From Warsaw with Love: Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance

This work, by a veteran U.S. foreign correspondent who spent four years in Poland, gives readers his own “hidden history” of Poland's role in ending the Cold War. Here, John Pomfret's work is similar to Seth Jones’ A Covert Action, reviewed in this journal in 2021. Both deal with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's “behind the scenes” activities on behalf of Poland's successful liberation from Soviet domination in 1989.However, From Warsaw With Love is much more than that!Indeed, the author goes much further in offering a detailed discussion of a series of instances where Polish intelligence operatives worked closely with the CIA—not only in the 1980s but into the first decade of the twenty-first century. He provides readers with a series of intriguing spy stories where Poles and Americans worked together in the interests of their two countries. And he backs up what he writes with his interviews of seventeen members of Polish intelligence departments, a comparable number of CIA personnel, and more than a dozen top level Polish and American government officials—people he names (pp. 271–272).But there is even more to Love. The author goes out of his way to show his admiration for Poland and his appreciation of the values shared by Americans and Poles, values that go back to the time of Tadeusz Kościuszko and America's war for independence. His words about Poland's history, sprinkled throughout the work, are well informed and they have a sincere ring. So is his appreciation of the importance of Poland's entry into the NATO alliance, something he shows was not easily achieved (pp. 164–169, 190). Along the way, Pomfret acknowledges the role played by Polish Americans in helping bring Poland into the Alliance.But Pomfret's principal focus goes beyond his telling the story of the recognition by a small but not insubstantial number of Polish intelligence agents that their country's submission to the Soviet Union threatened its national security, even its survival. As a result, some of them came to work closely with CIA personnel. And their varied activities, he implies, helped bring down the Polish communist regime.In celebrating their patriotic services, Pomfret comes down hard in criticizing those nationalist Poles whose virulent hatred of communism prevented them from recognizing their work once they came to power after 1989, first in 1992, then in 2005 and again after 2015. But he levels even sharper criticism of those U.S. officials who, he believes, took undue advantage of post-1989 Poland's commitment to the United States, first by pressuring Warsaw into joining the American-led invasion of Iraq and dividing the “old” and “new” Europe’ within NATO, then by ignoring the Poles’ sensible advice in how to deal with Iraq after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and last by pressuring the Polish government to imprison Muslim terrorists in Poland—a source of immense embarrassment when it was exposed. Here he compares Poland's relationship with the United States as “being married to a Hippo” (p. 235).Pomfret is sympathetic towards Polish government leaders who for varying reasons were interested in working with the U.S., such as Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the clever post-communist party leader who became President of Poland, and Radek Sikorski, an anti-communist who served in a number of high offices after 1989, including as his country's foreign minister. He is most critical of former Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz (pp. 160–162, 226–227). On the U.S. side, it is former Vice President Richard Cheney who gets the greatest attention for his wrongheaded triumphalism in refusing to listen to Poles who called for a more conciliatory policy towards Hussein's Baathist party following the U.S.-led military victory over Iraq (p. 218). He also questions former President Donald Trump for his anti-NATO rhetoric. (Pomfret also expressed appreciation of his decision to deploy 11,000 U.S. soldiers in Poland in 2020.)In sum, this is a provocative book that may displease, even anger. But in offering his straightforward argument about the realities of intelligence and espionage in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, the author takes readers far beyond the fiction of Ian Fleming's James Bond.