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. 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. Advertising Notice The CIA. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. Trong khi , mt ip vin ca GRU tn . Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . Some believe Penkovsky was burned alive as Soviet punishment for his treasonous espionage. The Case of Oleg Penkovsky. After attending the Military Diplomatic Academy from 1949 to 1953, he officially became an intelligence officer and worked in Moscow. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". 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. I always thought there was another one, he told me. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. Northolt Airport, England. During one of Wynnes trips to London in April 1961, Penkovsky handed him a hefty package of documents and film he passed along to MI6. His Girlfriend/boyfriends name is Not Available. Cookie Settings, FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, John Hallisey / FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12. The Courier (9/10) by Tony Medley 105 minutes. Stuzhin & Cheredintzev/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. But it was only a matter of time. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. Documents released by National Archives show British officials saw efforts to free Oleg Gordievsky's family as a lost cause Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor Mon 29 Dec 2014 19.01 EST Last . He was like a walking dead man. Bettmann/Getty ImagesPenkovskys debriefing sessions with MI6 and the CIA totaled up to 140 hours. In 1997, Andrei and Svetlana emigrated to the United States. The daughter of a Russian mother . Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? That's about all I knew until this film. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). 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. The papers show that. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Continuing the family, Greville Wynne had a son named Andrew Wynne. He sort of fought the Nazis off in Kiev, and was leading that and was decorated 13 times. Officially, he was shot to death. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Bokhan froze. It looked outward for any external threats, and employed people capable of subterfuge and turning potential pawns into assets. Continue. Also, we have no idea about his brother and sister, and we dont know their names either. 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. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. But he reportedly committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp. He was a highly placed Soviet official in Moscow who fed secrets to the West before and during the Cuban Missile crisis. John Turner. 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. Expert extermination for a safe property. Wynne's role as a salesman who works his . Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. No one knew what became of America's perfect spy until January 1990, when the state-controlled Soviet newspaper, Pravda, reported that on March 15, 1988, General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov was executed for espionage. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Its thought that once Blake implicated Penkovsky, the KGB began watching him from apartments across the river from his home and confirmed he was meeting with Western intelligence. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. GRU emblem. Years later, Penkovsky himself would try to halt the Soviet spread of communism. In 1962, Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky defied his country to save the world from nuclear war then paid for his heroism with his life. The Spy Who Saved the World: Explores how information provided by Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky aided the Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. How the traitor Oleg Penkovsky was 7 7.The Courier vs. the True Story of British Spy Greville Wynne The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. This was seized upon by critics, including then Tory MP and espionage expert Rupert Allason, who rubbished much of Wynne's record. 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. It is a collec- tion of. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. But if he returned home, he could be shot. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. Penkovsky was referred to in four of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan espionage novels: The Hunt for Red October (1984), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), The Bear and the Dragon (2000) and Red Rabbit (2002). 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. The Soviet authorities rejected appeals by Greville Wynne's lawyer but 17 months into his sentence, they agreed to exchange Wynne for Soviet spy . 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. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. We are a Claremont, CA situated business that delivers the leading pest control service in the area. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. 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. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. After 14 days of strained negotiations, on October 28 Khruschev agreed to withdraw Soviet weapons from Cuba and the world breathed a sigh of relief. Besides Wynne, Penkovsky had another contact, Janet Chisholm the wife of Rauri Chisholm, a British MI6 officer stationed in the Moscow embassy. View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Memorials Region His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. The Courier tells the story with legitimate subtleties and an excellent cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne. If you know some information, please comment below. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. What makes Hunting Pest Services stand out from any other pest services provider is not only the quality of the results we deliver but also our versatility. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Thanks to Penkovskys Ironbark files, CIA analysts were able to accurately identify the Soviet missiles that had been photographed in Cuba and give President Kennedy precise reports on the range and strength of those weapons. 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. 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. 445 & 35. His work helped American intelligence confirm that Soviet nuclear capabilities were vastly inferior to Americas arsenal information that would prove vital in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. These produced around 1,200 pages of transcripts which the CIA and MI6 delegated 30 translators and analysts to focus on. Penkovsky (right) during his trial. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. For Oleg Penkovsky, however, his world-altering espionage work hastened his death. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). Sooner or later they would arrest me.. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, Here is something from Leo. By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. Wynne had a notorious track record for fabrications, however. It shortened her life, he said. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. 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. Greville Wynnes cause of death: Where is his family? He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. Wynne was arrested in Budapest and extradited to the Soviet Union. The Courier is currently lived by his son, Andrew, as he died in 1990 at the age of 70. Together with a turned KGB specialist, Oleg Penkovsky, he obtained important information about the Soviet attacks that somehow prevented the atomic conflict during the virus war. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. Six days before Kennedys successful diplomatic resolution of the crisis, Penkovsky was arrested. This is a picture of Oleg Penkovsky in his uniform and all of his medals, which he earned during World War Two. 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. Do you urgently need a company that can help you out? AFP/Getty ImagesPenkovsky at his public trial in Moscow. 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. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Toasty. Northolt Airport, England. 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. The Cuban Missile Crisis began on Oct. 14, 1962, when a U-2 spy plane photographed missile installations in Cuba confirming the Soviets were gearing up with capabilities of their own. Your business came highly recommended, and I am glad that I found you! He did so, but nothing happened. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. However, while working together, something unexpected happens: The two men become friends. He would not say why. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. The results you delivered are amazing! After some months, she was released. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the London . 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 the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. Espionage charges in a Soviet court were not to be taken lightly and Penkovsky was sentenced to death. Penkovsky, who was tried with him, was sentenced to death for treason. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. 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