3
The Mount Royal near Hyde Park had originally been a block of flats, but had since been converted into a slightly shabby maze of a hotel that mainly catered to the tourist trade. To an outside observer, the four men in dark suits pacing its carpets and chain-smoking cigarettes on the evening of 20 April 1961 would probably have looked like businessmen, perhaps anxiously awaiting news of a deal. In fact they were intelligence officers, and they were mentally preparing for what they hoped would be the operation of their lifetimes.
Two of the men were Americans, and two were British: after some negotiation, the CIA had agreed to join forces with MI6. The Brits had beaten them to the punch by making contact with Penkovsky through Greville Wynne, and had also managed to arrange for him to visit London as part of an official Soviet trade delegation, the members of which were staying in the Mount Royal. But the CIA had figured out who Penkovsky was in the first place, had done the legwork on his list of sixty agents and, perhaps most significantly, had the money to fund a full-scale operation if he turned out to be the real deal.
Still, it hadn’t been an easy decision. The US and Britain were strong allies and the CIA and MI6 had a history of working together, but a joint operation increased the security risks, simply because people would need to know about it in both London and Washington. This was a particularly sensitive point, as several recent spy scandals had raised questions about the Brits’ competence and reliability. In 1951, decoded Soviet intelligence messages from the Second World War had pointed to British diplomat Donald Maclean being a Soviet agent, but just before he had been brought in for questioning he had fled the country with another diplomat, Guy Burgess – the two men had later turned up in Moscow. As a result of Burgess and Maclean’s flight, MI6’s Head of Station in Washington at the time, Kim Philby, had also come under suspicion of being a Soviet spy: he had known that the net was closing in on Maclean and had been a friend of Burgess. But despite being named as ‘the Third Man’ in the House of Commons, Philby had never been apprehended and had even remained unofficially attached to MI6, to the horror of some CIA officers who remained convinced he was a traitor.
More troubling than Burgess, Maclean and Philby was a case that had only fully come to light a few weeks earlier. A Polish intelligence officer, Michael Goleniewski, had defected to the Americans and, among other things, revealed that the KGB had two further British agents. Goleniewski didn’t know their identities, but some of the intelligence he had seen appeared to come from a Royal Navy research establishment, and some from MI6 documents. By early 1961, MI5 had identified the naval spy, Harry Houghton, and he had been arrested with three associates, all illegals: Konon Molody, a Russian operating in Britain as a Canadian businessman named Gordon Lonsdale, and Morris and Lona Cohen, two American Communists who had created cover identities as antiquarian booksellers Peter and Helen Kroger.
A major Soviet spy ring had been wrapped up, but Goleniewski’s clues about a traitor in MI6 had been harder to crack. Frustrated at the lack of progress, the head of MI6, Dick White – ‘C’ – had put senior officer Harry Shergold on the case. Before the war, Shergold had been a schoolmaster at Cheltenham Grammar School: shy and with thinning hair, he still would not have looked out of place in a senior common room, quietly marking papers in a corner. But despite his inconspicuousness, or perhaps partly because of it, ‘Shergie’ was already approaching legendary status within MI6. During the war he had worked with the Intelligence Corps in the Middle East and Italy, and in its aftermath had become a highly effective interrogator and agent-runner, heading MI6’s operations from Bad Salzuflen in the British Zone of Germany. In the years since he had transferred his area of expertise to the new enemy, and was now MI6’s ‘best Soviet specialist’.
After an extensive investigation, Shergie had concluded that the only person who could have had access to all the documents Goleniewski had seen was George Blake. This was explosive, because Blake was a career MI6 officer, and so could have done untold damage. He had joined during the war, and in 1948 had been appointed Head of Station in Seoul. However, he and several others at the British Legation had been taken prisoner by the invading North Korean Army, and he had spent three years in captivity. On his release and return to England, Blake had been regarded by many colleagues as a hero – but unknown to them he was harbouring a dark secret. While in captivity he had become a committed Communist. In the autumn of 1951, he had slipped into the guardroom of his camp and handed the North Koreans a note addressed to the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang. A few weeks later the KGB had sent an officer to meet him under the pretext of interviewing all the prisoners, and Blake’s life as a traitor had begun.
Blake’s greatest intelligence coup for his new masters had taken place shortly after his return from North Korea. In 1953, MI6 and the CIA had embarked on a major joint operation: the building of a tunnel beneath the Soviet Zone of Berlin. In the 1940s, the two agencies had been able to intercept Soviet radio transcripts, but the Russians had got wind of this and switched to using one-time pads in 1948. These were tiny pads of paper, each page of which contained a fresh string of random letters. There were only two copies of the pads in the world, and each sheet of paper was only used once before being burned: unless you had one of the pads, messages coded using them were unbreakable. The new tunnel meant the British and Americans would be able to get around this, by listening in to communications running from the joint Soviet– East German intelligence base in Karlshorst before they were enciphered.
However, George Blake had attended an early CIA–MI6 meeting about the operation in London, and had immediately informed his Soviet controller, Sergei Kondrashev. Blake was codenamed DIOMID, meaning ‘diamond’, and was so highly valued by Moscow that Kondrashev was the only person in the KGB’s London station (rezidentura) to know his name or position – even the Head of Station, the Rezident, was not informed.
Blake’s information about the plans for the Berlin tunnel was a coup for the Russians, but it also placed them in a very difficult position. If the tunnel went ahead, the West would be able to gain an enormous amount of intelligence about their activities. But if they exposed the tunnel, the British and Americans would naturally try to figure out how they had known about it. As only a handful of people were aware of the operation, MI6 and the CIA might investigate and discover that Blake had been the source.
The KGB considered its options. One was to let the tunnel go ahead and feed disinformation through the tapped lines, but this was overruled: a single error could alert the British and Americans to the fact that they knew about the tunnel all along, and Blake would once again be in the frame. Planting disinformation would also have meant involving more people, increasing the risk of compromising Blake’s security.
In the end, the KGB took just one measure to minimise the damage. They tapped the same lines as MI6 and the CIA were doing, and presented the resulting recordings of officers being overly talkative to the marshal responsible for the Karlshorst base: he immediately issued orders to his staff that discretion be observed on the telephone at all times.
But other than that, the Soviets left the tunnel completely alone, and MI6 and the CIA intercepted an enormous amount of classified material as a result. In terms of chess strategy, the KGB were losing a bishop, but Blake was the equivalent of a queen or even a king, and protecting him was worth the sacrifice of a lesser piece.
In the spring of 1956, the Soviets finally decided it was time to put a finger in the dyke. Khrushchev instructed the KGB to find a way to expose the tunnel that would provide them with a propaganda coup, and would not reveal how they had learned about it. Sergei Kondrashev discussed it with Blake, who felt that enough time had now gone by to remove him from suspicion. When heavy rains swept Berlin and disrupted phone lines, the Soviets seized the opportunity and sent soldiers in to carry out repair work. When they ‘accidentally’ came across the tunnel as a result they decried the operation at a press conference, while the Communist newspaper Neues Deutschland called it a ‘gangster act’.
The ruse paid off, for a time. MI6 and the CIA were dismayed that the tunnel had been discovered, but believed the Soviets’ story of accidentally discovering it, reasoning that the operation had been so successful for so long that the KGB would never have let it continue had they known about it. A CIA assessment concluded that the discovery had not been the result of ‘a penetration of the UK or US agencies concerned, a security violation, or testing of the lines by the Soviets or East Germans’, but had been ‘purely fortuitous’.
Blake had escaped suspicion for a while longer, but events finally caught up with him. Thanks to the information from Goleniewski, by February 1961 Harry Shergold had deduced that he was a Soviet agent. However, Shergold didn’t have enough evidence to be certain of a successful prosecution, so in early April he asked Blake to report to MI6’s personnel department in London without specifying what it was about. Once Blake had arrived, he took him to an elegant conference room in the grand and sedate Carlton Gardens, overlooking St James’s Park. MI6 had special interrogation centres, known as ‘rubber rooms’ because the walls were soundproofed, in the basements of several houses and hotels in London, but Shergold had decided that such an approach would be counterproductive in this case, as Blake might simply seize up and refuse to talk. Instead, he was going to smother him with politeness.
As soon as they had settled in the conference room, Shergold accused Blake of working for the KGB. Blake strenuously denied it, and continued to do so under intense questioning for two days. Exasperated, Shergold suggested he had been brainwashed by the North Koreans. Something in the accusation made Blake snap, and he suddenly burst out that Shergold was completely wrong. Yes, he said, it had happened when he was in the hands of the North Koreans, but he hadn’t been brainwashed: he had known perfectly well what he was doing all along, and had chosen to serve Communism purely as a result of his own beliefs.
Shergold had swiftly tied up the loose ends. He had taken Blake off to his cottage in Richmond for three days, where his wife Bevis, a former Olympic shot-putter, had cooked pancakes and vegetarian meals for them. Once Shergold had secured a legally binding confession, a two-part ciphered telegram was sent to every MI6 station in the world. The first part stated: ‘THE FOLLOWING NAME IS A TRAITOR’. The second spelled out Blake’s name.
The message sent shockwaves through the agency. Burgess and Maclean had been diplomats, not intelligence officers: Blake was a colleague. He confessed to having betrayed the true identities of every MI6 officer and agent he had known; it has been claimed the figure was around forty (he was given a forty-two-year prison sentence, ‘about one year for each agent’), but by his own estimation in later life it was ‘more likely 400’. It’s also likely that in many cases his betrayal would have resulted in their deaths.
Blake later engineered a spectacular escape from Wormwood Scrubs and defected to Moscow. But beyond all the agents, assets and operations he could have betrayed were some even more disturbing implications to his case. It was starting to look like Burgess and Maclean hadn’t been isolated cases, but that the Soviets had recruited them as part of a wide-ranging effort to penetrate the British establishment. The idea was in stark contrast to MI6’s own record: it didn’t have a single agent-in-place in the KGB, and the only notable defector it had received since the end of the Second World War, Grigori Tokaev, had arrived in 1947 and so had no knowledge of recent organisational changes, personnel or operations.
MI6 had discovered Blake by chance: Harry Shergold cracked the case, but only because he had clues to follow in the first place. If Goleniewski hadn’t decided to switch sides, Blake might have remained undetected for decades, and we might be none the wiser today that the KGB knew about the Berlin tunnel operation all along, and that their claim to have accidentally discovered it was a carefully constructed cover story designed to protect a valuable agent-in-place in the West.
Blake’s confession, then, opened several cans of worms. Most importantly, it changed the nature of the Berlin tunnel. Both MI6 and the CIA had believed that operation to be one of their greatest triumphs: it had yielded recordings of nearly half a million conversations, using up some 50,000 reels of tape, and much of it had been highly secret material. But it was now clear that the Soviets had been prepared to let them have all of it because they had held a far greater asset.
*
All of this was in the background when MI6 and the CIA discussed working together on Penkovsky. But despite American reservations about British security, the deal had been struck for a joint operation. Shergold, fresh from having secured Blake’s confession, led the MI6 contingent, supported by a junior officer, Mike Stokes.
Bulik had chosen for his deputy George ‘Teddy Bear’ Kisevalter, who would also act as the frontline handler for Penkovsky, as he was the team’s best Russian speaker. Kisevalter was a large, gregarious 51-year-old, ‘rumpled and roly-poly’ as a colleague would later describe him. He was well liked within the CIA, with his nickname derived from his bear-like physique but also the fact that he had a lifelong affection for the animals – as a young man he had worked for the Parks Commission in New York, and had known the name of every bear in the city’s zoo.
Beneath the cuddly exterior lay the mind of a very sharp and experienced intelligence officer. He had been born in 1910 in St Petersburg to a family of the dvorianstvo, Russia’s hereditary nobility. His grandfather had served as a deputy finance minister under two tsars, while his father was an engineer who had married a French schoolteacher. At the age of six, Kisevalter had accompanied his parents to the United States when his father had led a contingent of Russian munitions experts who were looking to buy weapons for the war against the Central Powers. The family had stayed on in the United States, and after the Bolshevik Revolution became stranded there, because they supported the White Russians. Almost all the Kisevalters’ extended family in Russia had been killed in the following years, with the result that George had grown up in the United States with great pride in his Russian roots – but a deep hatred of Communists.
Kisevalter had entered the espionage world in 1944, working in G-2, an Army intelligence unit. After the war he had joined the CIA, where his perceptiveness and fluent Russian had led to his running Pyotr Popov, his and perhaps the agency’s finest hour to that point. An unpretentious man, Kisevalter was wary of the agency’s urbane elite, perhaps sensing he would never rise higher in the ranks due to having been born in Russia, and there was tension between him and Bulik. Having run Popov, Kisevalter felt capable of running this operation himself. But no two operations are alike. Popov had been a rather uptight figure, and Kisevalter had bonded with him over long drinking sessions at safe houses in Vienna. Would Penkovsky be shy or talkative, distant or engaging, trustful or suspicious?
These questions circled the four men as they waited in the Mount Royal. Penkovsky had landed at Heathrow earlier that day, and had been met by Greville Wynne. Safely installed in Wynne’s Humber Snipe saloon, he had handed over a package that included a letter, in a similar vein to his first, addressed to the Queen, Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy among others. As well as reaffirming his desire to be a ‘soldier’ for the West, Penkovsky asked to be made a British or American citizen, and to be granted a rank in the US Army, both of which he wanted in preparation for a future life in the United States. The package also included material he had gathered over the previous year, and in the letter he asked that its significance be assessed, and that a decision on a ‘fixed sum’ of payment for it be reached and placed in an American bank, again with defection in mind.
Now Penkovsky was due at any moment. The plan was for him to have dinner with his colleagues from the delegation and then make his excuses, saying he was heading to his room for the night. Instead, he would take a back stairway and meet the team in another room. But would he come? Despite all his attempts to contact them, now he was in London he might decide that it was too risky, or ask for too much in exchange, or simply clam up. And if he did go through with it, what would he be able to reveal? Penkovsky was entering the picture at a point in the Cold War when the Soviets seemed to have the upper hand. They were winning the space race – Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space just over a week earlier – and also appeared to be winning the arms race: President Kennedy had repeatedly claimed in his election campaign that the Eisenhower administration had allowed the Soviets to gain a large lead on intercontinental range ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a lead he referred to as the ‘missile gap’.
Finally, at around twenty to ten, there was a knock on the door. Joe Bulik opened it to see a man wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie: Oleg Penkovsky.
*
The five men seated themselves around a small serving table, on which there was a bottle of white wine and several glasses.
‘Would you prefer to speak Russian or English?’ asked George Kisevalter.
‘I would much rather speak Russian,’ Penkovsky replied, explaining that he had used English for work when he had been stationed in Turkey but that it had since become rusty. He then looked at the expectant team. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘let’s get to work.’
With a recording device in Shergold’s briefcase capturing everything for later translation, transcription and analysis, the meeting began in earnest. It started shakily: Penkovsky wanted to know why it had taken so long to arrange the meeting, pointing out that he had been trying to make contact since the previous August.
‘If you knew how many grey hairs I have acquired since that time,’ he said, ‘if you had only marked the signal just so I would have known that the message got into the proper hands. I worried so much about this.’
Kisevalter tried to reassure him that the delay had been for his own protection, arguing that they had needed to establish a secure way to receive his material. ‘This was done exclusively in consideration of your security,’ he said.
‘And, between friends,’ Penkovsky added, sourly, ‘admit that you did not trust me. That is the most unpleasant and painful to me.’
‘No, it is quite the opposite,’ Kisevalter insisted.
The moment passed, and the meeting settled down. The men removed their jackets and rolled up their sleeves – the window had been closed to prevent anyone overhearing the conversation from the street, and the room had rapidly become hot, stuffy and filled with cigarette smoke. Mike Stokes, much to Kisevalter’s irritation, lay back on the bed.
As they sipped the Liebfraumilch, Penkovsky explained who he was and what had brought him to contact the West. He was clearly happy to talk, and had even brought along his own agenda. Bulik was enormously relieved. ‘Here was a man who had held a secret in his heart for many months and was obviously waiting to unload,’ he later recalled. ‘I think we all knew it. This would probably be the case of the century.’
The team had agreed in advance that they would allow Penkovsky to steer the meeting as he saw fit, and so let him talk, prompted by occasional questions from Kisevalter. The primary objective was to obtain intelligence that would establish if he were the genuine article.
‘I was born,’ Penkovsky began, ‘in 1919 in the Caucasus.’ His father had been a first lieutenant in the Tsar’s Army, from Stavropol, while his grandfather had been a judge. But, there was a problem with his family history. ‘Only recently,’ he said, ‘I have been accused and confronted with having come from a background of nobility.’
Descendants of the nobility, or anyone whose family had fought against Communism during the Revolution, were still highly suspect in the Soviet Union. A few months after Penkovsky’s birth, his father had vanished without trace. ‘Either he died of illness,’ he said, ‘or was shot during the Revolutionary days since there were very violent conflicts in that district of the Caucasus.’
Hearing this, Kisevalter may have had a pang of empathy, as most of his own family in Russia had been killed during this period. But Kisevalter, as a result of his father’s fortuitous visit to the United States, had escaped life under Communism, whereas Penkovsky had had to try to survive within that system. To do so, he had hidden the secret of his father’s disappearance all his life: to have stated that his whereabouts were unknown after he had served on the White side would have been impossible. ‘One simply would be blocked for life from progressing in any speciality,’ Penkovsky explained. ‘They would not accept one in the Party and one would just about be a common labourer.’
To avoid that fate, he had concocted a story that his father had died in 1919. This had been believed, and his career had advanced. He had joined the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party, and then the Army. In 1939 he had graduated from artillery school in Kiev, and had immediately been sent to help, as he put it, ‘liberate the Western Ukraine’ – the Soviet Union and Germany had invaded Poland. Penkovsky served in several Army units, and had survived the purges by the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB, which executed hundreds of thousands of people at this time, many of them from the Army.
During the war, Penkovsky met two men who would have an enormous impact on his life. After fighting in Poland and Finland he returned to Moscow, where he served as a military instructor. There, Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich took the dashing young officer under his wing and introduced him to his 14-year-old daughter Vera. Penkovsky had been smitten at once, and four years later he married her.
But before then, there was a war to win. In 1943, Penkovsky had returned to the front. This had been at his own request, because he had realised it might prove useful for his career. ‘At that time the recapture of Kiev was being celebrated,’ he said, ‘and I thought that the war would end very soon. Here I was with no distinctions or decorations. I received nothing for the Finnish campaign, only a commendation and a cigarette case.’
Penkovsky had been sent to the First Ukrainian Front, where he had been assigned to a subdivision of the headquarters of General Sergei Varentsov. Like Gapanovich, Varentsov had taken a liking to him, and appointed him commander of a training reception centre for anti-tank artillery regiments. But in the summer of 1944 Penkovsky had been injured, and had been sent back to Moscow for treatment. He had been about to return to the front when he heard that Varentsov had also been injured, and had been flown to hospital in Moscow. At Varentsov’s request, Penkovsky acted as his liaison officer with the front. ‘I knew that he would reward me tenfold for anything I did for him,’ Penkovsky told the team. While Varentsov was in hospital his daughter committed suicide – Penkovsky arranged for the funeral, selling his watch to be able to afford it. Deeply grateful, Varentsov told Penkovsky he was like a son to him.
Penkovsky’s loyalty to Marshal Varentsov, as he would become, paid off more than tenfold. He had received special protection in his career ever since, despite a few upsets along the way. Penkovsky revealed that he even had Varentsov to thank for his presence here in London, as he had asked him to intervene in a decision not to grant him permission to travel abroad. Varentsov knew that the Central Committee had requested that Penkovsky remain in Moscow, but was unaware that this was because the KGB had become suspicious about his father. Varentsov had hesitated, but at the last minute – just the day before – had supported his protégé, and had made sure the visa was granted.
This was doubly significant. On the one hand, it was clear that Penkovsky was mistrusted due to questions about his father, and that he was in a precarious position. He had only squeaked through on this trip thanks to Varentsov’s patronage. On the other hand, what patronage to have! Penkovsky was very close to one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union: Varentsov commanded the country’s tactical missile forces.
Penkovsky continued to fill in his life story. After the war, he had married Vera and they had moved to Moscow, where he had studied at the Frunze Military Academy and then the prestigious Military Diplomatic Academy near the underground station Sokol. ‘Is it not 13 Peschannaya Street?’ asked Kisevalter, and Penkovsky confirmed the address.
This was a rare misstep by Kisevalter. He knew a great deal about the inner workings of the Soviet Union from having been Popov’s handler, and was keen to show Penkovsky he was in the hands of professionals by referring to some of this knowledge. But on this and a few other occasions, Penkovsky was visibly unsettled at having his sentences finished in this way. After all, he was revealing Soviet state secrets – how could this man know such things? Harry Shergold was worried Kisevalter might overplay his hand.
In 1953, Penkovsky had graduated from the Military Diplomatic Academy, and joined the GRU. Two years later, he had been given his first and, it would turn out, only foreign posting, being sent to Turkey as the deputy Rezident. Kisevalter asked what rank he had held at this time, prompting a clue about Penkovsky’s motivation for switching sides. He said he had been appointed a full colonel in 1950, but that he would never be made a general. ‘They have already said so and they have said I was unreliable.’ And he added, jokingly: ‘Maybe I will become a general in another army.’
The Soviet diplomatic community in Ankara was closely knit, even claustrophobic. Penkovsky had begun an affair with the wife of the KGB Rezident, but when the Rezident had propositioned Vera, Penkovsky had become enraged. But amid the cocktail parties and affairs, deeper intrigues were unfolding. In Ankara, Penkovsky had taken his first steps towards betraying the Soviet Union. It hadn’t been for ideological or financial reasons, but out of petty vengeance: Penkovsky fell out of favour with his own boss, the GRU Rezident, and when a colleague had conspired with the Rezident to undermine him Penkovsky made an anonymous phone call from a public booth to Turkish counter-intelligence and told them where and when the officer met his agents. The Turks swooped, and the man was expelled from the country. Penkovsky then informed the KGB that the GRU Rezident was to blame for the incident, because he had allowed sloppy tradecraft. The tactic worked, and the Rezident was withdrawn from Turkey and discharged from the GRU, his career in tatters.
Penkovsky escaped unpunished, and went on to betray another colleague in Turkey in the same way. Turkish intelligence, which had strong links with the West, were interested – could Penkovsky perhaps become a full-time double agent? But he broke off contact: his career was now in the ascendant.
However, when his posting ended and he returned to Moscow, the picture suddenly appeared much less promising. Other GRU officers were angry at the way he had reported the Rezident in Turkey, and told him that no generals would work with him because he was a tattle-tale. Worried, Penkovsky turned to Varentsov. His mentor told him to wait until things had blown over, but the damage had already been done. Penkovsky had not been expelled from the GRU – perhaps because he had Varentsov’s patronage – but he had been sidelined, placed in the agency’s reserves. He was given intermittent assignments until in 1958 he had been sent to the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy, where he studied rocket artillery, graduating from three courses with distinction.
This led to a reconsidering of his abilities, and he was informed that he was being posted to India. However, just as he was about to leave he was told that the decision had been reversed and that he was to stay in Moscow after all, overseeing students at the academy. ‘I was very disappointed about this and was very worried,’ Penkovsky said. ‘To be quite honest with you, my disaffection with the whole political system began quite a long time ago . . . the whole set-up was one of demagoguery, idle talk and deceit of the people.’ Penkovsky was conveniently ignoring that he had been deceitful himself, and that there was a transparent connection between his supposed disaffection with the system and how far he had been able to advance in it.
In 1960, the KGB had discovered that his father had fought on the White side and that there was no record of his death. The GRU’s chief of personnel had called Penkovsky in and asked for an explanation. Penkovsky replied that he had never met his father, or received any help from him, but could not explain why he had claimed he was dead, rather than missing.
He had not been called in again, but now felt as though he were no longer trusted. Fearful of being kicked out of the GRU, and resentful that he was still a colonel, Penkovsky had made the irreversible decision to switch allegiance. ‘I was thinking of becoming a soldier in a new army,’ he said, ‘to adopt a new people, to struggle for a new ideal, and in some measure, to avenge my father and millions of other people who have perished in a terrible way – as well as for my close relatives . . .’
He had realised that there would be little point in approaching the West empty-handed: he needed something to bring with him. He had been appointed the master sergeant of a class of eighty students at the academy, and as a result had certain privileges. This included a pass allowing him to study books and lectures in the academy’s classified library. He took to studying alone there, blocking the door by placing a chair under the knob as he laboriously copied out secret documents about guided rockets and launching equipment by hand. ‘If anyone knocked I would slide everything into my briefcase, which was sealed, and I would simply say that I was studying.’
Penkovsky had copied out dozens of documents in this way, and hidden much of it in bundles wrapped in insulation tape in his uncle’s dacha outside Moscow. He had sewn some documents into his clothing, had found a dead drop and had written a letter of introduction. After work, he had loitered outside the American Embassy and America House looking for a reliable-looking foreigner he could approach. But KGB sentries guarded both buildings, and he had never dared make a move. Finally he had become desperate, and had sidled up to the students on Moskvoretsky Bridge.
*
Having established whom Penkovsky was and why he had decided to make contact, Kisevalter now tried to discover what specific intelligence he could provide. This, too, poured out: Penkovsky described the GRU’s structure in detail, explained the development of the Sputnik, discussed an accident that had killed a marshal that had been hushed up and gave some background to Yuri Gagarin’s recent mission to orbit the earth.
It was juicy stuff, and Penkovsky was clearly knowledgeable about some highly technical subjects, particularly related to rockets. Kisevalter asked if he were aware of any Soviet plans to build launch sites for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Penkovsky said he didn’t know, but that he had heard that bases and rocket troops for use against Britain were located north of Leningrad, in the region of Murmansk. ‘The exact coordinates of their location are known to a very small group of people and the data lies in underground safes in the Arbat district,’ he said, referring to the area in Moscow where his own office was located.
A map of Moscow was swiftly found, and Penkovsky pointed out the locations of key Ministry of Defence buildings, including the headquarters of the country’s anti-aircraft forces, and the artillery, engineering, military training and chemical directorates. ‘This should all be blown up with small, two kiloton bombs,’ he said matter-of-factly. He added that in the event of a war, at two minutes after ‘H-hour’ – the GRU’s term for the launch of an attack on the Soviet Union by the West – ‘critical targets such as the General Staff, the KGB Headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, the Central Committee of the Party which organizes everything and similar targets must all be blown up by atomic prepositioned bombs, rather than by means of aircraft bombs or rockets which may or may not hit the vital targets’.
It was an astonishing suggestion, but it soon became clear it was not a casual one. As well as the documents sewn into his clothing, Penkovsky had also been carrying around a secret desire to wreak vengeance on the system that had denied him his rightful rank, and had channelled his professional energy into creating an extraordinary plan, which he now presented to the team.
‘In our Soviet Army we have a five kiloton, a ten kiloton and higher weapons,’ he said, ‘but they have not been able to produce a one kiloton weapon yet. Our scientists are still working on it. I know this exactly. Such weapons would not need to be set within the buildings themselves, but there are many adjacent buildings where they can be concealed.’ He gave as an example a branch of Gastronom, one of the 300 official food halls, next to the Lubyanka. Continuing with his plan, he said that a ‘small group of saboteurs’ should plant one- or two-kiloton nuclear bombs in specific locations that would simultaneously destroy all the buildings he had mentioned. He also proposed that attacks be carried out elsewhere, estimating that each major Soviet city would only need one man to destroy its military district headquarters in the same way. If all the bombs were detonated at the same time, he said, it would send the Army into disarray and allow ‘the execution of a military decision’.
He offered several variations of how this plan could be carried out. One was that the bombs, connected to timers, could be hidden inside small suitcases or satchels, which he volunteered to place himself. He also suggested disguising them as baskets of fruit and checking them into the baggage storage area of GRU’s headquarters, where an old lady looked after packages during the day, and even that MI6 and the CIA could create replicas of the rubbish bins found in Moscow’s streets and hide the bombs in specially prepared false bottoms: having been given these by dead drop, he could then put them in the boot of his car and drive around the city placing them next to the targets.
Penkovsky didn’t just want to inform the West about Soviet intentions: he had devised his own action plan for how the USSR could be destroyed in a surprise attack, with himself helping to execute it. In one blow, he would defeat his enemies.
The plan was based on his knowledge that the Soviet Union was vastly exaggerating its military might. He claimed that although Khrushchev was prioritising the arms race above everything else, the Soviet Union was still significantly behind the West. ‘There simply is no monolithic Warsaw Pact,’ he said. He claimed that the pumping of money into weapons development had led to the lowering of Army officers’ pay and privileges, which in turn had caused a major slump in morale, with countless cases of ill-discipline. Penkovsky felt the West should exploit all these weaknesses. ‘Of course, I am sorry for the people,’ he said, ‘but they have suffered so much already that if they suffer just once more for the sake of a really better future, it would be worthwhile having this war. But in that case, let me know when I should be in Moscow.’
The phrase ‘this war’ seems revealing of Penkovsky’s thought processes. He had raised the idea of an imminent war, not the CIA–MI6 team, but he spoke as though it were accepted fact it would happen. He also presumed that the West would want a war with the Soviet Union, provided they could win it, and had already convinced himself of the merits of it taking place, and how he could play a part.
Casting himself as an armchair general, Penkovsky said that the West’s leaders should ignore all the peace talk coming from the Kremlin, which was simply empty rhetoric. Instead, they should press their advantage. ‘Back in 1956 when the Egyptian affair was going on,’ he said, referring to the Suez crisis, ‘the Soviet Union should have been sharply confronted, and even today this should be done. With Cuba, for example, I simply can’t understand why Khrushchev should not be sharply rebuked. I do not know what answer Mr Kennedy will give him, but he certainly should be accused of arming Cuba with Soviet tanks and guns, right under the gates of America . . . Kennedy should be firm. Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets. He is not ready for any war. I respect and love the United States and I certainly, in Kennedy’s place, would be firm.’ He asked why Kennedy shouldn’t intervene to support ‘patriotic elements’ in Cuba, especially, he added, ‘when you know what arms have been sent to Cuba from the USSR? This is my opinion and the opinion of many of our officers.’
The situation in Cuba was of intense interest to the United States – Fidel Castro’s revolution of 1959 had established a Communist bulwark just ninety miles off the coast of the United States. Unknown to Penkovsky, as he was speaking the CIA was attempting to invade the island and overthrow Castro. The operation had begun at midnight on 17 April: 1,400 Cuban exiles, accompanied by CIA operational officers, had landed on beaches at Bahía de Cochinos – ‘the Bay of Pigs’ – on the southern coast of the island. They had immediately met with heavy fire from the Cuban Air Force, and dozens of exiles had been killed or captured. By 20 April, it had become clear in the White House that the operation was a ‘real big mess’.
So for reasons Penkovsky could not know, his suggestion that Kennedy be firm with Khrushchev on Cuba was, at that moment, impractical: with the American backing of the failed invasion undeniable, Kennedy was now placed on the back foot. But Penkovsky’s proposal that the United States accuse the Soviet Union of supplying Cuba with arms because Khrushchev would not retaliate was eerily prescient – that very issue would soon bring the two nations to the brink of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Penkovsky had mentioned that his view on Cuba was shared by other officers. This prompted Kisevalter to ask if he were acting as a representative for any group. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am all alone.’ Nobody, including his wife, mother or teenage daughter, knew he was in contact with the West. However, he said that his views were widespread, and that many in the Soviet Union were disaffected, from the younger generation who were envious of the clothes they saw Western tourists wearing and who were turning to petty crime as a result, to senior members of the military who felt Khrushchev’s reforms were a sham. Despite repeated promises that the country’s situation would improve, it was instead worsening. He described the difficulty of finding decent food outside Moscow and Leningrad, saying he had heard that in some cities people had resorted to eating horse meat, and reported that poor roads and delays in the supply chain had led to rotting grain.
Khrushchev was ignoring all these problems, he said, and instead appeared to be looking for a chance to start a war with the West, claiming he wanted to bury imperialism under a ‘rain of rockets’. But Penkovsky felt that, for the time being anyway, this was also a bluff. ‘He will rant and rave and even send arms here and there just as he did to Cuba and possibly even send small-calibre rockets there. In fact, there was talk about this with Castro and possibly a few rockets are already there.’
This was the second time Penkovsky had mentioned that the Soviet Union were arming Cuba. The team didn’t react to his claim that Khrushchev was considering sending rockets to the island, or may have already done so, nor did they ask what type they might be – everything he said would have to be analysed later, and followed up as seen fit.
Penkovsky had now explained who he was, why he had contacted them, and provided a wealth of intelligence. His cards on the table, he wanted to know what they thought of him so far, saying he was ready to carry out any missions they assigned him. All he asked in return, he said, was that they protected his life. He also said he was not prepared to defect if it meant leaving his family in Moscow. ‘I would be happy now to go to England or America myself,’ he said, ‘but I cannot leave them behind.’
He also raised the question of payment, as he had done in the letter he had passed to Greville Wynne. Kisevalter replied warmly but cautiously, saying that they would give him what he needed in hand and deposit monthly payments in a bank for him. Penkovsky seemed satisfied with this, saying that he only wanted a nest-egg to secure his future. ‘I see in your faces official, responsible high stature workers, my comrades,’ he said, ‘and also being an intelligence officer I know how to vet people. There is no need to keep things in the dark. No one needs this. I wish that your governments, and I consider them both my governments, trust me as their own soldier. It doesn’t matter whether you confer the title of colonel on me or not.’
Considering his repeated references to having been denied promotion, and his written request to be given a military rank in the US Army, it seemed more likely that it was in fact very important to him that he be conferred such a title. Kisevalter had avoided mentioning figures, so Penkovsky now explained what he felt he deserved, pointing out that he was a man of substance: ‘I have been a colonel now for eleven years. Previously I have received 5,000 rubles per month; now I receive 4,500. I have an apartment with quite a few personal items. I have been a regimental commander, and I have also been abroad.’ In addition, he had married the daughter of a lieutenant-general, and had a good standard of living. ‘But I would like to live even better,’ he said, ‘and to provide luxuries for my family.’
He explained that any additional income he received would not attract suspicion, because officers who travelled to the West often bought goods from their savings to bring back to Moscow. He also wanted some money in hand already, because he was considering buying a dacha outside Moscow. ‘A modest dacha is entirely normal for someone of my age and status,’ he said. ‘This would cost about 10,000 rubles in new money. After returning from the Front, I had a Mercedes-Benz, but after riding around in it I sold it since I couldn’t get parts and I was thinking about buying a Volga. All my comrades have cars. From my small savings and the money I have I usually spend quite a bit on my family and go out to restaurants. I am not an ascetic.’
In return, Penkovsky said he was prepared to sign an oath of allegiance to the West and to act as an agent-in-place in Moscow ‘for at least a year or two’. He asked the team to prepare a way for them to be able to communicate once the delegation’s visit had ended and he returned to Moscow, as he didn’t want to risk meeting contacts personally, and to be given a miniature Minox camera so that he would be able to photograph documents.
Finally, at just after one o’clock in the morning, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky left Room 360 of the Mount Royal and made his way to his own room.