There was a reason for this deliberate and strict secrecy: The embarrassment Goleniewski’s defection caused to the intelligence operations of the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB), Poland’s secret police agency, as well as to those of Soviet Bloc espionage agencies with which it worked, was devastating. No report was published in Poland’s state-controlled media, and there is no evidence that the CIA, or any other Western intelligence service, was even aware it had taken place. The court proceedings that day were terse and to the point - the entire hearing was concluded well before the day’s end - and took place entirely behind closed doors. Among the most important spies he exposed were George Blake, Moscow’s man inside Britain’s MI6 West Germany’s head of counter-intelligence and a Swedish Air Force colonel who had sold U.S. for several weeks, which might have been a factor in his defection.Īfter he dropped his cover and defected to the United States in January 1961, he went on to provide yet more vital intelligence secrets - ultimately identifying more than 1,600 Soviet bloc agents spying in the West. Polish intelligence and the KGB in Moscow had harbored suspicions that Goleniewski had been working covertly for the U.S. Using the codename “Sniper,” he had sent hundreds of pages of Moscow’s military and espionage secrets to the West. The defendant was not present in the dock, to be photographed and filmed making a damning confession of his crimes even had he not, by April that year, been beyond the immediate reach of Poland’s government or military, there was never any likelihood that he would have been publicly arraigned.įor almost three years, Goleniewski had been the West’s most important spy, working undercover inside Communist intelligence services in Poland and the Soviet Union.