The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. 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. 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. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. I could not believe what was happening. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. 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. His fear mounted. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. Within two weeks after his flight to the United States, he had a new name, a fake background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. It was in my fathers handwriting. Leonid Poleshchuk knew his first CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, as Joe. Kent. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. A KGB general told him he had confessed. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. 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. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. [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. 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. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. 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. 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. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. He was arrested on October 22nd. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Updates? Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". 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. 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. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. 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 was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. 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. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. 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. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. 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. 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. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. 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). No products in the cart. Considerado como el doble agente ms valioso que tuvo Occidente durante la Guerra Fra, Penkovsky ofreci informacin que le dio al gobierno de Kennedy una ventaja clave durante la Crisis de . [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 did so, but nothing happened. 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 was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. 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. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. Thus began their fruitful relationship, one that involved Wynne hosting Penkovsky in London, who was visiting under the pretense of cultivate new opportunities in the West. Minutes passed. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. 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. 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. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. 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. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. We had neighbors that were very close. In the Jack Ryan universe, he is described as the agent who recruited Colonel Mikhail Filitov as a CIA agent (code-name CARDINAL) and had urged Filitov to betray him to solidify his position as the West's top spy in the Soviet hierarchy. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife Penkovsky's story is a tragic and revealing one, and it is regrettable that with it all he did not tell us more of what he could tell best, the story of his own life and of the lives of his close associates.-GEORGE A . Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. 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. 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.
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