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his father’s greeting was merely a friendly gesture to a fellow tourist. Kuklinski said he had told his son that he was going shopping for Hanka, and had given him ten guilders for sodas and candy. Bogdan would be fine for several hours. They had agreed to meet later in the park, but if Kuklinski was not there, Bogdan was to return to the boat without him. Kuklinski would arrive later.
     
    Kuklinski, who was still chain-smoking and coughing occasionally, seemed more relaxed than he had been the previous evening. Lang placed on the table a Philips cassette tape recorder, which had a small detachable microphone.
     
    “I live in Warsaw,” Kuklinski began, “on Jana Olbrachta Street, Number 19A, Apt. 55.” It was a block inhabited only by military people and their families. His building was nine stories tall; the surrounding complexes had only four. Kuklinski lived on the sixth floor, which was served by two elevators. He said his immediate neighbor was an Olympic fencing star, Egon Franke, who now worked as a coach at a sports club. Franke’s apartment was the only one with a wall that directly abutted his. Kuklinski said he was unaware of the names of his other neighbors on his floor.
     
    “I occupy three rooms with a kitchen,” Kuklinski said. “There is only one entrance to my apartment. There are three windows with a big balcony which look out on a residential quarter.”
     
    The street was guarded by uniformed militiamen on motorcycles or in radio-equipped cars, especially after dark. “Generally speaking, I work after hours,” he said. He often arrived home as late as eleven o’clock and sometimes later.
     
    “Sometimes, when my car is not operating or I want to save money on gasoline, I use my boss’s official car, a Fiat, which he often leaves after working hours,” Kuklinski said. “If I am alone, the driver takes me on my own route home. If there are several of us, we decide who will be dropped off first.”
     
    Kuklinski said that he liked to socialize with other officers in the General Staff’s yacht club, called Atol, on Wisniowa Street. He was vice president of the club. He enjoyed sailing with his family and tried to set aside weekends for his wife Hanka, Bogdan, and his other son, Waldemar, who was nineteen.
     
    Kuklinski said Hanka worked as a bookkeeper in a lathe factory, and together they earned enough “for a modest living.” He had borrowed to buy a garage for their car and was paying for car repairs after two accidents. The boys needed clothes and school supplies. Waldemar was constantly buying books and had an extensive collection.
     
    Lang was impressed at Kuklinski’s mastery of detail. At times during the meeting, and in a third session held a few days later in Ostend, Kuklinski grabbed the microphone of the recorder and paced around the room. At one point, he delivered a forty-five-minute exposition on his military education, his past and current assignments, and his access to secret documents, gesticulating as if he were addressing a staff meeting. Kuklinski had “apparent total command of subject,” Lang and Henry later wrote, and an “outstanding ability [to] organize and articulate material.”
     
    Kuklinski said he had joined the General Staff in 1963 and now worked in the operations directorate, which was a kind of nerve center for the Defense Ministry. He described his six-month stint in Vietnam, where he had gotten a close look at American troops. In 1969 he was the chief author of a signals exercise for Polish, East German, Czech, and Soviet troops. To prepare for this exercise, he had traveled to Moscow, where he worked closely with Warsaw Pact commanders. He was well-regarded and was assigned to write all of Poland’s military training exercises. He was the chief author of exercises called “Summer 70,” “Summer 71,” and “Spring 69,” each of which required collaborating with twenty to forty Warsaw Pact officers.
     
    Kuklinski had written the