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He is known as one of the greatest spies in the world. Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky was considered the wunderkind of the Soviet intelligence services. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The Courier (2020) - IMDb "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. It was scary.. 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. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child No question.". The Courier vs. the True Story of British Spy Greville Wynne He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Penkovsky joined the GRU as an officer, in 1953. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. 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. Thats when they showed me a piece of paper with the words, I met Joe, Andrei told me. 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. 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. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. 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. Oleg Penkovsky - Spartacus Educational The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. In Wright's view, the failure of British intelligence leaders to listen to him caused them to become paralysed when such agents defected to the Soviet Union; in his book, Spycatcher, he suggests that his hypothesis had to be true, and that the Soviets were aware of this paralysis and planted Penkovsky. 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. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". 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 school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. | READ MORE. Despite having no previous experience in intelligence work, Wynne was being recruited to serve as an MI6 agent. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Make way for his amateur,everyman spy Greville Wynne in "The Courier," now on premium VOD6. Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. I dont want to live in a tent, she 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]. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. Of course Cherkashin, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and handled Ames, may have been unable to resist a chance to taunt the FBI and the CIA. Oleg Penkovsky: Spy of the Century or Soviet Deception - The Moscow Times Bokhan froze. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. You, in your own mind, have developed this sense of self-importance, says West. "His clothes were sort of shrink-wrapped around this skeleton," says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and physically preparing to portray Wynne's final months of ordeal. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Greville Maynard Wynne | British spy | Britannica 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. An Extraordinary Bond: Dominic Cooke on The Courier. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. But over time, intelligence experts and those involved in the case, though reluctant to share sensitive information, cast doubt on much of what Wynne laid out in his books. And their actions were directly responsible for the hotline that now exists between the White House and the Kremlin to prevent nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. 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. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be. The ugly truth behind the secretive spying world - New York Daily News He was like a walking dead man. I always thought there was another one, he told me. Cookie Policy Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 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. This photograph was taken in the hotel room at the Mount Royal in London in April 1961, after one of our meetings, where Oleg Penkovsky on the left and yours truly on the right enjoying a small glass of wine. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. The Courier Review: Cold War Spy Drama Has a Great Cast But - MovieWeb Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. Wynne agreed, and during his visit to Moscow the following month he wound up connecting with Oleg Penkovsky, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (the Soviet Unions foreign-intelligence agency) who was eager to leak high-level military information to Western powers. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. They made an odd contrastthe short, energetic, and thinly mustachioed Wynne alongside the military bearing of Penkovskybut there seemed to be genuine affection between the two, and this friendship is a central focus of The Courier. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Thirty Years Later, We Still Don't Truly Know Who Betrayed These Spies 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. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. In fact, his contribution to U.S. intelligence and policymaking is exaggerated, distorted, and in several instances falsified. The Fascinating Story of the Russians Who Spied for the West on Moscow Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. OConnor makes clear that The Courier is not a documentary, even as he explains that he took pains to stick to the facts as much as they could be ascertaineddrawing on works such as Jerrold L. Shecter and Peter S. Deriabins The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War and other accounts that could be trusted more than Wynnes own inventions. His fear mounted. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. It was pathological with him.. World War 3: How CIA received imminent nuclear strike warning Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. Occasionally the killer will opt to dispense with the coffin . 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. At 4PM on the afternoon of July 19, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky dressed in a thin green sweater, faded green corduroy trousers and old brown shoes clothes he'd selected from the back of the wardrobe. 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. JOE BULIK - 31.1.98 - George Washington University Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. 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. 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. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child. Some days passed before his boss, Viktor Grushko, drove him to a KGB dacha, saying some people wanted to talk to him. In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass, Wright says: When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later Chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me: 'You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's [knighthoods] and Gongs [medals] riding high on the back of Penkovsky' he said, referring to the honours heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. He just couldnt tell the truth. At the time, they were largely accepted at face value and sold well. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. That fall, the KGB rolled up all of the CIAs assets in the Soviet Union in a lightning strike that sent the agency reeling. Joe had become very close to my father and worried that some action by him, some error, had led to his betrayal.. His trial began a few months later, and he was promptly sentenced to death for treason. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Wynne would later relate that as he walked down the steps of an exhibition pavilion, four men suddenly appeared as a car pulled up and Wynne was pushed inside. Picture of the Day - Caveman Circus He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. 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. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. 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. 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. [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. 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 After Ames, there was FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. He would not say why. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. 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. As the USSR came with the relatives of traitors to the Motherland Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. 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. Privacy Statement Impossible. By 1960 he had become a colonel in the GRU and deputy chief of the foreign section of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research (196062), in which post his task was to collect scientific and technical intelligence on the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. The Courier: Greville Wynne, Oleg Penkovsky and the remarkable true Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Macintyre writes in the book. Penkovsky papers, they do provide a fascinating glimpse into the strange and distorted world of Communism in the Soviet Union. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. He was probably the Wests most valuable double agent during the Cold War. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. 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. 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. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. Updates? His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. 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. Spy game: A familiar tale continues - BBC News How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War 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 Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. 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. 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. Everyone avoided me. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Janet Chisholm | Russia | The Guardian Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. 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. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . Final part of the true-life story behind Britain's most valuable spy The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the. You have the wrong number, he was told. MI6's agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Menu. Between April 1961 and October 1962, Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. JOE BULIK - 31.1.98 - George Washington University what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child Blog