what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child

Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. 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. Athens, May 21, 1985: After the Tuesday-morning staff meeting at the Soviet Embassy, Col. Sergei Ivanovich Bokhan stayed behind to talk to his boss, the local rezident of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. You have the wrong number, he was told. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. 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. 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 Among the materials Penkovsky provided to Wynne were four photocopies of plans for construction sites of missile-launching installations in Cuba. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. Terms of Use 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. "He started as a nave amateur. 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. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. harvp error: no target: CITEREFSchecterDeriabinPenkovskij1992 (. Penkovsky's father might have fled to the West rather than have died of typhus as Penkovsky had previously reported, the KGB prohibited Penkovsky from assuming his post in New Delhi but permitted him to remain in the GRU after his mother submitted a statement detailing her family's ignorance of her husband's fate.28 The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. Her eyes were empty. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Would she ever live in the West? The CIA delayed in contacting him. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. Relying once again on Varentsov's patronage, he spent nine months studying rocket artillery at Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. 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. 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. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. It doesnt matter, he said, and quoted a Russian proverb: S milym rai i v shalashe. If you love somebody, you will have heaven even in a tent. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. After many years, I understood him. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. A large man let him in and flashed a badge. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. 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. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. 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 . Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. 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. answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. 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. It was the signal to launch his escape. Seeking ways to parlay the notoriety he received, he became what Duns calls a rent-a-spokesperson for all kinds of espionage stuff, making appearances in the media about anything related to spycraft, whether or not it was anything he had experience with. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. We never drank too much, but we had to relax a little bit after one of our tiring meetings. 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. 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. 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. 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. "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. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. It shortened her life, he said. 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]. 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. In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: Im quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April 85, until June 13th.. Menu. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. 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. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malariabefore he could begin. 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. He has two daughters. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. 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. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Penkovsky felt stunted in his career with GRU and expected that by helping the West for a year or two, he and his family could be relocated and build a better life, and that he would personally be showered with recognition and honor. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Bokhan froze. It was scary.. 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. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. 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. It was pathological with him.. 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. After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. Then after your service, when you havent even told your family or friends about this, youre told, thank you very much, indeed. Though a former colonel of the 'KGB' by designation, who was appointed "resident-designate" at the . 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. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. Penkovsky never knew his father, who was killed fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War when he was a baby. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. 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. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 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. [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. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. So the discrepancy between Ames timeline and the exposure of Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk remains unexplained. 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. Yet the secrets that the Soviet colonel passed on to the West helped keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War . That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. 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. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. You, in your own mind, have developed this sense of self-importance, says West. 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. 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. 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. President John Kennedy read it and understood. 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. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. He would not say why. | Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. 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. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. [20] The head of the GRU, Ivan Serov was sacked during the same period. 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. 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. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. He was an intermediary for the important Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, who was engaged in selling arms and weapons secrets to British intelligence. 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. He just couldnt tell the truth. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. It was in my fathers handwriting. Leonid Poleshchuk knew his first CIA case officer, who had recruited him in Nepal, as Joe. 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. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. 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. 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. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. 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. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. 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. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. He is the author of The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. 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. 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. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. 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. He was the real deal. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. Greville Wynne, a British spy who told in his celebrated memoirs how he pried loose some of Moscow's best-kept secrets and who served 18 months in a Soviet prison for 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. As a top ranking Russian officer, he sinks into the depts and rises to the heights of international intrigue. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. | READ MORE. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. "Greville Wynne was anordinary mandoing an extraordinary thing," Cumberbatch says. As important as Popov was to the United States and the West, it was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, another Soviet GRU officer, who has earned the sobriquet, the "spy who saved the world.'. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, to help build . U.S. counterintelligence agents have established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. He was free. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. 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. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. Theres a fair amount of source material from all different kinds of authors, so by reading everybodynot just Wynnes books, but other historians, and the official history put out by the American side and the Soviet side I was able to try and work out what made the most sense and what seemed liked disinformation, says OConnor. 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. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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 had lost a lot of weight. 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. He works as a computer programmer. For his treason, Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad days after the trial ended (though Wynne would later claim he died of suicide). David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. The Cuban Missile Crisis. There were embraces, and everyone cried. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. Confess again! the general roared. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. He was like a walking dead man. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Wynne left The Ivy restaurant in Seven Dials that day probably wondering what he'd let himself in for. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. The agents he betrayed that day, he has said, included Oleg Gordievsky, whose CIA code name was GTTICKLE; Sergei Bokhan, or GTBLIZZARD; and Leonid Poleshchuk, or GTWEIGH. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. Arrested? American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. Upon release from prison, Wynnes old life was in tattershed lost much of his business and the time spent in the Soviet prison seemed to have caused long-term damage. [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. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine On October 29 of that year, just hours after the Soviets stood down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne went to Soviet-occupied Budapest with a traveling exhibition of British industrial goods, against the advice of his MI6 handlers. (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 May 1963, after his trial, Izvestya reported that Varentsov, who had since achieved the rank of Chief Marshal of Artillery and Commander in Chief of Rocket Forces and candidate member of the Central Committee had been demoted to the rank of Major General. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. Both he and the Soviet leader. 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. I could not believe what was happening. To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba.

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