what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child

The information he provided on the Soviets . Not only was this account widely denied shortly after publication by members of the CIA and Kennedys staff, but it would have been against the way espionage is runkeeping heads of state a safe distance from the details of intelligence work. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. At 4PM on the afternoon of July 19, 1985, Oleg Gordievsky dressed in a thin green sweater, faded green corduroy trousers and old brown shoes clothes he'd selected from the back of the wardrobe. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. 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. It's athank you from the West for what he sacrificed.". Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. | After months of negotiations, the British government was eventually able to arrange a trade of Wynne for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, whod been arrested the year before and was serving a 25-year sentence in England. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. He started having trouble breathing. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. 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. He met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, wrote a memoir and co-wrote a book on the KGB. In the midst of the Cold War, a top-ranking Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky feared that the risk of nuclear war was too great, and decided to share some of the most closely held secrets of the Soviet arsenal with the West. London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. 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 At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. 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. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. When it came to writing the screenplay, OConnor laments that the true story of Wynnes experiences may never be known. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. A KGB general told him he had confessed. Soon there was a plan for an exfiltration, the CIAs term for spiriting an agent in danger out of a foreign country. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. After Penkovsky and Wynne were captured by the KGB, which happened very similar to how their capture is depicted in the film, the GRU lieutenant colonel been convicted of treason and sentenced to death by firing squad. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. 41 ratings1 review. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. It's the early 1960s and Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a salesman who represents Western manufacturers in foreign countries. He joined the Kiev Artillery School and became a lieutenant in 1939. 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. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West. 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. The following article hopes to help you make more suitable choices and . | READ MORE. He was the real deal. Toasty. He had lost a lot of weight. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. After they chatted for a while, the rezident said, By the way, Sergei, this cable came in and tossed it over. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. It shortened her life, he said. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. The KGB men searched the apartment all night. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. 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. 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. I was 18 years old. He sees that episode differently now. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, 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. Gordievsky's Wife was not with him live Former Colonel of the First Central Board of the KGB of the USSR, recruited in the mid-80s the CIA and worked for British intelligence, abroad called the largest Soviet "mole" after Penkovsky. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. [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. By Benjy P. October 15, 2022. Even though Wynne wasnt exactly a reliable narrator for what he did during his time as a secret agent, the materials he smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain were the real thing. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. 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. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. 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. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. 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. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007.[22]. Corrections? The emaciated Wynne's returntohis middle-class Londonhomewherehis wife and child waited made for a jarring scene in newsreels at the time. 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. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving. (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. This time it's a true story:Wynne served as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spyOleg Penkovsky atthe height of the Cold War. His fear mounted. The film seeshim arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside PenkovskyinMay 1963. In a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov, named Penkovsky as Russia's biggest intelligence failure. With the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, it seemed that the mole hunters had found their quarry. They made an odd contrastthe short, energetic, and thinly mustachioed Wynne alongside the military bearing of Penkovskybut there seemed to be genuine affection between the two, and this friendship is a central focus of The Courier. He might be dead, or hes living in his dacha now. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. 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. 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. You are wondering about the question what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter but currently there is no answer, so let kienthuctudonghoa.com summarize and list the top articles with the question. Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London. During the 1960s, a corrosive mole hunt led by James J. Angleton, the CIAs counterintelligence chief, led to institutional paranoia, paralyzed operations aimed at the Soviet Union, and disrupted the lives of many innocent CIA officers who were fired or sidetracked in their careers. The first meeting between Penkovsky and two American and two British intelligence officers occurred during a visit by Penkovsky to London in April 1961. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. He was arrested on October 22nd. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. Assisting him in his role as "courier" is Oleg Penkovsky ( Merab Ninidze ), a far more experienced Russian agent. He would not say why. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for bringing outlandish, extraordinary characters, from Marvel's "Dr. I always thought there was another one, he told me. Leonid and his wife, Lyudmila, had been back two weeks when the KGB showed up at their door. 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.. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. 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 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. 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 drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. The next thing he knew, he woke up half-dressed in one of the dachas bedrooms. In May 1963, after his trial, Izvestya reported that Varentsov, who had since achieved the rank of Chief Marshal of Artillery and Commander in Chief of Rocket Forces and candidate member of the Central Committee had been demoted to the rank of Major General. I dont want to live in a tent, she said. In addition to Gordievsky, Bokhan and Poleshchuk, more than a dozen other sources were exposed. Alex Palmer 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. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. John F. Lewis Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was chief of the national security division, believes there is a fourth mole. 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. After a meeting in Paris in September 1961, Penkovskys next trips were mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. 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. Privacy Statement As the deputy chief, Bokhan was privy to all GRU spy operations aimed at Greece, the United States and the other NATO countries. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. 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. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. [12], Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency (NSA) employee and Soviet spy working for the KGB. Oleg Penkovsky married (wife played by Maria Mironova, actress and here's a brunette), he has a daughter. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. The KGB told Andrei his fathers remains were cremated and there would be no grave. 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. 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. He stayed in safe houses in Virginia at first, then lived half a year in California to learn English, moved back East and consulted for the CIA and some U.S. companies. [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. Oleg and Vera are both even-tempered and have mutual respect for each other. Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. "(Chisholm)played a very important role in the story that we couldn't get into, because it's a whole other movie," Cooke says. We know very well that youve been deceiving us for years, he said. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos. Oleg Gordievsky. 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. He was free. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. There were embraces, and everyone cried. [18] In a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film[clarification needed] was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot. 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. In April 1985, he has said, he told a Soviet contact in Washington the names of two or three double agents who had approached the CIA but who were actually working for the KGBdangles, in intelligence parlance. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oleg-Vladimirovich-Penkovsky, Public Broadcasting Service - Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Oleg Penkovsky. 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. Murder by Cremation. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. The Spy Who Saved the World, by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, pp. Penkovskys dynamism and enthusiasm, his wide-ranging and passionate denunciations of the Soviet system and its leaders illustrated with anecdotes, fascinated and captivated the American and British teams, write Schecter and Deriabin. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . "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. It was scary.. Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from mushroom clouds and untold deaths in the fall of 1962. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. Alex Palmer is a travel and culture writer who lives in Brooklyn. 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. In July 1994, Leslie Wiser, the FBI agent who unmasked Ames, flew to London to interview Gordievsky. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. OConnor makes clear that The Courier is not a documentary, even as he explains that he took pains to stick to the facts as much as they could be ascertaineddrawing on works such as Jerrold L. Shecter and Peter S. Deriabins The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War and other accounts that could be trusted more than Wynnes own inventions. He was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky,[21] which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall. But if he returned home, he could be shot. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. On October 29 of that year, just hours after the Soviets stood down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Wynne went to Soviet-occupied Budapest with a traveling exhibition of British industrial goods, against the advice of his MI6 handlers. In 1955 Penkovsky was appointed military attach in Ankara, Turkey, but was recalled after he had reported his superior officer, and later other GRU personnel for a breach of regulations, which made him unpopular in the department. These events serve as the inspiration for The Courier, the new film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wynne and Georgian actor Merab Ninidze as Penkovsky, out in theaters on March 19.

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