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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. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. 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. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. 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. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. He was the real deal. 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. After many years, I understood him. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. 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 had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Corrections? 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. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. 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. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. 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. 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. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Oleg Penkovsky, then a colonel in Russia's military intelligence service known as the GRU, had already passed along intelligence about the shoot-down of American satellite planes in Soviet territory and information on his own GRU graduating class. Meticulously documenting the wealth of information that Penkovsky provided, Schecter and Deriabin conclusively refute one of the enduring myths of the Cold War - that Oleg Penkovsky was a KGB plant. Cookie Policy He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. Terms of Use I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. 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. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. 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. I could not believe what was happening. 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. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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.. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. A colonel in Soviet military intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, was working for them as an agent-in-place, photographing thousands of top-secret documents with a miniature camera, and delivering the. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. 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. The CIA delayed in contacting him. 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. Toasty. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. You have the wrong number, he was told. [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. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. 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. Housing in Moscow was nearly impossible to find, even for a KGB officer, but sometime that May, hed received a seemingly miraculous letter from his father. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. 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. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. Privacy Statement The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. No products in the cart. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. 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. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. 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. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. In the midst of the Cold War, a top-ranking Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky feared that the risk of nuclear war was too great, and decided to share some of the most closely held secrets of the Soviet arsenal with the West. Bokhan froze. 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. The career of Oleg Penkovsky reads like a story by John le Carre. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. Janie and We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Impossible. 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. 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. 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 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. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. 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. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. For his treason, Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad days after the trial ended (though Wynne would later claim he died of suicide). His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Arrested? The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. 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. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. In 1988, he took a Moscow river cruise and met a blond, blue-eyed and very beautiful woman named Svetlana, who worked for an automotive magazine. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. You are wondering about the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter but currently there is no answer, so let kienthuctudonghoa.com summarize and list the top articles with the question. 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. 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. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. 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. 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 unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. 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 Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. 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. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. He was free. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. | READ MORE. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. 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. His work . 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. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." 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. Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel of the USSR Central Intelligence Agency, a distinguished officer in the Second World War, who has a close relationship with many high-ranking military personnel, is also USA and Great Britain was a spy working for the intelligence agency. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. 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. 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. He was arrested on October 22nd. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. By 1993 their marriage was over. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. [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. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. He started having trouble breathing. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. 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. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. 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. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. [8] The KGB defector Vladimir N. Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying: "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganisation precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. It was scary.. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). They were convicted of espionage. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. 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. 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. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire.