A 2020 film, The Courier, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, follows his story. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. 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. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. Institutions, golf courses, sports fields these are just some examples of the locations we can rid of pests. 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. A Russian undercover agent and a cooperating MI6 had the opportunity to gain close access to a vast amount of information that prevented an atomic conflict at the time. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 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. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. 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. 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. He knew instantly that the cable was a ruse. This for the spy masters is an exercise in . 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. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. The Courier is currently lived by his son, Andrew, as he died in 1990 at the age of 70. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. 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. Soon after his arrest she collapsed psychologically. Penkovsky, who was tried with him, was sentenced to death for treason. After some months, she was released. But the CIA and FBI debriefers soon recognized a glaring anomaly in Ames account: It was clear that those three agents had fallen under suspicion in May 1985before Ames insists he handed over the documents. 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 August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky contacted the West to offer to work as a 'soldier warrior for the free world. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. 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. Without the senior Soviet military intelligence officer or his active role as a double agent during that time the Cold War could have gotten very hot. 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. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. INTERVIEW WITH JOE BULIK - 31.1.98. [14] That information might have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of the island, which could have risked Soviet use of 9K52 Luna-M-class tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. But he reportedly committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp. Intelligence agencies cannot tolerate unsolved mysteries and loose ends. He started having trouble breathing. This jump from the army to the GRU set the course for the rest of Penkovskys life. Wynne had a notorious track record for fabrications, however. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. Over the course of his espionage, he delivered rolls of film, classified documents, and over 5,000 photos. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. 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. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. 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. This was seized upon by critics, including then Tory MP and espionage expert Rupert Allason, who rubbished much of Wynne's record. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. Documents released by National Archives show British officials saw efforts to free Oleg Gordievsky's family as a lost cause Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor Mon 29 Dec 2014 19.01 EST Last . Penkovsky and Greville smuggled more than 5000 top-secret military documents out of the USSR. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. I just saw The Courier The true story about two men who helped prevent nuclear war between the US and Russia in 1962. Oleg Gordievsky and Leila Alieva met in Copenhagen: she was a typist for the World Health Organization; he was an unhappily married KGB officer, and a spy for MI6. 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). Everything to know about their son and. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBritish spy Greville Wynne was Penkovskys contact and intermediate to MI6. 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. They are in relation from previous few years of a strong relationship. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. These produced around 1,200 pages of transcripts which the CIA and MI6 delegated 30 translators and analysts to focus on. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. As soon as I realized what this was, I closed everything up andstarted looking for an exterminator who could help me out. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' The publication of post-Cold War memoirs by former agents and the release of declassified documents by the United States and Russia have provided a fairly complete account of the CIA's activities, including both its successes and its failures. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Also, we have no idea about his brother and sister, and we dont know their names either. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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 Soviet authorities rejected appeals by Greville Wynne's lawyer but 17 months into his sentence, they agreed to exchange Wynne for Soviet spy . Bettmann/Getty ImagesPenkovskys debriefing sessions with MI6 and the CIA totaled up to 140 hours. The Estimated Net worth is $80K USD $85k. April 22, 1964. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky redirected the virus war. IN their own highly bizarre fashion, these two books represent what seems to be the first public encounter, via the literary confrontation of its agents, between the Soviet KGB and the Ameri- can CIA: the British, as spies and the spied-upon, occupy a hazy middle ground. 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. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. Many Animals, Including the Platypus, Lost Their Stomachs. Penkovsky (right) during his trial. 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