Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. 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. After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . But if he returned home, he could be shot. He was immediately. 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.'. 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. On April 23, 1919, Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky was born in Vladikavkaz, Russia. After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. Guaranteed Reliability and Proven Results! 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. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. They know.. Your business came highly recommended, and I am glad that I found you! https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky, far from being the decadent playboy.portrayed by the Soviet prosecutor, was probably The most highly placed Western agent ever to fall into the hands of'the Soviet security . This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. In either scenario, the double agent died on May 16, 1963. Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky redirected the virus war. We have no more Information about his Father; we will try to collect information and update soon. In simple terms, the GRU was Soviet army intelligence. MI6 was in disbelief as were the Americans they gave it to. This was prior to President Kennedy's address to the US revealing that U-2 spy plane photographs had confirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were installing medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, in what was known as Operation Anadyr. Your fathers been arrested, the man said. 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. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. The CIA. The courier was Greville Wynne [] Penkovsky at his public trial in Moscow. Whether your office needs a reliable exterminator or your home is under attack by a variety of rodents and insects, you dont need to fear anymore, because we are here to help you out. He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. And he really was a hero by anyone's standards, and incredibly thwarted. He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. Everything to know about their son and. I could sense he had been tortured. Leonid was executed on July 30. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. His ashes were allegedly dumped in a mass grave in Moscow. After 14 days of strained negotiations, on October 28 Khruschev agreed to withdraw Soviet weapons from Cuba and the world breathed a sigh of relief. 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. between this and #ThePowerOfDog lately, he might as well be the best actor in the world right now. Penkovsky was actually a real proper hero before beginning of the film. He later died of a throat disease in London. MI6 and the CIA ran Pen. Examining this moment in Cold War Era history, the film does a good job of remaining historically accurate with a . He had lost a lot of weight. For Oleg Penkovsky, however, his world-altering espionage work hastened his death. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Then, learn about Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet military man who saved the world from nuclear war in 1983. That year, Oleg Penkovsky passed a message to the CIA via a pair of American tourists that read, in part, I ask you to consider me as your soldier. The recruitment of a well-placed spy, in this case a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, lessened the tensions of the Cold War by providing information on the intentions, strength, and technological advancement of the Soviet Union. He had planned to write a memoir but died of malaria before he could begin. 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. If you know some information, please comment below. 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. Her husband was a spy who headed the MI6 station in Moscow but worked under the guise of a visa officer. He provided the CIA and MI6 with extensive debriefing sessions totaling up to 140 hours, delivered invaluable documents, and over 5,000 Soviet photos. What happened to the family of Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky? One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). It shortened her life, he said. On March 19, 2021, after a COVID-induced delay, the new historical thriller The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, had its world premiere. It is a collec- tion of. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Omissions? Many Animals, Including the Platypus, Lost Their Stomachs. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. The Wynne-Penkovsky case came at the height of the Cold War when relations between the superpowers were particularly strained. 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. 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. He sort of fought the Nazis off in Kiev, and was leading that and was decorated 13 times. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. Cookie Policy Espionage charges in a Soviet court were not to be taken lightly and Penkovsky was sentenced to death. On the appointed day he startedproverka, or dry-cleaningwalking an elaborate route to throw off anyone who might be watching him. 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. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. I just saw The Courier The true story about two men who helped prevent nuclear war between the US and Russia in 1962. Continuing the family, Greville Wynne had a son named Andrew Wynne. As Penkovskys position necessitated travel to Britain, the Russians initially didnt suspect him of espionage. 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. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. 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. Soon after they arrived in the United States, there was a ceremony honoring his father at a Russian Orthodox church in Washington. His arrest was followed by a public trial in May 1963. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. 3 3.Oleg Penkovsky - Your Resource for Espionage on the Web; 4 4.What Happened To Greville Wynne And Oleg - Showbizcorner; 5 5.The True Story Behind 'The Courier' | History| Smithsonian Magazine; 6 6.Spy Penkovsky biography. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. 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. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. Everyone avoided me. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. His MI6 handlers assured him theyd picked up no sign anything was wrong. 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. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 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. Toasty. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. We cant say their name. Be that as it may, the British intelligence official returned in 1964 after spending two years in Soviet prison. Over the two weeks that followed, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev engaged in tense negotiations, but the Americans had an ace up their sleeves. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. This was seized upon by critics, including then Tory MP and espionage expert Rupert Allason, who rubbished much of Wynne's record. But he reportedly committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. Together they stopped the Cuban Missle Crisis and prevented a nuclear catastrophe. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, Here is something from Leo. By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. That happened several times.. 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. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself. During one of Wynnes trips to London in April 1961, Penkovsky handed him a hefty package of documents and film he passed along to MI6. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. British spy Greville Wynne was Penkovskys contact and intermediate to MI6. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. No one knew what became of America's perfect spy until January 1990, when the state-controlled Soviet newspaper, Pravda, reported that on March 15, 1988, General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov was executed for espionage. Wynne was arrested in Budapest and extradited to the Soviet Union. [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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. After some months, she was released. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Our professional rodent controlwill surely provide you with the results you are looking for. Expert extermination for a safe property. Penkovsky, sadly, was tried and executed for conspiracy by the Soviets in 1962. 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. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He was most popular as the messenger who could give highly confidential information about the Soviets. He was like a walking dead man. Penkovsky and Wynne's motivation to steal top-secret intel from the USSR is driven by their desire to protect their loved ones from a nuclear holocaust. After being wounded in battle in 1944, Penkovsky left the army and joined the renowned Frunze Military Academy. Penkovsky was run jointly by a team of CIA and MI6 officers with the initial meetings taking place at a London hotel, but contacting him in Moscow and passing information proved hard, dangerous work. The Cuban Missile Crisis began on Oct. 14, 1962, when a U-2 spy plane photographed missile installations in Cuba confirming the Soviets were gearing up with capabilities of their own. 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. Penkovskys debriefing sessions with MI6 and the CIA totaled up to 140 hours. 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