4
One thing was immediately obvious: Penkovsky was genuine. Both the quality and the amount of intelligence he had handed over in the meeting could not plausibly be chickenfeed: under close questioning by experienced and wary case officers he had given a detailed description of Soviet intelligence structures, and had also discussed many other institutions, giving names, addresses and precise details of the dynamics between departments and personalities, as well as a wealth of technical information. He had spoken vividly about the mood of the country: a first-person report from the front lines of the enemy camp. The team also examined the material he had passed to Greville Wynne at Heathrow, and found it included top-secret field manuals for intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missiles, including for the R-12, which carried a one-megaton nuclear warhead. This intelligence would later prove crucial.
Another key factor in determining whether an agent is genuine is their motivations. Penkovsky’s were clear: deep resentment at having been passed over for promotion, and a desire for recognition, with remuneration to match. The KGB’s accusation that he had concealed the fact that his father had fought with the White Army was also a clear psychological trigger behind his decision to approach the West, and he had returned to the topic obsessively.
Experience and common sense said that none of this could be part of a disinformation operation cooked up by the Soviets. Penkovsky’s intelligence had tumbled out naturally, messily, and the way in which he had told his life story was far too humanly flawed to have been an act: he was eager to please and quick to sentimentalise, but also self-important, driven and, when discussing those who had crossed him, savage. By his own admission he could be vengeful, deceitful, petty and had been unfaithful to his wife – but, perversely, all these qualities pointed to his being genuine. It would have required the world’s greatest and best-prepared actor to have created such a plausible impression of a man desperately seeking vengeance against those who had overlooked him and a better lifestyle for his family, while pretending to his listeners and himself that his decision to betray his country was solely the result of principle and geopolitical necessity.
Another clincher was his insane scheme to use nuclear weapons to attack key command and control centres in Moscow, which he repeatedly insisted should be carried out. It was hard to imagine any Soviet intelligence chief thinking it would be a good idea to inform the West of the most vulnerable points of his country’s armed forces and suggest a way to blow them to smithereens in order to establish the bona fides of a plant.
History often alters course after widely publicised events: grand speeches, summits and treaties. But in this case it would be affected by what one man had said in a hotel room in London. It would take time to filter through to the decision-makers in Washington and London, but in less than four hours Oleg Penkovsky had presented a completely new picture of the state of the Cold War. By his reckoning, the Soviet Union was not leading the arms race but was in fact significantly behind the United States: it was a paper tiger, and Khrushchev was simply roaring as loudly as he could in the hope that the Americans might continue to believe it to be a real one. A huge amount of money and resources were being poured into trying to rectify the situation, with the result that the whole society was suffering.
That Penkovsky was genuine was a cause for celebration within the team: they were now, finally, in contact with a major source within Soviet intelligence, who had as his personal mentor one of the most powerful men in the country, Marshal Varentsov. This level of access to Soviet strategic thinking was unprecedented – more significant than even Popov had been.
But while the greatest hurdle had been cleared, the excitement was tempered by the realisation that they now faced several new problems. Penkovsky’s motivation rang true, and seemed powerful enough to drive him on to spy for some time yet, but might it also affect his work? Would he exaggerate snippets of intelligence he had heard in order to impress them with what they wanted to hear – or with what they didn’t? Bulik had been deeply impressed by Penkovsky, but was bearing in mind an old spooks’ proverb: ‘Never fall in love with your agents.’ Others were more unforgiving still. When Dick White read the transcript of the first meeting in his red-carpeted office on the fourth floor of MI6’s headquarters, he was stunned by the intelligence haul but hard-nosed about what it revealed of Penkovsky’s character: he felt the Russian was neurotic, vain and crazy.
That transcript had been prepared by female MI6 officers working in the basement of a large facility in Pall Mall that acted as the operation’s command centre. They would occasionally surface to ask Kisevalter the meaning of certain Russian words, as the language had evolved from tsarist times and some military terms were in no existing dictionaries. Like many Russians, Penkovsky swore a fair amount, and swear words also tended to be absent from Russian dictionaries. To spare their blushes, Kisevalter would give them a sanitised translation.
Once the transcripts were completed, the team pored over them with another CIA officer, Leonard McCoy, who was an expert in rocketry and missiles. McCoy was the team’s technical brain and his evaluation of Penkovsky’s intelligence, and advice on which questions to ask to elicit more of it, would prove integral to the operation. He had another important job – he distributed the sherry in the command centre at four o’clock sharp every afternoon.
*
Having prepared follow-up questions with McCoy, the team met Penkovsky in Room 360 the following evening. Within minutes, he was discussing the inner workings of the GRU: how it monitored radio communications, its relationship with the KGB and even the location of secret compartments in its cars.
Some of his information was incomplete, but intriguing nevertheless. At one point he said that he hoped that the GRU might one day send him for training to work under cover in Britain, Canada or the United States. ‘May God grant that this happens,’ he said, ‘because then I could play an important role. Everything would be in my hands, everything – ciphers, radio intelligence, people. This would be important to us. There is one agent – I don’t know whether he is in England or America, but I’ll swear by my life that there are agents.’
He doesn’t seem to have been talking about Soviet intelligence officers here, many of whom worked out of embassies, but foreign agents working for the GRU. This passing remark was never followed up, but it suggests that there may have been at least one undiscovered Soviet agent working in the West.
In the first meeting, Penkovsky had explained that a lot of the material he had gathered he had hidden at his uncle’s dacha outside Moscow. He said he would have no trouble retrieving it once he was back in the Soviet Union, but he needed a way to then pass it to them. He suggested they set up several more dead drops for him in Moscow, but Kisevalter felt this would be too risky.
‘Remember that the servicing of a dead drop by one of our people who is possibly – probably – under heavy surveillance is a constant danger,’ he said. ‘For you to fill and clear a dead drop where there is no surveillance is no problem. But although you live in Moscow and although you are forty-two, I am sure that you can have no idea how heavy the surveillance of all our people in Moscow is.’ Penkovsky said he understood. ‘Then double this understanding,’ said Kisevalter, ‘and you will be closer to the actual facts.’
Perhaps aware that this had sounded a little harsh, he went on to explain that it was not their officer that they were primarily worried about. ‘What can happen to him as a diplomat? A small scandal and he is thrown out. We will be alive and well, but . . .’
Penkovsky finished the sentence for him: ‘. . . I am gone.’
The other problem with using dead drops was timing – the longer the gap between material being deposited and picked up, the more chance it could be discovered. Harry Shergold suggested trying to combine the benefits of a dead drop with brush contacts. One way to do this would be at a cocktail party: as a Soviet official, Penkovsky would be expected to be invited to a few of these, and be allowed to attend without raising suspicion.
‘He would know that the man who was going to pick up the material would be there,’ Shergold explained to Kisevalter to translate. ‘He would put it in place and the man would remove it.’
Variations of this could also be done in restaurants, essentially creating a dead drop that was immediately emptied. Penkovsky was sceptical. ‘Surveillance is very concentrated against your people in restaurants,’ he said.
The problem would continue to exercise the team. It was all very well having a golden goose in Moscow – but they had to figure out a safe way to get at his eggs.
And there were a lot more eggs to grab. Most of the material Penkovsky had collected so far had been from the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy’s library, but the academy had another, more prestigious library. Penkovsky and other high-ranking officers attended weekly lectures at the academy to keep up with their military knowledge, which was routinely tested. But as part of their studies they were also entitled to work in the GRU’s library on the premises, which contained highly classified reference material under lock and key. Penkovsky had not accessed this library yet, but he could apply to do so for a few hours on Thursday afternoons. Penkovsky said that if he were given a Minox, he would try to photograph some of the documents he found. The team was keen; it was becoming clear that if they could find a way to keep in contact with him in Moscow, untold intelligence riches could be theirs for the taking.
Penkovsky also discussed the friction between Russia and its satellite states. He revealed that rockets had been delivered to all the satellite states, but without atomic warheads attached. An exception was the DDR, East Germany, where he said there were two brigades and two dumps of atomic warheads that were under the control of the Soviet Army.
This triggered one of his most intriguing parenthetical remarks, which nobody in the room could have known would foreshadow events to come. ‘Speaking of Germans,’ he said, ‘you have seen how often Khrushchev threatened to make a separate peace with the DDR. He will not do this because it could invoke a war. He is not ready to fire missiles now and he will avoid a war at this time. Even though he is giving rockets and training personnel to the DDR, they are still far from being ready to use them.’
In 1961, the situation regarding Germany had still not been resolved since the Second World War. The four major victorious allies had agreed to share power in the country, with the eastern part becoming a Soviet zone and the west coming under the supervision of the US, Britain and France until a stable democracy was established. Berlin had also been split, with four sectors each controlled by a nation, again with the intention of this being an interim measure. However, Berlin was positioned in the east of the country, meaning that its Western sectors could only be accessed through Soviet-controlled territory. In 1948, objecting to currency reforms in the Western zones, Stalin had blocked all road and rail traffic into the Western sectors of Berlin. For a time, it had looked as if the situation might develop into a third world war: in late September, senior MI6 officer Dick Brooman-White had confided to journalist and sometime-MI6 instructor Malcolm Muggeridge that ‘war now could more or less be taken for granted’.
The situation had eventually cooled, thanks to an airlift by the Western allies, but with a clear discrepancy in the standard of living between what was now two Germanys – the Soviets unilaterally declared the East a nation in 1949 – hundreds of thousands of people fled across the border from East to West Berlin every year. Since Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had repeatedly called for the Western allies to resolve the issue by signing a peace treaty with the Soviet Union recognising East and West Germany as two separate nations. If they didn’t, he said, he would sign a peace treaty with East Germany alone, which would once again threaten the access routes into western Berlin. However, according to Penkovsky, Khrushchev’s demands could be ignored, because he would never risk waging a war over the issue.
As he had done in the first meeting, Penkovsky tried to press for payment for offering such intelligence, and disclosed that he was in financial trouble. ‘I like to live freely and now and then take a lady out,’ he said. ‘I know how to approach them and I never drink to excess . . .’ But he had debts, and wanted the team to help him out. ‘I’ve already thought of buying odds and ends here that I can sell at a profit there,’ he said. ‘I know some wealthy Jews in Moscow who can even bundle diamonds.’
He argued that paying him would also smooth the wheels of access in Moscow. ‘I must bring each and every friend of mine some small item,’ he said, ‘since they know that I am going abroad. It does not have to be an expensive item in every case but it would be extremely bad to neglect anyone.’ Among the items he wanted were fountain pens, lipstick and neckties, as well as more expensive gifts for friends in the military. He was particularly keen to find cosmetics, stressing that he had to bring every secretary in his office at least one item, ‘even though it may be the cheapest lipstick in England.’
Bulik suggested that such considerations be discussed at the next meeting. ‘I just thought of something,’ Penkovsky said, perhaps fearing he had overplayed his hand. ‘If I could have a one-carat diamond, exactly one carat, not more or less, I am sure that I could cash it in for 1,200 rubles. Consider this, and possibly we can so work it out that you will not be concerned about passing any monies to me through contacts in Moscow for some time.’
Kisevalter assured him that it would be considered, and Penkovsky seemed satisfied. As two o’clock in the morning neared, the meeting broke up.
*
Penkovsky had once again provided a huge amount of raw intelligence, but the focus had shifted to a more blatant negotiation over payment. His claim that he needed to buy items in London because they were necessary to smooth his work gathering intelligence once back in Moscow probably had some truth to it: in the Soviet Union, the cultivation of influence through favours and gifts was central to society. As one CIA officer involved in the operation later put it: ‘Where one stood in the Kremlin hierarchy appeared to be part and parcel with what one was able to acquire from abroad.’
However, Penkovsky had also clearly realised that his intelligence was of great interest, and so was trying to pressure the CIA and MI6 into paying as high a price for it as he could get. But he didn’t have all the leverage. His handlers knew that there was now no turning back for him, and that he was unlikely to find any other takers anyway. They didn’t want to scare him off and have the intelligence dry up by low-balling him, but he couldn’t risk them turning their back on him if he asked for too much.
These delicate negotiations depended to a great extent on George Kisevalter’s charm and empathy, but the fact that they were happening was also reassuring. Penkovsky’s remarks chimed with Bulik’s earlier research into his time in Turkey, which had turned up reports of his approaching foreign diplomats trying to sell jewellery to them, and his desire for finan-cial reward was more controllable than the more volatile question of his desire to exact revenge on his colleagues.
More troubling was his admission that he liked to ‘now and then take a lady out’. It soon became obvious that this was an understatement, and that Penkovsky was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife and had a penchant for nightclub hostesses and prostitutes. Such behaviour posed a major security risk, as Penkovsky acknowledged, but it wasn’t an easy problem to solve. It needed to be controlled: simply telling him to stop the practice wouldn’t guarantee that he did.
*
Penkovsky and the rest of the delegation soon left London to visit factories in Leeds and Birmingham. The team followed, meeting him in hotel rooms. There were a few jumpy moments. In an episode reminiscent of a Laurel and Hardy film, when Kisevalter went into the street on one occasion to guide Penkovsky discreetly to the hotel where the team were staying the two men got in a muddle in the revolving door, with Kisevalter walking back through it to see what had happened to a dawdling Penkovsky just as the Russian was coming through – by the time they had extricated themselves, they had drawn the attention of most of the people sitting in the lobby. Penkovsky also made the mistake of going to the pub with Greville Wynne and drinking two pints of beer extremely quickly: his kidneys seized up and a doctor had to be summoned. Penkovsky was terrified of being hospitalised, as it would have been a black mark against him in Moscow, but luckily he soon recovered and it wasn’t necessary.
On 28 April, the delegation returned to London, where the meetings continued at the Mount Royal. Penkovsky discussed the weight of launching fuel, the construction of containers for nuclear warheads, military vehicles, the development of fissionable atomic material, the preparation and use of codes and ciphers, radio intelligence within GRU rezidenturas, the Strela 4 mainframe computer and the bugging of foreign embassies. He was also shown around seven thousand photographs of Soviet diplomats that had been provided by the CIA, MI5 and MI6. From these, he identified around a thousand GRU officers and two to three hundred KGB officers, providing names, roles and operational histories for many.
This was unprecedented intelligence, but it was exhausting work extracting it, especially as Penkovsky was becoming increasingly pompous. ‘I did not come to you to do little things,’ he said at one point while reciting an almost comically egotistical speech he had prepared. The team let him deliver it: a good case officer knows when to listen to his agent. Penkovsky said he wanted to be remembered as the greatest spy in history, and announced that he would like to meet the Queen. After all, Yuri Gagarin had met her when he had visited London, and unlike Gagarin he was working in Britain’s interests.
According to Bulik, Shergold ‘sweated crocodile drops’ at this request. They had to appear to take it seriously, because the intelligence Penkovsky was providing was too valuable to risk alienating him. But introducing the Queen to a Soviet agent was out of the question: another solution would have to be found. Penkovsky claimed it was vital that he personally reassure those at the highest level in the West that he was genuine. ‘I do not say that you do not believe me,’ he said, ‘you who are here and who are already my dear friends, my comrades in battle. This I reject. But perhaps somebody who does not know me, who cannot look into my eyes like you, will say, “Perhaps he copies all this about rockets out of Pravda,” or something like that.’
Penkovsky spent 1 May, International Workers’ Day, in high style: shopping at Harrods with Greville Wynne’s wife, Sheila. He bought clothes for his wife and daughter and aftershave lotion for himself, and gave it all to Wynne, who would later bring it to Moscow. Penkovsky then returned to the Mount Royal for a debriefing session with the team. He put in another appeal for his intelligence to be evaluated in the event of his defection. He had heard that the CIA had paid a million dollars for a dossier from a South American country – he had now decided it was only fair that he should be paid $8000 into an account if he were to defect in eight months’ time.
The team didn’t want to commit to such an arrangement – not because they couldn’t afford it, but because Penkovsky was far more valuable as an agent-in-place. The moment he defected he would cease to have access to current Soviet intelligence and strategic thinking. So they again avoided promising specific sums, and instead assured Penkovsky that he and his family would be extremely well looked after when they reached the West. Penkovsky emphasised how much he had already given them: ‘I did not say to you, “Here is one rocket, two. This is a code. This is something else.” I gave everything!’ He wanted to agree figures because he was worried they could be replaced by other case officers later on, who could then change the terms if they hadn’t been formally arranged. The team assured him that this would never happen: they would be his team from now until the end, come what may.
*
The team were processing the mountain of material at the command centre in Pall Mall, and bonded over lunches, often eating at a Lyons Corner House next door to the Mount Royal. Penkovsky, meanwhile, was enjoying his first trip outside the Soviet Union since his disastrous time in Turkey, and it was going to his head. After Wynne took him to the cinema to see Roman Holiday, he announced to the team that one day he would like to meet Audrey Hepburn.
He was also enjoying London’s more illicit pleasures. At another meeting, he told the team about an evening he had spent with Wynne at a ‘luxurious cabaret’ and jokingly asked if they could extend his visit for another ten days. He had met a 23-year-old girl at the club. ‘She has a pretty name,’ he said. ‘Zeph.’ Wynne had introduced Penkovsky as ‘Alex from Belgrade’, which had caused him some difficulty when she had asked him to teach her a few words of his language. Penkovsky had said something in broken Russian, which Zeph had solemnly repeated.
Penkovsky had given fifteen pounds to Wynne, who had then arranged for him to spend two hours with Zeph at her flat. This had potential security implications, and it may be that Zeph received a discreet knock on her door shortly afterwards asking her not to talk about Alex from Belgrade to anyone – later in the operation, MI6 would make sure Penkovsky had access to women with security clearance, and Bulik personally arranged at least one meeting with a prostitute. It was no time for scruples about such matters.
Penkovsky was enjoying his time roaming London’s demimonde, but he had not forgotten his request to meet someone of importance. He couldn’t meet the Queen, so Dick White decided he would attend a debriefing session with him instead.
‘Well, Colonel,’ said the lean, patrician spy chief shortly after entering Room 360 late on the evening of 3 May, ‘the message I have to deliver to you is from Lord Mountbatten, the chief of the Defence Department of England.’
Mountbatten was in fact chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, but it had been felt that this would make more of an impact. White apologised that Mountbatten could not be there himself, but said he had been asked to relay his admiration for the great stand Penkovsky had made in choosing to serve the governments of Britain and the United States. ‘I have also had reported to me the information which you have passed on to us,’ he said. ‘I can only tell you that it would be of the highest value and importance to the Free World.’
Penkovsky replied equally fulsomely, but ended by saying that he wished to swear his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth II and to President Kennedy. ‘Although unfortunately due to circumstances this is not possible now,’ he said, ‘I hope that in the future I will be blessed by this fortune personally by the Queen.’
White neatly sidestepped the issue, saying that should the time come that Penkovsky would need to leave the Soviet Union, MI6 and the CIA would ‘firmly and clearly’ fulfil all its obligations to him. Wine was served, and Penkovsky’s health and continued success was toasted. After this, Shergold escorted White out.
Penkovsky immediately turned to Kisevalter. ‘Did I say everything properly?’ he asked.
Kisevalter assured him he had done very well: ‘You didn’t overdo it.’ He added that he was sure that Lord Mountbatten would tell the Queen about his work.
Despite this, it was obvious that the show had not gone down as well as had been hoped: Bulik later said Penkovsky ‘was clearly not impressed’. White also sensed this, but felt it was unavoidable. ‘I realised it was not what he wanted to hear,’ he recalled. ‘He wanted to be praised personally by the Queen for his monumental contribution and to have a medal pinned on his breast. There was no possibility of this.’
*
The same day Dick White met Penkovsky, George Blake had been sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment at London’s Central Criminal Court. With Blake behind bars and contact with a major new source in Soviet intelligence established, White may have sat at his desk in London and felt that MI6 had finally put its darkest days behind it. Despite Penkovsky’s idiosyncrasies and demands, he was supplying a mountain of material about his colleagues, technical specifications and military secrets, the likes of which had never before been seen by the West.
For the team, elation was mixed with anxiety, because Penkovsky was soon due to return to Moscow. Also on 4 May, the team rehearsed a detailed communications plan, which had been codenamed YO-YO 51. It had several elements. One was the use of a radio set: this would be sent by diplomatic bag to the British Embassy in Moscow, and would be picked up by Greville Wynne to hand to Penkovsky at a later date. At designated times, the CIA would then broadcast messages via shortwave radio from one of their bases in Frankfurt. The messages consisted of numbers being read aloud: Penkovsky was told at which times these would be sent, and to disregard the random numbers transmitted either side of them. Once he had written down a message, he would decode it using a one-time pad. Kisevalter showed him how to make codes from the pads and the procedures for receiving and transmitting the messages, and tested him on both techniques with an expert named in the files as ‘Paul’ until he was totally fluent.
For simpler messages, there was the telephone, and several signals were agreed, including a regular check-in message on Mondays. Penkovsky was to set this in train as soon as he returned: at nine o’clock on the evening of Monday 8 May, he was to find a call box on the street and dial 948973. This was the number of John Varley, the assistant naval attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow. If all was well Penkovsky was to let the phone ring three times, then hang up, wait one minute, and repeat the process. If anything had gone wrong he was to do the same, but to let the phone ring five times in both bursts instead.
The team planned to provide Penkovsky with a miniature Minox camera, also via Wynne, with twenty rolls of film. At an earlier meeting, he had said he was worried whether he would be able to take good enough photographs with the Minox, as he had last used one in Turkey five years earlier. To make sure there were no problems, a photographic expert from MI6, referred to as ‘Kingsbury’ in the files, instructed him on how to use the camera to its best capabilities. After looking at several blown-up images by Penkovsky, Kingsbury pronounced himself impressed: ‘I think he has gotten the idea fairly well. These are very good shots.’
The team also had to make arrangements regarding Penkovsky’s meetings with Greville Wynne in Moscow – but Penkovsky raised a potential problem. He sensed that Wynne was starting to resent him, feeling that Penkovsky was flush with money from MI6 and the CIA while he ran around as his errand boy, never receiving his fair share of the proceeds. Penkovsky urged them to tread carefully with Wynne, to pay him, and to make sure he was kept happy – he didn’t want to jeopardise the operation with any weak links.
Wynne was not a professional intelligence officer, and nor could he be used too often without the KGB becoming suspicious. Several other methods of contact were discussed, some of them suggested by Penkovsky. The first was to use another dead drop he had identified and simply deposit material there. Then there was Shergold’s idea to contact him at cocktail parties attended by Western diplomats. Penkovsky was told that any approach of this nature would be done by someone who would find a way to insert the name of Charles Peeke, the American military attaché he had known in Turkey, into the conversation. As a further means of identification, the contact would wear a distinctive tie clasp with red stones, which Kisevalter showed him.
If neither of these methods proved possible, Penkovsky could also pass material to them by throwing it over the wall of America House at agreed times: the old plan from the desperate COMPASS days. And if Penkovsky were suddenly sent abroad and didn’t have an opportunity to warn them of it while still in Moscow, he should send a telegram to the address LABORICI LONDON, signing it ALEX. ‘That’s a nice name, Alex,’ Penkovsky mused. It was in fact poor tradecraft to use it, as this was the name Wynne called him, a fact that could easily have been discovered by the Soviets – but in the event Penkovsky would never send any telegrams.
One final method of personal contact was suggested. Ruari Chisholm, MI6’s Head of Station in Moscow, had worked with George Blake in Berlin, which meant Blake would almost certainly have given the KGB his name. As a result, Chisholm’s MI6 file was marked ‘Sovbloc Red’, meaning there was a danger in using him in operations. Harry Shergold had an idea: why not use Ruari’s wife Janet instead? Dick White thought it viable. She wasn’t an intelligence officer, but had worked for MI6 – she had been Ruari’s secretary and had given up the job on marrying him in 1954 – and although Blake had known her after that and her file was also marked ‘Sovbloc Red’ as a result, White’s instinct was that the KGB would be unlikely to tail a woman, especially if she had young children with her: the Chisholms had three, and Janet often took them for walks in the city. It was decided that Penkovsky could meet her in a park in Moscow, the details to be worked out later.
It was nearly time to go. Penkovsky was keyed up, and at an egocentric peak. ‘This is a historic room,’ he announced. ‘Someday there will be a memorial plaque here.’ He was missing London already – at one point he began pining for Zeph. ‘You know, she really fell for me,’ he said. ‘She was quite sincere, exceptionally so. Two hours was really very short. She was really a bit surprised that I left so soon.’ Penkovsky had been impressed by her flat: ‘I don’t have such a nice one!’ he said. It was perhaps a fitting note for the end of his trip, a reminder of the differences at stake: a Soviet colonel living with his wife, mother and teenage daughter was envying the living conditions of a London prostitute.
The team checked all the arrangements for Moscow one last time. Shergold drew up a set of detailed operational instructions, which ended with the following note: ‘Arrangements for receiving material from Subject by the use of a lady, children and prams in a park will be passed to him via WYNNE, or failing this through DLB.’
On Saturday, 6 May, Penkovsky arrived in Moscow. He spent the weekend basking in the glow of his family, who were delighted with all the gifts he had brought from London. Two days later he returned to work in Gorky Street, and on his way back from the office that evening entered a telephone booth close to his flat, placed a two-kopeck coin in the slot and dialled 948973. He let it ring three times, then hung up. He counted out one minute and repeated the process.
All was well, for now.