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. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: Im quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April 85, until June 13th.. Alex Palmer He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Janet Chisholm | Russia | The Guardian Cookie Policy Cookie Settings, FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, John Hallisey / FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12, 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. 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. Penkovsky was referred to in four of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan espionage novels: The Hunt for Red October (1984), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), The Bear and the Dragon (2000) and Red Rabbit (2002). 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. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for bringing outlandish, extraordinary characters, from Marvel's "Dr. 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. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. 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). Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. 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. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. Dead Drop: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold War's Most These things have to be run to ground.. 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. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. JOE BULIK - 31.1.98 - George Washington University Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. [Wynne], bless him, for all his wonderful work, was a menace and a fabricator, says Nigel West, who has written numerous books on British and American intelligence organizations, including two books specifically about fabricators in the intelligence arena. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. Three other officers were also disciplined. Terms of Use Oleg Penkovsky Born: April 23, 1919 Birthplace: Vladikavkaz, Russia Death: May 16, 1963, Moscow, USSR (executed by Soviet Union) Jessie Buckley Born: December 28, 1989 Birthplace: Killarney, Ireland Sheila Wynne Keir Hills Andrew Wynne Angus Wright Born: November 11, 1964 Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA Sir Arthur Temple 'Dickie' Franks It was the signal to launch his escape. Janie and 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. The Fascinating Story of the Russians Who Spied for the West on Moscow He works as a computer programmer. 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. 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 dealt with capabilities and intentions. 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. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. They had to go through a show trial, basically, so on the stand Wynne accused MI6 of using him as a dupehe may have just been saying whatever he could say because he worried they might execute him, says Jeremy Duns, an author of several spy novels set during the Cold War as well as the history book Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation. 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. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. 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. 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 daughter of a Russian mother . He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Greville Wynne | Military Wiki | Fandom The KGB men searched the apartment all night. In the late 1960s, after he had been imprisoned for his spycraft and could no longer assist MI6 nor the CIA, the amateur spy authored a pair of books: The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky and The Man From Odessa, that were riddled with falsehoods. 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. 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. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. 'The Courier' fact check: Benedict Cumberbatch's spy Greville Wynne When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. KGB defector pleaded in vain for help getting family out of USSR, files 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. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. 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. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. I had no job. Penkovsky, the Spy Who Tried to Destroy the World 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. 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 his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. 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. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. What Happened To Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky Family? Wiki His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. His work . In one of his biggest whoppers, Wynne explains that he and Penkovsky took a trip together in a private military jet from the U.K. to Washington, D.C. The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. 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. TOP 9 what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter BEST and NEWEST Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Privacy Statement 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. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. He just couldnt tell the truth. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . In all, Penkovsky had provided Western intelligence with about 140 hours of interviews and 111 exposed rolls of film, contributing to some 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. Wynne agreed, and during his visit to Moscow the following month he wound up connecting with Oleg Penkovsky, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Unions foreign-intelligence agency) who was eager to leak high-level military information to Western powers. 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 . At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. 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. That happened several times.. 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. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. But it was only a matter of time. Who was oleg penkovsky wife? - AskingForAnswer He had lost a lot of weight. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. 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. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). The Spy Who Saved The WorldThen Tried To Destroy It 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. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child Penkovsky approached American students on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package in which he offered to spy for the United States. 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. the imminent threat of nuclear war concealed by Soviet peace - JSTOR Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. 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. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. 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. 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. Murder by Cremation. As it happened: street fighting in Bakhmut as battle rages for control They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. 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 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. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. 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. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. He tried again, following the fallback plan, and this time a man carrying a dark-green bag from Harrods, the upscale London department store, walked by eating a candy bar. Menu. Joe said to his people, Keep the watch, I want to give it to his son. At a reception after the church ceremony, Joe gave Andrei the watch. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. Oleg Penkovsky: Spy of the Century or Soviet Deception - The Moscow Times By 1993 their marriage was over. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. 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. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. No question.". [11] Former GRU captain Viktor Suvorov, who defected to the UK in 1978, later wrote in his book on Soviet intelligence, "historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. After many years, I understood him. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. Thirty Years Later, We Still Don't Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. 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.
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