5
May 1961, Moscow.
Oleg Penkovsky walked into the Ministry of Defence complex on Frunze Street and showed his pass to the KGB guard on duty. After being nodded through, he strode down the lobby and took the stairs to the first floor, where he entered the library of the Artillery Command. He asked to be taken to the Special Collection, and showed another pass granting him access to the room containing shelves of top-secret material. Once inside, he quickly leaned the chair against the doorknob and took out his Minox. It was time to get to work.
Before he had left London, Leonard McCoy and an MI6 analyst had prepared a list of priorities – a ‘requirements list’ in the jargon – for Penkovsky to follow, and he now rifled through the files looking to fulfil it. He had told Marshal Varentsov that he wanted to write an article on nuclear strategy for a military journal, and Varentsov had immediately arranged for him to be given the relevant passes to access the material.
For the next couple of months, Penkovsky visited the library regularly, photographing hundreds of secret documents. He went well beyond the requirements list, looking for anything else that might be of interest. In his first meeting with the team in London, he had mentioned a defence journal, Voyennaya Mysl (‘Military Thought’). McCoy knew from a previous operation that there were two versions of this journal, one for wider distribution and a classified edition, and so had suggested to the team that they ask Penkovsky to try to get hold of the secret version once back in Moscow. In response, Penkovsky had laughed and asked if they might not want the third, top-secret, version of it instead, which had been introduced in 1960 and was marked ‘Only for Officers, Admirals and Generals of the Soviet Army’. Now Penkovsky took photographs of dozens of these issues of Voyennaya Mysl, which would become one of the CIA’s most prized intelligence treasures. He also found a list of documents that had been stolen from American, French, British and Italian intelligence, and in four frames photographed all the Kremlin’s classified telephone directories, which would eventually allow the West to create the most complete picture of the Soviet power structure to date.
*
On 27 May 1961, Greville Wynne arrived in Moscow, ostensibly for a French trade fair in the city. Penkovsky met him at the airport and helped him with one of his suitcases, which was stuffed with gifts Penkovsky had bought in London but had not dared bring through customs himself. Once they were in Penkovsky’s car, the Russian passed Wynne three rolls of microfilm containing documents from the Special Collection library.
Wynne checked in to the Metropol, reputed to be the best hotel in Moscow but which he felt was on a par with ‘some no-star hostel in the wilds of Cornwall’, and then made his way to the British Embassy, where he asked for Ruari Chisholm. The two men conducted an exchange in silence, Wynne handing over the microfilms and Chisholm passing him instructions to give Penkovsky that evening. As soon as Wynne had left the embassy, Chisholm’s assistant Felicity Stuart sent a ciphered message to London to say that the exchange had gone as planned.
*
In Washington, Joe Bulik, George Kisevalter, Harry Shergold, Leonard McCoy and Mike Stokes were busy assessing the mass of intelligence from the meetings with Penkovsky in England. Instead of working out of CIA headquarters, they operated out of a warehouse in Alexandria, where the meeting tapes were transcribed and analysed.
To obtain a deeper understanding of Penkovsky’s material, McCoy had been doing a lot of background research. He had visited the National Security Agency, the Strategic Air Command, Army and Air Force intelligence, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the nuclear weapons design laboratory in Los Alamos and the Dugway military facility. As a result MI6 reassigned their own analyst, and their reporting and requirements division sent information directly to McCoy, as did the equivalent CIA division.
McCoy’s careful probing within the intelligence community confirmed that Penkovsky’s material was dynamite – but as a result it had to be handled extremely delicately. The team wanted the intelligence to reach all the appropriate officials in Britain and the United States, but without endangering Penkovsky in any way. As a result of George Blake and other cases, they were well aware of the risk of a security leak, and that if the Soviets got wind of the fact that so much high-grade intelligence was being passed to the West they could investigate and pinpoint the source.
To counter this, MI6 gave Penkovsky’s material two codenames, RUPEE and ARNIKA, to try to disguise the fact that so much intelligence was coming from one source. In John le Carré’s The Russia House, which was inspired by the Penkovsky operation, an MI6 case officer complains that the distribution list for the material from ‘Bluebird’, the novel’s agent-in-place in the Soviet Union, is too large: ‘There are two hundred and forty people on that list and every one of them has a wife, a mistress and fifteen best friends.’ In Britain, 1,700 people eventually had access to Penkovsky’s material, including members of MI5, the Foreign Office, the Joint Intelligence Committee and scientific research establishments. In May, Dick White also gave the go-ahead for a small group of very senior officers in MI5 to be briefed about other aspects of the operation: MI5’s Director-General, Roger Hollis; his deputy Graham Mitchell; Martin Furnival Jones; and three other senior officers were informed that RUPEE and ARNIKA were in fact the same source, and were told Penkovsky’s identity: in July, a further MI5 officer was similarly informed.
The CIA gave Penkovsky the codename HERO, and also gave his material two codenames. Material emanating from Penkovsky himself, such as his own opinions and analysis or information he had heard from others, was codenamed CHICKADEE, and was only distributed on a ‘MUST KNOW’ basis to the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and around twenty senior CIA officers. The raw material he provided, such as top-secret field manuals and military journals, was given the codename IRONBARK, and had a slightly wider distribution. Documents stamped with these two codenames were among the American government’s most classified secrets.
The separate codenames were to help protect Penkovsky, but they also weakened the impact of his intelligence: some may have regarded it very differently had they known that the CIA and MI6 had managed to extract so much high-grade classified material from a single serving Soviet intelligence officer acting as an agent-in-place in Moscow. A later report by the US Senate called this the ‘ultimate achievement’ in the CIA’s mission to collect intelligence clandestinely, but at the time very few of those who received it knew that this had been done. With the benefit of half a century’s hindsight, it was probably also not the best idea to use a codename for the material that sounded like ‘chickenfeed’.
Some of Penkovsky’s most important intelligence, on Soviet missile strength, was greeted with great scepticism. At one of the meetings in London Kisevalter had asked him about Khrushchev’s public claim that the Soviet Union had rockets with a range of 2000–4000 kilometres, and that production had begun on some with an even greater range. Penkovsky had replied that he knew from Varentsov that many of Khrushchev’s proclamations on ICBMs and rockets were a bluff to fool the West: ‘He lies like a grey stallion,’ he said. This offered such a radically different interpretation of the situation that it was initially discounted. The US Air Force in particular had a vested interest in maintaining the perception that the Soviet missile threat was serious: the larger the threat, the greater its budget. Penkovsky’s claims were not even mentioned in the subsequent National Intelligence Estimate, because the source had not been known and, perhaps more importantly, the information ‘did not exactly fit the views of anyone at the meeting’.
In time, Penkovsky’s intelligence was more widely accepted. A National Intelligence Estimate from September 1961 stated that new information had caused ‘a sharp downward revision’ in the estimate of Soviet ICBM strength, and a CIA report from 1975 concluded that while Penkovsky’s intelligence alone had not been enough to close the missile gap argument, ‘it tentatively supported the almost heretical argument for a limited Soviet ICBM program’.
A combination of sources finally led to a major shift in thinking: Penkovsky’s information was corroborated by other intelligence, such as that provided by U-2 photographs. ‘It is my view that in the field of intelligence you need both technical and human sources,’ Joe Bulik later remarked. ‘If you can get into the mind of the Khrushchevs of the world, then you’ve got a weapon that no technical amount of information can give you, and this is what Penkovsky was able to give us.’
*
While the team went through Penkovsky’s material in the warehouse in Alexandria, close by John F. Kennedy was contemplating what to do in the wake of the Bay of Pigs humiliation. Kennedy was furious at the failed operation, declaring that he wanted to ‘splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’. Both in public and via private diplomatic channels, Khrushchev and Kennedy professed themselves keen to work with each other to ease tensions between their countries, but both were also investing enormous resources into trying to discover the other’s intentions, by fair means or foul. East and West alike claimed to be deeply shocked and outraged whenever they caught a spy on their territory, as though they never engaged in such activity themselves. But, as US Secretary of State Dean Rusk acknowledged a few years later, the reality of the Cold War was that behind the public statements and diplomacy, there was ‘a tough struggle going on in the back alleys all over the world’ in which there was ‘no quarter asked and none given’.
On 3 June 1961, Kennedy and Khrushchev met for a summit in Vienna. The two men walked around the grounds of the American Embassy, followed by their interpreters, sizing each other up like boxers in the opening seconds of a round. The city was an appropriate venue for the confrontation: still conflicted and scarred by the Second World War, a place where East and West met uneasily every day.
On the surface, it wasn’t a fair fight: Kennedy was young, handsome, new to office and still popular at home; the son of a diplomat, polished, articulate and leader of the world’s greatest superpower. Khrushchev was a Ukrainian peasant, a former miner and metal-worker who had slowly ascended through Stalin’s court. But the reality was rather different. Despite his glowing image of health, Kennedy experienced severe back pain as the result of Addison’s disease and was taking a cocktail of methamphetamines and steroids – his so-called ‘joy juice’ – to stave off the agony.
Khrushchev was also a bare-knuckle fighter, prepared to hit below the belt. Although Kennedy’s briefing documents had noted that Khrushchev was a volatile leader whose manner could veer from ‘the cherubic to the choleric’, the American was unprepared for the Russian’s undisguised hostility towards him, and couldn’t understand why Khrushchev was refusing to play by the usual diplomatic rules. The reason was simple: Khrushchev had estimated – precisely as Penkovsky had claimed – that the best way to deal with the Americans was to bluff about his own country’s strength. When his son Sergei had asked him why he boasted of factories producing missiles like sausages when they in fact were doing nothing of the sort, Khrushchev had replied: ‘The important thing is to make the Americans believe that. And that way we prevent an attack.’
The consequences of this strategy would play out in two crises to come, both of which took the world to the very brink of nuclear war. The first of these crises began in Vienna, and involved the tangled question of Germany. Khrushchev was pressing for his treaty with the West, but the Americans were anxious that this would result in restricting the freedom of movement in and out of western Berlin.
It was a stalemate, but it couldn’t remain one forever. In a meeting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on his yacht the Honey Fitz two months earlier, Kennedy had expressed surprise that Khrushchev hadn’t made a move on Berlin, and wondered whether the hesitation had been due to a belief that the West would react firmly, triggering war. Penkovsky had also alluded to this with the team in London, claiming that despite Khrushchev’s repeated threat to sign a separate treaty with East Germany he would not deliver on it because it might ‘invoke a war’.
For a fortnight before the Vienna summit, Kennedy used back-channel communications with Georgi Bolshakov, a GRU officer working under cover as the head of the TASS news bureau in Washington, to inform Khrushchev that while he wanted to cool the tensions between East and West, he was not yet prepared to reach any agreement on the status of Berlin. Khrushchev was unimpressed. Kennedy had claimed in his inaugural presidential address that ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans’, but the Soviet leader was not convinced that this was for the better: he felt Kennedy was young, weak and inexperienced. Just before leaving for Vienna, Khrushchev told a secret session of the Presidium in Moscow he would insist on an East German treaty, because he didn’t think the Americans would risk a nuclear war over the issue, partly because they could not rely on support from their allies. President de Gaulle and Prime Minister Macmillan would not side with the United States in unleashing war, he said, because ‘the greatest detonation of nuclear weapons will be on the territory of West Germany, France and England’. Therefore, he concluded, the risk of pushing the issue was justified: ‘If we look at it in terms of a percentage, there is more than a 95% probability that there will be no war.’
Khrushchev, then, went to Vienna with the aim of pressing for actions that by his own calculation involved a 5 per cent risk of war – a 5 per cent chance of the obliteration of many of the world’s cities, and the deaths of many millions of people. It was an astonishing gamble, but it would not be the last Khrushchev would make. His sabre-rattling would lead to a battle of nerves with Kennedy, who would rate the odds of a nuclear war over Berlin rather differently: he privately estimated that there was a one in five chance.
*
In Vienna, Khrushchev was as good as his word to the Presidium, telling Kennedy brusquely that he planned to sign a treaty with the East Germans and settle the Berlin question by the end of the year, and that if the Americans refused to sign with them ‘the Soviet Union will do so and nothing will stop it’. When Kennedy replied that this would mean war, Khrushchev responded ominously that if the US wanted to start a war over it, ‘let it be so’.
Kennedy was shocked by the exchange. He had been aware that Khrushchev would press for a conclusion over Berlin, but was unprepared for the Soviet leader’s forcefulness. A CIA memorandum a few days before the summit had reported a heated conversation on the issue that Khrushchev had had with Llewellyn Thompson, the US ambassador to Moscow, but concluded that the Soviet leader wasn’t setting the stage for a showdown in Vienna, and that despite his scepticism that the West would resort to nuclear war over Berlin he was sufficiently uncertain about it that he would still prefer a ‘negotiated solution’ than risk forcing the issue.
Kennedy was indeed unwilling to resort to nuclear war, as he was keenly aware of the outcome of one, telling his brother Bobby that if it were to happen they could be grateful that they had led full lives, and were at least fully aware of the situation: ‘The thought, though, of women and children perishing in a nuclear exchange. I can’t adjust to that.’ But when Kennedy mentioned to Khrushchev that a nuclear war between the US and the USSR could kill 70 million people in ten minutes, Khrushchev had looked at him as if to say, ‘So what?’ ‘My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that,’ Kennedy said.
This, of course, was precisely the impression Khrushchev wanted him to take away from the summit. He didn’t want a nuclear war any more than Kennedy did – in July 1963, he would give a chilling speech in which he asked if survivors of such a conflict ‘would perhaps envy the dead’. But that was still two years away: Khrushchev believed that by hinting that he might be prepared to go that far the Americans would cower. It was, just as Penkovsky had explained to the team in London, an enormous bluff.
*
While Kennedy stewed over the way he had lost control over the summit, the situation worsened. Newsweek claimed that Kennedy was convinced that war could break out as a result of the Berlin situation, and revealed secret Joint Chiefs of Staff proposals for that contingency. Kennedy was furious, partly because he hadn’t even seen the proposals himself but also because he was concerned how the Soviets might react to them.
Khrushchev was not about to back down, but instead mixed conciliatory messages with open threats. On 2 July, at a performance by Margot Fonteyn at the Bolshoi in Moscow, he summoned the British ambassador, Sir Frank Roberts, to his box, and invited him to dine with him there. During an interval in the performance, Khrushchev told Roberts that the last time he had seen Harold Macmillan he had promised to take him on a hunting expedition, but that it would be impossible to honour the promise if the two countries had broken relations over Berlin ‘and were perhaps shooting each other instead of elk’.
After this jovial opening, he added that the Soviet Union would ramp up its military strength in Germany if any other country did so, and that it could move forces to protect the territory of East Germany. However, he warned, this was not simply a matter of troop movements: modern wars would be fought with nuclear weapons, ‘ten of which could destroy France or for that matter the United Kingdom’. Such a war would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people, he said, but the Soviet Union was prepared to make that sacrifice if the Western allies attempted to force their way through to West Berlin following a Soviet treaty with East Germany. But he felt it would be ‘ridiculous’ for 200 million people to die over two million Berliners.
Three weeks later, Khrushchev adopted even starker rhetoric. He invited US envoy John McCloy to his dacha in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, where he warned him that if the US started a war Kennedy would be ‘the last president of the United States of America’. On the same day, Kennedy gave a speech stating he would not allow the Soviet Union to drive the United States out of Berlin, ‘an isle of freedom in a Communist sea’, either gradually by using unilateral agreements or by force. He also announced plans to allocate funds for new air raid warnings and fallout shelters; strengthen the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile forces; add five divisions to the Army; and increase military reserves and the capacity for sea and airlift in case Khrushchev tried to repeat Stalin’s 1948 blockade of the city.
The United States already had extensive measures in place for the event of nuclear war. Its first Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, at the US Air Force base at Thule in Greenland, had become operational in January 1961, and would be joined by a counterpart at Clear Air Force base in Alaska in September. If a report of incoming ballistic missiles from either base was deemed credible, members of Congress would be evacuated to a 112,544-square-foot bunker that had been built below the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 250 miles from Washington. Codenamed CASPER, the bunker had two-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls and a cafeteria, dormitory and clinic. If an attack was thought to be extremely imminent, the President and a small group of senior figures would head for one of the two shelters below the White House, but otherwise they would embark for Camp David, with the Pentagon evacuating to a facility nearby. In February, the Strategic Air Command had launched LOOKING GLASS, the maintenance of a fleet of specially equipped Boeing EC-135 jets that could act as airborne nuclear command and launch facilities if the country’s ground centres were critically damaged. For the next three decades, one ‘Doomsday Plane’ was in the air at all times.
Unlike the US, Britain didn’t yet have a dedicated method for detecting incoming ballistic missiles. In 1960, the Joint Intelligence Committee had noted with alarm that their previous estimate that they would have up to a week’s warning of an attack was wrong, and that in fact they couldn’t rely on receiving any warning at all until the British addition to the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System was ready. That was still being built at RAF Fylingdales in Yorkshire, having been held up by a series of strikes, and would not become operational until late 1963. As an interim measure, the telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire was adapted: the idea, as with Fylingdales, was to detect any incoming missiles at least four minutes before they landed, giving the RAF enough time to get its bombers in the air to launch a retaliatory strike. The ‘Four Minute Warning’ would also trigger emergency broadcasts by the BBC on television and radio, as well as sirens across the country, all of which would advise people to stay in their homes and move to their fallout rooms. After a nuclear strike on Britain, BBC radio planned to combine its Home, Light and Third Programmes into ‘the National Programme’, which would air updates on the situation from studios in Corsham, Wood Norton in Worcestershire and thirteen other bunkers. In late 1961, £72,000 was put aside to spend on a stockpile of records for the studios, as sustained live broadcasting would probably be ‘impracticable’. A later plan also proposed airing reruns of panel games such as My Word!, but as listeners would only be able to listen on battery-powered transistors that would fail within a few weeks it’s hard to imagine many survivors chuckling at Frank Muir’s witticisms.
The grim reality was that even with a warning very few people in Britain would have survived a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. Even if they managed to scramble to shelter in time, once their stockpiled food and water had run out there would have been nowhere to find more without risking contamination. British contingency plans had originally envisioned large-scale efforts to protect the public during an attack, but the costs had been so prohibitive that by 1961 the primary goal was to protect those who would be needed to rebuild and rule the country following a nuclear strike. An early plan for the Prime Minister and a select few to retreat to a honeycomb of rooms under Whitehall had been scrapped after two secret reports in 1955 painted a horrific picture of the consequences of an H-bomb attack on Britain. A detailed analysis of Whitehall’s ‘citadels’, as the bunkers were called, had revealed that they might not withstand a direct strike, and that a single explosion might even block their exits, entombing the country’s leadership below ground. The experts had also estimated that an attack on Britain with ten hydrogen bombs would turn much of the country into a radioactive wasteland, and kill or seriously injure 16 million people – around one third of the population.
As a result of these grim prognoses, a new plan had been devised: if the political situation deteriorated to the extent that an attack seemed imminent, the Cabinet, members of the royal family and senior members of the military and scientific communities would be evacuated to a thirty-five-acre blast-proof bunker that had been built in the old limestone quarries in Corsham, Wiltshire, with a few hundred others retreating to underground operational bases around the country. In the summer of 1961, government departments were asked to draw up lists of whom they would wish to have in their group in the Corsham bunker. A civil servant within the Treasury responded that, along with typists, a doctor and a solicitor, his department would also require a ‘Welfare Officer’, for which he provided a job description: ‘The kind of person we want is a kindly, fairly fat motherly sort of soul with a broad pair of shoulders on which people can weep. She need have no welfare experience so far as I can see, but be prepared to work hard in what would undoubtedly be very trying circumstances.’
*
As the situation in Berlin moved closer to the undoubtedly trying circumstances of a nuclear war, senior officers at the CIA’s headquarters in Washington turned their eyes to Oleg Penkovsky, wondering if their agent-in-place might be able to provide intelligence on the unfolding crisis. But CIA director Allen Dulles first wanted to know if Penkovsky could really be trusted – was there any chance he had either been turned or was part of a deception operation?
One man whose opinion held sway with Dulles and many others in the agency was its chief of counter-intelligence, James Angleton. Lean, tall and hollow-cheeked, Angleton’s vulturous demeanour and studied mystique had made him both revered and feared among the intelligence community in the United States and Britain. Within the CIA, he was nicknamed The Gray Ghost, The Fisherman and The Scarecrow.
Angleton was the dean of the shadowy world of counter-intelligence, which he termed a ‘wilderness of mirrors’, a place where bluff and counter-bluff were plotted like chess moves across continents. His first taste of it had been in blacked-out London, where he had served with the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, in its counter-intelligence unit X-2, sharing offices with MI6 and becoming friends with Kim Philby. The later revelation of Philby’s treason scarred him: shocked that he had failed to see the conspiracy in front of his eyes, and that he had been deceived by such an apparently warm and charming friend, Angleton devoted much of the rest of his life to trying to find other moles, with disastrous consequences.
In the summer of 1961, the molehunts were still to come. Angleton read some of the transcripts of the first meetings with Penkovsky in London, and was convinced that he could not be under Soviet control: a controlled agent simply would not have talked the way Penkovsky had done, for example his vicious remarks about Khrushchev and his damning reports about the rampant corruption, diminishing food supplies and dissatisfaction across the country.
In Angleton’s view, the operation was ‘undoubtedly the most important case that we had for years’, and he felt it would be dangerous to distribute the intelligence widely in case it got back to the Russians that they had such a major source. However, he also felt it was ‘terribly important that the President, who was now faced with crucial problems regarding Berlin, should have the benefit of the full story’. He recommended that Kennedy not just be briefed about Penkovsky’s intelligence, but given the raw transcript of the London meetings, because their full impact and obvious authenticity could only be appreciated by reading them directly. The transcript, Angleton said, ‘revealed so much about the agent’s access and the validity of his information that this should be made available to the man who had to make crucial decisions regarding the Berlin crisis’.