7
The Aeroflot TU-104 skimmed across the tarmac at Le Bourget airport on the outskirts of Paris, and came to a standstill. It was 9.50 p.m. on Wednesday 20 September 1961. Oleg Penkovsky, a member of a visiting delegation for the Soviet trade fair, stepped on to the stairs of the aircraft and looked out across the City of Light.
Once he had gone through customs, Penkovsky was greeted by the familiar face of Greville Wynne, who drove him to his hotel, the Cayré in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Along the way, Penkovsky handed Wynne eleven cassettes of undeveloped Minox film, which Wynne later passed to Roger King, a former racing driver who was MI6’s support officer in the city. King was used as a liaison in this way so that Wynne remained in the dark about the identities of Penkovsky’s case officers.
Joe Bulik, George Kisevalter and Mike Stokes were waiting for Penkovsky at an MI6 safe house at 6 Hameau Béranger in the 16th arrondissement. They were irritated and tense. Shergold had stayed behind in London while they had been living cheek-by-jowl in the cramped apartment for what had seemed an eternity: Penkovsky’s visit had been delayed by three weeks while the French authorities dithered over granting him a visa. On arriving in the city, Leonard McCoy was surprised to find that the three men were now barely speaking to one another, ‘except with hostility and antagonism’. The chief point of contention, McCoy remembered, was whose turn it was to return the Perrier bottles for the deposits. Kisevalter, who snored, had been banished to the living-room sofa. McCoy had attempted to act as peacemaker, but to no avail. On one visit to the apartment – he was accommodated elsewhere – he suggested they all visit the American military Post Exchange store in Fontainebleau. The excursion briefly lightened the mood, but the hostility lingered: ‘By the time Penkovsky arrived, they were not speaking to one another, and I became the messenger between them.’ Roger King, who as well as acting as the link with Wynne was managing the safe house, had become so irritated by his guests’ behaviour that he had taken to calling them the ‘Amcraps’ and the ‘Britshits’.
Penkovsky, by contrast, was in a buoyant mood: his wife was pregnant again, and expecting in seven months. He had also brought with him a long shopping list from GRU head Ivan Serov and his family. After looking at the list, Bulik joked, ‘I can see now why you need twenty-five days in Paris.’
Penkovsky also had important material to share with the team. Shergold was due on a flight from London that evening, so while they waited for him to arrive, Penkovsky distributed gifts, including caviar and hollowed Georgian cow horns, and asked if the last batch of Minox cassettes he had passed to Wynne in Moscow had turned out alright. Shergold then arrived from Orly, and after they had warmly greeted each other Penkovsky started to debrief. Since his last meeting with the team he had had several discussions with Varentsov and other high-ranking figures. They had confirmed that in early October major military exercises would begin, and would last up to a month. These were partly training in case there was a war over Berlin, checking everyone’s readiness and ability to coordinate, but they were also a way to have forces in a state of combat readiness. Khrushchev was planning to sign a peace treaty handing the control of Berlin to East Germany – if the West made any moves after the treaty was signed, Soviet forces would then already be mobilised and able ‘to strike a heavy blow’. Khrushchev, Penkovsky said, saw the sealing of the border between East and West Berlin as ‘the first pill’ for the West – they had swallowed it, so now a second pill would come in the form of a treaty.
Penkovsky now revealed that he had learned in advance of plans to close the Berlin border, including the precise date and time it would happen. ‘I knew about this closing four days before the fact,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to pass this information on to you but had no means for doing this, since the phone call arrangement was only good for Monday and this took place on a different day. I did not want to risk putting the information into the dead drop and calling by chance. We will have to work out a system that will permit me to pass critical information to you quickly in future.’
One imagines that both the team and the analysts who studied Penkovsky’s words later can only have agreed. It would have been an enormous intelligence coup to have known about the closing of the border in advance (some felt it was an enormous failure that nobody did), although it would probably have needed more than hearsay for Kennedy to have acted on it, especially as it came from just one source, and with only four days’ notice. But it’s a tantalising what-if. Had Penkovsky managed to pass this information to his case officers in time, and had it been taken seriously enough in Washington, Kennedy might just have found a way to cow Khrushchev – perhaps by preempting it in a speech and threatening firmer retaliation than tanks in rubber treads – and the Wall might never have gone up. But it wasn’t to be. Penkovsky did not get information about the closing of the border to the team in advance, and the Wall was built without any real resistance from the West, dividing Europe for the next twenty-eight years.
Penkovsky said he had been told about the closing of the Berlin border by one of Varentsov’s aides. Four days earlier, Penkovsky and his family had attended Varentsov’s sixtieth birthday party at his dacha. As with the party in June, it had been an idyllic affair, with sunshine, cold cuts and plenty of booze. Penkovsky had presented Varentsov with several gifts before the party, including a rocket-shaped lighter, a cigarette box and a very expensive and rare vintage cognac from 1901. It was supposed to be sixty years old, brewed on the date of Varentsov’s birth, but was in fact several years younger, and the label had been specially prepared with the help of four case officers in the CIA. The cognac had been rapturously received by the guests at the party, among whom had been Rodion Malinovsky, the minister of defence. ‘The minister,’ said Penkovsky, ‘wanted to drink only that cognac.’
At one point, Penkovsky’s mother had asked Malinovsky if there would be a war over Berlin. Malinovsky had replied that it was hard to say and that he didn’t want to talk about it, as it was something he had to consider all the time. However, he added, the closing of the border between East and West Berlin had been handled well, and ‘we are keeping everything in readiness’.
Leonard McCoy immediately began preparing a report: Penkovsky’s information about Khrushchev’s plans for October was highly significant, if true. MI6 were very keen to make sure it was, McCoy remembers: ‘MI6 sent the chiefs of its Soviet and European divisions to Paris to interview me and the MI6 team to assure that we were reporting correctly.’ On 5 October, the US Board of National Estimates prepared a Special National Intelligence Estimate, in part to evaluate the claims Penkovsky had made in the 20 September meeting – a ‘highly unusual’ step according to a CIA history of Cold War operations in Berlin. The report’s writers concluded that they didn’t believe that ‘firm decisions of this kind’ had been made by the top Soviet leadership, and that they felt instead that the information had been ‘construed’ by the source, i.e. Penkovsky, from knowledge of military preparations alone. Behind the bureaucrat-speak, the message to the CIA was clear: ‘Your source is over-reaching.’
*
Back in Paris, the team questioned Penkovsky more closely on 22 September. It was difficult to keep him pinned to concrete matters because he was worked up about Khrushchev, at one point even suggesting that the West consider assassinating him. Penkovsky was an intelligence-collecting machine with a remarkable memory for details, but his hatred of the Soviet leadership sometimes threatened to derail debriefings. ‘Khrushchev today is the new Hitler, an atomic Hitler,’ he said, ‘and with the help of his stooges who support him he wants to start a world conflict so that prior to his death as he has said, “I will bury Capitalism.”’ But when pressed by Shergold on whether Khrushchev would try to trigger a world war if the West forced access to Berlin despite the Wall, Penkovsky said he didn’t think he would in that case, and would instead try to defeat the West in a localised conflict. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if he feels that he has sufficient strength to knock out the USA and England, who are the leaders of NATO, it is possible that he may strike first.’
Penkovsky said that such strength was a long way off: the figure of 30,000 atomic weapons, which had been published in the Soviet press, was hugely exaggerated, and the R-14 range of intermediate-range ballistic missiles was still not in mass production. Nevertheless, he said, it might be a large enough arsenal for ‘this maniac’ to chance his hand and to launch an attack – ‘that is what all Russian people are afraid of’.
Shergold and Kisevalter carefully went through each piece of intelligence Penkovsky had revealed, asking him to name his sources for each item, and the circumstances in which he had heard it: the more it could be substantiated, the more useful it would be in London and Washington.
*
On 27 September, the team had a surprise for Penkovsky. Much to his delight, Janet Chisholm entered the room, and they arranged a detailed schedule of times and locations to meet in Moscow during the next three months, with alternates if either couldn’t make an appointment.
Three days later, there was another surprise visitor, Quentin Johnson from CIA headquarters, who was introduced to Penkovsky as ‘John’. Johnson was the Soviet Russia division’s Chief of Operations, and had flown in for two reasons. The first was to show Penkovsky a miniature short-range transmitter he was to use when he returned to Moscow. In a charming piece of spycraft, Johnson greeted Penkovsky, then revealed he had been recording him and removed the transmitter from his clothes and played it back. After this, Johnson briefed him on how to use the device – the idea was that he could carry it around Moscow with him and, when within range of the American Embassy, send a signal in a rapid burst. Penkovsky was impressed.
The other reason Johnson was in Paris was to smooth over the tensions that had built up between the four case officers. These had only been exacerbated by the arrival of Penkovsky, who loved Paris, a city that in its unapologetic delight in pleasure and comfort was the polar opposite of life in drab, grey Moscow. This had made him even harder to manage – the team felt he was operating ‘at the highest egotistical pitch ever noted’. As Kisevalter spoke French, Bulik had asked him for his help in hiring a prostitute for Penkovsky to keep him happy; when Kisevalter refused, Bulik arranged it himself. Kisevalter would later say that he felt that Bulik was trying to curry favour with Penkovsky, and to impress the British with his operational skills.
The tensions had finally boiled over. After one of the debriefing sessions, Kisevalter and Mike Stokes had gone out on the town and found a bistro. Kisevalter got drunk, started buying other customers drinks, and at one point began discussing Penkovsky, including information he had revealed in the latest session. On their return to the safe house, Stokes informed Shergold, and the two gave McCoy the bad news. McCoy, ever the messenger, informed Bulik.
‘He was thoroughly shocked,’ McCoy remembers, ‘but said he could not bring himself to report it to HQ, but that he would leave that to me.’ McCoy sent the message. Two days later Johnson arrived, and Kisevalter was quietly removed from the front line of the operation. To make sure Kisevalter was not offended, the chief of CIA’s Paris Station presented him with a Certificate of Merit and Distinction and a cheque for $1000 at a small ceremony at the American Embassy. Bulik was privately awarded the same medal.
From then on, Kisevalter took a backroom role in the operation, and was replaced by another officer, whose name has never been declassified. It was a sad end to the great Teddy Bear’s sterling work on the operation.
*
The huge amount of material Penkovsky was handing over was now becoming difficult to process, so McCoy proposed to Shergold that a dedicated task force be set up to handle it all. Shergie readily agreed. ‘He proposed that I come to London, interview translators, and produce the intelligence reports for both CIA and MI6,’ says McCoy. ‘I sent that proposal to HQ and immediately received a reply stating that the task force would be set up in Washington, under my jurisdiction, with translators selected by me. That then happened, and Mike [Stokes] came and worked as my deputy for a year and a half, as we managed a task force in the Central Building of the original CIA address, 2430 E Street.’
The CIA was now firmly in the driving seat of the operation. Under McCoy’s direction, the task force pored over Penkovsky’s material, trying to figure out what light it could shed on the situation in Berlin. The crisis could flare up again at any moment, especially now there was such an obvious sign of the problem in the form of the Wall. In September, Kennedy had been given a proposal to launch a limited first strike on Soviet military targets if necessary, but had rejected it. NATO officials would later propose a similar option, codenamed BERCON BRAVO, which involved a ‘nuclear demonstration’ to make it clear that the West was prepared to act. The plan had two variations: one was to detonate a nuclear weapon over selected areas in such a way as to minimise deaths but make sure that the explosion could be seen from the ground, while the second was to drop a nuclear weapon on a military target away from populated areas – potential targets included aircraft, airfields, surface-to-air missile sites and troop concentrations.
Due to the tense international climate, MI6 and the CIA decided that until the situation died down they needed a sure way to be in touch with Penkovsky – just as he had earlier heard about the closing of the Berlin border but had been unable to tell them in time, he might learn that the Soviets were planning a nuclear strike and be able to warn them of it sooner than the early warning stations. At a meeting on 2 October, the team discussed plans with him for how he could contact them in the case of such an emergency. Penkovsky said he was prepared to use a telephone signal provided he didn’t have to speak on the line: he was worried about leaving incriminating evidence for any KGB listeners, who might be able to identify his voice and use it against him if he were later accused of being a traitor.
They agreed the procedures – later given the codename DISTANT – with Penkovsky orally, but as it was vital that there should be no confusion about their use, before leaving Paris the team handed him a document that described them in detail. He should signal them only in three sets of circumstances. The first was the most important: if he received credible intelligence ‘from responsible Soviet officials’ that the USSR had decided to launch an attack on the West. In this case, he should immediately leave in his dead drop details of the plan, the date and time of the intended strike, and how he had come to know about it. The second situation was only marginally less critical: if he learned that the Soviet Union would launch an attack if the West carried out – or didn’t carry out – particular actions or policies. Again, he was to place all the information he had, and how he had found out about it, in the drop. The third situation was almost trifling in comparison, and seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought: if he learned that he was due to be posted out of Moscow, but that it was to happen before his next scheduled meeting with Janet Chisholm, he was also to place the information in the drop. The instructions emphasised that the drop should only ever be used for one of these emergencies, as material could only be safely taken from it once.
In any of these three circumstances, after loading the drop with his material Penkovsky was to make a black mark on a lamp post near a trolleybus stop on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, and then call the flat of Captain Alexis Davison, which overlooked the lamp post on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Davison was a US assistant military attaché and the embassy’s physician – he had no prior intelligence experience but was co-opted by the CIA to check the lamp post every day, which he usually did when he drove past it on his way to work. Now his wife, Claire, was instructed to be on standby regarding Penkovsky’s early warning signal, which could come at any time of the day or night. If he heard her answer ‘Hello, Mrs Davison speaking’, he was to replace the receiver without saying anything, count out a minute, then redial the same number and hang up again. If there was no reply or their Soviet maid answered instead, he was to call a second number, which was that of the flat of William C. Jones III, a CIA officer under cover as a second secretary at the embassy – his wife was also on standby, and someone would always be there to answer one of the numbers. As soon as the CIA received this signal, they would go to check the drop. In February 1962, Jones was replaced by Hugh Montgomery, Deputy Chief of the CIA station, who lived in the same flat, and Penkovsky was correspondingly informed that instead of ‘Jones’, the answer would be ‘Montgomery’.
There was one final emergency procedure. If Penkovsky learned that the Soviet government was about to go to war but didn’t have time to load the dead drop, he should try to leave a mark on the lamp post and then call either number. If a man answered, he was to ‘blow three times into mouth piece and hang up’. (It wasn’t specified what he was to do if a maid or one of the wives answered, but presumably he was to try the other number.) This signal was only to be used in the event of an imminent Soviet act of war.
*
In Britain, civil servants were continuing to revise contingency plans for a nuclear conflict. On 5 October 1961, Harold Macmillan was asked by one of his civil servants to divide his ministers into categories in the event of an imminent war: those who would stay in London, those who would leave for the bunker in Wiltshire and those who would leave for regional headquarters scattered elsewhere around the country. Macmillan also appointed two senior ministers, Rab Butler and Selwyn Lloyd, as his nuclear deputies: in the event he was killed in an attack they would be authorised to order a retaliatory strike. The first deputy would be authorised to issue the order from London, while the second would be in Corsham if the capital were, as one memorandum described it, ‘silenced’. Both agreed to take on the roles, and a letter was drawn up for them that explained the points and agreements that would need to be discussed with the American President and NATO’s commander in Europe before launching a strike – an eerie ‘don’t forget to turn the lights out’ checklist for nuclear war.
The Americans’ equivalent plans were starker still: in 2012, a declassified White House meeting report from 1968 revealed that US policy at this time had been that if the President were killed or couldn’t be found following any kind of attack from the Soviet Union or China, a ‘full nuclear response’ would automatically be ordered.
*
On 17 October 1961, the telephone rang twice in Felicity Stuart’s flat in Moscow, then went dead.
Penkovsky had been instructed to call her, she says, only in the event that he was about to travel to the West. The call came three days after Penkovsky had arrived back in Moscow. However, there was a problem with it. Penkovsky’s pre-arranged signal to Stuart’s number consisted of three rings, not two. ‘I wasn’t a hundred percent certain that it was the signal,’ she says. ‘But I knew this was an important signal if he was going to go to the West, and that the office in London wanted to know when that would be, so the following morning I sent a telegram to say I’d received it.’
*
Autumn was turning to winter. In Berlin, the crisis took a new turn, with tensions over access to the eastern part of the city: on 22 October, East German guards at the Friedrichstrasse crossing – ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ – stopped a blue Volkswagen belonging to Allan Lightner Jr., the US State Department’s most senior official in Berlin, as he and his wife tried to cross to attend the opera, and demanded to see identification papers. The four-power agreement stipulated that no German could stop Allied personnel in this way so Lightner refused, insisting that a Russian official inspect his papers instead. When this didn’t happen, he informed Kennedy’s personal adviser in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, who sent armed military police to escort him to the opera and back.
This triggered a war of nerves, and after two similar incidents Clay deployed tanks near Checkpoint Charlie to assert the Allied powers’ right of movement. The Soviets responded by sending six armoured tanks to within less than a hundred yards of the Americans, and everyone braced themselves for a possible confrontation – both sides’ tank commanders had orders to fire if they were fired upon. The standoff went on for eighteen hours until finally, at around half past ten on the morning of 28 October, the Soviet tanks started retreating – half an hour later, the Americans followed suit, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.
In Moscow, there were also small signs of a thaw. On 31 October, Stalin’s body was moved to a new resting place near the Kremlin Wall, leaving just Lenin at the more prestigious Mausoleum in Red Square – suggesting an official relegation of Stalin’s importance. His name was painted over at the Mausoleum’s entrance, but the paint wasn’t strong enough to withstand the Russian cold, and it soon peered through again.
In Washington, Dick Helms and James Angleton had become uncomfortable with the idea of operating Penkovsky by remote control via MI6 using Janet Chisholm, but they didn’t fancy sending another ‘singleton’ to Moscow: memories of COMPASS were still sore. The solution, they decided, was for the CIA finally to set up a station in Moscow, and in late November Paul Garbler arrived in the city as its first chief, taking the cover of a naval attaché in the embassy. A lean, handsome former dive-bomber pilot, Garbler had previously been stationed with the CIA in Berlin and Seoul: in the latter city, he had occasionally played tennis with George Blake. Like Kisevalter, his family had Russian roots: his father was Russian and his mother Polish.
Garbler was unaware that he was walking into a hornet’s nest of office politics. Joe Bulik had not wanted him to be appointed Chief of Station – he had favoured Hugh Montgomery, who was instead appointed Deputy Chief. Montgomery had served with the OSS in the war and, after taking a doctorate in Russian studies from Harvard, had joined the CIA: he had been one of the officers working on the Berlin tunnel operation.
In most US embassies, the CIA station is a separate entity, closed off from the rest of the staff. In Moscow there was no separate station, just a handful of intelligence officers working alongside embassy officials. When Garbler arrived, the first thing the ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, did was summon him into the Tank to ask him who in the embassy was CIA. Garbler brought some order to affairs, but it was a long process. All meetings between CIA officers were held in the Tank, and organising them was akin to arranging a rendezvous with an agent on the street, complete with an elaborate signal system – it could sometimes take two days for Garbler to set up a meeting with one of his own officers inside the embassy.
Garbler was also hamstrung by the fact that headquarters didn’t inform him about all aspects of the operation. This was because shortly after he arrived in Moscow Angleton’s paranoia erupted into full bloom: doubts about Penkovsky’s reliability were now joined by doubts about the trustworthiness of the CIA’s own officers.
Unaware of these developments, Garbler settled in for the winter ahead: in December, the temperature fell to minus twenty Celsius. For the Westerners already in the city, the season was always tense. ‘Bugging is funny in summer when you can get out,’ says Felicity Stuart, ‘less so in the white-out and dark evenings.’