pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife Gordievsky never took a penny from MI6 until after he had defected to the U.K. His actions were motivated by a hatred of the tyranny of the Soviet system, and the degraded condition in which it. Murder by Cremation. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. Your Privacy Rights Oleg Gordievsky. 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. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Updates? I could not believe what was happening. 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. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. Oleg Penkovskiy. 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. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. Theres a fair amount of source material from all different kinds of authors, so by reading everybodynot just Wynnes books, but other historians, and the official history put out by the American side and the Soviet side I was able to try and work out what made the most sense and what seemed liked disinformation, says OConnor. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. 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. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a British-looking man who was eating something. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. In all, Penkovsky had provided Western intelligence with about 140 hours of interviews and 111 exposed rolls of film, contributing to some 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. | While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. The daughter of a Russian mother . He has two daughters. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. 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. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. He had been drugged. 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. 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. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". Macintyre writes in the book. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. 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.. It also helped Americans to understand how limited the Soviets capabilities actually were in the area, so as tensions grew during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy knew how much rope he could give [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev, as Duns puts it. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. No products in the cart. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. He had lost a lot of weight. OConnor makes clear that The Courier is not a documentary, even as he explains that he took pains to stick to the facts as much as they could be ascertaineddrawing on works such as Jerrold L. Shecter and Peter S. Deriabins The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War and other accounts that could be trusted more than Wynnes own inventions. No question.". To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. He works as a computer programmer. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. I had no job. 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 make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. 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. 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.'. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Janie and Penkovsky was in fact arrested by the Soviets on Oct. 22, 1962, at the height of that crisis, after they realized that highly classified information was leaking to the West. The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting up with Janet Chisholm, a British MI6 agent stationed in Moscow. 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. Omissions? what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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. He did so, but nothing happened. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. Upon release from prison, Wynnes old life was in tattershed lost much of his business and the time spent in the Soviet prison seemed to have caused long-term damage. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. They were convicted of espionage. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. 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. Considerado como el doble agente ms valioso que tuvo Occidente durante la Guerra Fra, Penkovsky ofreci informacin que le dio al gobierno de Kennedy una ventaja clave durante la Crisis de . In 1965 his journal, The Penkovskiy Papers, was published in the United States, though the books authenticity has been questioned by some. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. During the 1960s, a corrosive mole hunt led by James J. Angleton, the CIAs counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at the Soviet Union, and disrupted the lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired or sidetracked in their careers. 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. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Alex Palmer Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? There is no statute of limitations for espionage. 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. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. 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. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. A new spy thriller draws on the fascinating lifeand whopping liesof one of the U.K.s most famous intelligence agents. 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. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. 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. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. Housing in Moscow was nearly impossible to find, even for a KGB officer, but sometime that May, hed received a seemingly miraculous letter from his father. Penkovsky's father might have fled to the West rather than have died of typhus as Penkovsky had previously reported, the KGB prohibited Penkovsky from assuming his post in New Delhi but permitted him to remain in the GRU after his mother submitted a statement detailing her family's ignorance of her husband's fate.28 In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Impossible. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. 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 . His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. 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. 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. Terms of Use "And Greville played a big part in that.". On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. 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. 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. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Toasty. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. 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. 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. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. 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 asked for a fictitious Greek employee. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. 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. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. 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. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lore and popular culture tout Col. Oleg Penkovsky as "the spy who saved the world" during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. 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. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. 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. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. The information he provided on the Soviets . She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Both he and the Soviet leader. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. 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. In a Moscow park, Penkovsky also passed packets of sweets (with camera film hidden inside) to the wife of a British MI6 officer while she was pushing her children in a pram. At the time, they were largely accepted at face value and sold well. Privacy Statement Cookie Settings, Liam Daniel, Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, 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. The Cuban Missile Crisis was high-stakes brinkmanship played out between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, bringing Washington and Moscow to the precipice of nuclear war in October 1962.