Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. 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. I always thought there was another one, he told me. 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. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. But it was only a matter of time. 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. The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. 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.. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. [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'". Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. 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. 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. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. He works as a computer programmer. 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. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. 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. 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. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. Even though Wynne wasnt exactly a reliable narrator for what he did during his time as a secret agent, the materials he smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain were the real thing. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. 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. 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. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. 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. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. No products in the cart. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . 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. That happened several times.. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. 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. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. 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. 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. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. 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. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. 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. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. 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. 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. 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. 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 . When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. 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. 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. 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. 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. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky born 23 April 1919 died 16 May 1963, USSR codenamed HERO, was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late . He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. 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. After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. After many years, I understood him. 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. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. 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. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. 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. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. 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. His work . Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. It was the signal to launch his escape. By 1993 their marriage was over. 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. 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. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. 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.. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. [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. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. 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. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . 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. Before Ames, there was Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who had been slated to go to Moscow but was fired instead for drug use and petty theft. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy.

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