what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child

Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. You have the wrong number, he was told. 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. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. Advertising Notice MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. Three other officers were also disciplined. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. Omissions? 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. 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. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. "He started as a nave amateur. Cookie Policy [9] While the weight of opinion seems to be that Penkovsky was genuine, the debate underscores the difficulty faced by all intelligence agencies of determining information offered from the enemy. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. 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. There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldnt put our finger on., And Bearden says, I remain convinced there is a fourth man. It was pathological with him.. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. "And Greville played a big part in that.". 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. 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. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . He was thin, pale and obviously sick. At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed.If it wasnt Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise, Wiser said. 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 Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. In 1944, he was assigned to the headquarters of Colonel-General Sergei Varentsov, commander of artillery on the 1st Ukrainian front, who became his patron. 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. And their actions were directly responsible for the hotline that now exists between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. 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. After months of negotiations, the British government was eventually able to arrange a trade of Wynne for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, whod been arrested the year before and was serving a 25-year sentence in England. There were embraces, and everyone cried. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. Your Privacy Rights 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. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . I always thought there was another one, he told me. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. 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. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. [11] Former GRU captain Viktor Suvorov, who defected to the UK in 1978, later wrote in his book on Soviet intelligence, "historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. But Ames always insisted to the FBI, the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee that he revealed no significant sources before his meeting at Chadwicks. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 445 & 35. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. Some of it just didnt add up, he says. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. 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. Wynne would later relate that as he walked down the steps of an exhibition pavilion, four men suddenly appeared as a car pulled up and Wynne was pushed inside. 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. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. 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. 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. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. The career of Oleg Penkovsky reads like a story by John le Carre. troops.[15]. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Either one of ours or theirs., When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, David Wise But if he returned home, he could be shot. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. 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. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. President John Kennedy read it and understood. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. Alexander Zagvozdin, chief KGB interrogator for the investigation, stated that Penkovsky had been "questioned perhaps a hundred times" and that he had been shot and cremated. Joe said to his people, Keep the watch, I want to give it to his son. At a reception after the church ceremony, Joe gave Andrei the watch. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. 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. Oleg Penkovsky, aged 44. a scientific worker, told the court that he had passed the information through the child to Mrs. Janet ** Anna " Chisholm, wife of Mr. Roderick Chisholm, who worked at the British embassy from May, I960, to August last year. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. 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. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. Cookie Policy Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. 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. Privacy Statement After many years, I understood him. Minutes passed. 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. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . 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 . On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. 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). 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. Confess again! the general roared. But it was only a matter of time. Impossible. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. 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. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. Both he and the Soviet leader. | READ MORE. 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. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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.. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. 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. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. 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. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. 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. The CIA delayed in contacting him. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. "Most experts agreethat what Penkovsky provided on the Soviet's capabilities was extremely useful during the Cuban Missile crisis," saysRobert English, director of Central European Studies at the University of Southern California. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. 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. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Benedict Cumberbatch:Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian'. 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. 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. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. 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. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara, Turkey, but was recalled after he had reported his superior officer, and later other GRU personnel for a breach of regulations, which made him unpopular in the department. When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. 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. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. [16] The noted Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny said that he had been told by the director of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium "how Penkovsky [had been] executed by 'fire'". [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. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. 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. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. 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. 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. Maybe a fifth. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. Penkovsky was the highest-ranking Soviet official to provide intelligence for the West up until that time, and is one of several individuals credited with altering the course of the Cold War. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. In the late 1960s, after he had been imprisoned for his spycraft and could no longer assist MI6 nor the CIA, the amateur spy authored a pair of books: The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky and The Man From Odessa, that were riddled with falsehoods. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. 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. Advertising Notice He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. 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. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". He works as a computer programmer. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, we believed it was important for us to consider the strong possibility that Gordievsky was compromised by someone within the U.S. intelligence community., Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken about the dateAmes has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB. Penkovsky's story is a tragic and revealing one, and it is regrettable that with it all he did not tell us more of what he could tell best, the story of his own life and of the lives of his close associates.-GEORGE A . Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. [10], The Soviet leadership began the deployment of nuclear missiles, in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. They know.. 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. Kent. 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. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. Among the explanations are a desire for money or fame, a ruinous case of alcoholism, or perhaps even psychological scars left by his time in Soviet prison or the shame he felt for publicly turning against British intelligence during the trial. 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. (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. Privacy Statement 2023 Smithsonian Magazine His work . Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He was the real deal. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. 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. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. A colonel in Soviet military intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, was working for them as an agent-in-place, photographing thousands of top-secret documents with a miniature camera, and delivering the. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953.

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