Oleg Penkovsky

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Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky (1919–1963) was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the late 1950s and early 1960s who passed important secrets to the west. He is considered one of the best assets the West has ever had in the Soviet Union.

[edit] Early life

Penkovsky's father died fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War, a fact that later became important in his life. Penkovsky had a negative experience with his superiors while working in the Soviet intelligence services in Turkey in the 1950s, and returned to Moscow. When his father's background was discovered by his superiors, Penkovsky's chances for any further promotion disappeared. This action was part of his motivation to decide to become a spy. He even approached American students on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package, which was delivered to the CIA. CIA officers delayed in contacting him because they believed they were under constant surveillance.

[edit] Spy career

Eventually he persuaded Greville Wynne to arrange a meeting with two American and two British intelligence officers during a visit to London in 1961. Wynne became one of his couriers. For the following eighteen months he supplied a tremendous amount of information to his SIS handlers in Moscow, Ruari and Janet Chisholm, and to CIA and SIS contacts during his permitted trips abroad. Most significantly, he was responsible for arming President Kennedy with the information that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was smaller than previously thought before and during the face-off with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1962 he was arrested by the KGB, and was tried and convicted of treason and espionage in a show trial in 1963. After being convicted, accounts differ regarding the Penkovsky's fate. Some sources allege that Penkovsky was executed by firing squad and cremated. GRU author Vladimir Rezun, "Viktor Suvorov" alleges in Inside Soviet Military Intelligence that Penkovsky was bound to a board with piano wire and 'cremated alive'.

[edit] Further reading

• The Penkovsky Papers, 1966 by Oleg Penkovsky (see note), NY, Doubleday

Note: Purportedly Penkovsky's diaries and smuggled out after his execution, it is commonly believed not to have been written by him, but to be an American creation in diary form yet still based on his interviews with American and British intelligence services. In truth, it has been recently divulged that the CIA actually wrote the book as a covert operation intended as a propaganda device.

• The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War, 1992 by JL Schecter and PS Deriabin, NY, Scribner's, ISBN 1-57488-046-2