His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. Director Cooke says Donovan is a composite character representing several real-life people, includingJanet Chisholmthewife of a Moscow-based British visa officer whoalso served as a conduit for information passed to the West by Penkovsky. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Wright noted that, unlike Igor Gouzenko and other earlier defectors, Penkovsky did not reveal the names of any Soviet agents in the West but only provided organisational detail, much of which was known already. "He started as a nave amateur. Wynne also enthusiastically embraced his role, enjoying the part of a daring secret agent where he could apply his salesman skills to a higher-stakes game. I went into the bathroom, locked the door and stared at myself in the mirror.. For the following 18 months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to the CIAMI6 team of handlers, including documents demonstrating that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than Nikita Khrushchev claimed or the CIA had thought and that the Soviets were not yet capable of producing a large number of ICBMs. David Hefner was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, CA, as the son of Hugh Hefner, founder of "Playboy" magazine. 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 Vladimirovich Penkovsky born 23 April 1919 died 16 May 1963, USSR codenamed HERO, was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late . MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. Wynne had worked as both Penkovsky's contact and courier; both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962. Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. These guys were in the foxhole togetherthey each had a secret that only the other man knew, says OConnor. While its standard for Hollywood films to take liberties with the facts, insert composite characters, devise imagined conversations, and smooth-out timelines to ensure a brisk pace, its less common for a based-on-a-true-story movie to have to be more truthful than the source material. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. 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. Sooner or later they would arrest me.. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. In June he was expelled from the Central Committee for 'having relaxed his political vigilance.' They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. One theory is that Penkovsky wrote his message in broad brush strokes. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. 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. He drove around Athens in his BMW for close to an hour to make certain he wasnt being followed, then walked into a 100-foot pedestrian tunnel under a highway. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . 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. Ameeting between theRussian prisoners, in which Wynne tellsPenkovsky of the import of his information, asdepicted in the film, is drama. 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. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". By all appearances Oleg and Vera have a happy marriage and are loving parents to Nina. Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. 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. They know.. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. That happened several times.. He just was an ordinary man who got thrust into this just extraordinary, life-altering situation that was going to define his existence forever, says OConnor. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Donec gravida mi a condimentum rutrum. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. But Ames always insisted to the FBI, the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee that he revealed no significant sources before his meeting at Chadwicks. A drink-lovingbon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne'sreal-life salesmanship and genuine naivet made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion. The burden of that is hard to imagine.. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. 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. Wise is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Politics of Lying, Spy Who Got Away and Tiger Trap. You have the wrong number, he was told. Oleg Gordievsky and Leila Alieva met in Copenhagen: she was a typist for the World Health Organization; he was an unhappily married KGB officer, and a spy for MI6. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990 at a London hospital. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. Kent. [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. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. 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. Why did Wynne make up so much, when the truths of his 18 months as a spy are already filled with astounding details? Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. | READ MORE. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). | 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. He works as a computer programmer. 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. 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. To top it off, it would have been physically impossible at the time. [4], Greville Wynne, a British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. Cookie Policy But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. Joe said to his people, Keep the watch, I want to give it to his son. At a reception after the church ceremony, Joe gave Andrei the watch. A few months after the U-2 disaster, they had a breakthrough when a Col. Oleg Penkovsky approached them. 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. Oleg Gordievsky is a Russian-born former British secret agent. Maybe a fifth. But over the course of their two-year friendship, Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne clandestinely smuggled 5000 top-secret documents from Russia to England and the United States. It also helped Americans to understand how limited the Soviets capabilities actually were in the area, so as tensions grew during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy knew how much rope he could give [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev, as Duns puts it. In the morning, they took usmy mother, my grandmother and meand put us in separate black Volgas, Andrei said. 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. In Russia, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich PENKOVSKY, executed in Moscow 34 years ago is regarded as a traitor. 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.'. "Think about going back to life after that intense drama," Cooke says. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. 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.

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