Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. 41 ratings1 review. 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 November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. sports injuries prezi. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Mr. Wint: Very moving. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. 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. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". 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. 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. Confess again! the general roared. 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. 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. 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. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. Terms of Use 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. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado The CIA delayed in contacting him. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. 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. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. 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. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." 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. Advertising Notice In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. 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 it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. 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. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. 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. 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. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. Privacy Statement On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. 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. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. Alex Palmer He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. He was the real deal. 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. We had neighbors that were very close. Privacy Statement Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. They were convicted of espionage. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. 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. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. 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. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. No products in the cart. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). He was like a walking dead man. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. Would she ever live in the West? Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. 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. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. After some months, she was released. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . 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. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. 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. 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. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. 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. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". No, he was told, theyre here for you.. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Toasty. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. 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. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. 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. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. Corrections? He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 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. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. | READ MORE. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. 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. 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. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. Maybe a fifth. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . 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. [16] The noted Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny said that he had been told by the director of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium "how Penkovsky [had been] executed by 'fire'". Penkovsky's father might have fled to the West rather than have died of typhus as Penkovsky had previously reported, the KGB prohibited Penkovsky from assuming his post in New Delhi but permitted him to remain in the GRU after his mother submitted a statement detailing her family's ignorance of her husband's fate.28 The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting up with Janet Chisholm, a British MI6 agent stationed in Moscow. 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. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. 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. Gordievsky's Wife was not with him live Former Colonel of the First Central Board of the KGB of the USSR, recruited in the mid-80s the CIA and worked for British intelligence, abroad called the largest Soviet "mole" after Penkovsky. 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. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Kent. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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 handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. "And Greville played a big part in that.". There were embraces, and everyone cried. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. troops.[15]. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. 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 British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. Minutes passed. 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. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. His work . Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. He has two daughters. 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. Oleg Penkovskiy. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife 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. 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. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. He had lost a lot of weight. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. The operation was the most productive classic clandestine operation ever conducted by the CIA or MI6 against the Soviet target, as Schecter and Deriabin put it, and key to its success was the mustachioed courier with no prior intelligence experience. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. 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. 3.80. 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. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. 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). Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. 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.
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