Ryszard Kukliński, the former Polish army colonel sentenced to death in absentia in 1984 for treason and desertion, said recently in the Washington Post that his activities were directed at the Soviet Union's illegal occupation of Poland.

"I don't regard myself as an American spy, but as a Polish patriot who can't understand why the sentence passed by the communists is still in force," he said. After August 1980, Kukliński informed the United States of plans to impose martial law. The Americans helped him leave Poland when suspicions grew in Warsaw and Moscow that information was being leaked to the CIA. In a conversation with a Washington Post journalist, Kukliński revealed he had been voluntarily passing top-secret information about the Warsaw Pact's military plans as early as 1971. The Americans received 35,000 pages of documents from Kukliński, including Soviet war plans for Europe and the Warsaw Pact's strategic plans.