what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child

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. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. 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. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. 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. 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. He Had a Big Enemy", : , "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. No, he was told, theyre here for you.. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. (1) BBC Broadcast (11th May, 1963) A British businessman accused of spying for the West has been sentenced to eight years' detention by a Moscow tribunal. 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 KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. In Athens, Bokhan called an emergency telephone number that rang in the CIA station inside the American Embassy. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. From the day they talked, Wiser told me, we believed it was important for us to consider the strong possibility that Gordievsky was compromised by someone within the U.S. intelligence community., Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken about the dateAmes has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB. [3] When the US Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. 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. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. He had been drugged. Murder by Cremation. But this Land Rovers driveshaft had been rerouted through one of the vehicles doors, the former CIA officer says, so that Gordievsky could fold himself into the hump, in effect hiding in plain sight. After a West German agent overheard a remark at Stasi headquarters, paraphrased as "I wonder how things are going in Cuba" he passed it on to the CIA. 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. "Thistrue story is a very interesting, skewed way to tellingaticking time-bomb, spy-thriller.". To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. 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. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Oleksandr Marchenko told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: There is fighting in the city . Confess again! the general roared. Penkovsky's story is a tragic and revealing one, and it is regrettable that with it all he did not tell us more of what he could tell best, the story of his own life and of the lives of his close associates.-GEORGE A . In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave been identified. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. This gave American officials a clearer picture of what the Soviets were doing in the region, bringing in medium-range ballistic missiles. 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. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. In one of his biggest whoppers, Wynne explains that he and Penkovsky took a trip together in a private military jet from the U.K. to Washington, D.C. His father, Leonid Poleshchuk, was a senior KGB counterintelligence officer, most recently the deputy rezident for counterintelligence in Lagos, Nigeria. [19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. He is the author of The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. 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 He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. The two then visited the White House where President John F. Kennedy personally thanked them for their servicethen the two returned to the U.K. just 18 hours later. It is possible that Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk fell under KGB suspicion through some operational error or communications intercept. 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. Advertising Notice Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. 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. 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. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. Penkovsky had in the meantime become increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, particularly with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Penkovsky supplied the West with information on Soviet deployment of missiles to Cuba and has been dubbed the spy of the century. Arrested? His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. He was flown to Moscow, imprisoned, and tried alongside Penkovsky, who it would later be learned had been arrested the week before Wynne entered Hungary. 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. Its OK. To be dead or to be alive was the question for my dad. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. Gordievsky never took a penny from MI6 until after he had defected to the U.K. His actions were motivated by a hatred of the tyranny of the Soviet system, and the degraded condition in which it. 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 Janie and [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. Privacy Statement After Ames was arrested and charged with espionage, his attorney, Plato Cacheris, negotiated a plea bargain with prosecutors: Ames wife, Rosario, an accomplice in his spying, would be spared a long prison sentence if he cooperated fully with the authorities. By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. 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. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. Top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Penkovsky was a British agent, but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6. We had neighbors that were very close. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. 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. "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. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. He has a net worth estimated to be over $500,000. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. Inside was an offer to work as a 'soldier-warrior' for the free world. The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Through the windows of the ground-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he could see strangers moving about. Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel of the USSR Central Intelligence Agency, a distinguished officer in the Second World War, who has a close relationship with many high-ranking military personnel, is also USA and Great Britain was a spy working for the intelligence agency. But unlike other famous characters, his personality, the role he played and what . In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. answer the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, which will help you get the most accurate answer. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Terms of Use Was there a fourth mole in the U.S. intelligence system that blew these secret agents covers? The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. A member of the Communist Party, he took part in the invasion of Finland and by the end of the Second World War had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Cookie Settings, Liam Daniel, Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, 5,000-Year-Old Tavern With Food Still Inside Discovered in Iraq, The Surprisingly Scientific Roots of Monkey Bars. Though nobody knows how the leak was traced back to Penkovsky, he was arrested by the Soviets on October 22, 1962. The Untold Truth of Hugh Hefner's Son - David Hefner. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. 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. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs. "(Chisholm)played a very important role in the story that we couldn't get into, because it's a whole other movie," Cooke says. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. 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]. Never before had there been a Soviet spy like him.. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. [11] Former GRU captain Viktor Suvorov, who defected to the UK in 1978, later wrote in his book on Soviet intelligence, "historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. David Wise is a journalist and author, best known for his expertise in espionage and intelligence. By 1993 their marriage was over. In a letter to me from the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a life sentence, Ames wrote: Im quite sure of my recollection that I gave the KGB no names of any other than the two or three double agents/dangles I provided in April 85, until June 13th.. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. Seeking ways to parlay the notoriety he received, he became what Duns calls a rent-a-spokesperson for all kinds of espionage stuff, making appearances in the media about anything related to spycraft, whether or not it was anything he had experience with. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' That Friday, Gordievsky received a cable ordering him to report to Moscow urgently to confirm his promotion and meet with the KGBs two highest officials. They were convicted of espionage. If it should turn out that the mole is no longer alive, the intelligence agencies would still run a damage assessment to try to reconstruct what and whom he might have betrayed. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne are directly responsible for its positive outcome. Impossible. These things have to be run to ground.. When I came to Moscow, she left, he says, taking the children with her on a vacation. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. He was selected for the post of military attach in India, but the KGB had uncovered the story of his father's death, and he was suspended, investigated, and assigned in November 1960 to the State Committee for Science and Technology. Wynne and Penkovsky were both arrested by the KGB in November 1962, when some of the information their endeavours produced was of assistance to the West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". 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. Posted on . "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. This both kills the victim and disposes of the body in one fell swoop. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962 and executed the next. 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. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from him notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. A KGB general told him he had confessed. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. "In a way, it's a love letter to Penkovsky,"Cumberbatch says. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. [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. Penkovsky joined the Soviet Red Army in 1937 and served as an artillery officer in World War II, being severely wounded in 1944. 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. 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. 3.80. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. Moscow seemed to have no clue hed been secretly working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service, for 11 years. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. It shortened her life, he said. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. On this trip, Penkovsky submitted to hours of interviews with British and American intelligence officials about the Soviet Unions military and political developments. His work . He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. For two years I went to Lefortovo two, three times a week, Alla Bokhan told me. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. "But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened," says director Dominic Cooke. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. Thus began their fruitful relationship, one that involved Wynne hosting Penkovsky in London, who was visiting under the pretense of cultivate new opportunities in the West. 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. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. But it was only a matter of time. Mr. Wint: Very moving. Wynne was a middle-classBritish businessman whose frequenttravelto Eastern Europe attracted recruitmentby MI-6 to serve as a liaison to high-ranking Soviet official Penkovsky. Wynne went along, slightly concerned about whether Penkovsky was on the level and concerned about putting himself into a dangerous situation, kicking off what would be one of the most productive clandestine operations in Cold War history. 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. Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. 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. 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. There were certain anomalies that took place that we just couldnt put our finger on., And Bearden says, I remain convinced there is a fourth man. British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. For his treason, Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad days after the trial ended (though Wynne would later claim he died of suicide). 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. She did, in 1991, but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. 445 & 35. The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. I could not believe what was happening. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities and played a key role in President Kennedy'sstrong, successful stance duringthe Cuban Missile Crisis. He was later traded in an exchange after the British had a Russian spy, Konon Molody in their custody. In all, Penkovsky had provided Western intelligence with about 140 hours of interviews and 111 exposed rolls of film, contributing to some 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. Minutes passed. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. Even the official accounts put out by American and Russian authorities regarding the Penkovsky affair include disinformation and spin that he, or any historian, has to navigate through. 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. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and asked Wynne for his help. The domestic impact of foreign clandestine operations: the CIA and academic institutions, the media and religious institutions, Appendix B", The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963, "Nonfiction Book Review: The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War by Jerrold L. Schecter, Author, Peter S. Deriabin, With Scribner Book Company ISBN 978-0-684-19068-6", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oleg_Penkovsky&oldid=1136437646, Soviet people executed for spying for the United States, Russian people executed by the Soviet Union, Executed people from North OssetiaAlania, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2022, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0.

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what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child