and SCHOLZ had some special reason for entering the Berlin death trap and remaining behind in the Chancellery. If their object was to carry out a memorable and convincing suicide, they really bungled the job.
The CI Staff requested a deeper CIA investigation to find proof that would confirm or disprove these competing theories. Yet it appears that the CI Staff's request for a full-fledged investigation of the Mueller matter was not accepted.36 The Mueller file itself ends in December 1971 with the circulation of the CI Staff report.

Interesting read. I noted the following excerpt on how our enemies accessed the usefull idiots in the Mainstream media. Some things never seem to change.

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Urban Warfare

The world probably would never have heard of Ryszard Kuklinski if Jerzy Urban had not tried to embarrass Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Urban was press spokesman for the Military Council of National Salvation, the junta headed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski that had seized power and instituted martial law in December 1981.

Known for his acerbic wit, sharp tongue, and occasional profanity, Urban stood out among the colorless bureaucrats who ruled Poland. He was always combative and never apologetic, even when defending an illegitimate government that had suppressed the first free trade union in the Soviet Bloc.

Warsaw had failed to improve or even normalize relations with Washington. Although the White House had lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed in 1981, the strongest measures, including withdrawal of Most Favored Nation status, remained in force. Even more important, Urban and his bosses knew that the United States was covertly supporting the underground opposition in order "to keep the spirit of Solidarity alive," and the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private, government-funded, public diplomacy initiative, was about to receive $1 million in congressionally appropriated funds earmarked for Solidarity.4 Jaruzelski and company were in a foul mood because they were losing the battle against the underground, and the economy was in worse shape than ever.

Most important, however, Urban and his bosses could not abide Ronald Reagan. Next to Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, the American president was the most revered figure in Poland. The "evil empire" rhetoric of Reagan’s first term, while controversial at home, cheered the Poles on in their struggle against Soviet hegemony; in 1984, many prayed for his reelection.

On 3 June 1986, Urban met with Michael Dobbs, the former Washington Post bureau chief in Warsaw, then based in Paris. Urban offered Dobbs a scoop: in a few days, the Polish minister of internal affairs would reveal that CIA had had an agent inside the general staff who had drafted the operational blueprint for martial law. CIA had "evacuated" the agent and his family from Warsaw on 8 November 1981 and flown them to safety in the United States.5

The scoop was a setup. Perhaps because the Kuklinski case was potentially embarrassing to the Polish Army and to state security, Urban wanted it to surface in the US media before it appeared in Poland. He also wanted the Reagan administration to confirm the story. Thus Urban insisted that his remarks were "off the record," unless the Post obtained some form of official comment on the impending revelation.

If that was Urban’s intention, he succeeded. The next day, the Post ran a front-page story under the joint byline of Dobbs and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. It repeated what Urban had told Dobbs: "The US administration could have publicly revealed these plans to the world and warned Solidarity," Urban said, "Had it done so, the implementation of martial law would have been impossible."6

With his own spin on the story, Urban was in a position at a 6 June 1986 press conference to comment on Washington’s (not Warsaw’s!) revelation that CIA had been in liaison with a senior Polish Army officer involved in martial law planning.7 In his briefing, Urban elaborated the theme he had developed with Dobbs. The Polish government, he said, assumed that CIA had withdrawn Kuklinski so that Washington could alert its "friends" in Solidarity—Urban often sarcastically referred to the Polish opposition as America’s "friends" and "allies"—and thereby foil Warsaw’s martial law plans. "Washington, however, kept silent," Urban noted. "It did not warn its allies. It did not boast of its agent as it customarily does." The Reagan administration had "lied to its own people and to its friends [in Solidarity] in Poland," when it denied having prior knowledge of martial law. Kuklinski, he maintained, was living proof to the contrary.

Urban even blamed President Reagan personally for the plight of the Polish opposition, asserting that Reagan "could have prevented the arrests and internment" of Solidarity leaders but did not because the White House was hoping to provoke a "a bloodbath of European proportions." It had intended to use Solidarity as a "bloody pawn" in its "imperialist aims" and in its geopolitical rivalry with the USSR. Reagan was no friend of Poland; his policy was "morally repulsive."

As intended, Urban also stirred up trouble for the White House within the large and politically influential Polish-American community. Alojzy Mazewski, President of the Polish American Congress (PAC), fired off an open letter to the President demanding to know why Solidarity had not been warned, why Kuklinski had been kept incommunicado, and why he had not been allowed to meet with the Polish-American community or given a job. The White House delayed its reply, giving Urban another opportunity to denounce America’s alleged "disregard for the [Polish-American] community." When the response came, Polish media noted that the messenger was not a top-level official.

The brouhaha eventually died down, but Urban had caused some damage. A commentator on Poland’s state-run television gloated as he read from Mazewski’s letter asserting that the "trust and friendship of the of the Polish nation toward America has been undermined." "And not for the first time," the commentator added.8 The Washington correspondent of Trybuna Ludu, the Polish equivalent of Pravda, cited a letter from a Polish-language daily in New York warning that foreign leaders from Napoleon to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman had betrayed the trust of the Polish people. 9 Now the underground opposition was flying close "to the flame of Reagan’s candle."10 When Mazewski expressed dissatisfaction with the slow response he was getting from the White House, Urban publicly invited him to Warsaw for a meeting with Polish officials.

Impact of Accusations

A decade later, a respected journalist could write that the allegation that "the most vocally anti-Communist US president" had failed to warn Solidarity "is still a subject of much discussion in Poland."11 Some Poles felt betrayed. But how much truth was there to Urban’s accusations? The answer is—not much. Having Kuklinski in the United States was a disadvantage, not a benefit. The blueprint he had worked on was a contingency plan. Having lost its source, the Agency did not know and could not predict when or if the plan would be implemented.

More important, perhaps, the policymaking community (and, in all fairness, the Intelligence Community as well) still seemed "mesmerized by the vision of Soviet troops marching into Poland" after months of Moscow’s saber-rattling and almost continuous military exercises and operations in Poland and along its borders.12 This saber-rattling had accomplished its objective: the West had been confused, Solidarity had been intimidated, and Jaruzelski could claim that, by instituting martial law, he had chosen the "lesser evil" (internal repression) and avoided the "greater catastrophe" (external intervention).

Some policymakers complained after the fact that they had not seen or been briefed on Kuklinski’s reporting, but, as former Deputy Director for Central Intelligence Bobby Ray Inman confirmed, at least 20 senior officials, including President Reagan and his closest advisers, knew about the colonel and his information. But it did not matter; no one saw an internal crackdown as likely or even feasible, given the questionable loyalty of the Polish Army.13 As one observer noted only half in jest, "US policy would have likely remained the same even if Kuklinski’s reports had been underlined in red and posted in every men’s room in Washington."14

Urban’s assertion that the United States wanted a bloodbath in Poland was especially odious. The Reagan administration, like the Carter administration before it, had worked to avoid just such an outcome. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig noted, even if the White House had known martial law was coming, he would have advised against warning Solidarity for fear of inciting the opposition to suicidal resistance.15

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