"Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . Welcome to the United States, one of them said. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. These things have to be run to ground.. sports injuries prezi. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. 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. West maintains that its the result of something all too typical in the intelligence communitywhat he calls post-usefulness syndrome., Imagine that I recruit you and I tell you that whatever you report to me, within an hour, it will be on the presidents desk. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. 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. 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. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. 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. 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. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. 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. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. The CIA delayed in contacting him. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. | 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. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. 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. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. It doesnt matter, he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: S milym rai i v shalashe. If you love somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent. The President of the Court declared Greville Wynne, aged 44, would serve three years in prison and five in a labour camp. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. 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. 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. 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. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. [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. 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. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. No question.". Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. 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 . I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. Impossible. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. Maybe a fifth. 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. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. 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. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. 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. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Posted on . [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. The daughter of a Russian mother . A somewhat baroque means of murder, the killer shuts their victim in a coffin (knocking them out first is optional) and feeds the coffin into a crematorium oven. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. I always thought there was another one, he told me. 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. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. When he began spying for the Russians almost a decade earlier, Ames was chief of the CIAs Soviet counterintelligence branch, entrusted with secrets that would be of incalculable value to the KGB. 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. These events serve as the inspiration for The Courier, the new film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wynne and Georgian actor Merab Ninidze as Penkovsky, out in theaters on March 19. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. 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. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. Corrections? It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. After Penkovsky and Wynne were captured by the KGB, which happened very similar to how their capture is depicted in the film, the GRU lieutenant colonel been convicted of treason and sentenced to death by firing squad. Wynne was a British businessman who, from 1960 and 1962, smuggled thousands of pieces of intel out of Russia before he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured for two years by the KGB. 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. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. Murder by Cremation. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). 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. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. 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. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. 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. 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. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. Advertising Notice [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. 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. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. He was free. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. But if he returned home, he could be shot. He had been drugged. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. 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 Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. 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. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . Your Privacy Rights But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. 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. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. 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.. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. His fear mounted. After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. 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. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. 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. Cookie Settings, FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, John Hallisey / FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12, 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 two then visited the White House where President John F. Kennedy personally thanked them for their servicethen the two returned to the U.K. just 18 hours later. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. He was the real deal. 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. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. Seeking ways to parlay the notoriety he received, he became what Duns calls a rent-a-spokesperson for all kinds of espionage stuff, making appearances in the media about anything related to spycraft, whether or not it was anything he had experience with. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. In his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he wrapped up five to seven pounds of secret documents and walked out of the building. I could not believe what was happening. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. 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. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. 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. 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 . 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. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. 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. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. [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. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. You have the wrong number, he was told. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. 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. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. Mr. Wint: Very moving. 3.80. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. 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. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. They had to go through a show trial, basically, so on the stand Wynne accused MI6 of using him as a dupehe may have just been saying whatever he could say because he worried they might execute him, says Jeremy Duns, an author of several spy novels set during the Cold War as well as the history book Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. The operation was the most productive classic clandestine operation ever conducted by the CIA or MI6 against the Soviet target, as Schecter and Deriabin put it, and key to its success was the mustachioed courier with no prior intelligence experience. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. [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'". 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. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. 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. In 1962, Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky defied his country to save the world from nuclear war then paid for his heroism with his life. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Arrested? After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. 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. 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. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Concierge Medicine Bay Area, Sam Kinison Death Last Words, The Illusionists Documentary Transcript, Taylor Road Homes For Sale In Montgomery, Al 36117, Articles W