Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. Throughout 1962, the KGB surveilled the colonel, identified his contacts, tactfully questioned his colleagues at work, and secretly searched the suspected spys apartment. I said: Dont do that, get my family It was very, very, difficult.. It would be a decade before other Russians stepped forward. Each time, the spying continued. Other sources of this information is not confirmed nor refuted. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. This paper is about Oleg Penkovsky and his profound contributions to the UK and US military intelligence. The KGB devoted huge resources to counter-espionage and a British agent would have been spotted approaching Penkovsky in the Russian capital but Wynne a civilian with officially sanctioned business in the city would arouse less suspicion. However, the colonel did not have time to enjoy the gratitude of the United States. 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 resulting microfilm in disguised packs of cigarettes and boxes of sweets to Chisholms wife Janet, at cocktail parties, parks and other locations around the city. Later Greville was released from a Russian prison in exchange for the soviet spy Konon Molody. His bosses, though, had been right: Ames was sloppy. During the early days of the Cold War, one of the hardest workers was the chief of CIA operations in Berlin, a man later dubbed the American James Bond.. In 2006, the defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned after meeting two Russians in London. In public, they ran a travel business, which will sound familiar to fans of The Americans. Privately, they ran a spy network, providing fake passports to the Kremlins secret agents. Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne clandestinely smuggled 5000 top-secret . The answer is, yes, this film is based on true events and is inspired by the story of Greville Wynne, an unassuming businessman who was recruited into the Cold War by both the British and American secret services. The Courier is a new feature film, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wynne. Wife Shevchenko Longina soon after the escape of her husband hanged himself. In 1961, Moscow was perhaps the most dangerous city for espionage in the world. Polyakov lasted the longest; the other twoPyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovskywere betrayed, it is believed, by British mole George Blake (who is in his 90s, living in exile in Moscow). Penkovsky himself paid the ultimate price and was executed. 22:56 GMT 01 Jul 2021 Penkovsky and Wynne had some fun while their collaboration lasted. Introduction. Her husband was a spy who headed the MI6 station in Moscow but worked under the guise of a visa officer. Sir Gerry Warner, a former deputy chief of MI6, recalled the incident in a 2012 interview with the BBC: He did nothingwhich was exactly the right thing to do. Balding and jowly, William Harvey didnt look like any of the screen Bonds. The daughter of a Russian mother . Each side still wants to know about the other's secrets. The work involved considerable foreign travel, including crucially to the Soviet bloc. He didnt tell his ambassador, he didnt tell London, he didnt tell anybody, because he was morally certain that Penkovsky was captured so this was meaningless. the western world, rather, rise on top in terms of the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis and . Those old enough can never forget a nerve-racking period of more than a week when nuclear Armageddon seemed possible every single day. Ames was finally arrested in 1994. In the affair of the traitor Penkovsky and his associate Wynne, it was established that the carelessness, political myopia and irresponsible chatter of some military personnel with whom Penkovsky met and drank directly facilitated his criminal activities, wrote the head of the KGB Investigative Department, Nikolai Chistyakov. Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox. Subsequently, a trade was exchanged after the British had a Russian government agent, Konon Molody, under his tutelage. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. One of the lessons of the Penkovsky case was that running agents in Moscow was extremely hard for Western intelligence services. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, they sentenced Wynne to eight years in prison. Chisholm was portrayed by Lucy Liemann in the 2007 BBC Television docudrama Nuclear Secrets. Greville Wynne was detained in Budapest ten days after Penkovskys arrest, and taken to Moscow. Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. Your email address will not be published. The spy who helped save the world looks likely also to have tried to destroy it. 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. Fifty years ago Greville Wynne was put on trial. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife Yeltsin enjoyed embarrassing the KGB, the former KGB man said. In 1945. Penkovsky made a return visit to London, toured the rest of the UK and met Wynne in Paris. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . 4. His family was allowed to live quietly in Moscow. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. 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.'. Can you put soda crystals in your washing machine? Where are dogs allowed on Llandudno beach? 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. It rivaled anything from The Great Escape.. He became a foreign negotiator for UK trade. Tens of thousands of KGB officers worked in the city, and a dedicated division conducted surveillance on the small community of foreigners. The film tells the story of Oleg Penkovsky, one of the most famous Cold War traitors, and his contact, Greville Wynne (played by the British actor). Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Oleg Gordievsky (Former Colonel of the KGB and Bureau Chief in London) Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. 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. Oleg Penkovsky was executed and buried in an unmarked grave. the Property Arkady Shevchenko in Moscow apartment, more like a Museum of Antiques, confiscated. The Soviet authorities rejected appeals by Greville Wynne's lawyer but 17 months into his sentence, they agreed to exchange Wynne for Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, serving 25 years in the UK. But with a wife and young daughter at home, Penkovsky worried that the bragging would soon lead to nuclear warand the subsequent death of himself, his family and his countrymen. Their cover was eventually blown by another British agent, George Blake, who defected to the Soviets. Although the crisis finally appeared to be over, Soviet missiles were still on Cuba and US forces remained at DEFCON-3, while British V-bombers were at Alert Condition 3. 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. MI6s agent, however, eventually fell under suspicion, and was ordered back to Moscow and interrogated by the KGB. One of its members was Penkovsky, in his new cover job arranging exchange visits with the West on scientific matters. He really came into his own during the Cuban missile crisis, passing on knowledge of Soviet nuclear capabilities on the island. It was decided to use the telephone, but because everywhere was bugged the rings would function as messages. Dimitri Polyakov was a Russian double agent who became one of America's most valuable spies during the Cold War. On October 22, 1962 he was arrested by the KGB. 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. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Both men were arrested in October 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nothing like them had been seen on Cuba before, raising a very troubling question: could they be medium-range ballistic missilescould they be offensive, rather than defensive? The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. His father came to take Irina, Oleg's wife, and the couple's two children, six-year-old Sofia and Ivan, who was not even two months old, to his house in Vesele. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret Soviet military documents, totaling 7,650 pages. One major problem was how to communicate with Penkovsky. On the fifth floor of a block of apartments in Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the telephone rang twice, then went dead. [1] He had planned to write a memoir but died of malaria before he could begin. The British ambassador in Moscow sent a strongly worded telegram opposing further efforts being made to secure Hetmans family. Cowell felt certain the call was a false alarm and, deciding it was not worth jangling highly jittery nerves, didnt send it up the line as the procedure dictated, but simply sat on the information. Last year, another double agent and his daughter were poisoned as well but survived. Quizzed by reporters back in the UK, Wynne could still manage a joke about his shaven head being the Lubyankas interpretation of a haircut. The British decided to take a chance on him and were richly rewarded. Britain's MI5 has complained about the activities of Russian spies in the UK, saying the numbers are close to Cold War levels - although many will be looking at the large number of Russian exiles. And when the team consulted these, they came across a manual for the Soviets R-12 MRBM, designated the SS-4 by NATO forces, that Penkovsky had provided. When Oleg Penkovsky offered Soviet military secrets to MI6, she became the go-between. Would hydrogen chloride be a gas at room temperature? The KGB wouldnt have risked triggering a nuclear war simply to arrest a CIA officer, but the much vaguer unexpected danger wouldnt have worried them. What is Moscow really thinking and doing about Syria or Iran, for instance? Elizabeth Bentley was a Vassar graduate and a dedicated Communist in 1938 when she fell for Timmy. What the lonely woman didnt know was that Timmy was actually Jacob Golos, one of Stalins top spies. 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