The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

as the Radio Warsaw broadcasts over the next several days made clear, there never had been a WiN—at least not in recent memory. In actual fact, the Polish resistance group had been eliminated as a fighting force some five years earlier, its few remaining members reduced to fugitives hiding out in the forests. As for Stefan Sieńko, the WiN commander who in 1948 had put the word out to the West that the insurgency was alive and well, he had been an agent of Polish intelligence from the beginning, as were the WiN “volunteers” lamenting their past criminality on Radio Warsaw. This meant that all the airdrops into Poland that Michael Burke had approved over the past two years, all the volunteer commandos with all the weapons and the gold and the eavesdropping equipment that had accompanied them, had floated directly down into a trap, their arrival on the ground met by teams of KGB officers and Polish security forces.