Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. Enter Oleg Penkovsky. On March 19, 2021, after a COVID-induced delay, the new historical thriller The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, had its world premiere. 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.'. He reportedly committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp. JB: In the 1960s, TWA used to take a Polaroid pictures of some of its passengers and this one was taken actually while I was on my first trip to London in April 1961. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. From a Moscow railroad station, he made his way by train, bus and taxi to a point near the Finnish-Soviet border, where he hid in some grass by the roadside until two cars stopped. They urged him to go to Moscow, but they also provided him with an escape plan in case he signaled that he was in danger. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. 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. As MacIntyre reminds us, the rumor has always been that MI6-CIA agent Oleg Penkovsky, betrayed by British-spy-turned-Soviet-agent George Blake, had been cremated alive in 1963 by the KGB after . Do , ip vin "ba mang" phi nhn n t hnh. That day was June 13, 1985, by Ames account. Minutes passed. He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. Privacy Statement His real job was as a senior officer in the GRU, Soviet . A GRU colonel by 1960, he served as deputy chief of the foreign section of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research for the next two years. I will never forget the day when I got home and she was singing songs, melodies, no words, and looking insane. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 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.. Bokhans son, Alex, also made it to the U.S., in 1995. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. Dennis Oulds/Central Press/Getty ImagesGreville Wynne being escorted by police after arriving back home from Russia. The information he provided on the Soviets relatively weak capability in long-range missiles proved invaluable to the United States before and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. Bettmann/Getty ImagesPenkovskys debriefing sessions with MI6 and the CIA totaled up to 140 hours. Penkovsky delivered crucial information, including about the Soviet Union's new Cuban missiles. A somewhat baroque means of murder, the killer shuts their victim in a coffin (knocking them out first is optional) and feeds the coffin into a crematorium oven. A staff writer for All Thats Interesting, Marco Margaritoff has also published work at outlets including People, VICE, and Complex, covering everything from film to finance to technology. May 11, 1963. Wikimedia CommonsOleg Penkovskys father died in the Russian Revolution. During one of Wynnes trips to London in April 1961, Penkovsky handed him a hefty package of documents and film he passed along to MI6. After a show trial, Penkovsky, who had been hoping to defect to the West with his family, was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad; Wynne, meanwhile, ended up serving 18 months in the . between this and #ThePowerOfDog lately, he might as well be the best actor in the world right now. He had lost a lot of weight. In 1949 Penkovsky transferred from the regular army to the Soviet army intelligence directorate (GRU). The publication of post-Cold War memoirs by former agents and the release of declassified documents by the United States and Russia have provided a fairly complete account of the CIA's activities, including both its successes and its failures. Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBritish spy Greville Wynne was Penkovskys contact and intermediate to MI6. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Welcome to the United States, one of them said. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. Cookie Settings, FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, John Hallisey / FBI / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12. But, he adds, I would never, ever see her smile again. She died three years later, in 1988. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. Chief KGB interrogator Alexander Zagvozdin said Penkosvky was questioned perhaps a hundred times and then shot. We have no more information about his spouse. View Source Suggest Edits Memorial Photos Flowers Memorials Region This is quite shocking, since their countries are nearly at war. But we are sure that it is not available and his spouses name is not available. Positive Elements. After months of interrogation at Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told his captors he wouldnt answer any more questions unless they told him who his father worked for. 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. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. Henceforth, the ranks of your armed forces are increased by one man.. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. Oleg Penkovsky was born in a small town on the 23rd of April in 1919. troops.[15]. He was like a walking dead man. 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 United States. It looked outward for any external threats, and employed people capable of subterfuge and turning potential pawns into assets. Leonids original case officer blamed himself for years for letting my father down. Oleg Penkovsky, then a colonel in Russia's military intelligence service known as the GRU, had already passed along intelligence about the shoot-down of American satellite planes in Soviet territory and information on his own GRU graduating class. But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.). Thanks to Penkovskys Ironbark files, CIA analysts were able to accurately identify the Soviet missiles that had been photographed in Cuba and give President Kennedy precise reports on the range and strength of those weapons. Penkovsky (right) during his trial. 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. I was angry because I was dropped from military school and sent to the Army, far off, near Vladivostok, he said. The Cuban Missile Crisis began on Oct. 14, 1962, when a U-2 spy plane photographed missile installations in Cuba confirming the Soviets were gearing up with capabilities of their own. He tried again, following the fallback plan, and this time a man carrying a dark-green bag from Harrods, the upscale London department store, walked by eating a candy bar. In either scenario, the double agent died on May 16, 1963. Examining this moment in Cold War Era history, the film does a good job of remaining historically accurate with a . 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. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Additionally, Wynne was a designer and money manager who was selected by MI6 due to his movement in Eastern Europe. "Maybe we're only two people but this is how things change." The Courier is an intriguing spy drama. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. I could not believe what was happening. [13], Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. What happened to the family of Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky? Also, we have no information about his son and daughter. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. 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. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. 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. His boyhood nickname, back on a collective farm in Ukraine, was Mole. Now a stocky, powerfully built man of 43, he had been working for the GRU for 16 yearsand feeding Soviet secrets to the CIA for 10. Ti Lin X, gin ip l mt trng ti. 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