[20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. Impossible. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. 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. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. 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. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. These things have to be run to ground.. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Wynne also enthusiastically embraced his role, enjoying the part of a daring secret agent where he could apply his salesman skills to a higher-stakes game. 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. He was free. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . U.S. counterintelligence agents have established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. Toasty. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. For several years, they'd noticed Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a war hero and high-ranking official in the Soviet intelligence services, making overtures to Western diplomats and even tourists; the. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. 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. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. But it was only a matter of time. "He started as a nave amateur. He had been drugged. At the time, they were largely accepted at face value and sold well. 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. 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. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. He had lost a lot of weight. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. 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. 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). A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. 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. Penkovsky gave a huge amount of details about what missiles the Soviets had, how old they were, how there were queues for foodit was an extremely vivid portrait of the country and the people within intelligence, says Duns. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. | When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. "And Greville played a big part in that.". Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. Minutes passed. Your Privacy Rights 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. Cookie Policy 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. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Within two weeks after his flight to the United States, he had a new name, a fake background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta. After some months, she was released. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985before Ames insists he handed over the documents. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. 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. [8] The KGB defector Vladimir N. Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying: "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganisation precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. 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. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. When he began spying for the Russians almost a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIAs Soviet counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would be of incalculable value to 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. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. Murder by Cremation. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. I had no job. The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. 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. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. For the following 18 months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to the CIAMI6 team of handlers, including documents demonstrating that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than Nikita Khrushchev claimed or the CIA had thought and that the Soviets were not yet capable of producing a large number of ICBMs. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. 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. 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. 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. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. They were convicted of espionage. Updates? The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. 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. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. 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. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . That happened several times.. The daughter of a Russian mother . Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Everyone avoided me. 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. Omissions? It was scary.. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. In a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov, named Penkovsky as Russia's biggest intelligence failure. His fear mounted. He was the real deal. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. 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. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. 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.
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