Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. You have the wrong number, he was told. 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. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. Donec gravida mi a condimentum rutrum. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. 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. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. Cookie Policy Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. [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. Omissions? Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. Among the explanations are a desire for money or fame, a ruinous case of alcoholism, or perhaps even psychological scars left by his time in Soviet prison or the shame he felt for publicly turning against British intelligence during the trial. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. 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. 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. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. Macintyre writes in the book. Oleg Gordievsky and Leila Alieva met in Copenhagen: she was a typist for the World Health Organization; he was an unhappily married KGB officer, and a spy for MI6. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. Updates? 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. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Murder by Cremation. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. [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. Cookie Policy He had been drugged. He would not say why. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. 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. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . 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. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. Privacy Statement On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. That happened several times.. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. 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. 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. 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 reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. Impossible. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. 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. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. 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. Corrections? Wynne was a middle-classBritish businessman whose frequenttravelto Eastern Europe attracted recruitmentby MI-6 to serve as a liaison to high-ranking Soviet official Penkovsky. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. By 1960 he had become a colonel in the GRU and deputy chief of the foreign section of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research (196062), in which post his task was to collect scientific and technical intelligence on the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. He just couldnt tell the truth. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. 445 & 35. 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. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. 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. 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. 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 . It doesnt matter, he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: S milym rai i v shalashe. If you love somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. They were convicted of espionage. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. 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. Three other officers were also disciplined. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. The career of Oleg Penkovsky reads like a story by John le Carre. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . The CIA delayed in contacting him. He did so, but nothing happened. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. After many years, I understood him. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". 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 In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Released in the same week as The Sun's revelations about an alleged spy known as David Smith who worked in Britain's embassy in Berlin, The Courier tells how the married 41-year-old sales consultant was persuaded by MI6 to deliver secrets from Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. You are wondering about the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter but currently there is no answer, so let kienthuctudonghoa.com summarize and list the top articles with the question. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. Posted on . There were embraces, and everyone cried. These things have to be run to ground.. 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. Maria, then 16, was carrying the patatuff. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine "Most experts agreethat what Penkovsky provided on the Soviet's capabilities was extremely useful during the Cuban Missile crisis," saysRobert English, director of Central European Studies at the University of Southern California. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. On September 21, 1985, Howard eluded FBI surveillance and escaped into the New Mexico desert with the help of his wife, Mary, and a pop-up dummy in his cars passenger seat (a technique he had learned in CIA training). But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. 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. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Wynne agreed, and during his visit to Moscow the following month he wound up connecting with Oleg Penkovsky, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Unions foreign-intelligence agency) who was eager to leak high-level military information to Western powers. 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. By 1993 their marriage was over. 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. Privacy Statement answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. [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. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. 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. 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. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Seeking ways to parlay the notoriety he received, he became what Duns calls a rent-a-spokesperson for all kinds of espionage stuff, making appearances in the media about anything related to spycraft, whether or not it was anything he had experience with. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. 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. troops.[15]. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. His work . Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. 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. 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. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. 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. 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. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. 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. 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. cole and rye leather swivel chair; north star cherry tree colorado Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. 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. 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. It was pathological with him.. In 1962, Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky defied his country to save the world from nuclear war then paid for his heroism with his life. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Terms of Use Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, to help build . If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. [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'". Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. He works as a computer programmer. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. (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. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. 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. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. He has two daughters. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. 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. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . 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. 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. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. 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. The daughter of a Russian mother . After months of interrogation at Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told his captors he wouldnt answer any more questions unless they told him who his father worked for. 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. 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. Janie and 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. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. Your Privacy Rights This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. Alexander Zagvozdin, chief KGB interrogator for the investigation, stated that Penkovsky had been "questioned perhaps a hundred times" and that he had been shot and cremated. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. 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. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. Greville Wynne, a British spy who told in his celebrated memoirs how he pried loose some of Moscow's best-kept secrets and who served 18 months in a Soviet prison for The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. 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. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city .
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