Oleg Penkovsky

Penkovsky's father died fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Penkovsky graduated from the Kyiv Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. A GRU officer, in 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attaché in Ankara, Turkey. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. Penkovsky was a friend of GRU head Ivan Serov and marshal Sergei Varentsov.[2]

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 U.S. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the U.S. Embassy. The Central Intelligence Agency delayed in contacting him.[3] When the U.S. Embassy in Moscow refused to cooperate, fearing an international incident, the CIA contacted MI6 for assistance. [4]

A British salesman of industrial equipment to countries behind the Iron Curtain, Greville Wynne, was recruited by MI6 to communicate with Penkovksy. 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]

The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in 1961. For the following 18 months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to the CIA–MI6 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.[6] This information was invaluable to President John F. Kennedy in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for the removal of the Soviet IRBMs from Cuba.

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. 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. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet agents. In Wright's view, the failure of British intelligence leaders to listen to him caused them to become paralysed when British/Soviet agents defected to the Soviet Union; he suggests that his hypothesis must be true and that the Soviets were aware of this paralysis and planted Penkovsky.

In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass, Wright said:

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.[7]

Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West.[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. The party was not satisfied with KGB performance ... I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin".[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. In a meeting with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov named Penkovsky as Russia's biggest intelligence failure.[10]

The Soviet leadership began the deployment of nuclear missiles in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. This information allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. The documents provided by Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba.[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. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War".[12]

Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet double-agent working for the KGB. The top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Penkovsky was a double agent but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6. Jack Dunlap was just another source they had to protect. They worked hard, shadowing British diplomats, to build up a "discovery case" against Penkovsky so that they could arrest him without throwing suspicion on their moles. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being discovered earlier than the Soviets would have preferred. After a West German double agent overheard a remark at Stasi headquarters, paraphrased as "I wonder how things are going in Cuba" he passed it on to the CIA.[13]

Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. This was prior to President Kennedy's address to the US revealing that U-2 spy plane photographs had confirmed intelligence reports and that the Soviets were installing medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, in what was known as Operation Anadyr. President Kennedy was deprived of information from a potentially important intelligence agent who might have lessened the tension during the ensuing 13-day stand-off, such as reporting that Nikita Khrushchev was already looking for ways to defuse the situation.[14] That information might have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of the island, which could have risked Soviet use of 9K52 Luna-M-class tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. troops.[15]

Penkovsky at the trial in 1963

Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from Penkovsky notifying them that a Moscow dead drop had been loaded. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. Alexander Zagvozdin, Chief KGB interrogator for the investigation, stated that Penkovsky had been "questioned perhaps a hundred times" and that he had been shot and cremated.[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".[17] A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies, Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit and in Viktor Suvorov's book Aquarium.[18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot.[19] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky killed himself. (Wynne had worked as Penkovsky's contact and courier and both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1962.)

Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. 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. The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting up with Janet Chisholm, a British MI6 agent stationed in Moscow. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[20]

Penkovsky was referred to in three of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan espionage novels: The Hunt for Red October (1984), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), and Red Rabbit (2002). In the Jack Ryan universe, he is described as the agent who recruited Colonel Mikhail Filitov as a CIA agent (code-name CARDINAL) and had urged Filitov to betray him to solidify his position as the West's top spy in the Soviet hierarchy. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988).

Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliński, another Cold War spy. His character's execution was the opening scene for the movie. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne.

• Gervase Cowell
• George Kisevalter

• Schecter, Jerrold L; Deriabin, Peter S; Penkovsky, Oleg V (1992). The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-19068-6. OCLC 909016158.

• Duns, Jeremy (2014). Dead Drop: TheTrue Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold War's Most Dangerous Operation. London: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781849839297.
• Penkovsky, Oleg (1965). The Penkovsky Papers : The Russian Who Spied for the West. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. OCLC 749223763. Introduction and Commentary by Frank Gibney ; Foreword By Edward Crankshaw ; Translation by Peter Deriabin.

Note: The book was commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency

see: Howard Hunt, Everette (26 February 2007). American Spy. ISBN 978-0-471-78982-6. Retrieved 19 March 2019..

A 1976 Senate commission stated that "the book was prepared and written by witting agency assets who drew on actual case materials."

See: Church, Frank (23 April 1976). "Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence: X. The domestic impact of foreign clandestine operations: the CIA and academic institutions, the media and religious institutions, Appendix B". U.S. Government Printing Office, Senate, Report 94-755, Church Committee. Retrieved 3 April 2010.

Note: Author Frank Gibney denied the CIA had forged the provided source material, which was also the opinion of Robert Conquest. Other dismissed the book as propaganda and having no historic value.

• Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to al-Qaeda, New York, Dutton, 2008. ISBN 0-525-94980-1
• Frederick Forsyth, The Deceiver, Bantam Books, 1992 ISBN 0-553-29742-2, p. 43, 4th line.
• Viktor Suvorov, Devil's Mother, Sofia, Fakel Express, 2011 ISBN 978-954-9772-76-0, in Bulgarian language.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Oleg Penkovsky.

• Oleg Penkovsky at Find a Grave
• John Simkin. Oleg Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational
• cia.gov The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963 Archived 21 December 2020 at the Wayback Machine
• Joseph J. Bulik. Oral History, Penkovsky's CIA case officer
• "Soviet Propaganda Film 14 (53234)". PeriscopeFilm. Los Angeles: Periscope Film LLC via Internet Archive. 1963. Retrieved 23 May 2021. Highlights: 00:09 Criminal case against Penkovski O.V. and Wynne G.M. concerning unlawful acts described by Articles 64, Article 65 of the USSR's RSFSR Criminal code. Article 64 is Treason, Article 65 is Espionage. This is the 30th of November 1962.
• 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories
• "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". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 22 May 2021.