The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. A KGB general told him he had confessed. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. 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 year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. 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. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. Confess again! the general roared. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. Toasty. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. He had been drugged. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. Omissions? 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. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. His work . But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . I always thought there was another one, he told me. Three other officers were also disciplined. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine The KGB men searched the apartment all night. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . 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.. 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. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. Oleg Penkovskiy. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. It was scary.. No products in the cart. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. Advertising Notice Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. 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. After some months, she was released. By 1993 their marriage was over. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. 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. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. He was arrested on October 22nd. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. The documents provided by Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba. 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. 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. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. 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. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . 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 Upon release from prison, Wynnes old life was in tattershed lost much of his business and the time spent in the Soviet prison seemed to have caused long-term damage. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. At the time, they were largely accepted at face value and sold well. 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. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. troops.[15]. Maybe a fifth. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. 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. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. 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. Your Privacy Rights On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. | READ MORE. 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. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. It was the signal to launch his escape. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. 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. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. 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. 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. 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. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. Bokhan froze. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. You have the wrong number, he was told. 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. 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. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. Menu. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. 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. We had neighbors that were very close. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories, This page was last edited on 30 January 2023, at 08:39. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. 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. 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. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' After many years, I understood him. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. Murder by Cremation. He is the author of The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York. Both he and the Soviet leader. 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. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Cookie Settings, Liam Daniel, Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, 5,000-Year-Old Tavern With Food Still Inside Discovered in Iraq, The Surprisingly Scientific Roots of Monkey Bars. 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. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . It doesnt matter, he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: S milym rai i v shalashe. If you love somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. [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. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. [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 had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. 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. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. 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. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Privacy Statement Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. 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 Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. (1) BBC Broadcast (11th May, 1963) A British businessman accused of spying for the West has been sentenced to eight years' detention by a Moscow tribunal. [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. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. Released in the same week as The Sun's revelations about an alleged spy known as David Smith who worked in Britain's embassy in Berlin, The Courier tells how the married 41-year-old sales consultant was persuaded by MI6 to deliver secrets from Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. 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. Kent. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . He did so, but nothing happened. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. 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. Oleg Gordievsky. 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. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. 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. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. 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. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. He would not say why. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. 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. The CIA delayed in contacting him. | READ MORE. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. In his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he wrapped up five to seven pounds of secret documents and walked out of the building. He works as a computer programmer. 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 . I could not believe what was happening. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. Updates? 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. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. 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. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Wynne was arrested and jailed as a spy The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. 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. The stories of Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Bokhan and Leonid Poleshchukreported here in extensive new detail and based on interviews with Gordievsky, Bokhan and Andrei Poleshchuk, as well as former FBI and CIA officialssuggest the damage a mole can do. [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.
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what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child