After his release, Wynne struggled with . Wynne served 18 months in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. He graduated from the strenuous academy in 1948 and promptly joined the GRU. 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 would not say why. 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. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. Gophers and other rodents can prove to be a real nuisance for open sporting fields, and if you want to have an undisturbed game or event, our specialists will make sure that everything is OK. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Oleg Penkovskys father died in the Russian Revolution. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. All our insect andgopher control solutions we deliver are delivered with the help of top gradeequipment and products. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 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. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). However, while working together, something unexpected happens: The two men become friends. He did so, but nothing happened. Omissions? Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. But we are sure that it is not available and his spouses name is not available. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. How Penkovsky and Wynne did it, how they were caught, and what happened to them next is the focus of The Courier. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky, born the same year as Wynne in 1919, was the man on the inside, the Russian GRU spy who smuggled out military documents, photos, and human intelligence - including gossip he'd pick up at parties - which he passed to Wynne during business meetings. 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. 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. Over the two weeks that followed, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev engaged in tense negotiations, but the Americans had an ace up their sleeves. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. Cookie Policy Everyone avoided me. 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. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Updates? Upon his return, Greville married his secretary and narrator, Herma Van Burren. The Wynne-Penkovsky case came at the height of the Cold War when relations between the superpowers were particularly strained. 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. Be that as it may, the British intelligence official returned in 1964 after spending two years in Soviet prison. This knowledge gave Kennedy the upper hand he needed to successfully negotiate away from the brink of nuclear war. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. It remains unclear to this day exactly how Penkovsky was found out. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. 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. As MacIntyre reminds us, the rumor has always been that MI6-CIA agent Oleg Penkovsky, betrayed by British-spy-turned-Soviet-agent George Blake, had been cremated alive in 1963 by the KGB after . Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Memorials Region He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. Introduction. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malaria before he could begin. | READ MORE. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. Institutions, golf courses, sports fields these are just some examples of the locations we can rid of pests. Together with a turned KGB specialist, Oleg Penkovsky, he obtained important information about the Soviet attacks that somehow prevented the atomic conflict during the virus war. 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. Six days before Kennedys successful diplomatic resolution of the crisis, Penkovsky was arrested. They know.. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. If you are interested in finding out more about our services, feel free to contact us right away! 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. Arrested? While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. 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. Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? He started having trouble breathing. After 14 days of strained negotiations, on October 28 Khruschev agreed to withdraw Soviet weapons from Cuba and the world breathed a sigh of relief. 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. He was like a walking dead man. secret papers written by Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet official sentenced to death after the Greville Wynne trial. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. In extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked about his nine years of spying for Moscowincluding the day when he turned over, in his words, the identities of virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.. Her eyes were empty. Greville Wynnes cause of death: Where is his family? In May 1963, after his trial, Izvestya reported that Varentsov, who had since achieved the rank of Chief Marshal of Artillery and Commander in Chief of Rocket Forces and candidate member of the Central Committee had been demoted to the rank of Major General. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. I always thought there was another one, he told me. 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. 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. 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. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. 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. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. What happened next is unclear. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. CIA data collection and analysis was important for arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and for determining U.S . The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. Continuing the family, Greville Wynne had a son named Andrew Wynne. Oleg Penkovsky had his sights set on moving to the West and building a better life with his family and, therefore, he was keen to expose some of the Soviet's most valuable military secrets. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . 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, who was tried with him, was sentenced to death for treason. After being wounded in battle in 1944, Penkovsky left the army and joined the renowned Frunze Military Academy. The most controversial claim in the book was that he and Penkovsky were smuggled into the White House and lauded by President Kennedy. During one of Wynnes trips to London in April 1961, Penkovsky handed him a hefty package of documents and film he passed along to MI6. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. PG-13 I remember Oleg Penkovsky (a scintillating Merab Nididze) very well. Enter Oleg Penkovsky. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. Penkovsky at his public trial in Moscow. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. 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.'. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. 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 . You can be sure that our Claremont, CA business will provide you with the quality and long-lasting results you are looking for! INTERVIEW WITH JOE BULIK - 31.1.98. Afterward, we drove to a home in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe, Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a restaurant tucked away on a side street in Washington. 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. Everything to know about their son and. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. He holds dual bachelor's degrees from Pace University and a master's degree from New York University. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. He was arrested for espionage in Budapest on Nov. 16, 1962. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. "Deca que Penkovsky tena dos vas para contactar a los estadounidenses y que una de ellas, 'en caso de un peligro inesperado', implicaba soplar tres veces en el micrfono del telfono. 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. In October 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were on the brink of nuclear war after Soviet nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba. As Penkovskys position necessitated travel to Britain, the Russians initially didnt suspect him of espionage. The MI6 specialist experienced post-arrest sadness and torment. 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.. 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. 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. May 11, 1963. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. document.getElementById("ak_js_1").setAttribute("value",(new Date()).getTime()). In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky contacted the West to offer to work as a 'soldier warrior for the free world. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. 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. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. After a West German agent overheard a remark at Stasi headquarters, paraphrased as "I wonder how things are going in Cuba" he passed it on to the CIA. 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. Northolt Airport, England. 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. The future double agents father died that same year fighting against the communists in the Russian Revolution. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In his autobiography, Wynne says that he was carefully developed by British intelligence over many years with the specific task of making contact with Penkovsky.[5]. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Murder by Cremation. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. I had no job. [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. Additionally, the files revealed that Soviet guidance systems werent yet functional, nor were their fueling systems operational. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. 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