CHAPTER ONE
TINSELTOWN ESPIONAGE
On February 1, 1977, Marian Zacharski, a Polish salesman, rolled into the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles in a Pontiac Catalina with his wife and daughter. At the end of a four-day drive from wintry Chicago, their destination was a tidy apartment complex within earshot of Los Angeles International Airport.
A rangy tennis player with a big serve and an easy smile, Zacharski exuded the entrepreneurial chutzpah of a fresh-faced immigrant answering the long pull of the California dream. But Zacharski would not become an American; instead he’d become a spy. As an agent from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, Zacharski robbed the United States of its most closely held military secrets. In so doing, he achieved a legendary status among the FBI agents and CIA officers who tracked him down.
As he guided the Catalina into the parking lot of Cross Creek Apartments, Zacharski wasn’t yet a master of espionage tradecraft. He wasn’t even an intelligence officer. Zacharski had been sent to America for the mundane task of selling lathes. He represented an outfit called the Polish American Machine Company, or POLAMCO, which was founded in 1975 as Poland’s Communist government sought to stabilize its tottering economy with exports to the capitalist world. Between 1970 and 1977, Poland borrowed $20 billion from Western banks and institutions in a failed bid to put money in people’s pockets and food on empty shelves. Poland counted on increased exports through state-run firms like POLAMCO to repay its debts.
POLAMCO was a subsidiary of Metalexport, the trading wing of the Ministry of Machine Building. Zacharski had joined Metalexport in 1973, after graduating from the University of Warsaw with a degree in law. At six-two with sandy blond hair and an engaging if somewhat narcissistic personality, Zacharski impressed his bosses as an ambitious man on the make.
Zacharski had been born into, as he put it, “a respectable” Polish family. During World War II, his father, Waclaw, served in the underground resistance forces known as the AK, the Armia Krajowa, or the Home Army, which battled the occupying German Wehrmacht. Over the summer of 1944, Waclaw fought in the Warsaw Uprising, which sought to liberate Poland’s capital from German occupation.
The Warsaw Uprising failed. German forces massacred thousands of Poles, obliterated the AK, and gutted Warsaw while the Soviet Red Army watched and waited on the east bank of the Vistula River. For the remainder of the war, Waclaw and thousands of other prisoners were confined to a slave labor camp in Bavaria. After the Allied victory, Waclaw returned to Poland. With Warsaw in ruins, he opted for a small city on the Baltic Coast near Gdansk, where he met Zacharski’s mother, Czeslawa.
The Soviet-installed government of the newly minted People’s Republic of Poland mistrusted those who’d served in the anti-Communist AK. For years, Waclaw was monitored by the secret police. Still, he succeeded in building a modest manufacturing business allowing Czeslawa to stay at home to raise Marian and his younger brother, Bogdan. Small firms, like small private farms, were fixtures of Poland’s socialist economy. Communism never took root in Polish soil, as it had in the neighboring USSR. The heft of the Catholic Church and the cussedness of the Polish peasantry were mostly to blame. Imposing Communism on Poland, Soviet leader Josef Stalin once quipped, “is like saddling a cow.” He mocked Polish Communist comrades as “radishes,” red only on the outside.
Zacharski’s parents gave their son opportunities that many of his peers could only dream of. Thanks to study in England, his English was practically fluent. He’d backpacked around Europe, too. So, when POLAMCO began operations in the United States in 1975, Zacharski, barely twenty-four years old, was tapped as one of the firm’s reps. Zacharski’s wife, Basia, and ten-month-old Malgosia joined him in America in the fall of 1976.
The Polish government based POLAMCO in Elk Grove Village, near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, banking on a warm embrace from a metropolitan region home to a million and a half Polish Americans. But after suffering through the winter of ’76, the third coldest in Chicago’s history, Zacharski wanted out of Illinois. He hadn’t come all the way to America just to endure Warsaw-like iciness in the Windy City. He’d also found promising leads for POLAMCO’s products among US aeronautics firms on the West Coast. California made sense for a satellite office. Besides, the tennis was better in L.A.
At the end of January 1977, Zacharski and his family packed the Pontiac to the gills and headed west. The day they left Chicago was so blustery it felt like minus fifty. Zacharski had never seen so much snow, which says a lot for a Pole from the shores of the Baltic Sea. Through Nebraska and Wyoming, there wasn’t an automobile in sight, just the vast, white emptiness of the Plains. The weather finally broke in Utah. At a gas station outside Provo, little Malgosia wouldn’t get back in the car because it’d seemed like forever since she’d seen the sun. Four days after bidding goodbye to Chicago, the family rolled up to Cross Creek Apartments on Redlands Street in Playa del Rey, a thirty-minute stroll from the shores of the Pacific. “California!” Zacharski recalled in 2018 gazing up at the green hills above Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, where he resides. “I have been searching for California ever since.”
Back home in Poland, the economy reeled from shortages. Initially, Western bank loans had boosted living standards, but persistent mismanagement by the Communist government made things worse. Poland exported meat to the USSR, but meat was unavailable in Polish stores. In 1976, the government raised the price of staples and instituted rationing. Workers in two industrial towns, Ursus and Radom, went on strike. Food riots erupted; strikers were fired, beaten, and imprisoned. A team of dissidents formed the Workers’ Defense Committee to stitch together an alliance between Poland’s working class and its Western-leaning intellectuals. In June 1979, the new Polish-born pope, John Paul II, visited his homeland to a tumultuous welcome, further galvanizing hope for political change. In August 1980, now schooled in civil disobedience and aware of their basic rights, more than seven hundred thousand workers at shipyards, steel mills, coal mines, and factories went on strike, forcing the Communist government to recognize the independent labor union that would come to be known as Solidarity.
Halfway across the world, Zacharski mailed care packages to his parents while he eased into the life of a Southern California executive. He swapped the office Pontiac for a Chrysler Cordoba. A friend advised him to avoid living by the ocean and working downtown because he’d have to fight the sun both ways on his commute. Zacharski stayed in Playa del Rey. “I need the sea,” he said. “I was born there.” He bought sunglasses instead.
POLAMCO’s machine tools found a market in America. The technology was adequate and the prices were good. Zacharski sold to a who’s who of American capitalism: McDonnell Douglas, United Airlines, and Standard Oil. Lockheed employed the tools in its skunk works projects for the US Department of Defense. POLAMCO’s machinery was used to manufacture the Trident nuclear submarine and was sold to EG&G, which made nuclear weapons. This was all despite a ban on Warsaw Pact products in US weapons plants. In 1981, when Rockwell was preparing to restart production of the B-1 bomber, an executive invited Zacharski to submit a bid.
Zacharski tapped into the Polish American network on the West Coast. He befriended a physics professor at Stanford and engineers in Los Angeles. He spent time with a Polish American expert on rocket fuel who’d flown for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He hiked the canyons around Southern California with a renowned metals inventor, wielding sticks to ward off rattlesnakes. Zacharski’s clients called him Marian or Marion, Walter or Walt—an Anglicized version of his tongue-twisting middle name, Wlodzimierz.
Being Polish in America, especially in Southern California, hundreds of miles from the nearest Polish diplomatic mission, meant that Zacharski escaped the scrutiny that the FBI brought to bear on Russians and other Eastern Europeans elsewhere in the United States. Americans just couldn’t conceive of Poland as a foe. Poles were the brunt of jokes but never an enemy. The FBI could be forgiven for its inattention. On October 6, 1976, no less than President Gerald Ford, in his second campaign debate with challenger Jimmy Carter, erroneously declared that Poland was a member of the free world. Ford’s gaffe helped cost him the White House.
At Cross Creek, Zacharski and Basia fell in with a group of eight couples, all of whom had lived overseas or were married to foreigners. They called themselves “a little United Nations.” There were barbecues and trips to Disneyland, tennis and cocktails. Zacharski was a fixture on the courts and at drinks afterward. As a boy, Zacharski had yearned to play soccer, but his father forbade him. Studies, not sport. Tennis was acceptable, however, because the “right kind” of people played. Marian, Basia, and Malgosia settled in nicely in Southern California. Before they knew it, June 1977 had come and it was time for home leave.
* * *
Several days after returning to Warsaw, Zacharski received a call from a colleague at the machine-building ministry who invited him to meet for coffee on Saturday morning, June 11. At the café was a man who introduced himself as Zdzislaw Jakubczak. Zacharski vaguely recognized Jakubczak as a functionary at the ministry. Leaning toward Zacharski and dropping his voice, Jakubczak explained that in reality he was a captain in Department I—Foreign Intelligence—of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (the Security Services). The SB was Poland’s version of the Soviet KGB.
Zacharski had never met a spy. He’d gleaned his understanding of espionage from his mother, a big fan of thrillers, who passed that passion on to her son. Zacharski had grown up on stories of the exploits of Polish intelligence officers against the German occupation in World War II and the Polish mathematicians who’d first broken Germany’s secret Enigma codes. Captain Jakubczak probed Zacharski’s familiarity with intelligence operations. “Complete ignorance,” he concluded in a report to his superiors in Department I.
Jakubczak had come with a proposal. Zacharski’s presence in Los Angeles, he said, was of interest to Polish Intelligence. Jakubczak asked Zacharski whether he’d be willing to spy for Poland. Zacharski blushed. He was already having a hard time grasping that Jakubczak was an undercover intelligence officer detailed to his ministry. And now this spy was recruiting Zacharski to be his agent? “He could not see himself in that role at all,” Jakubczak observed in his report to Department I, “due to his very hazy understanding of what intelligence actually does.”
Jakubczak massaged the young man’s ego. He told Zacharski that he was an ideal candidate: he spoke great English and clearly had a knack for making friends. Jakubczak steered the conversation to the Cuban Missile Crisis and other developments in world affairs. After about an hour, Zacharski warmed to the idea. Zacharski had a request, Jakubczak noted: “Due to his unfamiliarity with this subject, he would like to receive exact instructions on what to do and how to do it.” Jakubczak felt it was premature to have Zacharski sign a contract to spy for the SB. The pair agreed to meet again.
Zacharski walked out of the café on a cloud. “I felt like a character in one of the books I’d been reading so avidly,” he recalled in a 2009 memoir. “All my lifelong dreams as a twenty-something had been leading to this moment: I’d been noticed!” To Zacharski, intelligence officers belonged to “an elite club” and he was being given the chance to “measure myself against the best.”
“I didn’t know if I would win,” he wrote, “but I wanted this test. I wanted a job that required me to move mountains because I felt that I was capable of moving mountains!”
Zacharski’s fantasy conveniently ignored the specifics of Jakubczak’s proposal. He wasn’t actually being offered the chance to become the Polish James Bond. Zacharski would merely be a source, run by a case officer, Captain Jakubczak. But Zacharski never let facts get in the way of a good story. In a nod to 007, he’d title his memoirs The Name Is Zacharski, Marian Zacharski.
Jakubczak and Zacharski met again on June 21 as Zacharski prepared to return to California. Zacharski signed a contract with the SB and promised to keep his activities secret. Jakubczak gave Zacharski a code name, “Pay.” He took out two identical calling cards and gave one to Zacharski. The other would be sent to a courier in the United States who’d contact Zacharski after Zacharski signaled he had intelligence to share. Jakubczak directed Zacharski to focus on obtaining American commercial technology.
More than the Russians or other Eastern Europeans, the Poles specialized in industrial espionage. Poland’s economy relied on secrets pilfered from the West. Its pharmaceutical industry was built on stolen patents. Its electronics industry depended on technology purloined from the United States and Japan, as did its automotive and shipbuilding assembly lines. During a posting in West Germany, a colonel from Foreign Intelligence named Henryk Jasik stole the formula for what became one of the most popular brands of laundry detergent in the Eastern Bloc, IXI (pronounced ik-see).
The Polish service was respected in the West. A 1978 “Spy Guide” by Time magazine ranked Poland’s intelligence agency fifth in the world behind the United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, and Britain. Polish spies didn’t favor murder, or “wet work,” like the Bulgarians or the KGB. In fact, Polish Intelligence is believed to have carried out only one overseas assassination, in 1960, of an officer who’d defected to France. “Poles,” Time noted, “tend to move and mix better internationally.”
Returning to Los Angeles, Zacharski fell back into the busy life of a salesman. In early December 1977, Zacharski had just finished a tennis match when his partner pointed out William Bell, a resident at Cross Creek who was entering the courts. “He’s a big shot in aerospace, a genius, I tell you, a genius!” the man whispered. Zacharski took note of his neighbor: late fifties, six-two, sideburns, thickening middle, followed by an attractive, much younger wife, named Rita. “I pricked up my ears,” Zacharski wrote. “I just watched.”
CHAPTER TWO
TENNIS, ANYONE?
William Bell, fifty-seven, and his wife, Rita, thirty-three, were members of Cross Creek’s “little UN.” Rita was from Belgium. They’d met in Europe when Bill, recently divorced, had been posted there and she was the office secretary. Rita had brought her six-year-old son from another marriage to live with them in the United States and was applying for a job as a flight attendant with Pan American Airlines.
On the evening of December 10, Zacharski, already curious about Bell, sidled over to Rita at a Saturday night party in a neighbor’s apartment. Rita introduced Zacharski to her husband, Bill.
Bell had the air of an absentminded professor. Zacharski stood there wondering how he could crack him. He figured alcohol would do the trick. “In Poland you start a friendship with vodka,” Zacharski announced. “I’ve got a bottle in my fridge.” He took Bill’s empty glass, sprinted home, and returned with it filled. The two clinked glasses and drank. Rita told the story of Bill at a restaurant where he’d kicked off his shoes under the table. After the meal was over, Bill asked a waiter to call him a cab, and only noticed that his shoes were missing after he’d returned home. Bill beamed whenever Rita called him a scientist.
When it was time to go, Zacharski pulled Bill aside and told him he needed a tennis partner. Bill eagerly agreed. That night Zacharski dashed off a report to Jakubczak. “I accidentally met a gentleman in my apartment complex who I believe is the vice president of a company called Hughes,” he wrote. “In the near future I will probably have the opportunity to play tennis with the gentleman and find out more about his work.”
A few days later, they played. Bill was terrible; Zacharski let him win a few points. After the match, Zacharski invited Bell over and the pair drank again. It was then that Zacharski discovered Bell was a weapons engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company, one of the most important defense contractors in the United States.
Feeling his way into his new role as a spy, Zacharski drew up a list of several contacts, including Bell, and passed them to Jakubczak. In a report on February 7, 1978, Jakubczak told the leadership at Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau that he’d directed Zacharski to focus on Bell, who was given the nickname “Pato.” But, Jakubczak cautioned, “We must not allow Pato to realize that via Pay he’s dealing with Polish Intelligence.”
Zacharski learned that Bell had graduated from UCLA in 1951 with a degree in applied physics and, after specialist courses in the US Navy, had worked in the defense industry ever since, mostly for Hughes. Bell had been posted abroad twice in the 1960s and mid-1970s but had returned to the United States after the second tour in deep financial straits. He’d come out the wrong end of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service and had been through a nasty divorce. He’d filed for bankruptcy. What’s more, in 1975, Bell’s nineteen-year-old son, Kevin, died in a camping accident in Mexico after his bug repellent caught fire and he suffered severe burns. Friends at Hughes took up a collection to pay for some of Kevin’s medical expenses. Still, Bell was in a very deep hole.
Bell told Zacharski he dreamed about solving his financial woes by penning spy novels. In his drawer was a rough draft of a potboiler starring a swashbuckling arms dealer named Peter K. Peach, who, like Bell, had married his secretary and sported a mustache. Peach loved gourmet food, beautiful women, and, naturally, danger. Bell had asked a friend who covered Hollywood for the Burbank Daily Review to spice up the manuscript with bodice-ripping sex scenes.
Although well liked at Hughes, Bell felt like an outsider upon his return home from Belgium. A younger group had taken charge of his department and he sensed he’d been shunted off to a quiet back office to waste away. He began to drink copiously. Bell was being oversensitive. Even in that back office, Bell was working on incredibly important stuff. Under his direction, a team of engineers was developing an early iteration of stealth technology. It was called low-probability-of-intercept radar. The Pentagon planned to deploy it in tanks, helicopters, bombers, and fighter planes.
Brilliant techie that he was, Bell still craved respect and praise. Zacharski lavished attention on him and Bell took comfort in his companionship. There was something of Bell’s lost son, Kevin, in Zacharski’s jaunty demeanor. Kevin and Zacharski were close in age and practically the same height. “He slowly became my best friend,” Bell would later say.
Jakubczak instructed Zacharski to probe Bell for weaknesses, and asked for more information about “character traits, interests, addictions, political beliefs, attitude toward Poland, morale, material and family situation, etc.” When Zacharski visited Warsaw again near the end of February 1978, Jakubczak ordered a crash course for Zacharski on espionage. By this time, Basia was pregnant with their second child. Karolina would be born in the United States.
Back in Warsaw, with Basia and Malgosia ensconced at her parents’ place, Zacharski holed up in a ministry safe house. Jakubczak personally oversaw his instruction in everything from Foreign Intelligence’s organizational structure, to how to detect counterintelligence activity, to psychological issues involving espionage, to methods of source cultivation and interviews. Specialists taught Zacharski how to use a miniature camera to photograph documents. The training wasn’t always relevant. In one session, he had to practice how to lose a tail on foot. “Great!” he wrote in his memoirs. “In LA, nobody walks!”
Zacharski was an enthusiastic student. He “showed great initiative and commitment,” Jakubczak wrote, and had turned out to be “a conscientious and disciplined collaborator” with “a high predisposition for operational work.” In short, Zacharski was a natural. Reflecting on Zacharski’s motivations to spy, Jakubczak observed that “elements of adventure” dwarfed patriotism. Zacharski was in it for the game.
Jakubczak recommended that the ministry hire Zacharski as a contract employee, increasing his total pay package by 20 percent, and bring him into the service full-time when he and his family moved back to Poland. Jakubczak suggested that Zacharski begin parceling out “beer money” to Bell to judge his receptiveness.
Soon after Zacharski returned to Los Angeles, he asked Bell for contacts at Hughes and other companies for POLAMCO’s products. Bell gave Zacharski the name of a purchasing manager at Hughes along with executives at Lockheed and Northrop. Zacharski dipped into his “beer money” funds and paid Bell $200 here, $200 there. Zacharski and Basia took Bill and Rita to the Christmas ball on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach in 1978. When Bell offered reimbursement for the tickets, Zacharski waved him off. “Don’t worry,” he said. “My firm is paying.” After tennis, the two would retire to Zacharski’s house for drinks. Zacharski downed water and plied Bill with vodka as Bill whined about his financial troubles. Zacharski presented Bill with books about Polish history and coffee mugs from Warsaw. Bill would often stop himself in the middle of a sentence to say, “Oh, but that’s classified.” Zacharski had a stock reply: “No, no, you’re just helping me with my technical English.”
Zacharski floated the possibility of Bell becoming an adviser to POLAMCO. Flattered, Bell opened up more, bringing home documents to share with Zacharski. He started with declassified reports, Hughes’s in-house newsletter, and publicity materials. Bell told himself he was just trying to help out his new friend.
Zacharski played the role of an interested, younger apprentice. “Bill,” Zacharski recalled saying at one point, “you’re using terms I don’t understand. You need to bring me something that explains it.” That was how Zacharski opened the gate. “Gently, gently I got him into the relationship,” Zacharski explained. “He was a scientist. He wanted a sounding board. I played along.” For a while, Bell maintained the fiction that Zacharski was paying him to help POLAMCO sell tools. But soon Zacharski’s requests veered into classified territory and Bell didn’t flinch. Bell even upped the classification of some documents he gave Zacharski to make them appear more secret than they actually were.
Zacharski came to the United States with no knowledge of espionage. Intelligence Command had directed him to fish for minnows. In Bill Bell, he landed a whale. Zacharski started giving Bell thicker envelopes stuffed with dollars. “He hooked me, you’re damn right, he did,” Bell would admit.
Zacharski furnished Bell with a camera and special high-resolution film that simplified the process of photographing confidential documents. He also gave Bell concealment devices, including a tie rack and a large wooden chess piece that opened only if turned upside down for forty-five seconds and then gently tapped.
In Warsaw, Zacharski’s haul of classified material swamped Department I. In addition to early US stealth technology research, he obtained information on West Germany’s radar control system and the Patriot antimissile system; details of the Amram, Phoenix, and Hawk missiles; and classified material on the Apache attack helicopter. Zacharski stole the whole radar setup for the F-15 Eagle and the F-18 Hornet combat jets along with plans for a new radar used by the US Navy. When an experimental US aircraft crashed at the Nevada Test and Training Range, Zacharski got the report.
Zacharski provided his minders with the classified American analysis of the defection of Soviet fighter pilot Viktor Belenko, who flew his MiG-25 Foxbat to Japan in September 1976. “It was a helluva book, what he told the Americans,” Zacharski recounted. “They were drinking from a firehose.” He was given the proceedings to conferences held by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which managed cutting-edge weapons research. Zacharski handed over US plans to fly a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird along the East German border to wake up its radar and study the Warsaw Pact’s ability to recognize a threat. An official Polish accounting of the secrets Zacharski obtained went on for seven pages. A 1982 CIA report, declassified in 2006, said Zacharski and Bell passed to their handlers at least twenty secret reports on future US weapons systems. It estimated that Warsaw Pact forces saved hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development and “put in jeopardy existing weapons and advanced future weapons systems of the United States and its allies.”
US investigators in the 1980s believed that Zacharski’s espionage harvest was limited to information provided by Bell. It now appears that he had other contacts. Americans felt comfortable discussing sensitive programs with Zacharski. He attended classified briefings at Rockwell as it tooled up to resume producing the B-1 bomber. Polish Americans in the aeronautics business routinely shared details of their work with him. “When someone says, ‘This is top secret,’ they forget the human element,” Zacharski observed. “I had friends, and friends help friends.”
Zacharski’s requests for information from Bell were also suspiciously precise. Zacharski knew system designations and individual document numbers. When Bell asked him how he had found those, Zacharski just smiled. “Bell wasn’t the only show in town,” Zacharski said in 2018. “He wasn’t my only source.”
The idea that Zacharski had help elsewhere is further bolstered by a document from Poland’s Intelligence Command dated June 24, 1985. “Apart from Bell,” it reads, “Zacharski provided other information on the operational situation in California, on military plans and personal data which continue to be used for operational purposes.”
* * *
When Zacharski was ready to pass documents to the Polish government, he called the Polish consulate in Chicago and announced, “I suspect my daughter has pneumonia.” A courier was then dispatched to Los Angeles. After only one visit, the chief intelligence officer at the consulate, known as the rezydent, told Warsaw that he no longer wanted to go to L.A. He worried about being tracked by the FBI, especially because he was flying.
Zacharski began stuffing documents into suitcases and transporting them to Chicago himself. He had a decent cover: meetings at POLAMCO’s headquarters in Elk Grove Village. A frequent first-class flier on American Airlines, Zacharski lugged the suitcases directly on board.
Zacharski was juggling increasing responsibilities: the birth of his second daughter, Karolina, in Los Angeles, the need to service POLAMCO’s machine-tools throughout the American West, a demanding Bill Bell, and a confusing series of instructions from Intelligence Command in Warsaw. “There were moments when I was going completely crazy. We had two young children at home and I was managing a full-time job and full-time espionage,” Zacharski recalled.
In late 1978, Cross Creek’s owners announced that the apartment complex was converting to condominiums. Bill and Rita wanted to buy their place but they were strapped for cash. Zacharski stepped in. In February 1979, he handed Bell $12,000 in two envelopes. Bell used a portion of the money for a down payment and to pay his back taxes.
Bell took what was left and went on a spending spree. He swapped his medium-sized Chevrolet for a red Cadillac with a white vinyl top and sunroof. He began sporting a Panama hat and designer shades, à la Bell’s novelized character, Peter K. Peach. Zacharski worried that Bell’s showboating would raise eyebrows among the security officers at Hughes. He started giving Bell gold coins instead of cash to make it harder for Bell to burn a hole in his pocket.
Following direction from Warsaw, Zacharski suggested that Bell travel to Europe to meet directly with officers from Department I. In November 1979, Bell brought a suitcase full of documents to a park in Innsbruck, Austria. He was approached by a man who asked him, “Aren’t you a friend of Marian’s?” The man introduced himself as “Paul.” His real name was Anatoliusz Inowolski, a longtime Polish intelligence officer who’d served undercover at the Polish consulate in New York. Bell made two more trips to Austria and one to Geneva, passing reams of files to Paul and other handlers. Altogether, the Poles paid Bell more than $100,000 in cash and $60,000 in gold Krugerrands.
From 1978 into early 1980, Zacharski conducted espionage unmolested by any US law enforcement agency. He was good at it. He was also lucky. A close shave occurred one morning before dawn. Zacharski was driving to his office to photocopy a batch of Bell’s documents, when an LAPD officer pulled him over for speeding. The officer searched Zacharski’s car, overlooking two hundred pages of highly classified reports piled in the backseat.
In Poland, Zacharski’s documents revealed a vast knowledge gap between the Warsaw Pact and the United States. A Polish radar specialist spent three days studying one group of files and emerged to say that he couldn’t fathom the science. When Zacharski passed along US plans to use stealth technology to conceal US warships, one Polish official asked, “How can you hide a boat?” In his memoirs, Czeslaw Kiszczak, the former Polish minister of interior and spy chief, observed that “even our most outstanding scientists had no idea how to deal with the material supplied by Zacharski, not to mention how to put it to practical use.”
KGB experts on US technology traveled to Warsaw and had a better time analyzing Zacharski’s harvest. Yuri Andropov, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, personally thanked Kiszczak for Zacharski’s contributions to the defense of the Warsaw Pact. Still, to Zacharski and his Polish minders at Intelligence Command, the documents served as a wake-up call that they were on the wrong side of a race for military supremacy. As Zacharski put it: “It showed us that we had no chance to catch up.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE AMERICAN BEAR
Espionage is a two-way street, and the CIA had spent years penetrating the Polish government. Take the case of Polish army colonel (and CIA agent) Ryszard Kuklinski. Kuklinski worked in the heart of the Warsaw Pact’s military command. In the 1970s, Kuklinski passed the CIA thirty-five thousand pages of classified documents that revealed Moscow’s strategic plans for its use of nuclear weapons, details of its weapons systems and spy satellites, and the whereabouts of hidden antiaircraft installations and bunkers used by the Warsaw Pact’s command.
Horrified by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kuklinski volunteered to spy for the CIA. Kuklinski did so because he feared that the Soviet Union’s growing superiority in conventional weapons might tempt Moscow to invade Western Europe. The only effective way for NATO to counter such an assault, Kuklinski surmised, would be with nuclear weapons, which would turn his homeland into a nuclear wasteland. Kuklinski saw Poland as enslaved by the Soviet Union. His main handler at the CIA said Kuklinski never asked for money.
Kuklinski was the most important of the many Polish agents who worked for the United States. The CIA recruited a Polish spy who was the world’s greatest fencer. Another asset served as a triple agent for Poland, the Soviets, and the CIA. (Later in life, he claimed to be descended from the last Russian czar.) Another was a member of Poland’s secret police who was so notorious for torturing political prisoners that they nicknamed him “The Butcher.” Zacharski’s first office mate at Metalexport, Leszek Chróst, had been working for the CIA since 1964.
One CIA officer was at the center of an extraordinary number of Polish recruitment operations. Over the course of a thirty-five-year career, John Palevich managed eighteen agents and recruited even more, a remarkable juggling act in a profession where many successful CIA case officers never conscript a single spy.
Palevich’s grandparents were Polish, although when they immigrated to America at the end of the nineteenth century, Poland didn’t exist. One branch came from territory held by Prussia; another from a region that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like many Polish arrivals, they made their way to coal country in northeastern Pennsylvania. There, the men found employment in the mines.
At thirteen, Palevich’s father had already begun work as a “breaker boy,” picking slate out of the coal. He was prepared to follow his dad underground. But as phone ownership spread across the United States, a job as a lineman for AT&T kept him aboveground. He spent the rest of his life working for Ma Bell.
John’s mother also left school early, to labor in a silk mill. When his parents married, she became a housewife. The family moved to the central Pennsylvanian town of Bloomsburg, along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Born in 1934, John was the second of three brothers and a sister.
John’s elder brother, Edward, was a standout student, the first in his family to graduate from high school and go to college—on a scholarship to Princeton. John didn’t share Edward’s academic bent. He’d rather spelunk in the caves on the outskirts of town. In 1950, at sixteen, John tried to enlist in the US Army to fight in Korea—but he was too young and the army found him out. A year later, he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, joined a fraternity, and settled on geology as a major. After tangling with organic chemistry, the trenches of Korea began to look even more inviting. Dropping out of Penn State in his sophomore year, John enlisted, this time legally, in 1953.
John had his heart set on an armored division, even though he’d never gotten close enough to a tank to see whether his beefy six-one frame could squeeze into the hull. The army had other plans. After a battery of tests, the army sent John to its language school in Monterey, California. “Palevich, what type of name is that? Yugoslav?” asked an officer as Palevich stepped off the bus from the East Coast. “Polish,” Palevich replied. “We’ve got an opening in the Polish section,” the officer said.
Palevich studied Polish for a year. Only three out of ten students, including John, passed. The army assigned Palevich to the Army Security Agency, part of the growing national security architecture being built in the emerging Cold War.
“I didn’t know what intelligence operations were but they sounded pretty sexy,” he recalled. By the summer of 1954, John found himself detailed to a secret location in a small forest in West Berlin where he spent eight hours a day with a set of headphones listening to the chitchat of Polish pilots and tank operators.
John’s agency shared its intelligence with other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the world’s largest peacetime military alliance, which had been founded in 1949 and included the United States, Canada, and, initially, ten Western European nations. NATO faced off against the Warsaw Pact, which grouped the USSR with seven Eastern European Communist-run countries. Palevich served three years in Germany, returning to Penn State in early 1956.
Palevich left America a boy and returned a staff sergeant in the US Army. He withdrew from the fraternity, became an RA in a dorm, and switched his major from geology to political science with a Russia area specialization. He planned on a career as a diplomat.
After finishing midterms at the end of his first semester, Palevich was loafing around campus when a friend, the son of a German rocket scientist, offered to drive him down to Washington if he’d split gas money. His friend had an interview with the CIA. John was game. In DC, John accompanied his pal to the CIA personnel office located in a nondescript building on the Mall. An attendant handed Palevich a stack of forms. “As long as you’re here, you might as well apply,” the man suggested. Palevich got a job offer; his friend did not.
At Penn State, Palevich met a bright education major named Bonnie Jones and the pair began dating. John graduated in August 1958 and joined the agency the next month. He was soon sent to The Farm, the CIA’s training facility, in Williamsburg, Virginia. For Thanksgiving that year, Bonnie’s parents invited John to their home outside Baltimore. John had already told Bonnie he was going to be an intelligence officer. It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise. After dinner that night he asked her to marry him. They fixed a wedding date for the fall of 1959 after Bonnie was set to graduate.
John Palevich was an easy fit for the CIA. He already spoke Polish, which the US government considered a strategic language. He had a security clearance thanks to his military service. His political science degree meant that he could operate comfortably under State Department cover. In addition, John was a gentle giant. His nicknames were “Big John” and the “Bear.” (Well into his eighties, he maintained a collection of ursine knickknacks.) Graced with an avuncular personality, Palevich displayed the natural bonhomie that the CIA sought to instill in its case officers who were charged with recruiting spies. Early on, Palevich mastered the skill of talking engagingly without saying anything. He was, as he put it, chatty.
In 1961, the agency sent Palevich back to Berlin for his first overseas posting. He witnessed the East Germans building the Berlin Wall and the standoff between US and Russian tanks near the Brandenburg Gate. Bonnie gave birth to their first child, John, in 1962.
From Berlin, the Paleviches moved to Warsaw, where John worked undercover as a consular officer at the embassy. John, Bonnie, and son John lived in an apartment building with World War II bullet holes in its facade. In a report on Palevich, a Polish intelligence officer noted his Polish heritage and his improving Polish but appeared to have no inkling that he was a spy.
John and Bonnie hung out with Western reporters at the US embassy bar and played matchmaker between New York Times correspondent David Halberstam and his soon-to-be bride, Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska. “It was love at first sight,” Bonnie recalled. “But communication was challenging so John translated.” Warsaw social life was enlivened by visits from Hollywood stars Omar Sharif and Kirk Douglas and by Marlene Dietrich’s first concert east of the Iron Curtain. In 1964, Bonnie had a second child, Matthew.
Palevich’s next foreign posting took the family to Laos during the Vietnam War; he worked across the region cultivating Polish sources. Indochina was a rich hunting ground for the CIA. Polish military officers made up one-third of the International Control Commission set up in the 1950s to monitor the partition of Vietnam. The CIA recruited Polish army officers and trade officials, such as Marian Zacharski’s colleague Leszek Chróst, who became an American agent when he was stationed in Thailand. In some cases, the CIA would prepare what was known in the business as kompromat; they’d set up the men with prostitutes, photograph them in compromising situations, and use the threat of informing their wives to get the officers to spy for the United States. Palevich had little truck with that type of tradecraft. “If you blackmail your target, he’s going to spend most of his time thinking how to screw you rather than work for you,” Palevich said. “I always found it easier to become their friends.”
While the family was posted in Vientiane, Matthew fell ill. Bonnie took him to a US military hospital in the Philippines, where he was diagnosed with childhood leukemia. Despite treatment at the National Institutes of Health, Matthew didn’t make it past his sixth birthday. A hole opened up in the family.
Tragedy followed Palevich to his next posting in Athens. After a Christmas party in 1975, leftist gunmen murdered his boss, CIA station chief Richard Welch. In 1976, Palevich and the family returned to the United States for good. Bonnie needed to care for her aging mother. By that time, several writers had already identified Palevich as a CIA officer.
At Langley, John served in a few leadership positions but itched to get back into the game of recruiting spies. In a highly unusual move, the agency appointed Palevich special assistant to the chief of Soviet/Eastern European operations. He essentially became a freelancer, roaming the globe roping in Polish agents. The Bear referred to himself as a “paladin,” like the medieval French knights who served Charlemagne’s court. His colleagues called him “Mr. Poland.”
John was one of only two CIA officers to make “super grade,” a CIA rank equivalent to that of an army general, without having spent years as a manager. Palevich wasn’t interested in administration. “He didn’t like worrying about the Sams and Marys,” recalled Burton Gerber, a senior CIA officer who’d joined the agency around the same time as Palevich. “He liked being a case officer. And he made super grade anyway. The agency never had anyone like him.” John had his flamboyant side. He was proud of his “sweetheart,” a 1986 white Jaguar XJ6, the first one in the CIA’s parking lot. That sweetheart got him into a pickle in the early 1990s, when US authorities received a tip that a Jaguar-driving CIA officer was spying for the KGB. Palevich was investigated; the turncoat turned out to be Aldrich Ames, a former CIA counterintelligence officer who was sentenced to life in prison in 1994.
Dots on a map on the wall of John and Bonnie’s condo outside Seattle show the places where Palevich recruited agents: the Middle East, the Balkans, North America, Western Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa. He used seven different passports and seven different names. “You have these situations where our case officers could sense that maybe a guy was a good target but they didn’t have the self-confidence to reel him in, so they called me,” he said. Palevich became one of the best recruiters in the agency’s history. “I never had the bureaucracy,” John said, noting the reams of paperwork and questionnaires that can squeeze the life out of an ordinary spy. “I had the fun.”
There are as many clichés in espionage as there are spy movies. But one cliché that rang true to Palevich was the first lesson he learned at The Farm: “Never fall in love with your agent.” The idea behind it was that if you weren’t suspicious enough, you could be double-crossed. It also meant something else. In a life-and-death business where intelligence agencies on the Warsaw Pact side had no compunction about executing traitors, getting too close to an agent could be devastating if he or she were to be unmasked. To the Bear’s enduring relief, he never lost an agent. “If I had,” he said, “I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
Palevich had a great appreciation for Polish history and, partially due to his ethnic background, was deeply sympathetic to the Poles. He also respected the expertise of his Polish foes. “They were a good service,” he said. “They weren’t a bunch of goons like the KGB or the Bulgarians. Of course, they had baddies in internal security. But as far as foreign intelligence, their CIA types, I found them very, very decent.”
Palevich described his Polish agents as lovable. One senior Polish intelligence officer whom John had recruited checked himself out of a hospital in order to make a rendezvous with John. “Talk about dedication,” Palevich said.
Another Palevich recruit sympathetic to the United States was Jerzy Korycinski, a nondescript, balding man who favored Clark Kent glasses and skinny ties. Korycinski had joined Polish intelligence in the early 1960s, and from the outset his personnel file was riddled with lackluster reports. His evaluations were consistently negative and several times he almost lost his job.
When Korycinski was posted to the Polish consulate in Chicago from 1973 to 1975, he pulled a series of stunts that alarmed his bosses. He disappeared for days on end; he set his wife up with a job working for the state of Illinois; and he maintained contacts with US government officials that seemed, to his superiors, overly chummy. Plus, according to an evaluation from Intelligence Command, Korycinski basically refused to spy.
In 1975, Korycinski was recalled to Poland. Back in Warsaw, he was assigned to a team charged with analyzing the weapons industry and Western military technology just as Zacharski’s gusher began to swamp Department I. He shared an office with Zdzislaw Jakubczak, Zacharski’s handler.
Korycinski’s new boss in Warsaw tried to get him fired. “The complaints made to date against Jerzy Korycinski disqualify him as an intelligence officer and argue for his removal from the Center,” he wrote. His report was ignored. In 1979, Korycinski was sent to Stockholm. He had no more success there than elsewhere and would again vanish for days.
Palevich probably recruited Korycinski in Sweden if not earlier. In January 1980, Korycinski informed Palevich that a Polish spy was operating in Los Angeles. Three years later, Korycinski and his family would defect to the United States. In all, he’d out more than one hundred Polish officers and spies.
* * *
There were reasons why Polish officers were open to working for the United States. Something intangible drew Americans and Poles together. Things worked between the two cultures, a natural fellowship, an ease of understanding. “Ameryka” was a magic word, and world, to the Poles. There was also something else. During the Cold War, as Polish historian Przemyslaw Gasztold has noted, the “black-and-white” narrative of the CIA on one side of the Iron Curtain and the spy services of the Warsaw Pact on the other didn’t fit the complicated reality of the day. Even back then, between the American and Polish spy agencies, there was no shortage of contact and backdoor deals.
In the 1980s, for example, the CIA bought millions of dollars of Polish weapons from the state-run Polish arms dealer CENZIN and shipped them to the Nicaraguan “contras” and the Afghan mujahideen. So, while Poland’s political authorities feted Nicaragua’s leftist president Daniel Ortega during a May 1985 visit to Warsaw—and cheered the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan—American-backed rebels in both countries killed Communists with Polish-made guns. The CIA also purchased advanced Soviet weaponry from Polish intermediaries, allowing US weapons experts to devise countermeasures against the arsenal of Warsaw’s ostensible ally, the USSR. The CIA remembered its Polish partners; when two Polish arms dealers who’d done business with the agency in the 1980s were indicted in a US weapons smuggling case in 1993, the CIA persuaded the Justice Department to drop the charges against them.
The camaraderie between spies wasn’t confined to Polish defectors or collaborators. Competition between the intelligence services, although serious, was often oddly good-natured. Sometimes they even had each other’s backs. In November 1979, at the height of the American hostage crisis in Iran, Polish counterintelligence filmed a CIA officer retrieving a dead drop in a Warsaw park. The dead drop, a hollow rock, contained information on Poland’s air defense system. The officer was expelled but the Polish government didn’t publicize the case until January 1982, a year after Iran released the last of the fifty-two hostages. The Americans had requested the Poles not give Iran any additional fodder with which to attack the United States; the Poles complied.
Around the same time, an Athens-based Polish Intelligence officer, Waldemar Markiewicz, had a problem. He wanted to know whether he should take seriously a death threat he’d received from a man who carried a Jordanian passport. Markiewicz asked Warsaw for guidance but no one replied to his urgent request. Desperate, Markiewicz approached a Polish American CIA officer named Ksawery Wyrozemski, who because of his almost unpronounceable name was universally known as “Ski.” Ski ran the Jordanian’s name by Langley and learned that he was, in fact, a major financier of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
“The opportunity of being shot is not an everyday occurrence,” Markiewicz noted. “Ski did his best to make sure I understood the risks.” Even in the spy-v.-spy days in the systemic battle between Communism and capitalism, “we had a feeling,” Markiewicz recalled, “that we could count on the Americans.” Added Ski, “We just couldn’t see the Poles as the bad guys.”
In early 1980, Palevich passed Korycinski’s tip that the Poles had a spy in Los Angeles to the FBI. The bureau had been blind to the presence of a Polish businessman at the heart of the aeronautics industry in Southern California. After searching for several months, the CIA found Zacharski in April and began surveillance. Two months later, FBI agents started tailing Bill Bell.
Zacharski notified Warsaw on May 4 that he was being followed. He responded to the surveillance in a manner that worried Department I. In Poland, he’d been taught to lose a tail. Instead, Zacharski confronted the G-men who were doing the tailing. Zacharski motioned over an FBI agent in an L.A. mall to tell him he wasn’t doing a very good job. He boasted to another FBI agent, “I could leave this country in a matter of hours and you people would never know it.” On November 10, 1980, at the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City, he approached FBI agent Don Ligon.
“I guess you fellows will be at my daughter’s birthday party next week,” Zacharski said.
“Yes,” Ligon said. “We’ll get her a present.”
“What kind of present?” Zacharski asked.
“I don’t know,” Ligon said; “we don’t make too much money.” They ended up bringing miniature American flags to Malgosia’s party at a local Burger King. Zacharski gave the agents mechanical pencils from POLAMCO in return.
“I know you guys take a tremendous amount of notes,” he quipped.
Zacharski complained to the FBI that an agent had been following too close in his car. “If I brake suddenly, he’s going to rear-end me and my daughter could be in the back seat,” Zacharski griped. “Take him off me and I promise I’ll be less difficult.” The agent was removed.
Department I wasn’t pleased with Zacharski’s gall. His minders worried that he was cracking under the pressure of FBI surveillance. During one of Bell’s trips to Europe, his Polish handler suggested that Bell stop contacting Zacharski and communicate directly with Warsaw via the rezydent in Chicago. Bell wasn’t interested; Zacharski was his friend. In early 1981, Department I considered ordering Zacharski’s ministry to pull him out of Los Angeles. All the while, more American documents wended their way to Warsaw.
Under the noses of a bevy of FBI agents, Bell took three of his four trips to Europe. Zacharski continued to bring suitcases stuffed with classified material out of L.A. The FBI had Zacharski under surveillance for more than 250 days and, throughout, Zacharski passed classified information to Poland’s Intelligence Command.
Arriving on one trip to Chicago with two suitcases of classified files, Zacharski found the rezydent so spooked about handling the goods that he refused to touch the bags until they were safely inside the consulate, a four-story brownstone on North Lake Shore Drive. Zacharski even surprised Jakubczak in Warsaw, bringing a load direct to Poland. Jakubczak told Zacharski off for having the nerve to travel to Poland without informing him beforehand. Zacharski blew up and threatened to take the files back to the United States.
“My bosses are idiots,” Zacharski griped in his memoirs. “I’m disgusted with these talentless, vulgar drunks.” Zacharski, a newbie to the espionage game, thought he knew the business better than the pros.
Copyright © 2021 by John Pomfret
