VZWOLVERINE was from an aristocratic family in Kraków, one of the
At a second boozy lunch at the fabulously expensive seafood restaurant La Rossetta in the shadow of the Pantheon, VZWOLVERINE brought a list of influential Polish families who would, with careful encouragement, provide information on Polish Communist Party leadership, Soviet intelligence activity in Poland, and Warsaw Pact military readiness levels. Putting down his lobster claw, Gale Stack took the paper with a butter-slick thumb, put it into his coat pocket, and told Witold he’d “run traces” on the names. Stifling his ready temper, VZWOLVERINE told Stack that he wanted to talk to someone else in his organization. Alarm bell. Bad idea to let another Station officer get his nose under the tent to see how Stack was expensing meals off this case, never mind letting this wannabe freedom fighter complain about his handling officer.
Stack the next day told the branch Chief that VZWOLVERINE was a bitter émigré with no access to intel, and that he was recommending that Station cut the asset with a $1,000 termination bonus (he’d give the young man $500 and keep the rest as pocket money) and stop wasting time. The branch Chief wearily said okay, but something made him change his mind, and he told Stack, instead, to turn over the case to another officer, that maybe changing the chemistry would help. Alarm bell. An experienced Station officer would see the real story and report back. Then Stack remembered that new kid Forsyth in the next cubicle. He wouldn’t know the ropes yet; he’d be perfect. How about it? asked Stack. Easy case to cut his teeth on, push the asset to develop access, nice and slow. The branch Chief shrugged and said to go ahead.
That was the start of the WOLVERINE network. After a bibulous turnover meeting, Tom Forsyth and his new agent Witold Zawadzki warily began to feel each other out: Witold saw that his new rookie case officer was honest, energetic, and driven to be successful; Forsyth saw that the impatient young Pole’s fierce commitment needed to be controlled. Nothing would be accomplished by running suicide missions. VZWOLVERINE’s return forays to Poland started slowly—covered as commercial buying trips for an Italian design company—letting the SB, the
After two trips, VZWOLVERINE recruited a childhood friend, now a Polish Army captain, who was encrypted VZWOLVERINE/2. Family friends, VZWOLVERINE/3 and /4, a comely former art student, now special assistant in the party secretariat, and a police sergeant respectively, were acquired in the next six months. Witold’s next recruitment was VZWOLVERINE/5, his cousin, who was coincidentally a communicator in the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, who processed KGB message traffic between Warsaw and Moscow. The intelligence streams started slowly. Reports were collected from those subagents by WOLVERINE/1 (as principal agent) and brought to Forsyth in Rome.
Rome Station management sat up and started taking notice, then Headquarters followed. The reporting from the WOLVERINEs was superb, including photography of classified Warsaw Pact and Soviet Red Army documents never seen before. Counterintelligence analysts looked at the take with a skeptical eye: too-good-to-be-true intelligence always aroused suspicions, but the reports were corroborated and they kept coming. Forsyth had to continually rein in Witold, to tell him to slow down, to balance production against risk. In his continuing effort to protect his WOLVERINEs, Forsyth trained Witold in clandestine photography, impersonal communications, secret writing, and advanced intel reporting, who in turn trained his network members inside Poland.
