OConnor makes clear that The Courier is not a documentary, even as he explains that he took pains to stick to the facts as much as they could be ascertaineddrawing on works such as Jerrold L. Shecter and Peter S. Deriabins The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War and other accounts that could be trusted more than Wynnes own inventions. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. By 1993 their marriage was over. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. Murder by Cremation. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. They married in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he worked for an independent newspaper in Moscow for a time. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting up with Janet Chisholm, a British MI6 agent stationed in Moscow. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . Milton Bearden, who held several senior posts is his 30-year career at the CIA, is convinced there was a traitor, as yet undetected. Mr. Wint: Very moving. 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 If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in October 1962. 3.80. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He was arrested on October 22nd. 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. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. In the midst of the Cold War, a top-ranking Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky feared that the risk of nuclear war was too great, and decided to share some of the most closely held secrets of the Soviet arsenal with the West. He just couldnt tell the truth. Donec gravida mi a condimentum rutrum. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). When it comes to espionage, its hard to know who to trust. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Cookie Policy "He started as a nave amateur. 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. He was the real deal. 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. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. After many years, I understood him. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. Even the official accounts put out by American and Russian authorities regarding the Penkovsky affair include disinformation and spin that he, or any historian, has to navigate through. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. 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. 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. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. [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'". Terms of Use 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 . Gordievsky never took a penny from MI6 until after he had defected to the U.K. His actions were motivated by a hatred of the tyranny of the Soviet system, and the degraded condition in which it. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. 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. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. Terms of Use For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. Toasty. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. Afterward, we drove to a home in Virginia for a reception, where I met Joe, Andrei told me in a conversation over lunch at a restaurant tucked away on a side street in Washington. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. 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.. Thus began their fruitful relationship, one that involved Wynne hosting Penkovsky in London, who was visiting under the pretense of cultivate new opportunities in the West. 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]. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. 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. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Confess again! the general roared. Alex Palmer Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Everyone avoided me. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. 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. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lore and popular culture tout Col. Oleg Penkovsky as "the spy who saved the world" during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. "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. Gordievsky decided to risk his life and go. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. From a Moscow railroad station, he made his way by train, bus and taxi to a point near the Finnish-Soviet border, where he hid in some grass by the roadside until two cars stopped. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. 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. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. And their actions were directly responsible for the hotline that now exists between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. 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. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. Wynne was a middle-classBritish businessman whose frequenttravelto Eastern Europe attracted recruitmentby MI-6 to serve as a liaison to high-ranking Soviet official Penkovsky. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. 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. 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. 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. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. The 23-year-old journalist had been working late for Novosti, the Soviet press agency. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. 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 . There were embraces, and everyone cried. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. 41 ratings1 review. | READ MORE. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. 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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. Both he and the Soviet leader. No question.". Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. 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. Updates? Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . I always thought there was another one, he told me. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. 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 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. Janie and He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara, Turkey, but was recalled after he had reported his superior officer, and later other GRU personnel for a breach of regulations, which made him unpopular in the department. "And Greville played a big part in that.". As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. It was scary.. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. After some months, she was released. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. 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). The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. 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 daughter of a Russian mother . Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. Posted on . Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. I could not believe what was happening. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. 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. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Penkovsky (right) during his trial What happened next is unclear. 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. Kent. 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. 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. Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynnewrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandizingbooks, "The Man From Moscow" (1967) and "The Man From Odessa" (1981). That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. The defection of Gordievsky was one of the UK's greatest security coups, delivering a stream of high-grade information. Wright noted that, unlike Igor Gouzenko and other earlier defectors, Penkovsky did not reveal the names of any Soviet agents in the West but only provided organisational detail, much of which was known already. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin". When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close byAlsatians, he later learned. Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. In Wright's view, the failure of British intelligence leaders to listen to him caused them to become paralysed when such agents defected to the Soviet Union; in his book, Spycatcher, he suggests that his hypothesis had to be true, and that the Soviets were aware of this paralysis and planted Penkovsky. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. 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. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Advertising Notice 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 . He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. 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. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC.