6
The CIA’s power-brokers had given the operation the green light to continue, but Penkovsky was now back in the Soviet Union and therefore out of direct American control: for the foreseeable future his fate rested in the hands of a few Brits in Moscow, and in particular a 31-year-old mother of three.
The idea to use Janet Chisholm as Penkovsky’s contact has been characterised as a ‘fit of intelligence lunacy’ by one writer on Cold War espionage. Apart from the fact that George Blake had known her in Berlin, she was not a professional intelligence officer and so had never worked in the field, let alone one as intimidating as Moscow. It was home to KGB headquarters, tens of thousands of whose officers roamed the city, many of them under cover conducting surveillance on the small pool of foreign diplomats. Walls in apartments, offices and public locations across the city contained microphones, and entire floors of buildings were given over to command posts listening in to and recording conversations. It was not for nothing that COMPASS had become paranoid, and that the CIA still didn’t have a station there: in 1961, Moscow was perhaps the most dangerous city for espionage in the world.
How to meet Penkovsky in such an environment? The plan depended on simple, brazen double bluff. Shergold had reasoned – and Dick White had agreed with him – that the sheer improbability of using Janet Chisholm was the best reason to do so, as the Russians would never consider the possibility. White would later say he had felt that the alternatives of using dead drops and safe houses in Moscow would have been even riskier – especially as, thanks to Blake and other traitors, the Russians knew MI6’s ‘complete order of battle’.
Janet Chisholm was no longer in MI6, but as a result of her brief time at the agency she had a keen sense of discretion and understood what it meant to work for her country’s interests. Born in India, the daughter of a colonel in the Royal Engineers, she was naturally reserved and patient: both good characteristics for intelligence work. She had learned Russian at school and French at Grenoble University, immediately after which she joined MI6 as a secretary, and was posted to the Allied Control Commission in Germany.
Her boss there turned out to be a charming and ‘immensely likeable’ Roman Catholic Scot. Ruari Chisholm’s father had been a Highlander, then a gaucho in Argentina, but had returned to Europe to fight in the First World War, during which he had lost a leg and been imprisoned by the Germans. Ruari became a cold warrior, joining MI6 after studying French and Russian at Cambridge. Berlin had been his first posting, and after marrying Janet he had worked back in London for a while, and then in Singapore.
In May 1960 he had arrived in Moscow as Head of Station, working under diplomatic cover as a visa officer at the embassy. He was soon joined by Felicity Stuart, fresh from a three-year assignment at the MI6 station in Paris. After learning Russian from MI6-approved émigrés in London, Stuart had been offered the posting in Moscow, which she had jumped at. ‘I was dying to go there,’ she says. ‘I had an aunt who’d had some marvellous experiences during the Revolution and I wanted to follow in her footsteps.’
Stuart, under cover as a junior attaché in the embassy, was Chisholm’s secretary and cipher clerk. Despite the lack of creature comforts compared to Paris, she remembers her time in the city fondly: there was usually a party on somewhere to stave off the ‘Moscow twitch’, the feeling of isolation that came from being far from home and under constant surveillance, unable to discuss one’s feelings or work with friends or even spouses for fear of being bugged.
Stuart was certain her flat was bugged, and fairly sure her car was, too. ‘I had a little black Austin A30 I used to bomb around in,’ she says, ‘but the battery failed shortly after I arrived in the city and a new one was fitted by Russians.’ This may have afforded an opportunity for a microphone to be fitted somewhere in the car but, miraculously, the new battery also worked, even in sub-zero temperatures. ‘It made me incredibly popular. The big American cars like the Chevrolets never used to be able to start, but my Austin did so I was always giving people lifts home from parties.’
She soon learned to spot surveillance on the street, usually a muddy green Pobeda with no number plate in front, and perfected a move to lose it: ‘A quick turn round Arbatska Square meant you could get behind the Pobeda and even spot its rear number plate as it waited by traffic lights to follow you. But it was a tricky manoeuvre and not to be recommended with innocent passengers.’
At the British Embassy – a former sugar baron’s mansion directly opposite the Kremlin – Stuart and Ruari Chisholm shared an office, and both took it as given that this too was bugged. ‘Ruari was a marvellous story-teller, but sometimes he would get halfway through an anecdote and suddenly realise that he was about to say something incriminating about someone he knew, and that it might be used for blackmail. So he would finish the story by scribbling the crucial point down on paper and we’d have a good laugh about it, before rushing off to burn the paper.’ There was a pan especially for this purpose in the nearest bathroom – the ashes were then flushed away.
If they wanted to discuss sensitive matters at greater length they would leave the office, as it was believed that the KGB’s microphones picked up much less if one kept moving. Loudspeakers were strategically placed around the embassy’s corridors, and at the touch of a button would play random snatches of speech or music to confuse the eavesdroppers. Another technique was to talk while strolling across the tennis courts at the back of the embassy. And like the Americans, the British had built a ‘bug-proof’ room. John Miller, a Reuters correspondent in the city at the time and a friend of the Chisholms, once visited it and felt it resembled a combination of ‘a “portakabin” toilet, bank vault and boardroom’.
Ruari Chisholm took his work seriously, but he also had a mischievous sense of humour. Miller remembers how after they had once been unable to book a table at the Praga restaurant, Ruari had hammered on the plate-glass door. When a doorman angrily approached, Ruari grandly proclaimed he was the King of Laos, who was on a state visit to the Kremlin at the time. He and Miller had been shown to a table at once.
Miller and Stuart were both frequent visitors to the Chisholms’ home on the eighth floor of 12/24 Sadovo-Samotechnaya Street, a beige block of flats built by German POWs after the war. It was nicknamed ‘Sad Sam’ by its residents, all of whom were foreign diplomats and journalists – no Russians lived there, and the courtyard had a ten-foot-high cement wall closing it off from surrounding houses and apartments. But the KGB, or ‘the Nasties’ as Ruari called them, were again ever-present. During a spot check the Chisholms found a bug in a hollow spot in one of their walls, but when they tried to remove it found themselves in a surreal tug of war with the KGB men at the other end, eventually coming away with the microphone and a piece of snipped wire. Cleaners were provided by a Soviet agency that was clearly a KGB front: Janet discovered their first maid going through their drawers and sacked her, but when the next did the same realised it was futile. An exception was the family’s nanny, Martina Browne, a young Irish Catholic whom they had brought with them from London.
The Chisholms had quickly adapted to life in the city. Janet enrolled in ballet classes at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, while the children attended the city’s Anglo-American school. Ruari would often dip into the bar at the British Embassy, where staff and visiting Brits would usually drink to avoid getting into trouble elsewhere – apart from the alcohol and the company, it was a good way to keep his ear to the ground.
Along with John Miller, the Chisholms were also close friends with the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, Jeremy Wolfenden, who lived in the Ukraina Hotel. Janie, the couple’s eldest daughter, who was five when the family arrived in Moscow, remembers Wolfenden as a charming and funny visitor to their flat in Sad Sam. ‘He used to tell us children that he was Jeremy Fisher from Beatrix Potter,’ she says.
Wolfenden was precociously clever: reputed to have been the cleverest boy at Eton (and, in the school’s estimation, therefore the country), he had taken a congratulatory first in PPE at Oxford, with one of his examiners complaining that even when being brilliant he acted as though it were beneath him: ‘He wrote as though it were all such a waste of his time.’ As well as being charming and clever, Wolfenden was gay, an irony as he was the son of Sir John Wolfenden, who had chaired the 1957 committee recommending the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Britain (although the law would not be changed until 1967).
Jeremy Wolfenden may also have worked for MI6, at least informally. Journalists were even more prized assets than businessmen, as they were trained to ferret out information and had permission to do so. After Eton, Wolfenden had learned Russian as part of his National Service, and at Oxford had been recommended to MI6 by a fellow undergraduate. Following the interview, Wolfenden confided in a friend that he believed that only the secret services could make the most of his talents, adding: ‘And they don’t seem to mind me being homosexual.’
After a spell at The Times Wolfenden had been poached by the Daily Telegraph, a paper rumoured to have close links with the intelligence services. One former correspondent on the paper has claimed he was told to report to MI6 officers in Moscow when he was posted there, and it may be that Wolfenden received similar instructions before he arrived in the city in April 1961. If so, he would have been able to inform with relative ease on other expatriates, as he himself noted in a 1965 article about Moscow life: ‘Everyone knows the private affairs of everyone else.’
But Wolfenden was not a natural spy, mainly because he spent most of his days in an alcoholic haze. Moscow’s expatriate village was cosy, but could also lead to strange interconnections: as well as being friends with MI6’s man in Moscow and his family, Wolfenden was close to one of the most notorious traitors of the time, Guy Burgess. Since his defection in the early 1950s, Burgess lived in a flat in the city under the alias Jim Andreyevitch Eliot, pottering around it in blue silk pyjamas from Fortnum & Mason. Burgess and Wolfenden had a lot in common: both were Old Etonians, had worked for The Times, were flagrantly gay and were heavy drinkers – after his death in 1963, Wolfenden inherited many of Burgess’s books and was one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
*
This was the cast of the British community in Moscow, but for now the leading player was Janet Chisholm, who had been given the codename ANNE (her middle name). On Sunday 2 July 1961, as Margot Fonteyn and her company prepared to perform at the Bolshoi, Janet gathered up her three children and walked with them towards Tsvetnoy Boulevard. The location for the brush pass with Penkovsky was the park just off the boulevard, which had been chosen to avoid drawing suspicion on either of them if they happened to be seen there. It was just a few minutes’ walk from Sad Sam, so an unsurprising spot for Janet to take the children for an outing, and a plausible place for Penkovsky to wander during his lunch break from his office at the State Committee on Gorky Street, while also being far enough away that it was unlikely any of his colleagues would do the same.
Summers in Moscow are short and sultry, and on that Sunday the threat of rain was in the air. Janet was wearing a brown suede jacket, as she had been instructed by Ruari, and pushed her youngest child, Alastair, in a pram. Once they had reached the park she found a bench by the main path, opposite a circus and a cinema and near some kiosks selling fast food and ice cream, and kept one eye on the pram and another on her two daughters as they ran around playing.
Penkovsky arrived shortly after. He had brought his ‘red book’ with him as a safety precaution – if a militiaman challenged him he intended to brandish his GRU credentials to bluff his way out of the situation. Approaching the middle of the park he soon recognised ANNE from her jacket and the photograph Greville Wynne had shown him. He didn’t much like the spot she had picked: there were too many people milling around for his liking. He wandered about for a while until, as he had hoped, it started to rain. The crowd began to thin out, and Penkovsky approached the bench. He casually admired the baby in the pram, then smilingly offered the older children a box of multi-coloured vitamin C tablets, commonly eaten as sweets by Russian children because of the climate. Janet thanked him, took the box, swiftly placed it under a blanket in the pram, then brought out an identical box and offered those to the children instead. Penkovsky was impressed by how naturally she had acted, and with his typical flamboyance called her a ‘heroine’ when later relating the encounter to MI6. He chatted with the children a little while longer, then moved on. Just a friendly stranger saying hello.
All told, the pass had taken less than two minutes – but it was one of the most significant moments of espionage during the Cold War. Hidden inside Penkovsky’s box of sweets were seven rolls of undeveloped film and two typewritten sheets of paper, dated 26 June and marked ‘Especially Important and Urgent’.
A few days later, Maurice Oldfield, MI6’s senior officer in Washington, informed the CIA of the take from this meeting, noting that it included ‘an important statement on Berlin’. Penkovsky told how he had visited his mentor Varentsov’s dacha in Babushkino for a party to celebrate his having been promoted to Chief Marshal. Penkovsky reported that during a private conversation at the party Varentsov had told him that Khrushchev had now decided to sign a treaty with East Germany in late October, immediately after the next Party Congress.
Khrushchev apparently recognised that this was a risky tactic, but felt that the US, Britain and France would back down over the issue rather than risk conflict. By acting tough, he hoped to force Western leaders to recognise East Germany, at least in part, and to accept his terms for access routes. The treaty would not entail cutting off access to Berlin completely, but would introduce new restrictions over movement in and out of the city. In case the West objected to this and decided to try to consolidate communications with Berlin, Varentsov had revealed, on signing the treaty Khrushchev would declare a combat alert, and East German troops would block the Helmstedt highway and other ‘dangerous roads’ with tanks. Air patrols would also be strengthened, and Soviet troops in East Germany and Czechoslovakia would be put at battle readiness. The Soviet Union was prepared to use tanks ‘and other weapons’ if necessary. ‘However,’ Varentsov had said, ‘we would want any clash to be brief and limited in scope.’ The intention was not to start a world war, but at worst a local one restricted to a small area inside Germany.
Penkovsky had his own view of this, which he appended to his report: ‘The treaty will be signed. The firmness of Khrushchev must be met with firmness.’ He reiterated that Khrushchev was not prepared for a major war, and suggested that the West immediately let it be known that they were redeploying NATO troops and that they simulate the bringing of their own forces to combat readiness. Once again, Penkovsky was providing intelligence indicating that Khrushchev was using belligerence as a psychological tactic to try to bend the West to his will, and once again he was advising that if his bluff was called firmly, rapidly and clearly, he would back down.
On receiving this material from MI6, Dick Helms, head of the CIA’s clandestine operations, sent a memorandum to the Department of State summarising its message, and on 13 July senior members of the CIA met to discuss its implications. Penkovsky’s tendency to present his intelligence as a warning had intensified, and they had to consider how much this was because the international situation was changing and how much might be a result of Penkovsky’s pride: simply relating the facts with no real consequences or escalating effect attached to them might not have suited his own sense of worth as the greatest spy of all time. MI6 had backed Penkovsky’s report to the hilt, stating that his bona fides had been established ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’. But although Dick Helms had been convinced that Penkovsky was genuine several months before MI6 had become involved in the operation, he now felt that the agency had to be careful about ‘going bail’ for such major and controversial intelligence. The head of the Soviet Russia division, Jack Maury, remained confident that Soviet deception was out of the question, but Helms felt that Penkovsky’s latest material might have been influenced by personal bias, and that there was a risk of him ‘overreading’ information he had picked up through hearsay.
More troublingly, James Angleton, who only a fortnight earlier had called the operation the most important the agency had had in years and advised informing Kennedy of it at once, now turned cold on HERO. Angleton still felt it impossible that the Russians would want to feed such information to them, but he didn’t trust it nevertheless. He told his colleagues, including CIA director Allen Dulles, that he suspected Penkovsky was ‘an anarchist or crank’ who for reasons of his own was trying to get the West into a war with the Soviet Union.
*
Angleton’s concerns were overruled, and his earlier suggestion for the President to be told about the operation was carried out instead. Dulles met Kennedy in the Oval Office; he didn’t reveal Penkovsky’s name – nobody outside the small team directly involved in the operation knew that, as was standard practice – but informed him that the CIA, in conjunction with MI6, had a spy within the Soviet General Staff, and briefed him on his information from Varentsov. Kennedy, still smarting from the Vienna summit, anxious about the crisis and in excruciating pain from his back, read the report, rapt. As well as the specific intelligence regarding intentions for Germany and the advice that Khrushchev’s firmness ‘be met with firmness’, at several points Penkovsky had said that Khrushchev was deliberately overstating the Soviets’ military capacity. As Kennedy had suspected, Khrushchev was trying to manipulate him psychologically. Penkovsky’s report gave a strong signal to hold his resolve.
However, despite Kennedy’s enthusiasm for Penkovsky’s report, there was still hesitation among senior figures to trust the CIA’s sudden flood of intelligence from the USSR. As a result, on 18 July the Soviet Russia division circulated an ‘operational history’ of their source to its distribution list to explain why his intelligence was so significant. He was described as ‘a senior-grade Soviet Army staff officer presently in intelligence, whose career up to a certain point was successful and indeed brilliant’. The details of his career, the evaluation stated, had been independently corroborated, and his motivation was probably through having been sidelined due to ‘disagreements on matters of principle with his superiors’, which was a kind interpretation of his squabbles in Turkey. ‘His tour of duty in a Western country was abruptly terminated,’ the document noted, and having become attracted to Western comforts while there, he had started preparing to contact the US government. The document was accompanied by a CIA evaluation of his material, which noted that he had provided unique and unprecedented information on the structure and aims of Soviet intelligence, including the identification of ‘more than 300 Soviet Intelligence officers and of more than a dozen Soviet Intelligence agents active in the West’.
This document may have helped convince senior US policymakers that IRONBARK was genuine – but it was also a very risky move. It revealed that IRONBARK was a human source, and gave several clues as to his identity. Goleniewski had known that the KGB had an agent in British intelligence, but had not known his name – however, the documents he had seen had provided enough information for Harold Shergold to narrow the list of suspects until he was certain it was George Blake. If anyone who received the CIA’s operational history of IRONBARK was working for the Soviets and passed the document to them, the KGB would have several valuable leads. A Soviet Army staff officer who was in intelligence suggested a member of the GRU. He was currently serving, and of a senior rank, which would disqualify many candidates. How many of the remainder had served in Western countries, and how many of those had had their tours ‘abruptly terminated’? If the number of suspects was small enough, the KGB could then place surveillance on all of them.
*
On 18 July 1961, the same day the CIA sent out documents clarifying the importance of their agent, Penkovsky arrived back in London. A few weeks earlier he had been appointed deputy head of the foreign section of the State Committee, and his first task in his new role was to arrange a scientific delegation to take to the Soviet trade fair in Earls Court, which had started in early July. Khrushchev had decided another forty or fifty specialists should be sent to London, including chemists and metallurgists, and as Penkovsky had been there before and apparently performed his tasks well he was given the three-week assignment.
This, of course, was a perfect opportunity for MI6 and the CIA. Penkovsky checked into the Kensington Close hotel, where a room had been booked for him by the Soviet Embassy, and called Greville Wynne – now referred to by the codename TARRY in MI6–CIA documents – to tell him he had arrived. Wynne immediately informed Mike Stokes and gave him a rendezvous point away from the hotel. Stokes booked into the Kensington Close, then proceeded to the rendezvous point and picked up Penkovsky to drive him to the flat of fellow MI6 officer John Collins, which would be used as a safe house.
As well as his work with the trade fair, Penkovsky had been given another, unofficial assignment, which was potentially much more important: the wife and daughter of GRU chief Ivan Serov had decided to use the occasion to visit London, and Serov had asked Penkovsky to take care of them as a personal favour. He took up the task with relish. On one evening, he treated them to dinner in a restaurant, and in the taxi back to their hotel Svetlana, Serov’s 22-year-old daughter, flirted and ‘squeezed up to him’. Despite the deep waters he was now swimming in, Penkovsky was living life to the full – perhaps even enjoying the feeling of operating in such danger.
He was unaware that, behind the scenes, frantic discussions about him were taking place. Ironically, just as the President of the United States was starting to appreciate the value of his intelligence and the CIA were insisting on its significance, the doubts about him within the agency had resurfaced, leading to the suggestion that he should be ‘fluttered’ – given a polygraph test, possibly supplemented with the use of sodium pentothal or other truth drugs. On the one hand, it seemed inconceivable that the Soviets would sacrifice so much top-secret strategic intelligence for a deception operation. On the other, they had done just that with the Berlin tunnel to protect George Blake.
One cause for the suspicions about Penkovsky was the quality of his photographs: the MI6 expert training appeared to have worked almost too well. George Kisevalter later estimated that Penkovsky had produced around five thousand perfect frames. This had led to the question: could the KGB be taking the photographs for him? The team had tested Penkovsky out, surprising him at one of the meetings in May by giving him a Minox and asking him to take photographs of magazines, maps and pound notes on the spot. They had left him alone for fifteen minutes while they had taken afternoon tea, and then returned. ‘I’m done,’ Penkovsky had said, throwing the camera back. The next day they developed the prints. They were masterful, Kisevalter remembered: ‘Out of this world.’
Penkovsky had been right to be worried in April: some were indeed wondering if he was copying his rocket information out of Pravda, or perhaps worse. Up close, it was easy to understand that he was genuine, but thousands of miles away in CIA headquarters all such estimations could be, and were, second-guessed.
MI6 took exception to the Americans’ proposal to flutter Penkovsky, and unofficially asked CIA analyst Leonard McCoy for his opinion. From previous experience McCoy felt that polygraph tests could be unreliable; he was also certain from his own analysis of the material that Penkovsky was bona fide. The polygraph idea was dropped, partly because MI6 were emboldened by McCoy’s analysis, and partly through fears that such an exercise might humiliate Penkovsky and that he could withdraw his cooperation as a result.
Agreement on the polygraph had been reached, but it had left a cloud over the operation: around this time, suspicions between the Americans and the British erupted. McCoy remembers being summoned to see the CIA’s London Chief of Station, Frank Wisner. ‘I went into his office and he handed me a HQ cable, asking for my comment. It was from Joe [Bulik], charging that MI6 was trying to steal the operation. It seemed a very negative approach to take, and I told Wisner that I saw no basis for it, and that MI6 was in fact responsible for everything we had received from Penkovsky in Moscow. The main unexpected evidence was that the MI6 man in Moscow had worn the jointly agreed signal to an event which Penkovsky had attended, and Penkovsky had observed the signal.’ This was a reference to the tie clasp Kisevalter had shown Penkovsky in May, but it is not clear what meeting this refers to.
As soon as Bulik and Kisevalter arrived in London, Wisner called a meeting with Shergold at MI6’s Pall Mall base. He asked Bulik to present his case, and after he had done so asked for Shergold to respond to what he had heard. ‘When Shergie finished,’ McCoy recalled, ‘Wisner declared the meeting over, directed that the matter not be discussed further, got up and left.’
Oblivious to all this, Penkovsky began his debriefing sessions, unloading everything he had picked up since he had last met the team, including insights he had gleaned from Varentsov and others, how the meeting had gone with Janet in the park and more. At a meeting on 28 July, he told them that there was ‘a secret opposition’ to Khrushchev in the Kremlin. This group was still in a minority, he claimed, but its existence could lead to a serious split in the Soviet leadership as a result of doubts over the way Khrushchev was handling the Berlin crisis.
Penkovsky was soon due to return to Moscow. He repeated the request he had made in May that Wynne be paid a fair sum for his contributions to the operation, and suggested that the team also be given bonuses for their work. Decoration and prestige were often on Penkovsky’s mind. As part of his continuing efforts to have his own contribution recognised, he had asked to be made a colonel in both the British and American armies, with uniforms to match. Bulik knew the American military attaché in London, who was about Penkovsky’s size, and borrowed his uniform: using a Polaroid, he took photographs of the Russian posing proudly in both outfits.
Before Penkovsky left again, the team held a small going-away party. In the midst of effusive toasts and speeches of thanks to one another, it was stressed that however important the intelligence he obtained was, his own safety took priority and he was not to run any unnecessary risks. ‘For me it is not only your respect,’ Penkovsky replied in English, ‘for me it is your order.’ In the event that he were to come under suspicion, he suggested an alternative method of escape than those they had discussed at earlier meetings, which had included escaping via Berlin. ‘If you say, “Penkovsky, go to the Far East and working from there we’ll collect you by submarine and take you to Japan when necessary; go with your family to such and such a harbour for a fishing trip and then row out a few miles in a rowing boat.” That is also an alternative!’
*
The Berlin fuse was still burning. On 4 August, Khrushchev sent notes to the governments of the United States, Britain, France and West Germany, saying he was ready to negotiate a settlement, but with a classic sting in the tail: in his note to the West Germans, he warned them that they would not survive ‘even a few hours of a third world war if it is unleashed’.
Kennedy, meanwhile, was shown a document Penkovsky had photographed: the Russian transcript of his summit with Khrushchev in Vienna, which had been distributed within the Soviet intelligence and military community. Kennedy was ‘most enthusiastic’ about this, and asked to be informed on precisely how it differed from the American transcript. Perhaps that could offer clues as to Khrushchev’s real intentions.
On the evening of Saturday 12 August 1961, taxi drivers in western Berlin started radioing in to their dispatcher at headquarters that they were being stopped from taking customers into the eastern sector of the city. At around two o’clock in the morning of 13 August, the dispatcher told his drivers to refuse any further requests to drive into the eastern sector, for fear they would have difficulties getting back across. An hour later, East German troops started work on an operation codenamed ROSE: fortifications were placed around western Berlin, including concertina wire, and the border between the east and the west of the city was soon sealed.
As the month went on, fortified barricades and watchtowers were also erected, and construction began on what would become known as the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain had been made physical . . .