His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. The President of the Court declared Greville Wynne, aged 44, would serve three years in prison and five in a labour camp. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. Confess again! the general roared. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. Posted on . The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. According to an official Soviet announcement, he was executed on May 16, 1963, though other reports have him committing suicide while in a Soviet camp. 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. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. You have the wrong number, he was told. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. 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. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. 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. Minutes passed. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. 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. 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.'. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. 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 was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. 41 ratings1 review. 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. After many years, I understood him. Penkovsky approached American students on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package in which he offered to spy for the United States. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. I always thought there was another one, he told me. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Penkovsky gave a huge amount of details about what missiles the Soviets had, how old they were, how there were queues for foodit was an extremely vivid portrait of the country and the people within intelligence, says Duns. No question.". [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. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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. 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. He was free. 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 was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. 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. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". 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 Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. 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. Seeking ways to parlay the notoriety he received, he became what Duns calls a rent-a-spokesperson for all kinds of espionage stuff, making appearances in the media about anything related to spycraft, whether or not it was anything he had experience with. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. 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. 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. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. No products in the cart. 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. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Maybe a fifth. 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. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). 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. 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. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. 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.. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. 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. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. Alex Palmer American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. The CIA delayed in contacting him. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. We had neighbors that were very close. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. 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. It was the signal to launch his escape. He just couldnt tell the truth. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. 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. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. 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. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. 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. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky (Russian: ; 23 April 1919 16 May 1963), codenamed HERO,[1] was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. 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. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. Her eyes were empty. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lore and popular culture tout Col. Oleg Penkovsky as "the spy who saved the world" during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. 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. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. At 4PM on the afternoon of July 19, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky dressed in a thin green sweater, faded green corduroy trousers and old brown shoes clothes he'd selected from the back of the wardrobe. 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. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. But over the course of their two-year friendship, Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne clandestinely smuggled 5000 top-secret documents from Russia to England and the United States. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. The information he provided on the Soviets . In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. 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. Oleg Gordievsky. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. 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. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. [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 did so, but nothing happened. 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. Murder by Cremation. 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. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time.
Signs Wife Is Cheating With Co Worker,
Who Is Darlie Routier Married To Now,
Articles W