Penkovsky had been given a list of numbers, one of which was Felicity Stuarts. As deputy head of the Foreign Relations Department of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research under the USSR Council of Ministers, Penkovsky had an opportunity to travel on trips abroad, which he used to meet with his new Western colleagues. It was ideal cover for spying or approaching a recruit for MI6. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret Soviet military documents, totaling 7,650 pages. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. MI6 was famously accused of deploying a "spy rock" in a Moscow park in 2006 in which a transmitter to pass information was concealed (meaning there was less need for the kind of furtive exchange that got Penkovsky into trouble). The CIA. Penkovskys pre-arranged signal to Stuarts number consisted of three rings, not two. And sometimes save the world. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Macintyre writes in the book. A meeting in the Oval Office between Oleg Gordievsky and President Ronald Reagan on July 21, 1987. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. The Courier will be in cinemas from August 13. In 1959, MI6 had sent him to Odessa on the Black Sea to help shepherd out a Soviet intelligence service major named Sergei Kuznov. Although American politicians exploited the resulting paranoia, Bentley proved there were Russian spies among us. Thankfully for him, it was only to last 18 months as, in early 1964, the Soviet Union agreed to swap him for their spy Konon Molody, who as Canadian businessman Gordon Lonsdale had been the architect of the Portland Spy Ring that had gathered British naval secrets until his arrest in 1961. Quizzed by reporters back in the UK, Wynne could still manage a joke about his shaven head being the Lubyankas interpretation of a haircut. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Tuesday, October 17, 1961: Moscow. Ames, meanwhile, hated that he only made $60,000 a year. Wynne was arrested and sent to jail until he was swapped for a KGB spy arrested in London. In a Moscow park, Penkovsky also passed packets of sweets (with camera film hidden inside) to the wife of a British MI6 officer while she was pushing her children in a pram. Dracula is supposed to be from Transylvania which is in Romania, but the famous accent was portrayed by Bela Lugosi who was Hungarian. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. Together they stopped the Cuban Missle Crisis and prevented a nuclear catastrophe. That space was reserved for Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet military intelligence colonel and British double agent whose information is credited with ending the Cuban missile crisis and even altering the entire course of the Cold War. In the summer of 1985, Gordievsky managed to evade his captors and was smuggled out of Russia. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. According to Lyudmila, gave a rare interview to the journalists, their family, the security services after the husbands escape is slighted, but she did not understand why Belenko decided to escape. 22:56 GMT 01 Jul 2021 (Associated Press) (Anonymous/AP). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection, 1948) (Library of Congress). Your email address will not be published. While negotiating his depature from the city, he claimed to have had a dream where his wine was . In 1945, You will remember me kindly, I will win your recognition, wrote Oleg Penkovsky in a secret message to Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and ten leading Western politicians. As well as hundreds of photographs taken at the Soviets May Day parades, they contained top-secret field manuals that had been photographed by Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow. In fact, Penkovsky, who despised the repressive Soviet leadership and feared it would take the world to nuclear oblivion, had already approached the Americans and the Canadians about helping them. Penkovsky and Wynne had some fun while their collaboration lasted. On November 2, 1962, two such calls came. [1] After school, she worked in London as a secretary before joining the Allied Control Commission and moving to West Germany. He outlived the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991. They were all short and thickset and wore their trilby hats at the same angle. He kept his sanity by drawing up designs for modifications to his Chelsea home on scraps of newspaper he stole from the lavatory. Unlike the old days, though, these spies werent interested in the cause. Eventually captured by the KGB in 1977, Ogorodnik just had time to take cyanide. Wynne and Penkovsky pleaded guilty on 7 May 1963 and were sentenced four days later. According to Wynne, British intelligence noticed Penkovskys odd (for a Soviet official) behaviour frequently slipping away alone for long strolls round the city or drinking wine at a pavement cafe where he would have a faraway expression. Wynnes interpreter was making a quick exit when the Englishman called to him for help. The CIA then decided to check the dead drop to see if Penkovsky had provided any further details, just in case, and the officer who was sent, Dick Jacob, was promptly arrested by the KGB. A December 1962 article in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia unwittingly pointed to what probably happened. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin agreed to allow Gordievskys wife and daughters to join him in UK. This paper is about Oleg Penkovsky and his profound contributions to the UK and US military intelligence. 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. Oleg Gordievsky (Former Colonel of the KGB and Bureau Chief in London) Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. Dimitri Polyakov was a Russian double agent who became one of America's most valuable spies during the Cold War. Being a democracy, we were vulnerable in a way the totalitarian Soviet Union never could be. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. After the war, Wynne worked in the electrical goods trade, in 1950 setting up his own business as an exporter of industrial engineering products. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. He had been a key contact for a Russian military intelligence officer named Col Oleg Penkovsky, who had provided vital intelligence at a time of great tension during the Cold War. She was born in Kasauli, India to a Royal Engineers officer. He is the author of Dead Drop: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation (Simon & Schuster). It required what were known as "Moscow Rules" - the closest attention to detail and to what is known in the spy-world as "tradecraft" to avoid being caught. But her bosses in Moscow didnt trust a woman to do the job. Walls in apartments, offices, and public locations contained microphones, and entire floors of buildings were given over to command posts listening in to and recording conversations. Penkovsky himself paid the ultimate price and was executed. During a trip to London in April 1961, the Soviet colonel held a series of . That approach went down in flames, literally, when the Soviet Union shot down pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1960, an event the CIA experts swore was impossible. Almost a year to the day after the mysterious call to Felicity Stuarts apartment, analysts at the CIAs National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington pored over photographs taken by a U-2 pilot over western Cuba, and noticed images of unusually long missiles. Photograph: News (UK) Ltd/Rex Features, Thatcher considered UK chemical weapons programme, documents show, Downing Street files reveal how Oliver Letwin kept poll tax plans alive, TheGuardian view of the poll tax papers: judgment on Oliver Letwin, Home Office dismissed nuclear winter threat as scaremongering, files show, National Archives: revelations from the released documents, Archive files show how Thatcher vetoes shaped 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement, Cabinet papers show Thatcher advisers struggle with Heseltine over Westland. In both cases, when someone answered he was to blow three times into the mouthpiece, and then hang up. 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. the Property Arkady Shevchenko in Moscow apartment, more like a Museum of Antiques, confiscated. Tom Leonard for the Daily Mail America continued to rely on technology, including surveillance by super-secret U-2 spy planes. There was no imminent nuclear strikeit had simply been a trap. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Both men were heavy drinkers who liked a party and even persuaded their respective paymasters to stump up 500 each for the construction of a bar at Wynnes home. Wynne and Penkovsky engage in bland business banter while Wynne's wife (Jessie Buckley) assumes his new secretiveness is to cover up an affair. He gave them secret codes. 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. Penkovsky's leaks prove valuable in informing the West about Soviet missile activity in Cuba, paving the way for swift action when photos confirm it in the fall of 1962. How many Russians do we expel? Sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscows Lubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. Cold War Budapest in 1962 was not the most welcoming place for a British businessman, but Greville Wynne was feeling rather pleased with himself. They don't sip vodka martinis with exotic beauties. Greville Wynne was sentenced after a short trial in Moscow in 1963, Col Gordievsky had to be smuggled out Russia in an MI6 officer's car, The "spy rock" scandal severely strained British-Russian relations, Rescuers search wreckage of deadly Greece train crash. 2023 BBC. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. (World Telegram Photo, C.M. Even while Penkovskys intelligence was being relayed inside the White House during the greatest crisis of the Cold War, his own identity had to be protectedeven to the extent of claiming that he represented more than one sourcebecause if this crisis abated, he might be crucial in stopping the next one. The arrest of alleged CIA spies harks back both to a Cold War sense of an external danger as well a sense of Russia still being a country the CIA wants to spy on - like it did in the old days when the US and Russia were seen (often wrongly) as evenly matched. The former type of information might be known by a diplomat - the latter only by another spy. Before they could, though, she got rid of them. 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On March 19, 2021, after a COVID-induced delay, the new historical thrillerThe Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, had its world premiere. Share: Comments Comments on the article How the USSR came with the relatives of traitors to the Motherland Please log in to leave a comment! But he was also driven by revenge: he had been stymied in his career, and was furious he had never been made a general. Where are dogs allowed on Llandudno beach? MI6s agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back to Moscow and interrogated by the KGB. Hetman the codename under which Gordievsky operated had disclosed that at least 25 Russian and east European diplomats based in London were spies. When Golos dropped dead in their New York apartment, Bentley took over the operation. Espionage historians are now fairly certain Kuznov never existed, just as they are convinced that Wynne never exposed a German spy in 1938 nor that as Wynne also claimed he and Penkovsky flew to Washington DC to be personally thanked by President John F. Kennedy. At other meetings, he would hand over film inside cigarette packets, signalling that he had something to report by phoning the British embassys naval attache but hanging up after a few rings. The GRU continues to operate as well. But then, Alexander Ogorodnik, a cash-strapped Soviet diplomat, started spying for the Americans and a dissatisfied KGB colonel, Oleg Gordievsky, began doing the same for the English. Her husband was a spy who headed the MI6 station in Moscow but worked under the guise of a visa officer. Over the course of his espionage career, Oleg Penkovsky inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union. 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