"He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. 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. 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. 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. Penkovskys dynamism and enthusiasm, his wide-ranging and passionate denunciations of the Soviet system and its leaders illustrated with anecdotes, fascinated and captivated the American and British teams, write Schecter and Deriabin. 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. 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. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. Her eyes were empty. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. 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 Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. 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. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. I always thought there was another one, he told me. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. 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. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was Mole. Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 yearsand feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. 3.80. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. 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. 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. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. We had neighbors that were very close. He did so, but nothing happened. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. 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. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. Meticulously documenting the wealth of information that Penkovsky provided, Schecter and Deriabin conclusively refute one of the enduring myths of the Cold War - that Oleg Penkovsky was a KGB plant. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. By 1993 their marriage was over. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. 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. Menu. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. He was the real deal. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . 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). After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. Oleg Penkovskiy. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. 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. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. 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, Soviet people executed for spying for the United States, Russian people executed by the Soviet Union, Executed people from North OssetiaAlania, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2022, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Your Privacy Rights 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 . MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. 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. The daughter of a Russian mother . A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. 445 & 35. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. It was scary.. He was like a walking dead man. Bokhan froze. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. 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.. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. These things have to be run to ground.. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. 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. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. He just couldnt tell the truth. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, (born April 23, 1919, Vladikavkaz, Russiadied May 1963?, U.S.S.R.), senior Soviet military intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for the United Kingdom and the United States. troops.[15]. His fear mounted. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. 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. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. "His clothes were sort of shrink-wrapped around this skeleton," says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and physically preparing to portray Wynne's final months of ordeal.