There were embraces, and everyone cried. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. Menu. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. 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. 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. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. What happened to wife of Oleg Penkovsky? 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. He would not say why. 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. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. 3.80. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. 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. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". Either one of ours or theirs., When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, David Wise British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . 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. Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and petty theft. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. 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. Three other officers were also disciplined. Alexander Zagvozdin, chief KGB interrogator for the investigation, stated that Penkovsky had been "questioned perhaps a hundred times" and that he had been shot and cremated. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Kennedy was deprived of information from a potentially important intelligence agent, such as reporting that Khrushchev was already looking for ways to defuse the situation, which might have lessened the tension during the ensuing 13-day stand-off. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. But over time, intelligence experts and those involved in the case, though reluctant to share sensitive information, cast doubt on much of what Wynne laid out in his books. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. Wynne was a British businessman who, from 1960 and 1962, smuggled thousands of pieces of intel out of Russia before he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured for two years by the KGB. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. 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. Maybe a fifth. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. "His clothes were sort of shrink-wrapped around this skeleton," says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and physically preparing to portray Wynne's final months of ordeal. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. 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. 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. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. JB: The first meeting with Oleg Penkovsky was about seven p.m. April twenty first 1961 and he was told what room to go to at the Mount Royal Hotel in London and thanks to my MI6 friends, they permitted me, since he first wanted to meet the Americans, to be the one to answer the door and meet him. OConnor makes clear that The Courier is not a documentary, even as he explains that he took pains to stick to the facts as much as they could be ascertaineddrawing on works such as Jerrold L. Shecter and Peter S. Deriabins The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War and other accounts that could be trusted more than Wynnes own inventions. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. The daughter of a Russian mother . Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. 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. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. 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. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. Alex Palmer Toasty. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. 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. In October 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were on the brink of nuclear war after Soviet nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. 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. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. 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. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Minutes passed. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . 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. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Her eyes were empty. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. 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. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . 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. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, Here is something from Leo. By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. An industrial sales consultant who regularly traveled through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union representing British electrical and steel companies, Wynne was told it would be helpful if on his next trip, he could arrange for a meeting with a state committee in Moscow dedicated to developing opportunities with foreigners in science and technology, and report back on his conversations. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. Cookie Settings, Liam Daniel, Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, 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. 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 . answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. I had no job. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for bringing outlandish, extraordinary characters, from Marvel's "Dr. 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. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Privacy Statement 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. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. 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 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. After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. Oleg Gordievsky. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London. As important as Popov was to the United States and the West, it was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, another Soviet GRU officer, who has earned the sobriquet, the "spy who saved the world.'. The Cuban Missile Crisis. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . The stories of Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Bokhan and Leonid Poleshchukreported here in extensive new detail and based on interviews with Gordievsky, Bokhan and Andrei Poleshchuk, as well as former FBI and CIA officialssuggest the damage a mole can do. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. Your Privacy Rights It was pathological with him.. 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. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldnt put our finger on., And Bearden says, I remain convinced there is a fourth man. 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. 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. Corrections? 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. [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. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. [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. Both he and the Soviet leader. 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. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. 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. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. Kent. 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. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Wright noted that, unlike Igor Gouzenko and other earlier defectors, Penkovsky did not reveal the names of any Soviet agents in the West but only provided organisational detail, much of which was known already. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. 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. The Soviet public was first told of Penkovsky's arrest more than seven weeks later, when Pravda named Wynne and Jacobs[clarification needed] as his contacts, without naming anyone else. Upon release from prison, Wynnes old life was in tattershed lost much of his business and the time spent in the Soviet prison seemed to have caused long-term damage. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. "And Greville played a big part in that.". But it was only a matter of time. 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. We had neighbors that were very close. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. 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. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. Wynne would later relate that as he walked down the steps of an exhibition pavilion, four men suddenly appeared as a car pulled up and Wynne was pushed inside. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. Advertising Notice 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). Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. 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. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. You have the wrong number, he was told. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. 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. troops.[15]. 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.. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. 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 joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. 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
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