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The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. 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. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. The career of Oleg Penkovsky reads like a story by John le Carre. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. 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. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. 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. 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. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine 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. 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. He did so, but nothing happened. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. 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. 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. 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 . 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. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. 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. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". 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. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . 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. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. In 1965 his journal, The Penkovskiy Papers, was published in the United States, though the books authenticity has been questioned by some. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. They were convicted of espionage. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. 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. 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. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. 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.. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . 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. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. Wynne went along, slightly concerned about whether Penkovsky was on the level and concerned about putting himself into a dangerous situation, kicking off what would be one of the most productive clandestine operations in Cold War history. Oleg Penkovskiy. answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. 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. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. 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. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. 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. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. Her eyes were empty. His fear mounted. 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 The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. 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. 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. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. Omissions? At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. 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.. "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. 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 would not say why. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. 41 ratings1 review. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. 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. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. 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). Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Updates? Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . He always hoped Leila would join him in England. 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. 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. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. These things have to be run to ground.. In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass, Wright says: When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later Chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me: 'You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's [knighthoods] and Gongs [medals] riding high on the back of Penkovsky' he said, referring to the honours heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). 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).