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. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. 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. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. 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. 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. He works as a computer programmer. 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. Minutes passed. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. 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 . je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. It shortened her life, he said. 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. It was the signal to launch his escape. 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. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. 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. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. [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. 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. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. He would not say why. 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. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. They flew to New York and, with help from the CIA and the FBI, were reunited with Sergei at a motel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. 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. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. Some of it just didnt add up, he says. Impossible. In a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov, named Penkovsky as Russia's biggest intelligence failure. 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. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). In April 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGBdangles, in intelligence parlance. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. Oleg Penkovskiy. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. 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. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against 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. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. 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. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. His work . He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . 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. 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. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. 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. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . 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. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. [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. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. 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. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Your Privacy Rights I had no job. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife 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. 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 He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. He started having trouble breathing. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. | READ MORE. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky born 23 April 1919 died 16 May 1963, USSR codenamed HERO, was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late . "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. 3.80. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. Menu. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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.. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. 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. Either one of ours or theirs., When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, David Wise Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . 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. 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. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Bokhan froze. The information he provided on the Soviets . Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. 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.. 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. 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. 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. 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. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . 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. He was the real deal. Oleg lives a quiet and unassuming life with his wife Vera (played by Maria Mironova) and their daughter Nina (played by Emma Penzina), who's about 5 or 6 years old. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. 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. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. 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. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. It was in my fathers handwriting. Leonid Poleshchuk knew his first CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, as Joe. 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. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . 41 ratings1 review. "His clothes were sort of shrink-wrapped around this skeleton," says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and physically preparing to portray Wynne's final months of ordeal. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. Murder by Cremation. 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. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. 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.