Greville Wynne is a legend in the history books and his family has also benefited from it. He would not say why. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. For Oleg Penkovsky, however, his world-altering espionage work hastened his death. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". Then the car started up again, and the radio, which had been playing pop music, suddenly boomed out SibeliusFinlandia. Omissions? Fathers name is Not Available. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. How Soviet Spy Oleg Penkovsky Single-Handedly Prevented Nuclear War During The Cuban Missile Crisis. 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 He holds dual bachelor's degrees from Pace University and a master's degree from New York University. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a far more experienced Russian agent. 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. Stansfield. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. April 22, 1964. [6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. How the traitor Oleg Penkovsky was 7 7.The Courier vs. the True Story of British Spy Greville Wynne Peter Wright, a former British MI5 officer known for his scathing condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence during most of the Cold War, believed that Penkovsky was a fake defection. The most controversial claim in the book was that he and Penkovsky were smuggled into the White House and lauded by President Kennedy. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. 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. 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. 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. [16] The noted Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny said that he had been told by the director of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium "how Penkovsky [had been] executed by 'fire'". Compared to the KGB, which focused squarely on crushing internal dissent, the GRU had more of a geopolitical impact. As Penkovskys position necessitated travel to Britain, the Russians initially didnt suspect him of espionage. In 1944, he was assigned to the headquarters of Colonel-General Sergei Varentsov, commander of artillery on the 1st Ukrainian front, who became his patron. For a long time he resented the impact of his fathers CIA spying on his own life. Rookie Cops Episode 9 Release Date and Time, Countdown, When Is It Coming Out? The daughter of a Russian mother . After many years, I understood him. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. 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. Over the course of his espionage, he delivered rolls of film, classified documents, and over 5,000 photos. Advertising Notice Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. The CIA. He was to stand on a certain Moscow street corner on a designated day and time until he saw a British-looking man who was eating something. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. More than a year before the crisis, they had recruited a civilian, British businessman Greville Wynne, to do so. 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. I had not opened my garage for more than two months, and when I finally decided to completely clean it, I found out that a swarm of wasps had comfortably settled in it. He works as a computer programmer. 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. 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 always hoped Leila would join him in England. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. It is a collec- tion of. Penkovsky was put on trial for treason in May 1963 and was found guilty and sentenced to death. Be that as it may, the British intelligence official returned in 1964 after spending two years in Soviet prison. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. As soon as I realized what this was, I closed everything up andstarted looking for an exterminator who could help me out. 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 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. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. 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. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. Penkovsky had been trying to offer his services to the west for some years, blatantly buttonholing diplomats and businessmen at receptions and approaching tourists in the street. INTERVIEW WITH JOE BULIK - 31.1.98. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . He was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and then tried and executed the following year. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. The Wynne-Penkovsky case came at the height of the Cold War when relations between the superpowers were particularly strained. JB: The first meeting with Oleg Penkovsky was about seven p.m. April twenty first 1961 and he was told what room to go to at the Mount Royal Hotel in London and thanks to my MI6 friends, they permitted me, since he first wanted to meet the Americans, to be the one to answer the door and meet him. Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky redirected the virus war. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. The FBI declined to comment on whether the search Wiser began is continuing. Were they executed? 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. Penkovsky and Greville smuggled more than 5000 top-secret military documents out of the USSR. [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. He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. 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. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky, born the same year as Wynne in 1919, was the man on the inside, the Russian GRU spy who smuggled out military documents, photos, and human intelligence - including gossip he'd pick up at parties - which he passed to Wynne during business meetings. He later died of a throat disease in London. A 2020 film, The Courier, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, follows his story. 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