The Polish-born Col Ryszard Kuklinski, who spied for Washington for years during the Cold War before defecting with his family, has died in the US of a stroke. He was 74.
As a senior Polish military staff officer, Kuklinski passed some 35,000 top-secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA between 1972 and 1981 before moving to the West.
"He was a tragic figure. On the one hand, he was a Polish soldier, on the other an American spy," said Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity leader and Poland's president after 1989. "He did great things, risked his head when few of us would dare," Mr Walesa said.
When it appeared Kuklinski was in danger of being uncovered as a spy, the CIA pulled him and his family out of Poland and brought them to the US.
The CIA Director, George Tenet, praised him as "a true hero" who helped his homeland and other countries.
"This passionate and courageous man helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious information upon which so many critical national security decisions rested," he said.
A court sentenced Kuklinski to death in 1984 for passing intelligence to the US, including the authorities' plans to impose martial law in 1981 to crush Solidarity.
Poland overthrew communism in 1989, but his sentence was lifted only in 1995 and he was not rehabilitated fully until 1997.
Kuklinski visited Poland in 1998 and received a hero's welcome from the right-wing government, which said that thanks to people like him the country had regained independence after five decades of Soviet-imposed governments.
A controversial figure, some Poles felt Kuklinski had betrayed his country, and his press agent said the colonel hoped a recently published biography, A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser, would earn him respect at home.
A former CIA analyst, James Simon, who knew Kuklinski said he had volunteered to spy for the US. "A lot of people who do these things do them because they are mad at somebody. He wasn't," he said. "He just seriously believed his country would never be free unless the West triumphed."
Kuklinski joined the Polish army in 1947 soon after the Soviet Union imposed communism in Poland after the second World War and rose rapidly. He was appalled when the Polish army helped crush the Prague Spring in 1968 and when Polish soldiers were ordered to shoot at protesting shipyard workers in the city of Gdansk in 1970.
Kuklinski is survived by his wife. His two sons died while he was living in hiding in the US under an assumed name.
Ryszard Kuklinski: born 1929; died February 11th, 2004