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As the United States cobbles together a coalition to undo Saddam Hussein鈥檚 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鈥檇 battled the West for decades to rescue the six Americans. John Pomfret鈥檚 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 鈥渙ne of the two foremost intelligence relationships that the United States has ever had,鈥� and one that paved the way for NATO鈥檚 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鈥攐ne 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 鈥淐hinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China鈥� (1996). His book, 鈥淭he Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present鈥� (2016) was awarded the 2017 Arthur Ross Award by the Council on Foreign Relations. His new book, 鈥淔rom Warsaw With Love: Polish Spies, the CIA and the Making of an Unlikely Alliance鈥� was published in October 2021.

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