This documentary tells the remarkable Cold War spy story of Army Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski. In his service on the Polish General Staff, Kuklinski saw that the Warsaw Pact’s war plans for an invasion of Western Europe would inevitably lead to the nuclear obliteration of Poland. To avoid that horror, he passed on the Warsaw Pact war plans to the West so NATO could strengthen its stance and thereby deter the invasion by making it a less attractive option for the Soviets.
Kuklinshi passed over 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA – the largest act of espionage in world history. After the screening, Director Dariusz Jabloński said that Kuklinski considered himself a Polish soldier doing his duty, not a spy for the West.
Kuklinski died just before he could be interviewed for this documentary. However, Jabloński did secure interviews with the senior commanders of the Soviet and Polish militaries, former Polish heads of state, CIA officers and Kuklinski’s widow, as well as screen shots from Warsaw Pact war simulations. At 110 minutes, it’s a little long, but the story is compelling.
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