INTRODUCTION
One afternoon in late October 1990, on a dusty stretch of highway in the mountains of northern Iraq, a Polish intelligence officer pulled four bottles of Johnnie Walker Red out of his satchel and passed them to six new friends—from the United States.
Drink, came the command.
Although they hadn’t had a bite to eat all day, the Americans—two US Army officers, three intelligence agency cryptanalysts, and a CIA station chief—obeyed, sipping and sloshing the fiery brew. The booze, along with six pairs of cheap khaki overalls and six fake passports, were meant to camouflage the Americans as drunken Poles on their way home from construction jobs in the Middle East. The alcohol had little effect. Stone-cold sober and clammy with sweat, the six officers approached the border between Iraq and Turkey at dusk.
The whiskey-soaked escapade capped one of the most remarkable clandestine operations of the Persian Gulf War—a mission of such significance that it opened the floodgates for an alliance between Washington and Warsaw and joint intelligence operations that would span the globe.
The twisted roots of this union stretch back to the dissolution of the USSR, when foe became friend; before that to the Cold War, when Polish spies infiltrated America and stole US secrets; and deeper still into the rubble of World War II, when America tossed Poland to the Russians in exchange for Josef Stalin’s promise to level Soviet firepower at Japan. This unlikely alliance culminated when Poland led the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO in 1999—a geostrategic earthquake that obliterated the boundaries of a divided Europe. The alliance with Poland didn’t stop there; it continues to this day.
From Warsaw with Love reminds us how far allies go for America. They risk the lives of their operatives, their soldiers, and those of innocents, too. They bend morality. They break the law. All for the chance to be America’s friend. For those friends, Uncle Sam provides security, counsel, technology, and an enormous market. But this account also warns of an America that can lead its allies down the garden path, leaving professed partners belittled and betrayed.
As Polish politician and journalist Radoslaw Sikorski has observed, an alliance with the United States is like marrying a hippo. At first, it’s warm and cuddly. Then the hippo turns, crushes you, and doesn’t even notice.
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, urban legend has it that 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.
Copyright © 2021 by John Pomfret
