Former CIA agent was watched by Polish secret service in Cold War: report

On Tuesday, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) published on its website a list of papers from its archives, including documents on Burggraf, which had until 2016 been marked as classified.

Burggraf was a contact for Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish military officer famous for passing top-secret documents to the CIA for ten years from 1971, according to niezalezna.pl.

But the IPN’s Sławomir Cenckiewicz said that the communist-era counterintelligence operation to watch Burggraf did not establish a link between her and Kukliński. Cenckiewicz added that he has seen only “a thousandth” of the released documents.

According to niezalezna.pl, surveillance of Burggraf was coordinated by Colonel Gromosław Czempiński, who it said was a former secret service officer.

Czempiński, who started working as an intelligence officer in 1972, told niezalezna.pl in 2009 that he helped to set up the Civic Platform (PO) party, which co-governed Poland from 2007 to 2015.

On Tuesday, the IPN published a list of more than 6,000 documents from its archives which had until 2016 been marked as classified. Among the documents were papers on Kukliński and "illegals", secret service officers who used aliases during the Cold War.

Kukliński, considered by some a national hero, was last October posthumously promoted to the rank of brigadier general.

He passed top-secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA between 1971 and 1981, including plans for a military onslaught on the West and for the imposition of martial law in Poland to crush the Solidarity movement.

Shortly after the declaration of martial law in December 1981, Kukliński was extracted from Poland by the CIA, along with his family.

In 1984, a military court in Warsaw sentenced him to death in absentia. The sentence was annulled after the fall of communism in 1989. (vb/pk)