This time it's a true story:Wynne served as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spyOleg Penkovsky atthe height of the Cold War. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. He did so, but nothing happened. 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. 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. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife 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. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. 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 did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. 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.. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. He had lost a lot of weight. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985before Ames insists he handed over the documents. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. 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. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. He was the real deal. 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. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. [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. But if he returned home, he could be shot. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. Menu. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. The Cuban Missile Crisis was high-stakes brinkmanship played out between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, bringing Washington and Moscow to the precipice of nuclear war in October 1962. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. He works as a computer programmer. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. 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. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. 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). 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. [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. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. President John Kennedy read it and understood. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. By 1993 their marriage was over. This photograph was taken in the hotel room at the Mount Royal in London in April 1961, after one of our meetings, where Oleg Penkovsky on the left and yours truly on the right enjoying a small glass of wine. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. 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. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. Terms of Use Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. Finally, in 1991, with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities let Alla and her daughter leave. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. 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 In a Moscow park, Penkovsky also passed packets of sweets (with camera film hidden inside) to the wife of a British MI6 officer while she was pushing her children in a pram. Penkovsky was in fact arrested by the Soviets on Oct. 22, 1962, at the height of that crisis, after they realized that highly classified information was leaking to the West. 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. But this Land Rovers driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicles doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and petty theft. 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. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . We had neighbors that were very close. JB: The first meeting with Oleg Penkovsky was about seven p.m. April twenty first 1961 and he was told what room to go to at the Mount Royal Hotel in London and thanks to my MI6 friends, they permitted me, since he first wanted to meet the Americans, to be the one to answer the door and meet him. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. 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. It was scary.. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. 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. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. Impossible. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a pop-up dummy in his cars passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. The daughter of a Russian mother . They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. In Wright's view, the failure of British intelligence leaders to listen to him caused them to become paralysed when such agents defected to the Soviet Union; in his book, Spycatcher, he suggests that his hypothesis had to be true, and that the Soviets were aware of this paralysis and planted Penkovsky. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. 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. He would not say why. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. 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 A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. 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 the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. 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. Both he and the Soviet leader. Top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Penkovsky was a British agent, but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. 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.. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynnewrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandizingbooks, "The Man From Moscow" (1967) and "The Man From Odessa" (1981). Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. 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. The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. On October 29 of that year, just hours after the Soviets stood down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne went to Soviet-occupied Budapest with a traveling exhibition of British industrial goods, against the advice of his MI6 handlers. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. They know.. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. Toasty. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. 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. 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. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 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.