“Jack Strong” (2014)

Work

The film was written and directed by Władysław Pasikowski, with cinematography by Magdalena Górka and editing by Jarosław Kamiński. It opened in cinemas on 7 February 2014.¹

The film was produced by Scorpio Studio and co-produced by ITI Cinema and Orange, with co-financing from the Polish Film Institute. According to the distributor, the screenplay drew on previously unknown material from the IPN archives, CIA operational documents and witness accounts, including that of David Forden, the CIA officer who handled Kukliński.⁴

Culture.pl describes the film not as a biography of the colonel or a portrait of the era, but as a thriller built on suspense.¹

The real case

According to the IPN, Ryszard Kukliński was born on 30 June 1930 in Warsaw, became a colonel in 1972 and in spring 1981 led the team planning the introduction of martial law. His first meeting with the Americans took place on 18 August 1972 in The Hague, during a voyage by Polish officers on the yacht “Legia”; he went on to work with the CIA under the codename “Jack Strong” and passed on some 40,000 pages of documents on the Polish People’s Republic, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.²

Grzegorz Majchrzak of the IPN’s Historical Research Office writes that in 1981 counterintelligence learned that the Americans knew the latest martial-law plans, including the outline of General Florian Siwicki’s address to the National Defence Committee (KOK) on 13 September 1981. This narrowed the circle of suspects to a handful of people.⁵

On the night of 7–8 November 1981 CIA officers exfiltrated Kukliński from Poland together with his wife and two sons.^2,5

The sentence and its quashing

On 23 May 1984 a military court in Warsaw sentenced Kukliński to death in absentia. Majchrzak points out that there was no material evidence of guilt, and in its reasoning the court admitted it had not established when the defendant first contacted US intelligence.⁵

In March 1990 the death sentence was commuted under an amnesty to 25 years’ imprisonment. In 1995 the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court quashed the verdict, and in September 1997 the case was discontinued on the grounds that Kukliński had acted out of necessity.^2,5

Kukliński died on 11 February 2004 in Tampa, Florida. The urn with his ashes was laid to rest on 19 June 2004 in the Avenue of the Meritorious at Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.²

What is accurate

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesPatryk Pleskot, an IPN historian, told PAP after a screening that the thriller simplifies history but most probably does not distort it: there are many inaccuracies, but they do not falsify the overall picture, and the film’s version of events is a reasonable interpretation that does not contradict current knowledge.³

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAris Pappas, a former CIA officer who saw the film before its release together with David Forden, judged that it realistically portrays Kukliński’s actions and motives, while stressing that it is a feature film, not a documentary.⁶

What was added or changed

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAs an example of an inaccuracy Pleskot cited the car chase through Warsaw during the 1981 escape – there was no such chase. According to the IPN, Kukliński and his family were evacuated by CIA officers.^2,3

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesSpeaking at the Łódź Film School, the director said that Kukliński was a staff planner, not a spy, and had no training for undercover work. The chase sequence took four days to shoot.⁷

What remains unclear

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesPleskot stressed that much about the Kukliński case remains unexplained, because a large part of the American records is still classified.³

The IPN’s English-language text gives the period in which documents were passed on as 1971–1981, although it dates the first meeting with the Americans to August 1972; in 1984 the court did not establish when the contacts began.^2,5