Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. The documents provided by Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. | This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. Bokhan froze. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. 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. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. 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. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. 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. An industrial sales consultant who regularly traveled through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union representing British electrical and steel companies, Wynne was told it would be helpful if on his next trip, he could arrange for a meeting with a state committee in Moscow dedicated to developing opportunities with foreigners in science and technology, and report back on his conversations. It was pathological with him.. Mr. Wint: Very moving. 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. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for bringing outlandish, extraordinary characters, from Marvel's "Dr. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He just couldnt tell the truth. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. These things have to be run to ground.. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. 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. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. I always thought there was another one, he told me. He was free. Kent. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". "And Greville played a big part in that.". 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. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIAit would have put her in mortal dangerbut now he had to say something. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. 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. What happened to wife of Oleg Penkovsky? [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. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. 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. 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. 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. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. 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. 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. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. 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.. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. 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. 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. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. 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. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. Macintyre writes in the book. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. 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. 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. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. They flew to New York and, with help from the CIA and the FBI, were reunited with Sergei at a motel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. 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 . Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. Your Privacy Rights The Soviet public was first told of Penkovsky's arrest more than seven weeks later, when Pravda named Wynne and Jacobs[clarification needed] as his contacts, without naming anyone else. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. President John Kennedy read it and understood. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. 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. 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. He did so, but nothing happened. 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. 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. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. 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. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. 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. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . Oleg Penkovsky Born: April 23, 1919 Birthplace: Vladikavkaz, Russia Death: May 16, 1963, Moscow, USSR (executed by Soviet Union) Jessie Buckley Born: December 28, 1989 Birthplace: Killarney, Ireland Sheila Wynne Keir Hills Andrew Wynne Angus Wright Born: November 11, 1964 Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA Sir Arthur Temple 'Dickie' Franks He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. 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. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. 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. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. The Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. But it was only a matter of time. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. Wynne was arrested and jailed as a spy The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. His fear mounted. 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. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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. It shortened her life, he said. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. The CIA delayed in contacting him. Terms of Use Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass, Wright says: When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later Chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me: 'You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's [knighthoods] and Gongs [medals] riding high on the back of Penkovsky' he said, referring to the honours heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation. 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 . Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. No question.". Welcome to the United States, one of them said. He had been drugged. 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. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. 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. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. Peter Wright, a former British MI5 officer known for his scathing condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence during most of the Cold War, believed that Penkovsky was a fake defection. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . 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. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. 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. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. sports injuries prezi. He just was an ordinary man who got thrust into this just extraordinary, life-altering situation that was going to define his existence forever, says OConnor. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. It was scary.. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. 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. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. Privacy Statement 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. Gordievsky's Wife was not with him live Former Colonel of the First Central Board of the KGB of the USSR, recruited in the mid-80s the CIA and worked for British intelligence, abroad called the largest Soviet "mole" after Penkovsky. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. You have the wrong number, he was told. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. 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. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. 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. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West.
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