On October 29 of that year, just hours after the Soviets stood down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne went to Soviet-occupied Budapest with a traveling exhibition of British industrial goods, against the advice of his MI6 handlers. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. An industrial sales consultant who regularly traveled through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union representing British electrical and steel companies, Wynne was told it would be helpful if on his next trip, he could arrange for a meeting with a state committee in Moscow dedicated to developing opportunities with foreigners in science and technology, and report back on his conversations. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). But it was only a matter of time. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. 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. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. 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. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Oleg Penkovsky, aged 44. a scientific worker, told the court that he had passed the information through the child to Mrs. Janet ** Anna " Chisholm, wife of Mr. Roderick Chisholm, who worked at the British embassy from May, I960, to August last year. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. [16] The noted Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny said that he had been told by the director of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium "how Penkovsky [had been] executed by 'fire'". The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. 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. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. 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. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. "He started as a nave amateur. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. The documents provided by Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. 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. 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.'. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? 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. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. [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. 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. 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. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. 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. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. And their actions were directly responsible for the hotline that now exists between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. Would she ever live in the West? The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. 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. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, Here is something from Leo. By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. 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. Between April 1961 and August 1962 Penkovsky passed more than 5,000 photographs of classified military, political, and economic documents to British and U.S. intelligence forces. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. 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. Peter Wright, a former British MI5 officer known for his scathing condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence during most of the Cold War, believed that Penkovsky was a fake defection. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). 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. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. 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. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. 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. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. 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 . Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. 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. 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. 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. In 1944, he was assigned to the headquarters of Colonel-General Sergei Varentsov, commander of artillery on the 1st Ukrainian front, who became his patron. 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. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. They know.. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. Alex Palmer He was detained at Lubyanka prison. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. 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. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. [11] Former GRU captain Viktor Suvorov, who defected to the UK in 1978, later wrote in his book on Soviet intelligence, "historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.
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