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He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. 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. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. Penkovsky approached American students on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package in which he offered to spy for the United States. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. 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. 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. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. [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. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". 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. I always thought there was another one, he told me. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . (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. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. He had been drugged. But if he returned home, he could be shot. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Among the explanations are a desire for money or fame, a ruinous case of alcoholism, or perhaps even psychological scars left by his time in Soviet prison or the shame he felt for publicly turning against British intelligence during the trial. At least the timeline based on what Ames said when he was debriefed.If it wasnt Ames, then it was someone else, so we began to search for the source of the compromise, Wiser said. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. 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. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. West maintains that its the result of something all too typical in the intelligence communitywhat he calls post-usefulness syndrome., Imagine that I recruit you and I tell you that whatever you report to me, within an hour, it will be on the presidents desk. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. "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. It was pathological with him.. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. 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. He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a British-looking man who was eating something. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. 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. Either one of ours or theirs., When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, David Wise Son And Daughter Now Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were both arrested by the Soviets in 1962. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. An industrial sales consultant who regularly traveled through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union representing British electrical and steel companies, Wynne was told it would be helpful if on his next trip, he could arrange for a meeting with a state committee in Moscow dedicated to developing opportunities with foreigners in science and technology, and report back on his conversations. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Within two weeks after his flight to the United States, he had a new name, a fake background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta. 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. Penkovsky was the highest-ranking Soviet official to provide intelligence for the West up until that time, and is one of several individuals credited with altering the course of the Cold War. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". His fear mounted. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. 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. Advertising Notice London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. He created his own computer consulting firm and dabbled in film production. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. 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. 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. Would she ever live in the West? 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. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. 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. It also helped Americans to understand how limited the Soviets capabilities actually were in the area, so as tensions grew during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy knew how much rope he could give [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev, as Duns puts it. 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. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. The Cuban Missile Crisis was high-stakes brinkmanship played out between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, bringing Washington and Moscow to the precipice of nuclear war in October 1962. But it was only a matter of time. 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). 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. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. 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. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. "(Chisholm)played a very important role in the story that we couldn't get into, because it's a whole other movie," Cooke says. Some of it just didnt add up, he says. 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 Oleg Penkovskiy. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. Terms of Use The name of Oleg Penkovsky is not nearly as well known. "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. A member of the Communist Party, he took part in the invasion of Finland and by the end of the Second World War had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 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. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 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.. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. 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. Even though Wynne wasnt exactly a reliable narrator for what he did during his time as a secret agent, the materials he smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain were the real thing. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. They know.. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldnt put our finger on., And Bearden says, I remain convinced there is a fourth man. 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. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. 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. 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. 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. Impossible. Everyone avoided me. 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. 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). 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. Three other officers were also disciplined. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. They worked hard, shadowing British diplomats, to build up a "discovery case" against Penkovsky so that they could arrest him without throwing suspicion on their own moles. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. 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. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Toasty. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. Cookie Policy They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. 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. He just couldnt tell the truth. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. [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. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). After some months, she was released. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. They had to go through a show trial, basically, so on the stand Wynne accused MI6 of using him as a dupehe may have just been saying whatever he could say because he worried they might execute him, says Jeremy Duns, an author of several spy novels set during the Cold War as well as the history book Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. Meticulously documenting the wealth of information that Penkovsky provided, Schecter and Deriabin conclusively refute one of the enduring myths of the Cold War - that Oleg Penkovsky was a KGB plant. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. Released in the same week as The Sun's revelations about an alleged spy known as David Smith who worked in Britain's embassy in Berlin, The Courier tells how the married 41-year-old sales consultant was persuaded by MI6 to deliver secrets from Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky. 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. After a West German agent overheard a remark at Stasi headquarters, paraphrased as "I wonder how things are going in Cuba" he passed it on to the CIA. 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. 41 ratings1 review. 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. 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. 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. je voulais juste avoir de tes nouvelles what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. After months of negotiations, the British government was eventually able to arrange a trade of Wynne for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, whod been arrested the year before and was serving a 25-year sentence in England. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. He was free.