Wynne and Penkovsky were both arrested by the KGB in November 1962, when some of the information their endeavours produced was of assistance to the West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. Bokhan froze. It led to him and a Soviet double agent, Oleg Penkovsky, becoming firm friends, involved in . | "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. 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 . Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. Omissions? Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. 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. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. 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. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Arrested? President John Kennedy read it and understood. 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. This explosive book records the secret life and adventures of the greatest spy of our time - Oleg Penkovskiy - and reads with the excitement of the greatest of suspense novels. He just couldnt tell the truth. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. 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. Your Privacy Rights 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. The CIA delayed in contacting him. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". Wynne went along, slightly concerned about whether Penkovsky was on the level and concerned about putting himself into a dangerous situation, kicking off what would be one of the most productive clandestine operations in Cold War history. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. Three other officers were also disciplined. I could not believe what was happening. "He started as a nave amateur. Only a few days earlier he had called his brother-in-law in Kiev, where Alex was studying, and been assured his son was doing well. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. 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. Kent. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. After many years, I understood him. 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. JB: The first meeting with Oleg Penkovsky was about seven p.m. April twenty first 1961 and he was told what room to go to at the Mount Royal Hotel in London and thanks to my MI6 friends, they permitted me, since he first wanted to meet the Americans, to be the one to answer the door and meet him. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. 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. To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. 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. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. Janie and It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985before Ames insists he handed over the documents. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. 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 name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. Advertising Notice Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. But the chummy interactions between the agents and Penkovskys prolific, even reckless, acquisition of materials grew increasingly perilousand finally caught the KGBs attention. [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. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. 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. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and asked Wynne for his help. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' Oleg Gordievsky. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. 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. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). This time it's a true story:Wynne served as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spyOleg Penkovsky atthe height of the Cold War. Toasty. Impossible. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. 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. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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 . Posted on . (Mr. Chisholm now works in London and lives at Ashford. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. [8] The KGB defector Vladimir N. Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying: "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganisation precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. He was arrested on October 22nd. Confess again! the general roared. We had neighbors that were very close. 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. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy (194953), he became an intelligence officer, serving primarily in Moscow. Wynne agreed, and during his visit to Moscow the following month he wound up connecting with Oleg Penkovsky, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Unions foreign-intelligence agency) who was eager to leak high-level military information to Western powers. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. 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. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. During their visits, Penkovsky and Wynne would get out on the town, visiting restaurants, nightclubs and shops under the cover of talking business, with each man proudly showing the other around his home country. 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. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. 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. 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. It was the signal to launch his escape. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . He works as a computer programmer. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. I had no job. 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. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. 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. 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]. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky.