1
22 October 1962.
As Oleg Penkovsky emerged from the basement cafeteria on to the chill of Gorky Street, he heard a voice calling out his name. He looked up to see Sergei Nasedkin on the other side of the road, waving at him through the traffic. Surprised, Penkovsky raised a hand in return, and Nasedkin strode towards him, briskly sidestepping a mud-smeared delivery truck and kicking up a cloud of startled pigeons in the process.
‘Hello, Sergei!’ Penkovsky said once Nasedkin had reached the pavement and they had embraced. ‘Is your canteen closed today?’
Nasedkin was a KGB officer, and they rarely ventured out for lunch. Penkovsky was a colonel in the GRU – military intelligence – but despite the often bitter rivalry between the agencies the two men had remained friends since their schooldays and still went drinking together, although their last bout had not been for several months.
Nasedkin laughed at Penkovsky’s gentle jibe. ‘I’m actually here to see you, Oleg,’ he said. ‘I was just on my way to your office when I spotted you emerging from your hiding place.’
Penkovsky was suddenly conscious of the smell of cabbage soup and sweat clinging to his clothes. With his rank, he should really have been eating at the Baku or the Praga, but he had a fondness for greasy food – and besides, at the moment he couldn’t afford to dine out anywhere more expensive.
‘It’s about work, then?’ he said, trying not to seem concerned.
‘Not really,’ said Nasedkin. ‘It’s that passport you applied for – it came through. Fedorchuk was going to send one of his messenger boys to deliver it, but I overheard him giving the order and asked to do the honours myself.’ He gestured elaborately with his hands as though he were a magician reappearing after a vanishing act. ‘And here I am.’
Penkovsky nodded, a little dazed at the news. He had applied for an external passport months ago and had heard nothing back despite repeated enquiries. As a result, he had become convinced that the KGB didn’t trust him enough to grant him one. He was immensely relieved they had finally come round.
‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Sergei,’ he said. ‘Come back to my office and give me the passport there. I’d love to hear all your news, and you can watch Kennedy with us – we’ve set up a television on the top floor.’ The American President was due to give a speech in the early hours of the morning about a ‘grave international crisis’, and everyone had been ordered to stay behind to watch it. Many were speculating that the speech would be about Cuba.
‘I’d love to,’ said Nasedkin, walking in step with him, ‘though I’m not sure I can stay until the speech as I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on – you know what it’s like. How are you feeling, by the way? I heard you’d been ill.’
Penkovsky smiled wanly. ‘Is there nothing you lot don’t know about? Yes, I was in hospital last month with a skin problem. It was painful, but it cleared up in a few days.’ In fact, it had taken three weeks and had been an excruciating experience, as he had developed blisters on his buttocks – but there was no need to tell Sergei that.
A sudden gust of wind blew up from the street, lifting leaves from the pavement until they swirled about the two men. Sergei turned the lapel of his overcoat to shield himself against it. It was a beautiful coat, Penkovsky noticed – it draped perfectly on his frame and looked brand new. Penkovsky prided himself on his appearance and had a collection of Western-style suits and silk shirts, but his coat was four years old and the sleeves were shiny and starting to bobble around the cuffs. These KGB bastards are so well paid, he thought. Sergei’s a year younger than me and several ranks lower in their system, but he’s still able to afford flashy clothes, keep in shape – no doubt his apartment is bigger, too.
When the wind had subsided Penkovsky started to walk back down the street, with Sergei directly behind him. A car suddenly veered up to the pavement, a polished black Chaika, and a rear door sprang open. ‘Oleg!’ a voice called from the back seat.
What was this? Penkovsky peered into the car’s interior and glimpsed an outstretched hand. He leaned forward and felt a sharp shove in his back, which sent him tumbling on to the rear seat. The door thudded shut behind him and the car jerked forward, the sound of the engine reverberating in his skull.
Penkovsky lifted his face from the cold vinyl seat and righted himself. The man who had lured him into the car was looking down at him. A felt hat obscured most of his face, and Penkovsky could only make out a thin mouth and the tip of a fleshy nose.
‘What the hell’s this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’
The man’s nostrils flared. ‘Be quiet, traitor.’
On hearing the final word, Penkovsky slumped back against the upholstery. So this was it. The dreaded day had finally come. He felt the remains of the shashlik he had eaten for lunch gurgling in his stomach, but was surprised to find how calm he felt, as though nothing had changed. But everything had. Everything he had experienced before this moment was now meaningless, unreachable. He would never again have lunch in that cafeteria, or see his office, or walk down this street . . .
A second Chaika had now come up alongside them. Penkovsky caught a glimpse in the driver’s rear-view mirror of Sergei brushing down his overcoat as he stepped into a third car that had pulled up just behind. What a fool he was to have fallen for the story about the passport. He should have seen through it, but they had chosen wisely in sending Sergei. He had trusted him unthinkingly.
Penkovsky closed his eyes and let the idea of death sink in. There was no question about it, of course: Popov had faced the firing squad, and he would, too. He thought of Vera. He had met her during the war, when she had been just fourteen years old and he’d been a young officer in the Red Army. Gapanovich had invited him to his home to meet his wife and daughter and there she had been, smiling with her flashing eyes, promising so much. He had married her after the war, and had never been happier than on his wedding day, but their passion had dissolved soon after the birth of their first daughter, Galina, and he had turned to drinking and other women. If silence was broken between them now, it was mostly to fight. ‘You’ve ruined my life!’ she had yelled at him the night before last, after he had returned home at three o’clock in the morning smelling of another woman and waking baby Mariana.
Well, now he had definitely ruined it, and the guilt made him nauseous. She didn’t deserve to be a traitor’s widow: in a country where one’s loyalty to the state affected every aspect of daily life, it was a fate worse than death. And his mother, his poor mother – how would she cope? He hoped Vera would be able to shield her from as much of what would be said about him as possible, for her sake. He thought, too, of their two daughters, and willed himself not to cry. He was a sentimental man and cried easily, but he would not cry now, not in the presence of another.
He also had a momentary pang of pity for the Englishman, Wynne. Perhaps the Queen could intervene and persuade them to let him go, he thought, and then dismissed the idea. No, the British would do nothing. They were scarcely any better than these fools. ‘Oh don’t worry, Oleg, we’ll get you out in time, you and your family, we’ll send a submarine, we’ll pay you, handsomely . . .’ Empty promises – he had just been left out to dry, waiting for the KGB to close in and pick him up.
He opened his eyes, catching sight of a bin outside one of the ministries as he did so. It reminded him of his idea, formulated over two years ago now, when he had first thought to contact the CIA. If you
whisked away twenty of those bins from the street in the middle of the night, you could reconstruct replicas of them with false bottoms, and inside you could place miniature nuclear weapons attached to timers. Put them back on the street, then take the first plane out of Sheremetyevo and wait for the explosion. Moscow knocked out in a single blow. Repeat the process in a few other cities and the Cold War could be ended in a matter of minutes. Penkovsky had worked out all the details, including which buildings to target, and had explained the plan to his handlers, but they had never acted on it. It was almost as if they didn’t want to defeat the Soviet Union. Now, of course, there was no chance to carry it through.
It was all over, but there was no point in wringing his hands about it. He’d had a good run, better than could be expected. He hadn’t destroyed them all in a flash of blinding light, but he had damaged them irretrievably, of that there was no question – he’d told the Americans and the British everything he knew, about rockets, weapons, installations, agents; and photographed every document he could lay his hands on. There was nothing they could do about any of it now. Yes, and he had travelled, as he’d always wanted to. He smiled at the memory of the Moulin Rouge, and of the cabaret girl in London – what had her name been? Zeph, that was it. As the car turned into Dzerzhinsky Square and the familiar yellow façade came into view, Penkovsky closed his eyes again, and remembered Zeph . . .
*
Is this how it happened? I’ve imagined many details in the above scenario, but I think events much along these lines occurred. According to several Russian accounts, including a documentary made by the KGB for training purposes, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962 after being greeted on the street by a friend who told him his passport was ready. For eighteen months, Penkovsky had worked as an agent for MI6 and the CIA, who gave him the codename HERO. He photographed thousands of top-secret documents and met with his handlers for hours at a time, pouring out everything he knew about Soviet society, strategy, weapons systems and more.
But what happened after his arrest? A wealth of documents about Penkovsky have been declassified in recent years, but information is notably lacking from the Russian side. However, considering subsequent events, I imagine it went something like this . . .
*
In his wood-panelled office on the fourth floor of the Lubyanka, General Oleg Gribanov, head of the KGB’s counter-intelligence directorate, peered at his chief investigator over rimless spectacles.
‘I want more on Penkovsky,’ he said. ‘The General Secretary has decided to announce the trial soon, but we need something much more definite to present to him. Today.’
Alexander Zagvozdin didn’t register any reaction: he was used to being given orders at impossibly short notice and knew there was nothing more likely to anger his boss than to question that they could be carried out. He glanced at the cache of enlarged photographs spread out across the baize field of Gribanov’s desk, showing the microfilms, miniature cameras and radio transmitter they had found in the traitor’s home.
‘It’s not enough,’ said Gribanov, catching his look. ‘This isn’t about his guilt – we’ve known that for long enough – but who he was working for.’
Zagvozdin understood the point: unless they could prove that the CIA and MI6 had run Penkovsky, the trial would be a washout. The Americans and the British would simply deny all involvement, and probably claim that the Soviets had simply concocted the physical evidence to create a scandal – as indeed they could easily have done.
‘What do you have in mind, General?’ he asked. He knew he would not have been summoned here to ask for his own views.
Gribanov gave a sly smile. ‘Let’s restart the operation for them.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Zagvozdin. ‘Send him out again, you mean?’
Gribanov shook his head. ‘No, they’d smell that at once. But we can do it another way. They suspect we’ve arrested him, of course, but they don’t know it for certain. So they’ll be sitting at their desks, hoping he’s simply been inconvenienced or is lying low, waiting for the control signal from him to make contact again. The question is: what form does that signal take? How is it activated, and what do they do when it is?’
Zagvozdin understood. If they could draw one or more of Penkovsky’s handlers into the open, catching them directly in an act of espionage, all subsequent denials of involvement would be seen to be hollow – and they would have snatched a propaganda victory from the jaws of operational defeat. There was only one snag.
‘We tried that before,’ Zagvozdin said. ‘But they didn’t bite.’
Gribanov frowned. ‘You’re not your usual sharp self this morning, Alexander. The situation was different then. We knew the signal procedure, but we didn’t know what their response would be, or the location of his dead drop. So if they did react to us, we might simply have missed it. But now we have Penkovsky in our hands and he has told us about his drop, nothing should be simpler than to discover the missing part of the puzzle.’
Zagvozdin gave a curt bow as he left the room. He’d show Gribanov how sharp he was – he gave himself twenty minutes to extract the intelligence and have it on the general’s desk.
*
Penkovsky shivered involuntarily as the man in the felt hat entered the cell. It was partly from the cold, and partly from fear: something told him the investigator was about to do something very unpleasant. This was the first time he had visited him in his cell, instead of having guards bring him to his office, and he was alone.
Penkovsky, seated on the iron bed, tried to focus on the man’s face to keep his mind off the pain in his stomach. He had lost a stone since his arrest ten days earlier, and felt both disgusted with and ashamed of his own body, skeletal beneath the dungarees and the thin blanket he had draped over himself. They had stopped allowing him to use the lavatory down the hall after the first day, and his own dried excrement was now smeared across the far corner of the cell’s floor. He had become afraid to defecate, leading to constipation, and he felt weak, dizzy and nauseous – not only was he deprived of food and sleep, but also the cell was constantly lit by a bare bulb hanging above the bed, giving the eau-de-Nil walls a sickly sheen.
And yet, beneath the cold and the hunger, he had felt strangely exhilarated. Was this it? Was this all they were going to throw at him? When he had made the decision to contact Western intelligence he had known it was the point of no return, and had tried to imagine the worst that could happen if he were caught. Uppermost in his mind had been this place, the KGB’s notorious headquarters. The Lubyanka was known as ‘the tallest building in Moscow’ on account of its floors of cellars, where executions were carried out by a single shot to the back of the head without warning. He had also heard of the tortures that went on in the cells, including a special room filled with transparent plastic pipes. Anyone who refused to break was placed in the centre of the room, and dozens of starved rats were funnelled through the pipes. If they still refused to talk, a valve would be unblocked and a single rat would be released into the room. Then another. Then another. When the prisoner finally broke – and they always did – high-pressure water hoses would be used to push the rats back into the pipes.
Penkovsky had had nightmares about this scenario for months, and in the first couple of days after his arrest had lived in constant dread of it happening. But they hadn’t used the rats on him, or tortured him in any other way. The guards had spat ‘Traitor’ at him at every opportunity and he’d received a few kicks to the ribs, but the physical assaults had been minimal and had been conspicuous in their absence from his face. He had soon realised why: they were going to put him on public trial, and it wouldn’t do if the world’s press saw he had been mistreated.
Every few hours, he was awoken for interrogation. They had shown him the equipment they had found in his desk, as well as photographs of him using the transmitter in his living room, taken from a camera hidden in the ceiling. He remembered that the previous winter his upstairs neighbour, a steel trust executive, had announced he was taking a holiday to the Caucasus with his family. A young couple had moved in the following week, and had introduced themselves as the man’s nephew and his wife. KGB officers, of course. That had been almost a year ago. They had been watching him all that time. No doubt listening, too, to his arguments with Vera . . . This in turn made him wonder if she had known – they could have taken her aside and asked for her cooperation or face the consequences. That might explain the coincidence of the holiday she had taken with the children just before he had been admitted to hospital. No doubt his blisters had not been a coincidence, either, and they had spiked his coffee at the office or something similar to bring them on. Perhaps Vera had drugged him. ‘You’ve ruined my life,’ she had spat out, and then a curious look had crossed her face, as though she had said something she shouldn’t have done. At the time he had taken it that she had felt the remark had been too cruel, but perhaps not. Perhaps she had known he was a traitor and had simply been playing a part until he was arrested, ‘assisting the authorities with their enquiries’, as they put it in Pravda.
On being shown the evidence against him, Penkovsky had immediately signed a letter promising to cooperate and had even offered to turn triple agent, suggesting that as the Americans and British trusted him he could be sent back to them and pretend that nothing had happened. When that idea had been rejected, he had confessed – but not fully. He had realised that although they knew he was a traitor they had very little information about precisely what he had done, and had no way of knowing if he was telling them the complete story or not. As a result, he had pushed his luck as far as it could go. He had minimised just how much he had revealed, and the length of time he had been involved with the Americans and British, in the hope that he might be spared. He knew in his heart that there was no real chance of it, but he couldn’t help trying for it nonetheless. And if they realised what he was up to, so what? They couldn’t execute him twice . . .
‘We need your signal.’
Penkovsky snapped out of his reverie.
‘What signal?’
‘The signal to contact your handlers, of course. How do you let them know you’ve filled the dead drop?’
Penkovsky hesitated.
‘As you know, we want to put you on trial,’ said Zagvozdin, ‘but that will only be of any use if we can prove you were in contact with the British and the Americans. If not . . .’ He twitched his mouth. ‘There will be no trial.’
Penkovsky didn’t react – it made little odds to him if he were tried before being shot. But Zagvozdin hadn’t finished, and the deadness in his eyes was more terrifying than starved rats.
‘Of course, a trial would wipe the slate clean. It would be unpleasant for your family, but justice would have been done and they could continue their lives relatively unaffected. After all, your actions are not their fault. We would give them new identities, and house them elsewhere. We were thinking of Leningrad. But if justice is not done, that could be very hard on them. The relocation would probably have to be to the countryside. So please tell me: what number do you call, and what procedure do you follow?’
If there had been any food in Penkovsky’s stomach, he would have vomited it then. Rage clawed at him, clouding his mind, and he wanted to lash out at Zagvozdin, but didn’t have the strength. He knew his mother would never survive a labour camp, and the thought of his daughters there, particularly the baby, made his mouth dry. It was unimaginable that Mariana would ever see such a place. But as Zagvozdin had talked he had imagined it anyway, for a fraction of a second he could never undo, had seen her crawling across a bare stone floor through a forest of emaciated legs.
He tried to shake his head of the image and focus. Zagvozdin had said something peculiar. He had presumed that Penkovsky’s way of informing his handlers he had filled his dead drop was by telephone. But this wasn’t the case, although one method did have something to do with telephones. There was a public phone in the foyer of a block of apartments in Kozitsky Pereulok. A line in red pencil marked on the phone’s backboard signalled that the drop had been loaded. He also had standing appointments with his British contact, ANNE. They had worked out a routine whereby she would enter a block of apartments and he would follow her in a couple of minutes later. There, he could tell her the drop was filled and be gone within a matter of seconds.
He did have a way of contacting the CIA and MI6 by telephone, but that was to be used in the very gravest of emergencies – in the event that he knew of an imminent nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the West. As he stared with utter loathing into Zagvozdin’s vacant gaze, Penkovsky felt the seed of the idea forming in his mind. It was insane, of course, because if they took it seriously it could mean the end of everything . . . the deaths of all those he loved included – but what did life have in store for them otherwise? And it would mean he had not struggled, or died, for nothing. He would have achieved what he had originally set out to do, even if he was not there to see it. And it would remove the man with the dead eyes forever. He held the thought in his mind for a moment, the way he had once seen a pawnbroker hold a gem up to the light, and examined the idea again. For a moment he considered discarding it, but something kept it there, and he couldn’t let it go. Why should he? What did he have to lose now?
‘There are two telephone numbers,’ he said, and Zagvozdin quickly removed a notebook and pen from his jacket. ‘Forty-three, twenty-six, ninety-four. And forty-three, twenty-six, eighty-seven. I am to call either, and when someone picks up I breathe into the mouthpiece, three times, then replace the receiver. Exactly one minute later, the procedure is repeated.’
‘And then they send someone to the drop?’
Penkovsky nodded. ‘Yes. Then they send someone to the drop . . .’
*
I have long been fascinated by the Oleg Penkovsky case. It had the highest stakes of any espionage operation during the Cold War, taking place during two of the most dangerous episodes in recent history – the Berlin crisis in 1961 that led to the building of the Wall and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. But it was also packed with human drama, as well as tradecraft familiar to millions from fiction: microfilmed documents, coded messages, assignations in safe houses in London and Paris and dead drops in Moscow. If it sounds like the plot of a John le Carré novel, that’s no coincidence: it inspired one of his best-known books, The Russia House, and elements of it have seeped into many of his other works. And le Carré isn’t alone: parts of the story feel familiar because so much spy fiction has been inspired by it, directly or indirectly.
But it was real. Penkovsky has been described as the most valuable agent in CIA history and ‘the spy of the century’, and his intelligence is widely believed to have been crucial in helping President Kennedy avert nuclear war during the missile crisis, as it revealed that Nikita Khrushchev was bluffing about the Soviet Union’s military strength. An alternative theory about the operation, that the Russians deliberately sent Penkovsky to make contact with the West armed with faked intelligence, has been discredited, mainly because in the 1990s the CIA released over two thousand pages of material about the operation, including the transcripts of all their debriefings with him, and the sheer magnitude of high-level secrets he revealed can no longer be denied as a result.
Nevertheless, several key questions about the operation remain unanswered even today, most notably how and when the KGB realised Penkovsky was in contact with Western intelligence. The official version from the Russian side has always been that they detected him by a combination of pure chance and sloppy tradecraft by the CIA and MI6, around ten months before they arrested him. Over the years, this version of events has become the accepted history, both in Russia and in the West – but is it true?
I looked at the operation again a couple of years ago when I was writing a spy novel set in Moscow during the 1960s. I started noticing puzzling elements about it, and decided to research it in depth. This has mainly consisted of immersing myself in memoirs, newspaper archives and declassified documents, many of them newly released, as well as conducting interviews. Most of the key players are now dead, but two surviving participants of the operation spoke to me about it on the record. Felicity Stuart was the assistant to MI6’s Head of Station in Moscow during the operation, while CIA officer Leonard McCoy played a major, though to date largely unheralded, role. Both were extremely forthcoming, and offered new insights into how the operation was run and what it felt like to be involved. I also interviewed Janie Chisholm, whose parents Janet and Ruari played a crucial part in the operation, as well as John Miller, a friend of the Chisholms in Moscow who worked for Reuters, and Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley, a former CIA counter-intelligence officer, who both provided important new information.
The main protagonists of this book, though, are Oleg Penkovsky and his handlers: quiet, methodical Harry Shergold of MI6 – perhaps the closest real-life equivalent to George Smiley there has been – and the CIA’s easy-going and immensely sympathetic George ‘Teddy Bear’ Kisevalter, who was largely responsible for coaxing the raw intelligence from this wildly unpredictable agent. Their invisible foe was General Gribanov, the mastermind behind dozens of KGB operations, and his team of investigators.
As I researched, I uncovered several pieces of evidence that the Russian story about when and how they detected Penkovsky is a lie. If I’m right, this might have a substantial knock-on effect on other events, particularly the Cuban missile crisis. Put simply, if the Russians were sure that Penkovsky was a traitor significantly before the crisis, why did they let him continue to pass dozens of top-secret documents about weapons, including nuclear missiles, to the West – and why have they never revealed that they did this?
In trying to answer these questions, I’ve looked more closely at incidents that have previously occupied the margins of the story – even a haphazard one night stand in London had unintended consequences, for example, and the way in which the KGB used their agent George Blake has not been fully explored in relation to this operation.
I hope I have built the case for an entirely new interpretation of this operation: that it was indeed the West’s greatest intelligence coup during the Cold War, but that it was also part of a long-running Russian deception operation, the secret of which has remained hidden for half a century.