In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. 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. In one of his biggest whoppers, Wynne explains that he and Penkovsky took a trip together in a private military jet from the U.K. to Washington, D.C. 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. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. His fear mounted. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. 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. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. 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. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. 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. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. 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. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. 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. 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. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? The career of Oleg Penkovsky reads like a story by John le Carre. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. 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. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Maybe a fifth. 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. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. He was the real deal. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. 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 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. He had lost a lot of weight. 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. 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. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. 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. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 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. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. Impossible. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. 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. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. In Wright's view, the failure of British intelligence leaders to listen to him caused them to become paralysed when such agents defected to the Soviet Union; in his book, Spycatcher, he suggests that his hypothesis had to be true, and that the Soviets were aware of this paralysis and planted Penkovsky. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. They were convicted of espionage. 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. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. 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. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. 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 time it's a true story:Wynne served as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spyOleg Penkovsky atthe height of the Cold War. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. After a West German agent overheard a remark at Stasi headquarters, paraphrased as "I wonder how things are going in Cuba" he passed it on to the CIA. He works as a computer programmer. [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. 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]. 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. 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. But it was only a matter of time. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. 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. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. I could not believe what was happening. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. Director Cooke says Donovan is a composite character representing several real-life people, includingJanet Chisholmthewife of a Moscow-based British visa officer whoalso served as a conduit for information passed to the West by Penkovsky. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. 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. They flew to New York and, with help from the CIA and the FBI, were reunited with Sergei at a motel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". 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). Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. The Cuban Missile Crisis. sports injuries prezi. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. Cookie Policy But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. You have the wrong number, he was told. 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. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. 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. 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. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. 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. Between April 1961 and August 1962 Penkovsky passed more than 5,000 photographs of classified military, political, and economic documents to British and U.S. intelligence forces. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. I always thought there was another one, he told me. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. 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. 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. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. 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. 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. 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. This was prior to President Kennedy's address to the US revealing that U-2 spy plane photographs had confirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were installing medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, in what was known as Operation Anadyr. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. He has two daughters. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. 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. Everyone avoided me. [11] Former GRU captain Viktor Suvorov, who defected to the UK in 1978, later wrote in his book on Soviet intelligence, "historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Oleg Penkovsky Born: April 23, 1919 Birthplace: Vladikavkaz, Russia Death: May 16, 1963, Moscow, USSR (executed by Soviet Union) Jessie Buckley Born: December 28, 1989 Birthplace: Killarney, Ireland Sheila Wynne Keir Hills Andrew Wynne Angus Wright Born: November 11, 1964 Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA Sir Arthur Temple 'Dickie' Franks Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. No question.". His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. [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. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. 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. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. 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 . Oleg Gordievsky. He drove around Athens in his BMW for close to an hour to make certain he wasnt being followed, then walked into a 100-foot pedestrian tunnel under a highway. 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.. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. 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.