In 1965 his journal, The Penkovskiy Papers, was published in the United States, though the books authenticity has been questioned by some. (1) BBC Broadcast (11th May, 1963) A British businessman accused of spying for the West has been sentenced to eight years' detention by a Moscow tribunal. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. 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. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. | READ MORE. He was flown to Moscow, imprisoned, and tried alongside Penkovsky, who it would later be learned had been arrested the week before Wynne entered Hungary. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. Cookie Policy 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. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. troops.[15]. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. We had neighbors that were very close. 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. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. 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. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. His work . He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . 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-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . 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. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. 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 was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. Finally, in 1991, with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities let Alla and her daughter leave. 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. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. 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. 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). Sooner or later they would arrest me.. But if he returned home, he could be shot. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . 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. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. Advertising Notice A KGB general told him he had confessed. Minutes passed. 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 . The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. 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. 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. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. 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. It shortened her life, he said. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. [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. 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]. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. 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. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. He was arrested on October 22nd. 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. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. Arrested? 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. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. No products in the cart. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. He was like a walking dead man. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. 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. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for bringing outlandish, extraordinary characters, from Marvel's "Dr. 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. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine This was prior to President Kennedy's address to the US revealing that U-2 spy plane photographs had confirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were installing medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, in what was known as Operation Anadyr. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. 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 Gordievsky. The daughter of a Russian mother . 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. 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. 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. 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. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". 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. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. 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. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him.