Oleg Penkovskiy. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. 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. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. I could not believe what was happening. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. The President of the Court declared Greville Wynne, aged 44, would serve three years in prison and five in a labour camp. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. 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. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. These events serve as the inspiration for The Courier, the new film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wynne and Georgian actor Merab Ninidze as Penkovsky, out in theaters on March 19. 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. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. You have the wrong number, he was told. Confess again! the general roared. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. 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. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. The two then visited the White House where President John F. Kennedy personally thanked them for their servicethen the two returned to the U.K. just 18 hours later. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. Bokhan froze. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. 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. 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. 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. Would she ever live in the West? He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. 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. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a British-looking man who was eating something. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. 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. 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. The coded exchange triggered a meeting that night with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser, who cabled headquarters in Langley that BLIZZARD was in trouble. His spying career was the subject of episode 1 of the 2007 BBC Television docudrama Nuclear Secrets, titled "The Spy from Moscow" in which he was portrayed by Mark Bonnar. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. 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. 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. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. In the Jack Ryan universe, he is described as the agent who recruited Colonel Mikhail Filitov as a CIA agent (code-name CARDINAL) and had urged Filitov to betray him to solidify his position as the West's top spy in the Soviet hierarchy. 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 if he returned home, he could be shot. 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. No question.". This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . In 1944, he was assigned to the headquarters of Colonel-General Sergei Varentsov, commander of artillery on the 1st Ukrainian front, who became his patron. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was selected for the post of military attach in India, but the KGB had uncovered the story of his father's death, and he was suspended, investigated, and assigned in November 1960 to the State Committee for Science and Technology. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. 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. I always thought there was another one, he told me. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. Omissions? Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. 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 was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. Your Privacy Rights The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. That happened several times.. [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'". These things have to be run to ground.. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. We had neighbors that were very close. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. 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. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. 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. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . 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. Advertising Notice For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. 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. 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. Among the explanations are a desire for money or fame, a ruinous case of alcoholism, or perhaps even psychological scars left by his time in Soviet prison or the shame he felt for publicly turning against British intelligence during the trial. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife [10], The Soviet leadership began the deployment of nuclear missiles, in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. Cookie Policy The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. 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. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and asked Wynne for his help. 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. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. His work . A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. 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. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. 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.'. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. They were convicted of espionage. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . 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. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. 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. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed.If it wasnt Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise, Wiser said. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine [17] A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies, Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit and in Viktor Suvorov's book Aquarium. 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. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. 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. Her eyes were empty. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. 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. 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. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . 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. 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. 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. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. Privacy Statement Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . There were embraces, and everyone cried. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. troops.[15]. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. 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 would not say why. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. | READ MORE. 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. 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. 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. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. His fear mounted. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. 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. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. 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. 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. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. 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. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed.
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