He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. Only a few days earlier he had called his brother-in-law in Kiev, where Alex was studying, and been assured his son was doing well. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. Advertising Notice In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Oleg Gordievsky. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed.If it wasnt Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise, Wiser said. In his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he wrapped up five to seven pounds of secret documents and walked out of the building. Cookie Settings, FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, John Hallisey / FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, 5,000-Year-Old Tavern With Food Still Inside Discovered in Iraq, The Surprisingly Scientific Roots of Monkey Bars. In May 1963, after his trial, Izvestya reported that Varentsov, who had since achieved the rank of Chief Marshal of Artillery and Commander in Chief of Rocket Forces and candidate member of the Central Committee had been demoted to the rank of Major General. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. He is the author of The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York. That Friday, Gordievsky received a cable ordering him to report to Moscow urgently to confirm his promotion and meet with the KGBs two highest officials. It also helped Americans to understand how limited the Soviets capabilities actually were in the area, so as tensions grew during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy knew how much rope he could give [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev, as Duns puts it. In 1965 his journal, The Penkovskiy Papers, was published in the United States, though the books authenticity has been questioned by some. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, we believed it was important for us to consider the strong possibility that Gordievsky was compromised by someone within the U.S. intelligence community., Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken about the dateAmes has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a pop-up dummy in his cars passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". Penkovskys dynamism and enthusiasm, his wide-ranging and passionate denunciations of the Soviet system and its leaders illustrated with anecdotes, fascinated and captivated the American and British teams, write Schecter and Deriabin. "He started as a nave amateur. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky born 23 April 1919 died 16 May 1963, USSR codenamed HERO, was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late . I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, (born April 23, 1919, Vladikavkaz, Russiadied May 1963?, U.S.S.R.), senior Soviet military intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for the United Kingdom and the United States. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. Oleg Penkovsky, aged 44. a scientific worker, told the court that he had passed the information through the child to Mrs. Janet ** Anna " Chisholm, wife of Mr. Roderick Chisholm, who worked at the British embassy from May, I960, to August last year. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. The coded exchange triggered a meeting that night with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser, who cabled headquarters in Langley that BLIZZARD was in trouble. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. The domestic impact of foreign clandestine operations: the CIA and academic institutions, the media and religious institutions, Appendix B", The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963, "Nonfiction Book Review: The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War by Jerrold L. Schecter, Author, Peter S. Deriabin, With Scribner Book Company ISBN 978-0-684-19068-6", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oleg_Penkovsky&oldid=1136437646, Soviet people executed for spying for the United States, Russian people executed by the Soviet Union, Executed people from North OssetiaAlania, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2022, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. Wynne agreed, and during his visit to Moscow the following month he wound up connecting with Oleg Penkovsky, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Unions foreign-intelligence agency) who was eager to leak high-level military information to Western powers. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. After months of negotiations, the British government was eventually able to arrange a trade of Wynne for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, whod been arrested the year before and was serving a 25-year sentence in England. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. In all, Penkovsky had provided Western intelligence with about 140 hours of interviews and 111 exposed rolls of film, contributing to some 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. It doesnt matter, he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: S milym rai i v shalashe. If you love somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. U.S. counterintelligence agents have established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. And their actions were directly responsible for the hotline that now exists between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. Wynne and Penkovsky were both arrested by the KGB in November 1962, when some of the information their endeavours produced was of assistance to the West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. He works as a computer programmer. Gordievsky never took a penny from MI6 until after he had defected to the U.K. His actions were motivated by a hatred of the tyranny of the Soviet system, and the degraded condition in which it. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. [17] A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies, Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit and in Viktor Suvorov's book Aquarium. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. That raised a possibility that remains, even today, a subject of deep concern among counterintelligence agents, a problem privately acknowledged but little discussed publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed by a mole inside U.S. intelligence whose identity is still unknown. During their visits, Penkovsky and Wynne would get out on the town, visiting restaurants, nightclubs and shops under the cover of talking business, with each man proudly showing the other around his home country. I had no job. He stayed in safe houses in Virginia at first, then lived half a year in California to learn English, moved back East and consulted for the CIA and some U.S. companies. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. Oleg Penkovskiy. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. Terms of Use [9] While the weight of opinion seems to be that Penkovsky was genuine, the debate underscores the difficulty faced by all intelligence agencies of determining information offered from the enemy. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. A KGB general told him he had confessed. He had been drugged. In a Moscow park, Penkovsky also passed packets of sweets (with camera film hidden inside) to the wife of a British MI6 officer while she was pushing her children in a pram. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. After the initial meeting in December 1960, Penkovsky provided Wynne with film of Soviet military documents and later promised more information if an arrangement with British or American intelligence could be made. In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass, Wright says: When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later Chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me: 'You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's [knighthoods] and Gongs [medals] riding high on the back of Penkovsky' he said, referring to the honours heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation. Thus began their fruitful relationship, one that involved Wynne hosting Penkovsky in London, who was visiting under the pretense of cultivate new opportunities in the West. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIAit would have put her in mortal dangerbut now he had to say something. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. They were convicted of espionage. According to an official Soviet announcement, he was executed on May 16, 1963, though other reports have him committing suicide while in a Soviet camp. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. | His spying career was the subject of episode 1 of the 2007 BBC Television docudrama Nuclear Secrets, titled "The Spy from Moscow" in which he was portrayed by Mark Bonnar. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. Meticulously documenting the wealth of information that Penkovsky provided, Schecter and Deriabin conclusively refute one of the enduring myths of the Cold War - that Oleg Penkovsky was a KGB plant. This photograph was taken in the hotel room at the Mount Royal in London in April 1961, after one of our meetings, where Oleg Penkovsky on the left and yours truly on the right enjoying a small glass of wine. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. They had to go through a show trial, basically, so on the stand Wynne accused MI6 of using him as a dupehe may have just been saying whatever he could say because he worried they might execute him, says Jeremy Duns, an author of several spy novels set during the Cold War as well as the history book Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation. Penkovsky approached American students on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package in which he offered to spy for the United States. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Would she ever live in the West? The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. We had neighbors that were very close. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. But this Land Rovers driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicles doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. He had lost a lot of weight. Wynne was a middle-classBritish businessman whose frequenttravelto Eastern Europe attracted recruitmentby MI-6 to serve as a liaison to high-ranking Soviet official Penkovsky. He tried again, following the fallback plan, and this time a man carrying a dark-green bag from Harrods, the upscale London department store, walked by eating a candy bar. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. Menu. Even though Wynne wasnt exactly a reliable narrator for what he did during his time as a secret agent, the materials he smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain were the real thing. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. After many years, I understood him. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. Penkovsky was in fact arrested by the Soviets on Oct. 22, 1962, at the height of that crisis, after they realized that highly classified information was leaking to the West. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. He was flown to Moscow, imprisoned, and tried alongside Penkovsky, who it would later be learned had been arrested the week before Wynne entered Hungary. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. Corrections? He would not say why. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985before Ames insists he handed over the documents. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories, This page was last edited on 30 January 2023, at 08:39. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: Im quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April 85, until June 13th.. It said Bokhans son, Alex, 18, was having trouble in military school and suggested the deputy take his vacation now, three months early, and return to the Soviet Union to deal with him. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. Top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Penkovsky was a British agent, but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . Housing in Moscow was nearly impossible to find, even for a KGB officer, but sometime that May, hed received a seemingly miraculous letter from his father. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. [14] That information might have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of the island, which could have risked Soviet use of 9K52 Luna-M-class tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. Finally, in 1991, with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities let Alla and her daughter leave. The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. Three other officers were also disciplined. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. "And Greville played a big part in that.". Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. Cookie Policy (1) BBC Broadcast (11th May, 1963) A British businessman accused of spying for the West has been sentenced to eight years' detention by a Moscow tribunal. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Even the official accounts put out by American and Russian authorities regarding the Penkovsky affair include disinformation and spin that he, or any historian, has to navigate through. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). troops.[15]. Some of it just didnt add up, he says. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac.
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