2
12 August 1960.
It was eleven o’clock on a Friday night in Moscow, and a light rain was falling on the city. Few people were on the streets apart from the militsiya: armed police. Eldon Ray Cox and Henry Lee Cobb, two Americans on a two-week study programme from Indiana University, trudged across Red Square towards their hotel after watching a film at a nearby cinema. As they approached Moskvoretsky Bridge a man suddenly appeared alongside them, and in heavily accented English asked them for a light for his cigarette. Wearing a suit and tie, he looked to be in his forties, was of medium height and build, and had swept-back reddish hair tinged with grey.
Neither of the students had a light, but instead of walking away the man hovered by them, apparently anxious to impart some sort of message. As they reached the bridge, which was guarded by four sentries standing with fixed bayonets, the man fell silent, but as soon as they had passed the sentries he suddenly became animated again, begging the students to help him. Speaking rapidly in Russian, with English phrases occasionally interspersed, he told them that he had seen them a few days earlier on a train from Kiev and had wanted to approach them then, but had held back as they had been accompanied by a minder whom he knew to be an agent assigned to watch them. The Russian said that he had once worked at the Soviet Embassy in Turkey, where he had been friends with an American diplomat, and that he was now trying to contact US authorities to give them a letter.
The students were, naturally, perturbed by this unexpected development in their evening. But they were both mature students, and had become friends while serving together in the Air Force. Cox asked the Russian if he was in the military, and if so what was his rank and number. The man replied that as soon as the embassy read his letter they would know who he was. What was his plan, the students wanted to know – was it to go to the West? Perhaps, he replied, in a couple of years. Cobb asked him if he was a Communist, to which he replied ‘Byl’ – ‘I was’.
Repeatedly looking around to check that nobody could hear their conversation, the man then told the students he had secret information about an event that had recently made headlines around the world. This was the downing of a U-2 over Sverdlovsk on 1 May. The US government had initially claimed the craft was a weather-observation plane flown by a civilian, until Khrushchev had revealed that the pilot, Gary Powers, was still alive and that surveillance equipment had been recovered from the plane. In a humiliating climb-down, the Eisenhower administration had been forced to admit publicly that the U-2 had indeed been conducting an espionage mission over Soviet airspace.
Now, in a still moment on a Moscow night, the strange Russian told the American students he had been given information about the U-2 incident by ‘an officer friend’ that contradicted the official Soviet version. Powers, he claimed, had not been shot down by a single direct hit at high altitude, as Khrushchev had stated. In fact, the Soviet Air Force had tracked the American plane from the frontier and had repeatedly tried to bring it down, firing fourteen rockets at it, using both ground-to-air and air-to-air missiles as well as MiG fighter jets. Finally, he said, one of the rockets had burst near the U-2, causing it to spin out of control and crash. ‘In the process we destroyed one of our own MiG planes with ground-to-air missiles,’ he said, ‘killing the pilot.’ Powers had ejected, he said, but had been unconscious by the time he had landed.
The Russian then thrust two sealed envelopes into Cox’s hands, and implored the students to go to the embassy at once and deliver them either to one Edward Freers or to the military attaché, saying they contained very important information. He asked them to meet him on the bridge the following evening at the same time to confirm they had made the delivery. Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished into the night.
*
The two students had very different reactions to the encounter. Cobb was scared by it, and felt it was a trap designed to get them both kicked out of the country. But Cox was convinced the Russian was genuine. The young men argued, with Cobb imploring Cox not to act rashly. But he had made up his mind. As soon as they reached their hotel, Cox took a taxi to the American Embassy on Tchaikovsky Street, about a mile away. He paid the driver and approached the iron gates of the embassy.
Like all embassies in Moscow, it was guarded by KGB sentries – not to protect those inside, but to stop Soviet citizens from entering and defecting. Cox felt his heart pounding in his chest, and wondered if he shouldn’t have listened to his friend after all. But when he showed his papers the sentries let him pass, and he walked through the archway into the embassy compound. He asked to see Edward Freers, but was told he was not there. Instead, he was greeted by security officer John Abidian, who listened to his story – and was distinctly unimpressed by it. He took the envelopes, but told Cox he should not have accepted anything from a stranger on the street. Cox returned to his hotel, fuming at the scolding.
*
The next morning, John Abidian took the stairs to the ninth floor, where he nodded to a Marine guard standing outside a heavy door. The Marine stood to one side, and Abidian stepped into a curious windowless room. In the centre of it was a large transparent box of double-wall Plexiglas, which appeared to be floating. Inside the box was a small conference table and several chairs, and the entire structure was suspended by wires from the ceiling and floor.
Due to the acoustic barrier provided by the Plexiglas, this surreal room-within-a-room, nicknamed ‘the Tank’, was believed to be the only location in the Moscow Embassy that was secure from bugs. In 1952, an electronic sweep of the American ambassador’s residence had revealed that a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States that had been a gift from a Soviet youth group at the end of the war contained a listening device. As a result, the Americans were convinced that microphones were hidden throughout the embassy, and some staff had taken to communicating with each other by writing on children’s Magic Slate doodle pads, which they would wipe clean after each message so that no trace of sensitive conversations remained. It might seem like paranoia, but the KGB were in fact trying to listen in to the conversations in the embassy, from command posts stationed in neighbouring buildings.
Joining Abidian in the Tank were the Deputy Chief of Mission, Edward Freers, and the embassy’s political officer, Vladimir Toumanoff, a fluent Russian-speaker. Together, they opened the two envelopes Abidian had taken from Cox the previous evening. Inside, they found several documents. One was a letter, typed in Cyrillic text, which read:
My dear Sir!
I request that you pass the following to the appropriate authorities of the United States of America.
It is your good friend who is turning to you, a friend who has already become your soldier-warrior for the cause of Truth, for the ideals of a truly free world and of Democracy for Mankind, to which ideals your (and now my) President, government and people are sacrificing so much effort.
I have consciously embarked upon this path of struggle. Many things have contributed to this. In my life, the last three years have been very critical, both in my way of thinking and in other things, about which I will report later.
I have thought long and hard. Now I have taken a mature and for me a correct final decision, which has impelled me to approach you.
I ask that you believe the sincerity of my thoughts and desires to be of service to you. I wish to make my contribution, perhaps a modest one but in my view an important one, to our mutual cause, and henceforth as your soldier to carry out everything which is entrusted to me.
You need not doubt that I will give all my strength, knowledge, and my life to this new obligation.
In presenting the above, I want to say that I am not beginning my work for my new cause with empty hands. I understand perfectly well and take into full consideration that to correct words and thoughts must be added concrete proof confirming these words. I have had, and do have now, a definite capability to do this.
At the present time I have at my disposal very important materials on many subjects of exceptionally great interest and importance to your government.
I wish to pass these materials to you immediately for study, analysis, and subsequent utilization. This must be done as quickly as possible. You will determine the manner of transmittal of this material yourself. It is desirable that the transfer be effected not through personal contact, but through a dead drop.
Again I request that you ‘relieve’ me as quickly as possible of this material which I have prepared; this should be done for many valid reasons.
Your reply: Please inform me (preferably in the Russian language) through my dead drop No. 1 (see its description and manner of use) concerning the manner, form, time, and place for passing of the indicated material.
If you designate your own dead drop for my passing the material, please take into consideration that your drop should be able to contain material equivalent in size to the book Ven Klaybern by S. Khentov, published in 1959.
After you receive the material from me, it would be desirable to arrange a personal meeting with your representative during the second half of August of this year. We must discuss many things in detail. I request four to six hours for this. Saturdays and Sundays are convenient for me. You decide upon the place and manner of setting this up.
I will wait for your orders regarding the questions raised above, through Drop Number 1 starting from 15 August 1960.
I ask that in working with me you observe all the rules of tradecraft and security, and not permit any slip-ups. Protect me.
May the justice of the ideas and goals to which I am devoting myself from this day forward aid us in our future collaboration.
Always your . . .
P.S. My best, best greetings to my first good friend, Colonel Charles MacLean Peeke and his wife. Mentally I send greetings to my friends: Cotter, Koehler, Ditta, Beckett, Daniel, Glassbrook and others. I remember with great pleasure the time I spent with them.
I had planned to meet your representative and pass him this letter before 9 August 1960, but it did not work out. Now this must be postponed to 15 August.
Having absorbed this – Toumanoff translating the letter aloud for the others – the men turned to the second envelope, which contained a detailed description of the location of the dead drop, as well as a diagram of it and instructions on how to use it. Also known as Dead Letter Boxes, or DLBs, dead drops are used to this day, pre-arranged locations in which messages or material can be left and picked up by someone else later. They are used to minimise the risk of an agent and his contact being spotted together. Ideally, a dead drop should be somewhere easily accessed without drawing any attention, and unlikely to be investigated: the hollow of a tree, say, or a cistern in a public lavatory.
Spies spend a lot of time looking for such spots, and good ones are prized. The man on the bridge had found what he felt was an ideal location in the city: the foyer of a quiet block of flats in Pushkinskaya Street, between two shops. ‘The main entrance is open twenty-four hours a day,’ he wrote. ‘The entrance is not guarded, and there is no elevator.’ On entering the foyer, there was a telephone to the left. Opposite, in an unlit corner, was a radiator, painted dark green, fastened to the wall by a single metal hook. ‘If one stands facing the radiator, then the metal hook will be to the right, at the level of one’s hand hanging from the arm. Between the wall, to which the hook is attached, and the radiator, there is a space of two to three centimetres.’
This tiny space in Moscow was the Russian’s choice for a dead drop with American intelligence. Written material could be placed here, he wrote, in a matchbox, camouflaged by being wrapped in green wire that matched the colour of the radiator, with the end of the wire acting as a hook, allowing the box to hang from the radiator’s bracket.
The writer also left detailed instructions about a telephone booth in a different apartment foyer, at 2 Kozitsky Pereulok, the location of which was indicated on the diagram. The telephone there was fastened to a wooden backboard, the veneer of which had broken off in the bottom right-hand corner, leaving a lighter spot exposed – a stroke with a red pencil on this part of the board would indicate that the drop had been loaded.
In addition, there was a list of around sixty Russian names. ‘I know that you have no sound basis for completely trusting everything that I have said to you, so I must prove myself,’ read an accompanying note. ‘In order to do so, I am enclosing a list of incoming Military Diplomatic Academy students and their future assignments. Many of these facts I am giving to you can be checked by you, because a number of these people have already been abroad before and were previously exposed to you. In addition, I want instructions from you as to how I might safely deliver to you some top secret nuclear information. I don’t know how to do this securely. I need your guidance and help.’
The significance of this list was probably lost on the men in the Tank, none of whom were intelligence officers. The Military Diplomatic Academy sounded relatively innocuous, but it was in fact run by Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye (GRU): the Soviets’ highly secretive military intelligence agency. The academy was the GRU’s elite espionage school in Moscow, and was so called because its students were drawn from the armed forces and most practised intelligence roles under diplomatic cover abroad, often as military attachés. Most, but not all – some were ‘illegals’, spies who work outside the protection of diplomatic immunity, usually under a false identity. The Russian had placed asterisks next to eighteen students who had been earmarked for such work, including details of their backgrounds, languages and where they were expected to be sent after graduation.
There was one final item in the package: a photograph of three men at what looked to be a social occasion, perhaps a diplomatic cocktail party. The tall man on the left of the photo was wearing the uniform of an American colonel. The man on the right, his face away from the camera, also seemed to be in a uniform, but it was not possible to make out what it was. And the man in the centre of the picture was invisible, everything but the top of his forehead having been cut out with scissors or a razor. Above his forehead were the words ‘I am’. It seemed that, fearing the package could be intercepted, this was as far as the Russian was prepared to go in identifying himself.
What to make of this strange letter and its accompanying documents? The men in the Tank were intrigued, but cautious. On the one hand, the man was offering access to material ‘of exceptionally great interest and importance’ to the United States’ government, including ‘top secret nuclear information’. On the other, what if it were a provocation or some other form of trap?
*
It was raining again, and the Moskvoretsky Bridge had a sinister look it hadn’t possessed the previous evening. Eldon Cox and Henry Cobb approached slowly, both resisting the temptation to glance over their shoulders to see if they were being followed. As they reached the bridge, a man in an overcoat emerged from beneath a streetlight. It was the Russian from the night before.
‘Good evening, my friends,’ he whispered. ‘Did you deliver my package?’
Cox nodded. ‘They took it, but they didn’t seem very interested. In fact, they were angry with me for taking it from you.’
The Russian’s face dropped at the news.
‘You followed my instructions?’ he asked. ‘Did you give it to Freers?’
‘Freers wasn’t there, so I gave it to another security official. He said he would look into it, but the way he reacted I’m not sure he will.’
The Russian cursed. ‘They must!’ he said. ‘Khrushchev is a madman, and someone must stop him!’ Conscious that he had raised his voice in his excitement, he lowered it to a whisper again. ‘Thank you for trying to help me,’ he said. ‘You are both good men.’ Then he turned and once again walked off into the night.
*
Unknown to the Russian or the students, the documents were now making their way through the American government’s red tape, and would soon reach CIA headquarters, where they were scrutinised again. One CIA officer later described the reaction to the letter in Washington as ‘near-paralysis’, although this is perhaps understandable given the context of the time. Soviet intelligence specialised in provocation and aggressive actions. All KGB officers were given annual quotas for the number of agents they were expected to run, and their careers depended on meeting these requirements. As a result, attempts to recruit foreigners were rife, often by use of extortion. The technique was usually very simple: a pretty woman, or man, seduced you, and before you knew it you were being shown photographs or film of your dalliance and being pressured to provide secrets or face exposure. The CIA had discovered this to their cost in 1956, when the first officer they had sent to Moscow, Edward Ellis Smith, had been seduced by his maid, who he had boasted made wonderful Martinis. The maid, of course, was a ‘swallow’, and Smith had fallen into a classic ‘honey trap’. The KGB used the relationship to force one meeting with Smith, but he then confessed all to his superiors and was fired.
The KGB also pursued disinformation campaigns against Western targets. A typical strategy was to forge damaging documents and post them to foreign embassies. In 1959, the KGB had created ‘Department D’, a section in its First Chief Directorate dedicated to running dezinformatsiya operations: from its inception, the department had fifty officers.
Another weapon in the KGB’s armoury was ‘dangles’, or false defectors. In the previous few years, several Russians had simply approached American authorities and volunteered either to defect or, as seemed to be the case here, hand over secrets while remaining in the Soviet Union. But some of these ‘walk-ins’, as they were known, had turned out not to be all they had seemed. They would hand over some information to establish their bona fides, but this would either be disinformation or what was known as ‘chickenfeed’: genuine intelligence that the KGB had already established was known to the other side, or that was insignificant enough to sacrifice. After the bait had been taken, the Russian would suddenly return to KGB headquarters, having retrieved some intelligence of his own: the layout of a CIA station, perhaps, or the identities of those who had interviewed him.
The Americans and the British had both been caught out by such ploys before, with disastrous consequences. In the 1920s, Soviet intelligence had created the appearance of an entire anti-Communist organisation: the fictitious Monarchist Association of Central Russia, also known as ‘The Trust’, ensnared among others the British agent Sidney Reilly, who was shot. Similarly, in the 1940s and 1950s, American and British intelligence had supported several anti-Communist organisations behind the Iron Curtain, only to discover that the Soviets had taken complete control of them: hundreds of agents were killed as a result.
Even when agents were genuine, they didn’t always stay that way. If the Russians discovered one of their own was handing secrets to the West, they might arrest them – but they might also decide to ‘turn’ them, allowing them to continue their contact in order to feed disinformation or force an embarrassing diplomatic incident. This had happened with Lieutenant-Colonel Pyotr Popov, the most significant source the CIA had ever had inside the Soviet Union. In 1953, Popov approached the CIA and began to hand over top-secret material. Six years later, the KGB finally realised what he was doing. They arrested him, but decided to let him out of his cell every so often to continue his meetings with the CIA, only now provided with doctored information to give them. Finally, at a meeting in a Moscow restaurant, Popov managed to pass a message to his CIA handler that he had been acting under KGB control for months. The KGB later pounced on the CIA man as he carried out a brush contact, a very rapid exchange of material in person, with Popov on a bus. The American was ‘PNGed’ – made persona non grata by being asked to leave the country – while Popov was executed.
It was against this background that the CIA now tried to assess the documents that had been handed over by the man on the bridge in Moscow. Heading the investigation was Joe Bulik. A handsome, driven 44-year-old, Bulik typified the can-do spirit of the CIA, an organisation that had only been formed thirteen years earlier. From a family with Slovakian roots, he didn’t speak fluent Russian but had valuable experience – he had been an agricultural attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow in the 1940s, in which role he had once been given the task of smuggling out of the country wheat and rye hybrid seeds developed by Russian scientists to counter bacterial warfare.
The CIA had been set up while Bulik was in the Soviet Union and, having determined from observing the country at close quarters that it would soon become the United States’ ‘mortal enemy’, he had applied and been accepted into the agency. He now headed SR/9, a unit that had been established within the CIA’s Soviet Russia division to run Pyotr Popov in Moscow. It oversaw all the agency’s activity within the Soviet Union – such as it was. Following Popov’s arrest and the expulsion of his handler, there was no longer any official CIA presence in Moscow at all.
Bulik commanded the respect of his colleagues, and was particularly admired for his strict adherence to the principle of ‘compartmentalization’, whereby the fewest number of people necessary are informed of a source’s identity, position or intelligence. Joe Bulik, says one former colleague, ‘knew how to keep a secret’.
He also knew how to investigate, and got to work doing so. Key parts of the information given by the Russian on the bridge – such as his version of how Gary Powers’s U-2 had been downed – were compiled into a document. All clues as to the identity of the source were stripped out, and the document was then circulated among the intelligence community. The responses were unanimous: the information sounded genuine, or as one CIA officer commented: ‘It looks like we’ve got a live son of a bitch here.’
The next step was to identify the man on the bridge. He had left a few clues: he had signed off his letter with greetings to several Americans, and there was the photograph – presumably he was the man whose head had been cut out. He had also listed those sixty Russian students at the Military Diplomatic Academy.
Bulik soon determined that Colonel Charles MacLean Peeke, the ‘first good friend’ mentioned in the letter, had been a US military attaché in Turkey between 1955 and 1956, and that he was the man on the left in the photograph. Scanning photographs of Soviet military attachés who had been in Turkey at that time, Bulik came to the preliminary conclusion that the man on the bridge was Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. There were reports that while in Turkey Penkovsky had sold small items of jewellery to others in the foreign community, apparently because he had needed the money, and that he had also tried to sell a camera. Judging by his role as a military attaché and the list of students accompanying the letter, Penkovsky was also in the GRU.
Bulik assigned a crew of officers to analyse the list of sixty students. Working around the clock, they eventually identified around forty of the names on the list, and located photographs of around twenty-five of them. It was an extraordinary take: their anonymous benefactor had led them to forty Soviet agents. Bulik was particularly struck by the fact that one of the students was currently working in Japan and that the list claimed the GRU planned to send him as an illegal to South America – indeed, as Bulik could see from a photograph, he looked decidedly Latino.
With the bit now between his teeth, Bulik tracked down the two American students the Russian had approached. Interviewed in a Washington safe house, Henry Lee Cobb remembered the incident vividly. Bulik showed him around fifteen photographs of various Russians and Cobb picked out one of them: it was a snapshot of Oleg Penkovsky taken in 1955.
Bulik wanted to be sure, so he flew to Alaska, where Eldon Cox had moved to work. In a hotel in Anchorage, Cox told much the same story as Cobb, differing in only a few minor details. Bulik took out the snapshots. Cox looked through them, then punched his forefinger on the picture of Penkovsky and said: ‘That’s the man.’ Bulik leaped out of his chair. ‘I knew it!’ he said.
Bulik was now sure that the man on the bridge was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who appeared to be a Soviet intelligence officer anxious to pass crucial intelligence to the CIA. It was still possible he was a plant or some form of provocation, but the signs were increasingly pointing to his being genuine: the identities of so many illegals didn’t feel like chickenfeed, but rather more like intelligence gold. If they were very lucky, Penkovsky might even be able to offer greater access to Soviet secrets than Popov had done. But if he were genuine, he would also no doubt have been checking his dead drop since 15 August, as per his letter, and been perplexed that the Americans had not yet responded. Bulik knew Penkovsky could be discovered by his colleagues, or simply change his mind, at any moment. He had to be contacted in Moscow at once.
*
But Bulik faced two major hurdles, both from his own side. The first was the American ambassador in Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson. Following the Martini-making maid incident and the expulsion of Popov’s handler, Thompson didn’t want any further intelligence headaches, and so rejected the CIA’s request to send someone into the embassy under cover. As a sop, he instead offered the position of a janitor in America House, a compound in the city that housed many of the Marine guards from the embassy. Bulik had no choice but to accept.
The second problem was a shortage of suitable candidates for the job. The KGB were so omnipresent in Moscow that risking a senior CIA officer having their cover blown was out of the question. The officer who was eventually chosen, COMPASS – he has never allowed his real name to be declassified – was young, inexperienced, barely spoke a word of Russian and had a serious drinking problem. He arrived in Moscow in October and was assigned a room in America House facing a cement factory. He immediately became convinced that the KGB were following him everywhere, so he hardly moved from the compound. As winter arrived, his reports became increasingly erratic. He proposed that Penkovsky walk past America House at a set time and throw a package of material over the wall, where he would be waiting to receive it in the yard. But there was a kennel in the yard containing a puppy, which he soon claimed had become ‘an unmanageable beast’.
*
In the meantime, Penkovsky took matters into his own hands. He had been appointed to a cover role in the State Scientific Technical Committee, a Soviet organisation that arranged scientific visits overseas and supervised visiting foreign delegations, both of which offered ample opportunities for espionage. Penkovsky wasted no time in putting his new job to use. When a delegation of British steel companies visited Moscow in December, he followed one of the scientists, Arthur Merriman, to his hotel room under the pretext of cadging a cigarette. Penkovsky turned the radio up to drown out their voices in case there were microphones switched on, and pleaded with Merriman to call the American Embassy at once and ask them to send someone to pick up a package he had for them. Merriman suspected a provocation and refused to cooperate, but on returning to London he told the American Embassy there, who in turn informed the CIA.
CIA headquarters now instructed COMPASS to call Penkovsky at home, following a procedure he had described to Merriman in the hotel room. But COMPASS fluffed it: he rang the number an hour after the scheduled time and spoke in such garbled Russian that Penkovsky hung up, mystified. Worried that further errors might endanger Penkovsky, the CIA quietly withdrew their man from Moscow.
But Penkovsky kept trying. After his approach to Arthur Merriman failed, he persuaded a visiting Canadian geologist to introduce him to his trade attaché. It was no dice again – the attaché also smelled provocation, and a day after accepting a package from Penkovsky returned it to him unopened.
But now a new player entered the scene: MI6. After Arthur Merriman had informed the American Embassy in London, the CIA asked their British colleagues whether they could provide any information on Penkovsky. The British obliged, passing over a report from a former military attaché in Ankara. Penkovsky was ‘pleasant and well-mannered, 5’9”, slender; iron-grey hair; 160 lbs.; Western appearance’. The attaché had added, in a poetic touch, that he had noticed that Penkovsky’s genial expression ‘fades when one leaves him, and is replaced by a rather weak and frightened look’.
This may have been moderately useful to the CIA, but it had an unintended effect: MI6’s interest had been piqued. Why were the Americans interested in this Penkovsky? The delegation Merriman had been part of in Moscow had been organised and chaperoned by Greville Wynne, a bluff British engineering consultant with a Terry-Thomas moustache, a sheepskin car-coat and offices in Chelsea. And Wynne was ‘one of us’.
Wynne’s precise relationship with MI6 has never been clear, but such relationships rarely are. In 1960, MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service, known to insiders as ‘the Firm’, ‘the Office’ and other vague euphemisms – didn’t even officially exist. Most members of the public had never heard of it, and if they did discuss intelligence matters tended to refer to ‘the secret services’ and didn’t distinguish between MI6 and MI5, which was responsible for domestic threats. In this atmosphere, men and women were often recruited to ‘a branch of the Foreign Office’ without a clear idea of what the organisation they were entering did. Similarly, MI6 also often asked British businessmen who travelled behind the Iron Curtain to discuss on their return what they had seen and heard. Such contacts were almost always on an informal – and therefore deniable – footing. The line between talking with someone from the Foreign Office over dinner and being an intelligence asset was a deliberately fuzzy one.
Wynne had been recruited into this game by Dickie Franks, who ran MI6’s department DP4, which oversaw such contacts. On realising that the Americans were interested in Penkovsky, Franks took Wynne for lunch at The Ivy in London and asked what he had made of the man. Wynne said he had liked him: he was easy-going for a Russian, as well as being amusing and enjoying a drink. Franks suggested to Wynne that he return to Moscow and set up another delegation with the State Committee, this time for their scientists to visit London, and to make sure that Penkovsky came along. If they could get him out of the Soviet Union, where surveillance was a fact of life, it would be much easier to talk to him.
*
Wynne arrived in Moscow in early April 1961 to discuss a delegation to London with the State Committee. Penkovsky quickly realised the opportunities such a trip offered, but he couldn’t even wait until then. On 6 April, he visited Wynne in his hotel room and, after ushering him into the bathroom and turning on the taps, showed him a compartment in his trousers in which he had sewn documents – he had been so frightened of leaving them anywhere he carried them around with him at all times. Taking a razor, he slit open the secret pocket and handed the papers to Wynne, begging him to take them back to London.
Wynne was alarmed, but took two of the documents. In an echo of Penkovsky’s own frustrated attempts to be taken seriously, the British Embassy turned Wynne away when he tried to give them to the ambassador so they could be flown out in the secure diplomatic bag. This meant that Wynne was forced to run the gauntlet of customs instead. Worse, Penkovsky accompanied him to the airport and, minutes before Wynne was due to board his plane, drew him to one side in one of the bathrooms and tried to persuade him to take even more documents. Wynne eventually accepted one additional sheet of paper. The two men then gave each other a bear hug and Wynne rushed off, secret Soviet documents tucked tightly under his coat as he walked across the tarmac and on to the plane that would take him back to London.