![]() “The CIA is gobsmacked by the quality and importance of his material, as is MI5,” Tate says. “He names and identifies some of the most devastating Soviet bloc spies who have been betraying British American and Nato secrets to Moscow for more than a decade, and only Goleniewski’s information enables them to be caught and the haemorrhaging of the west’s most vital secrets to be stopped.”Īfter Goleniewski defected at the US embassy in West Berlin, he was exfiltrated to the US, where he spent most of the next three years being debriefed. He exposed, in Britain, George Blake – the KGB’s man inside MI6 – and the Portland spy ring, a group of Soviet spies who were sending Admiralty secrets, such as details of the UK’s Polaris nuclear submarines, to the KGB. “The CIA intercepts it and then deceives him for the next three years.” “He says: I’ll give you all of this information but I’m only going to deal with the FBI because every other American intelligence agency and government department, I know, has been penetrated by Soviet bloc intelligence.” His material was initially hidden from the FBI by the CIA. Goleniewski’s main condition was that he would only deal with the FBI. And that he needed, as a Polish intelligence officer working simultaneously for the KGB, to do everything he could to counter it, and to start working for the west and democracy.” “He said later he had this Damascene conversion, this revelatory experience where he realised that the communist system was wrong. Unlike most defectors to the west, who primarily wanted a better life outside the Soviet Union, Goleniewski was ideologically motivated, Tate says. “What he sends is unprecedented, both in quality and in quantity, and he sends it monthly.” He was already spying on Polish intelligence for the KGB when, in April 1958, he also decided to start sending KGB and Polish intelligence material and Soviet military information anonymously to the FBI. ![]() “His extraordinary contribution to western national security has been largely airbrushed from history,” Tate says.Ī former Nazi collaborator, Goleniewski rose to become a high-ranking counterintelligence officer for the Polish intelligence service after the second world war. “The agency’s files – and Goleniewski’s own previously unpublished letters and affidavits – reveal how the CIA and the US state department betrayed Goleniewski, reneged on his contract, harassed, smeared and attempted to discredit him and, ultimately, pushed his already fragile mind into full-blown madness.”Īs a result, he says, Goleniewski is primarily known as the man who falsely claimed to be Alexei Romanov, heir apparent to the last Tsar of Russia. During his research, he used freedom of information requests to obtain the CIA’s files on Goleniewski, many of which had never been made public before. “The CIA was primarily responsible for driving its best ever and most effective spy insane,” says Tate. Photograph: Goleniewski's Polish Intelligence files courtesy Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw Michal Goleniewski in his Queens apartment, New York City, 1964.
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