CIA handler saw himself as a Cold War peacekeeper
David Forden, an American intelligence officer who helped a highly placed Polish colonel deliver vital secrets for eight years during the Cold War, including advance warnings that may have helped prevent a Soviet invasion of Poland, died Tuesday in Alexandria, Va.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Sara Gay Forden said. He was 88.
Forden was a Polish-speaking former Warsaw station chief for the CIA who had returned to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia when, from 1973 to 1981, he oversaw the flow of Warsaw Pact military secrets conveyed by Ryszard Kuklinski, a colonel on the Polish army’s general staff and a liaison with Moscow.
Kuklinski gave Washington a heads-up that the Soviets were poised to invade Poland, as they had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, if the Poles failed to squelch growing dissent.
In December 1981, Kuklinski warned the U.S. that the Polish government was about to impose martial law to crush Solidarity, a grassroots dissident movement. The warning enabled Washington to better assess the implications of military manoeuvres in and around Poland.
“Thanks to Kuklinski, we had the information and insight to know the difference between military exercises and warfaring escalation,” Forden said last year in a statement prepared for a memorial in Poland for Kuklinski, who died in 2004.
Forden, who was chief of the SovietEastern European division at Langley, met Kuklinski when the officer left Poland for summer sailing missions that were disguised as vacations (his code name was Gull) in Northern Europe.
Forden and Kuklinski also conducted a personal correspondence to maintain the colonel’s morale during his solo mission behind the Iron Curtain.
Once the Poles suspected a leak, the colonel was smuggled out of Warsaw in late 1981 with his family and given a new identity in the United States. He later retired to Florida, where he and Forden became neighbours, and died in Tampa at 73.
Kuklinski always viewed himself as a peacekeeper and not as a spy, and saw his mission as a patriotic payback to the Soviets for subjugating Poland.
Forden went to Infantry Officer Candidate School, worked in Germany as a junior case officer and was assigned to undercover work in Buenos Aires. He accepted the post of station chief in Warsaw in 1964. There, he became famous within the agency for perfecting an automobile version of the pedestrian brush pass — the clandestine method of slipping secrets from one person to another on foot as they go around a corner to evade surveillance.
Forden was on assignment in Mexico City in June 1973 when he was dispatched to Hamburg, Germany, to meet Kuklinski. The colonel had made contact with the Americans the previous August through a handwritten letter in broken English to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn; convinced of his bona fides, the agency had reached for a trusted Polish-speaking officer, Forden.