He is the author of The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. 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 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. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". There is no statute of limitations for espionage. 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. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In the midst of the Cold War, a top-ranking Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky feared that the risk of nuclear war was too great, and decided to share some of the most closely held secrets of the Soviet arsenal with the West. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. 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. 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. 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. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. 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. 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. The President of the Court declared Greville Wynne, aged 44, would serve three years in prison and five in a labour camp. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. 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. They were convicted of espionage. 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. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. But it was only a matter of time. I could not believe what was happening. 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. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. In October 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were on the brink of nuclear war after Soviet nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. 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.. The daughter of a Russian mother . Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. [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. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . 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 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. That happened several times.. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. 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. Cookie Policy Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. 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. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories, This page was last edited on 30 January 2023, at 08:39. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. 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 Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. 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. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. 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. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He was free. He works as a computer programmer. 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). A KGB general told him he had confessed. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and asked Wynne for his help. 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). He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 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. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. They urged him to go to Moscow, but they also provided him with an escape plan in case he signaled that he was in danger. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Corrections? 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. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. 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. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. 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. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 445 & 35. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine 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. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. 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. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Three other officers were also disciplined. 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 . Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. 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. Some of it just didnt add up, he says. Director Cooke says Donovan is a composite character representing several real-life people, includingJanet Chisholmthewife of a Moscow-based British visa officer whoalso served as a conduit for information passed to the West by Penkovsky. After many years, I understood him. 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.. You, in your own mind, have developed this sense of self-importance, says West. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. Murder by Cremation. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. 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. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. 41 ratings1 review. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. 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. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . A member of the Communist Party, he took part in the invasion of Finland and by the end of the Second World War had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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. Your Privacy Rights 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. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed.If it wasnt Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise, Wiser said. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. 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. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . 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. 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.. His fear mounted. [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. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. It was pathological with him.. [17] A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies, Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit and in Viktor Suvorov's book Aquarium. 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. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. 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. Janie and Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. In May 1963, after his trial, Izvestya reported that Varentsov, who had since achieved the rank of Chief Marshal of Artillery and Commander in Chief of Rocket Forces and candidate member of the Central Committee had been demoted to the rank of Major General. Impossible. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. (1) BBC Broadcast (11th May, 1963) A British businessman accused of spying for the West has been sentenced to eight years' detention by a Moscow tribunal. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 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. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). 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. Donec gravida mi a condimentum rutrum. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. No products in the cart. 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. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. These things have to be run to ground.. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Posted on . They made an odd contrastthe short, energetic, and thinly mustachioed Wynne alongside the military bearing of Penkovskybut there seemed to be genuine affection between the two, and this friendship is a central focus of The Courier. 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. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. 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. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. 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. It was scary.. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. Cookie Policy As important as Popov was to the United States and the West, it was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, another Soviet GRU officer, who has earned the sobriquet, the "spy who saved the world.'. 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. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. 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. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. It shortened her life, he said. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado 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.
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