American Craftsman 70 Series Installation, Curious George Charkie, Electric Motor Brake Adjustment, Slovenian Rice Sausage, Grants For Raising Bison, Articles W

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. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. 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. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. Cookie Policy [10], The Soviet leadership began the deployment of nuclear missiles, in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . 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. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. After many years, I understood him. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. You, in your own mind, have developed this sense of self-importance, says West. For the following 18 months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to the CIAMI6 team of handlers, including documents demonstrating that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than Nikita Khrushchev claimed or the CIA had thought and that the Soviets were not yet capable of producing a large number of ICBMs. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. 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 Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. 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. But it was only a matter of time. 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. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. He would not say why. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . 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 . It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. Terms of Use In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Bokhan froze. He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a British-looking man who was eating something. 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. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. He did so, but nothing happened. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. 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. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. 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. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. He was arrested on October 22nd. "(Chisholm)played a very important role in the story that we couldn't get into, because it's a whole other movie," Cooke says. 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. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. (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. 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). 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. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. 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. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Impossible. 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. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. It was the signal to launch his escape. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. Your Privacy Rights | READ MORE. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. 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.. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. Everyone avoided me. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. 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. 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. [8] The KGB defector Vladimir N. Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying: "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganisation precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. He had lost a lot of weight. Oleg Penkovskiy. His work . But if he returned home, he could be shot. 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. What happened to wife of Oleg Penkovsky? A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. [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. Faced with these unexplained losses, the CIA in October 1986 set up a small, highly secret mole-hunting unit to uncover the cause of this disaster. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. I had no job. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. "He started as a nave amateur. There were embraces, and everyone cried. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. Privacy Statement The information he provided on the Soviets . He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. Penkovsky's story is a tragic and revealing one, and it is regrettable that with it all he did not tell us more of what he could tell best, the story of his own life and of the lives of his close associates.-GEORGE A . David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. 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]. They made an odd contrastthe short, energetic, and thinly mustachioed Wynne alongside the military bearing of Penkovskybut there seemed to be genuine affection between the two, and this friendship is a central focus of The Courier. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. 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. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. Considerado como el doble agente ms valioso que tuvo Occidente durante la Guerra Fra, Penkovsky ofreci informacin que le dio al gobierno de Kennedy una ventaja clave durante la Crisis de . (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. [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. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia.