On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. 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. 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 CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Wynne also enthusiastically embraced his role, enjoying the part of a daring secret agent where he could apply his salesman skills to a higher-stakes game. 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. While its standard for Hollywood films to take liberties with the facts, insert composite characters, devise imagined conversations, and smooth-out timelines to ensure a brisk pace, its less common for a based-on-a-true-story movie to have to be more truthful than the source material. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Impossible. Confess again! the general roared. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". 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. 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. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. 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. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. 445 & 35. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. He works as a computer programmer. | Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. troops.[15]. | READ MORE. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. 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. 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.. 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. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. Advertising Notice The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. Thus began their fruitful relationship, one that involved Wynne hosting Penkovsky in London, who was visiting under the pretense of cultivate new opportunities in the West. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. 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. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. 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. He had lost a lot of weight. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. 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. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . 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. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. "He started as a nave amateur. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. 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. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. 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.. 3.80. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. No question.". 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. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. 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. They know.. 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 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. It was pathological with him.. 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. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a pop-up dummy in his cars passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis was high-stakes brinkmanship played out between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, bringing Washington and Moscow to the precipice of nuclear war in October 1962. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. [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. During their visits, Penkovsky and Wynne would get out on the town, visiting restaurants, nightclubs and shops under the cover of talking business, with each man proudly showing the other around his home country. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Arrested? The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. Three other officers were also disciplined. 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. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. He just couldnt tell the truth. 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. Omissions? 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. Dun s denouement is both startling and convincing a fitting climax to this irresistible real life thriller Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday 'This excellent book contains lessons that are still valid in the 21st century' --Oleg Gordievsky, Literary Review 'This excellent book contains lessons that are still valid in the 21st . After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. The information he provided on the Soviets . Oleg Gordievsky and Leila Alieva met in Copenhagen: she was a typist for the World Health Organization; he was an unhappily married KGB officer, and a spy for MI6. 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. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. 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 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. 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. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. But if he returned home, he could be shot. Her eyes were empty. He started having trouble breathing. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. 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 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. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . 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. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. 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. 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. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. After many years, I understood him. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . 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. 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. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. From a Moscow railroad station, he made his way by train, bus and taxi to a point near the Finnish-Soviet border, where he hid in some grass by the roadside until two cars stopped. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child.