Polish Communist Spies, the CIA, and the Road to NATO Expansion with John Pomfret

As the United States cobbles together a coalition to undo Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, six US officers are trapped in Iraq with intelligence that could ruin Operation Desert Storm if it is obtained by the brutal Iraqi dictator. Desperate, the CIA asks Poland, a longtime Cold War foe famed for its excellent spies, for help. Just months after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Solidarity government in Warsaw sends a veteran ex-Communist spy who’d battled the West for decades to rescue the six Americans. John Pomfret’s gripping account of the 1990 cliffhanger in Iraq is just the beginning of the tale about intelligence cooperation between Poland and the United States, cooperation that one CIA director would later describe as “one of the two foremost intelligence relationships that the United States has ever had,” and one that paved the way for NATO’s eastward expansion.

Raised in New York City and educated at Stanford and Nanjing universities, John Pomfret is an award-winning journalist and writer who worked with the Washington Post for decades. Pomfret was a foreign correspondent for 20 years and spent eight years covering big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka and Iraq. Pomfret spent seven years covering China—one in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests and then from 1997 until the end of 2003 as the bureau chief for the Washington Post in Beijing. Pomfret is the author of the best-selling “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” (1996). His book, “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present” (2016) was awarded the 2017 Arthur Ross Award by the Council on Foreign Relations. His new book, “From Warsaw With Love: Polish Spies, the CIA and the Making of an Unlikely Alliance” was published in October 2021.

RSVP HERE