And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . By 1960 he had become a colonel in the GRU and deputy chief of the foreign section of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research (196062), in which post his task was to collect scientific and technical intelligence on the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. That happened several times.. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. At the time, they were largely accepted at face value and sold well. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. 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. Greville Wynne, a British spy who told in his celebrated memoirs how he pried loose some of Moscow's best-kept secrets and who served 18 months in a Soviet prison for But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Peter Wright, a former British MI5 officer known for his scathing condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence during most of the Cold War, believed that Penkovsky was a fake defection. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Kremlin's emplacement of missiles in Cuba. The operation was the most productive classic clandestine operation ever conducted by the CIA or MI6 against the Soviet target, as Schecter and Deriabin put it, and key to its success was the mustachioed courier with no prior intelligence experience. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. He had lost a lot of weight. troops.[15]. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. On October 29 of that year, just hours after the Soviets stood down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne went to Soviet-occupied Budapest with a traveling exhibition of British industrial goods, against the advice of his MI6 handlers. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. "He started as a nave amateur. For several years, they'd noticed Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a war hero and high-ranking official in the Soviet intelligence services, making overtures to Western diplomats and even tourists; the. In April 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGBdangles, in intelligence parlance. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. This explosive book records the secret life and adventures of the greatest spy of our time - Oleg Penkovskiy - and reads with the excitement of the greatest of suspense novels. 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. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynnewrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandizingbooks, "The Man From Moscow" (1967) and "The Man From Odessa" (1981). On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. The documents provided by Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. By 1993 their marriage was over. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. [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. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. Omissions? He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Athens, May 21, 1985: After the Tuesday-morning staff meeting at the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind to talk to his boss, the local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. His fear mounted. Murder by Cremation. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. Penkovsky never knew his father, who was killed fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War when he was a baby. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. 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. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . Both he and the Soviet leader. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. When he began spying for the Russians almost a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIAs Soviet counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would be of incalculable value to the KGB. Arrested? 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. Mr. Wint: Very moving. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . 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. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. A colonel in Soviet military intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, was working for them as an agent-in-place, photographing thousands of top-secret documents with a miniature camera, and delivering the. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. 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. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. He had been drugged. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. 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. Penkovsky felt stunted in his career with GRU and expected that by helping the West for a year or two, he and his family could be relocated and build a better life, and that he would personally be showered with recognition and honor. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. 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. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. He just was an ordinary man who got thrust into this just extraordinary, life-altering situation that was going to define his existence forever, says OConnor. They urged him to go to Moscow, but they also provided him with an escape plan in case he signaled that he was in danger. Penkovsky was referred to in four of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan espionage novels: The Hunt for Red October (1984), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), The Bear and the Dragon (2000) and Red Rabbit (2002). The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. 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. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. Within two weeks after his flight to the United States, he had a new name, a fake background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta. 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 . 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. His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was Mole. Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 yearsand feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. 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. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. 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 . | READ MORE. In 1988, he took a Moscow river cruise and met a blond, blue-eyed and very beautiful woman named Svetlana, who worked for an automotive magazine. If it should turn out that the mole is no longer alive, the intelligence agencies would still run a damage assessment to try to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara, Turkey, but was recalled after he had reported his superior officer, and later other GRU personnel for a breach of regulations, which made him unpopular in the department. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Afterward, we drove to a home in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe, Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a restaurant tucked away on a side street in Washington. 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. In his autobiography, Wynne says that he was carefully developed by British intelligence over many years with the specific task of making contact with Penkovsky.[5]. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. 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. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. Maybe a fifth. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Penkovsky was the highest-ranking Soviet official to provide intelligence for the West up until that time, and is one of several individuals credited with altering the course of the Cold War. Joe said to his people, Keep the watch, I want to give it to his son. At a reception after the church ceremony, Joe gave Andrei the watch. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. Advertising Notice Your Privacy Rights Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. 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. Her eyes were empty. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. In the late 1960s, after he had been imprisoned for his spycraft and could no longer assist MI6 nor the CIA, the amateur spy authored a pair of books: The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky and The Man From Odessa, that were riddled with falsehoods. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. 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. There were embraces, and everyone cried. He started having trouble breathing. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Macintyre writes in the book. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. Theres a fair amount of source material from all different kinds of authors, so by reading everybodynot just Wynnes books, but other historians, and the official history put out by the American side and the Soviet side I was able to try and work out what made the most sense and what seemed liked disinformation, says OConnor. I had no job. But Ames always insisted to the FBI, the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee that he revealed no significant sources before his meeting at Chadwicks. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. A member of the Communist Party, he took part in the invasion of Finland and by the end of the Second World War had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Advertising Notice 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. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. [Wynne], bless him, for all his wonderful work, was a menace and a fabricator, says Nigel West, who has written numerous books on British and American intelligence organizations, including two books specifically about fabricators in the intelligence arena. 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. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. We had neighbors that were very close. 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. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. West maintains that its the result of something all too typical in the intelligence communitywhat he calls post-usefulness syndrome., Imagine that I recruit you and I tell you that whatever you report to me, within an hour, it will be on the presidents desk. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife I always thought there was another one, he told me. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. A somewhat baroque means of murder, the killer shuts their victim in a coffin (knocking them out first is optional) and feeds the coffin into a crematorium oven. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, to help build . And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. Your Privacy Rights During the 1960s, a corrosive mole hunt led by James J. Angleton, the CIAs counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at the Soviet Union, and disrupted the lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired or sidetracked in their careers. He was arrested on October 22nd. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone avoided me. Terms of Use Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. Wynne was arrested and jailed as a spy The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. They worked hard, shadowing British diplomats, to build up a "discovery case" against Penkovsky so that they could arrest him without throwing suspicion on their own moles. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. President John Kennedy read it and understood. Wynne went along, slightly concerned about whether Penkovsky was on the level and concerned about putting himself into a dangerous situation, kicking off what would be one of the most productive clandestine operations in Cold War history. 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. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. These things have to be run to ground.. After months of interrogation at Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told his captors he wouldnt answer any more questions unless they told him who his father worked for. Cookie Policy After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. In extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked about his nine years of spying for Moscowincluding the day when he turned over, in his words, the identities of virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. But it was only a matter of time. 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. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. Kent. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. It was scary.. 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.
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