Polish colonel Ryszard Kukliński passed 40,000 pages to the CIA, was sentenced to death in absentia, and lost both sons within months in 1994

Ryszard Kukliński was a colonel on the Polish General Staff. On 18 August 1972 he met the Americans in The Hague and began working for the CIA under the code name "Jack Strong." He passed about 40,000 pages on Poland, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. On the night of 7 to 8 November 1981 CIA officers took him, his wife and their two sons out of Poland. In 1984 the Military Court in Warsaw sentenced him to death in absentia. In 1994 both sons died, months apart. The younger, a professional diver, disappeared from a boat off Florida during a storm, and his body was never found. The other died in a road accident about six months later. Kukliński said he did not want to suggest the KGB was responsible but that there were "so many unanswered questions." In Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski and other former generals called him a deserter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski called him "Poland's first NATO soldier." The death sentence was lifted after the fall of communism, and prosecutors dropped all charges. He died of a stroke in a Tampa hospital on 11 February 2004, aged 73. On 19 June 2004 his urn was placed in the Avenue of Honour at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. In 2016 President Andrzej Duda promoted him posthumously to brigadier general.