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Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. It shortened her life, he said. 'The Courier' Tells Lesser Known Real Life Spy Story sports injuries prezi. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. Updates? Advertising Notice A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. President John Kennedy read it and understood. He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. Strange" to Sherlock Holmes. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. 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. Arrested? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. I always thought there was another one, he told me. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. 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. As soon as Gordievsky landed in Moscow, he picked up signs that he had gambled wrong. 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 has two daughters. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. 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. Minutes passed. 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 . As the USSR came with the relatives of traitors to the Motherland 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. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. "He started as a nave amateur. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. Gordievsky's Wife was not with him live Former Colonel of the First Central Board of the KGB of the USSR, recruited in the mid-80s the CIA and worked for British intelligence, abroad called the largest Soviet "mole" after Penkovsky. JOE BULIK - 31.1.98 - George Washington University the imminent threat of nuclear war concealed by Soviet peace - JSTOR 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. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. Alex Palmer Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. 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. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. 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. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. 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. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. Final part of the true-life story behind Britain's most valuable spy Your Privacy Rights His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. 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. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. 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. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife WW3: CIA and MI6 received 'emergency' warning for 'imminent nuclear "And Greville played a big part in that.". Love in a Cold War: the romance of Oleg Gordievsky, MI6's greatest "His clothes were sort of shrink-wrapped around this skeleton," says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and physically preparing to portray Wynne's final months of ordeal. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky | Soviet officer | Britannica The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner - BiographyPedia "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. Cookie Policy His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. What Happened To Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky Family? Wiki 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. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories, This page was last edited on 30 January 2023, at 08:39. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Wynne also enthusiastically embraced his role, enjoying the part of a daring secret agent where he could apply his salesman skills to a higher-stakes game. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. Who in reality was the Soviet traitor in the new Cumberbatch spy The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. 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. KGB defector pleaded in vain for help getting family out of USSR, files 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. Penkovsky, the Spy Who Tried to Destroy the World 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. 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.. The information he provided on the Soviets . Would she ever live in the West? A KGB general told him he had confessed. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. During the 1960s, a corrosive mole hunt led by James J. Angleton, the CIAs counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at the Soviet Union, and disrupted the lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired or sidetracked in their careers. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. 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. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. Dead Drop: TheTrue Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold War's Most There were embraces, and everyone cried. In a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov, named Penkovsky as Russia's biggest intelligence failure. The Courier vs. the True Story of British Spy Greville Wynne He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. Cookie Settings, Liam Daniel, Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, 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. 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. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He was the real deal. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. After some months, she was released. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. troops.[15]. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). He would not say why. But this Land Rovers driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicles doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. Tinker, tailor, soldier 'The Courier' - The Boston Globe Some of it just didnt add up, he says. Macintyre writes in the book. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. 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. 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. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. 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. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. 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. Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. JOE BULIK - 31.1.98 - George Washington University 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 1944, he was assigned to the headquarters of Colonel-General Sergei Varentsov, commander of artillery on the 1st Ukrainian front, who became his patron. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. 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. Toasty. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. Oleg Penkovsky - Spartacus Educational In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. | READ MORE. Oleg Penkovsky Born: April 23, 1919 Birthplace: Vladikavkaz, Russia Death: May 16, 1963, Moscow, USSR (executed by Soviet Union) Jessie Buckley Born: December 28, 1989 Birthplace: Killarney, Ireland Sheila Wynne Keir Hills Andrew Wynne Angus Wright Born: November 11, 1964 Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA Sir Arthur Temple 'Dickie' Franks By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. 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. 'The Courier' fact check: Benedict Cumberbatch's spy Greville Wynne Oleg Penkovsky: Spy of the Century or Soviet Deception - The Moscow Times 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 . Donec gravida mi a condimentum rutrum. 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. 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.. Bokhan froze. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. 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. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. 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. Penkovskys dynamism and enthusiasm, his wide-ranging and passionate denunciations of the Soviet system and its leaders illustrated with anecdotes, fascinated and captivated the American and British teams, write Schecter and Deriabin. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. The True Story Behind 'The Courier' - Smithsonian Magazine After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. 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. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. He just couldnt tell the truth. [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. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. PDF THE TIM I OVERSEAS NEWS a British diplomatist's The spy who saved the world: For 12 perilous days in 1962, the world Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. The stories of Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Bokhan and Leonid Poleshchukreported here in extensive new detail and based on interviews with Gordievsky, Bokhan and Andrei Poleshchuk, as well as former FBI and CIA officialssuggest the damage a mole can do. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. 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. In 1962, Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky defied his country to save the world from nuclear war then paid for his heroism with his life. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Greville Wynne - Spartacus Educational With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. The domestic impact of foreign clandestine operations: the CIA and academic institutions, the media and religious institutions, Appendix B", The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963, "Nonfiction Book Review: The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War by Jerrold L. Schecter, Author, Peter S. Deriabin, With Scribner Book Company ISBN 978-0-684-19068-6", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oleg_Penkovsky&oldid=1136437646, Soviet people executed for spying for the United States, Russian people executed by the Soviet Union, Executed people from North OssetiaAlania, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2022, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and Economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. 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. 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 . His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. 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.