A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. 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. Menu. 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. 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). Sooner or later they would arrest me.. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. Three other officers were also disciplined. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . 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. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Only a few days earlier he had called his brother-in-law in Kiev, where Alex was studying, and been assured his son was doing well. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. Impossible. 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. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 41 ratings1 review. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. 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. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. 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. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. 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). By 1960 he had become a colonel in the GRU and deputy chief of the foreign section of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research (196062), in which post his task was to collect scientific and technical intelligence on the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. 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. troops.[15]. The CIA delayed in contacting him. 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. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . 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. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. It was the signal to launch his escape. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. Both he and the Soviet leader. 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. 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. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, to help build . As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. 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. He was free. Cookie Policy Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. 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). 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. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. Corrections? They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. 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. 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. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. 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. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. 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. Wynne was a British businessman who, from 1960 and 1962, smuggled thousands of pieces of intel out of Russia before he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured for two years by the KGB. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. Privacy Statement The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. 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. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. I always thought there was another one, he told me. 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. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. 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. "(Chisholm)played a very important role in the story that we couldn't get into, because it's a whole other movie," Cooke says. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. 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. Terms of Use The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Her eyes were empty. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. 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. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Updates? Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. 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. 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. After many years, I understood him. Even the official accounts put out by American and Russian authorities regarding the Penkovsky affair include disinformation and spin that he, or any historian, has to navigate through. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. He works as a computer programmer. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. Advertising Notice And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. 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. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. 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. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. 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. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. The Soviet public was first told of Penkovsky's arrest more than seven weeks later, when Pravda named Wynne and Jacobs[clarification needed] as his contacts, without naming anyone else. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. Toasty. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. 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. But if he returned home, he could be shot. 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. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' 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. 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. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . 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. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. 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. 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. Bokhan froze. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. 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.