Oleg Penkovsky

Penkovsky's father died fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev 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 personal friend of GRU head Ivan Serov and Soviet marshal Sergei Varentsov.[2]

Penkovsky approached American students on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package, which was delivered to the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA officers delayed in contacting him because they believed they were under constant surveillance.[3]

Penkovsky eventually persuaded the British spy Greville Wynne to arrange a meeting for him with two American and two British intelligence officers during a visit to London in 1961. Wynne became one of his couriers. 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.[4]

The delay in CIA contact proved to be regrettable to the US. However, the British would later share intelligence from Penkovsky with their American allies. For the following eighteen months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to his British Secret Intelligence Service handlers in Moscow, Ruari and Janet Chisholm, and to CIA and SIS contacts during his permitted trips abroad. Most significantly, he provided President John F. Kennedy with the information that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than previously thought, that the Soviet fueling systems were not fully operational, and that the Soviet guidance systems were not yet functional.

Peter Wright, a former British MI-5 officer, had a different view. 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 organizational 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 scathingly condemned the leadership of British intelligence throughout nearly the whole Cold War period.

He reportedly believed that the British/Soviet agents (Philby, Maclean, Burgess, and Blunt) could all have been identified more quickly using the scientific methods which he had proposed. In Wright's view, British intelligence leaders became more paralyzed when Philby and the others defected to the Soviet Union. British intelligence became so fearful of another fiasco that they avoided taking risks. Wright believes that the Soviets were aware of this and planted Penkovsky to buoy up the sagging fortunes of their ineffective—and therefore highly useful—counterparts in British intelligence.

In his memoir Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), written with journalist Paul Greengrass.[5], 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 honors heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation.

Wright was more complimentary of the CIA and even of the FBI, whose agents were initially suspicious (and remained suspicious) of Penkovsky. British agent Greville Wynne seems convinced that Penkovsky was genuine and that Wynne's own sacrifices, including 18 months in the Lubyanka Prison, were worthwhile.

Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his own career in intelligence against the West.[6] KGB defector Vladimir Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying, "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganization 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."[7] 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.

Soviet leadership started 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 on 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. 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."[8]

Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, an 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 prioritised protecting 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 these moles. Their caution in this matter may have led to the missiles being found out 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.[9]

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 on Cuba, in what was known as code name 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.[10] Such information might have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of the island. Such in invasion risked Soviet use of Luna class tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. troops.[11]

Penkovsky's American contacts received a letter from Penkovsky notifying 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. 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.[12]

GRU agent Vladimir Rezun became known in the 1980s and later for books about Soviet military and intelligence published under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov. He had defected in 1978 to the United Kingdom. He claimed in his memoir Aquarium (1985) to have been shown a black-and-white film in which a GRU colonel was bound to a stretcher and burned alive in a crematorium as a warning to potential traitors.[13] Since Penkovsky is the only GRU colonel known to have been executed, Suvorov's story was taken by many to be an account of Penkovsky's execution.[14]

A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies,[15] and Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit. But in a 2010 interview, Suvorov denied that the man in the film was Penkovsky and said that he had been shot.[16] Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Odessa, claimed that Penkovsky committed suicide. Wynne had worked as Penkovsky's contact and courier, and both men were arrested by the Soviets in October 1963.