Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Penkovskys stolen files showed that the Soviet arsenal was smaller and weaker than the Americans had previously thought. Years later, Penkovsky himself would try to halt the Soviet spread of communism. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. 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. GRU emblem. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. After many years, I understood him. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Compared to the KGB, which focused squarely on crushing internal dissent, the GRU had more of a geopolitical impact. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. If you know some information, please comment below. 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. The Courier is currently lived by his son, Andrew, as he died in 1990 at the age of 70. Stuzhin & Cheredintzev/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesSome believe Penkovsky was burned alive as Soviet punishment for his treasonous espionage. Toasty. Together with a turned KGB specialist, Oleg Penkovsky, he obtained important information about the Soviet attacks that somehow prevented the atomic conflict during the virus war. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Wynne had founded an export business of industrial engineering products years earlier, and the international travel involved provided excellent cover for espionage. The CIA. What happened to wife of Oleg Penkovsky? Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. We have no information about his girlfriend/boyfriend. 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]. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. John Turner. He provided the CIA and MI6 with extensive debriefing sessions totaling up to 140 hours, delivered invaluable documents, and over 5,000 Soviet photos. AFP/Getty ImagesPenkovsky at his public trial in Moscow. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. What happened to their family? The British intelligence agency MI6 (then known as SIS) had already been hard at work to infiltrate the Soviet Unions State Committee for Science and Technology, however. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. If there is a fourth mole, and he is still alive, the FBI would surely want to catch him and prosecute him. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. 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. Also, we have no information about his son and daughter. 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. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBritish spy Greville Wynne was Penkovskys contact and intermediate to MI6. As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. Omissions? I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. After his release, Wynne struggled with . Wynne who was also arrested for espionage would claim that Penkovsky committed suicide in prison. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Gophers and other rodents can prove to be a real nuisance for open sporting fields, and if you want to have an undisturbed game or event, our specialists will make sure that everything is OK. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. 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. We have no more information about his spouse. Thanks to Penkovskys Ironbark files, CIA analysts were able to accurately identify the Soviet missiles that had been photographed in Cuba and give President Kennedy precise reports on the range and strength of those weapons. [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. One theory links his arrest to the spouse of a contact. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. He was arrested for espionage in Budapest on Nov. 16, 1962. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. I had no job. | READ MORE. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. The Estimated Net worth is $80K USD $85k. Over the course of his espionage, he delivered rolls of film, classified documents, and over 5,000 photos. Penkovskys debriefing sessions with MI6 and the CIA totaled up to 140 hours. 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. Long after the massive losses in 1985, the lingering questions still gnaw at their counterintelligence experts. Between April 1961 and August 1962 Penkovsky passed more than 5,000 photographs of classified military, political, and economic documents to British and U.S. intelligence forces. [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. 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. 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 . In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. It looked outward for any external threats, and employed people capable of subterfuge and turning potential pawns into assets. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. 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. 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. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. Greville Wynne is a legend in the history books and his family has also benefited from it. He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIAit would have put her in mortal dangerbut now he had to say something. The mole isnt just some guy who stole a few secrets. CIA and FBI agents who knew the Russian agonized over . But before the two years were up, a KGB agent caught him passing secrets. 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. 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.. 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. How Soviet Spy Oleg Penkovsky Single-Handedly Prevented Nuclear War During The Cuban Missile Crisis. He didnt have a choice. Today, Sergei and Alla live quietly in the Sun Belt under his new identity. Your Privacy Rights Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. 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. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. Murder by Cremation. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. That raised a possibility that remains, even today, a subject of deep concern among counterintelligence agents, a problem privately acknowledged but little discussed publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed by a mole inside U.S. intelligence whose identity is still unknown. Positive Elements. [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. This was seized upon by critics, including then Tory MP and espionage expert Rupert Allason, who rubbished much of Wynne's record. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. Over the course of his espionage, he delivered rolls of film, classified documents, and over 5,000 photos. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. GRU agent Vladimir Rezun, however, claimed in his memoir that he saw footage of Penkovsky being strapped to a stretcher inside of a crematorium and burned alive. 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. 445 & 35. That's about all I knew until this film. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 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 results you delivered are amazing! Meet Hasekura Tsunenaga, The 17th-Century Samurai Who Traveled The World And Became A Roman Aristocrat, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch. These produced around 1,200 pages of transcripts which the CIA and MI6 delegated 30 translators and analysts to focus on. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. But if he returned home, he could be shot. It shortened her life, he said. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. This is quite shocking, since their countries are nearly at war. He was convicted of spying on 11 May 1963 and sentenced to eight years in prison; Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed (although Wynne himself in his book "The man from Odessa' claimed that Penkovsky committed suicide in prison). [9] While the weight of opinion seems to be that Penkovsky was genuine, the debate underscores the difficulty faced by all intelligence agencies of determining information offered from the enemy. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The Courier tells the story with legitimate subtleties and an excellent cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne. His Girlfriend/boyfriends name is Not Available. Espionage charges in a Soviet court were not to be taken lightly and Penkovsky was sentenced to death. But it was only a matter of time. Now a legitimate double agent, Oleg Penkovsky spent the next two years providing his Western contacts with stolen top-secret documents, war plans, military manuals and nuclear missile diagrams. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . 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. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Expert extermination for a safe property. Penkovsky, sadly, was tried and executed for conspiracy by the Soviets in 1962. Many Animals, Including the Platypus, Lost Their Stomachs. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. As MacIntyre reminds us, the rumor has always been that MI6-CIA agent Oleg Penkovsky, betrayed by British-spy-turned-Soviet-agent George Blake, had been cremated alive in 1963 by the KGB after . With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. His ashes were allegedly dumped in a mass grave in Moscow. However, the two were captured by the KGB after the Russians discovered that they were being neutralized. Confess again! the general roared. He was about to be married, and his debts were mounting. 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. 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. A mini-documentary about Oleg Penkovsky and his efforts during the Cold War. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. They urged him to go to Moscow, but they also provided him with an escape plan in case he signaled that he was in danger. 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.'. He works as a computer programmer. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Penkovsky, who was tried with him, was sentenced to death for treason. Stuzhin & Cheredintzev/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 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. GRU . The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. 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. (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. I just saw The Courier The true story about two men who helped prevent nuclear war between the US and Russia in 1962. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. He graduated from the strenuous academy in 1948 and promptly joined the GRU. Greville Wynne And Oleg Penkovsky were two people who had a significant role in containing the cold war. 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