8
In late 1961, MI6 and the CIA had another problem on their minds: they had established procedures for a telephone signal with Oleg Penkovsky, codenamed DISTANT – but what would they do if he activated it? As it was principally to provide warning of an imminent nuclear strike on the West, the new CIA station in Moscow had been instructed to report any such signal directly to headquarters in Washington, without waiting to pick up the details from the dead drop first. From there, the message would be transmitted to the President and his advisers for evaluation. However, Maurice Oldfield, head of MI6’s station in Washington, was worried that this might lead to the signal being misinterpreted, which could inadvertently trigger a nuclear war. He proposed to SR head Jack Maury that in the event of a DISTANT call being received, the Joint Intelligence Committee in London be informed first – the head of the CIA’s London Station sat in on JIC meetings. If they evaluated that the signal was a genuine threat, military and political leaders in Britain and the United States would then be informed.
This debate led to a top-level meeting in London in late October 1961, with Dick White, Allen Dulles and Dulles’s appointed successor John McCone all present. It was decided that if the DISTANT signal were received, the British Prime Minister, the American President and the Joint Intelligence Committee would all be informed simultaneously.
*
Bizarrely, British fears were tested less than two months later. On 25 December 1961, the telephone rang in the Moscow flat of Alexis Davison. His wife Claire, who despite it being Christmas was on duty monitoring the line, picked up. There was no answer, and the caller hung up. Three minutes later, the same thing happened again.
As with the earlier calls to Felicity Stuart, this didn’t correspond precisely to agreed procedures, which in this case stipulated that the gap between calls should be one minute rather than three. But there seemed no other way to interpret it than as the DISTANT signal from Penkovsky. The procedure had been put in place as an alert system for when the international situation appeared to be unstable and a nuclear strike might be a possibility: it would have been impractical to have someone in reach of either number for prolonged periods. But now was such a time – indeed, the procedure had only been set up a few weeks earlier – and one of the numbers had received two voiceless calls. The probability of one voiceless call happening by chance when the early warning procedure to receive it was in place seemed extremely slim: when someone calls a wrong number, for example, they usually say something before hanging up. Two calls left little doubt: the most logical explanation was that it was the emergency DISTANT signal, and that Penkovsky had simply mistimed the gap between rings.
Alexis Davison immediately called Spaso House, the American ambassador’s residence, and, after some trouble as there was a party going on, got through to Paul Garbler. There were two variants to the DISTANT signal, one with three breaths into the phone and one without. This was the latter variation, which indicated that the dead drop had been loaded with material. After a suitable pause so that the other guests would not make any connection with the call he had just received, Garbler feigned drunkenness and left the party with the embassy’s security officer, John Abidian, the man who had first received Penkovsky’s documents from Eldon Ray Cox over a year earlier. Abidian and Garbler drove to the lamp post at Kutuzovsky Prospekt to check it, but it was dark and they couldn’t tell if it was marked. Garbler decided they should check the dead drop at Pushkinskaya Street, and sent Abidian to do so. But it was empty.
Harry Shergold was informed of the calls to the Davison house two days later. He recommended not servicing the dead drop, saying that the calls must simply have been a false alarm. But the drop had already been checked by then, so it seems there was a communications breakdown about this. They were becomingly increasingly common.
*
The Penkovsky operation was in full swing, but the CIA was also being kept busy by startling developments elsewhere. On 15 December 1961, Major Anatoli Golitsyn, a senior officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, rang the doorbell at the home of the CIA’s Chief of Station in Helsinki and offered to defect to the United States. Golitsyn had been getting ready for the day for two years and he came well prepared, claiming to have memorised dozens of KGB files related to NATO countries.
Suddenly, Penkovsky was not alone: there was another walk-in. He shared Penkovsky’s self-importance, too, announcing immediately that he was ‘the most important defector in history’. He wanted a private jet to escort him and his family out of Finland at once, and demanded that as soon as he landed in the US he be taken to see the President so he could share his intelligence with him directly. He didn’t get his way, but once in the US he was eventually introduced to Robert Kennedy.
Golitsyn had fifteen years of experience as a serving KGB officer, which made many of his claims credible. He stated that Soviet intelligence had succeeded in recruiting dozens of agents in the West, including a ring in France codenamed SAPPHIRE and an agent within the CIA codenamed SASHA. His intelligence was remarkable in its value and precision, and many in the CIA were staggered by it, as it indicated that Soviet intelligence had penetrated the West to a far greater degree than feared. In March 1962, James Angleton introduced two senior British counter-intelligence officers to Golitysn, who informed them that the KGB had a group of agents in Britain, known as the ‘Ring of Five’.
This shocking claim coincided with fresh intelligence that convinced Dick White to reopen the file on Kim Philby. Despite all the suspicions about him over the years, Philby had never been arrested by the British, perhaps because to some the idea that such a senior officer could have been a traitor for decades was unthinkable – he had headed MI6’s Section IX, meaning he had been responsible for the agency’s entire counter-intelligence efforts against the Soviet Union. Some had even tipped him for a future ‘C’. However, when the evidence against him was re-examined it became clear that he was a Soviet agent, and in January 1963 MI6 finally decided to act on it, sending an officer to confront him in Beirut, where he was working as a journalist for the Observer, with the aim of extracting a confession that would help assess the damage he had done. Philby reacted by defecting to Moscow, confirming his treason unequivocally – MI6 went into a tailspin, and were soon hunting for moles in every corner. Suddenly, anything seemed possible.
*
All that was still to come. Back in Moscow, Penkovsky was now carrying out brush contacts with Janet Chisholm on an almost regular basis: at a delicatessen above the Praga restaurant, in the park, in the Kommission store, in a second-hand clothes shop and in the hallway of a block of flats in a small lane near Arbatska Square. Janet would sometimes duck inside the hallway under the pretext that she was adjusting her clothing or tending to her son out of the wind and cold. The Arbat neighbourhood was home to GRU headquarters, so the operation was being conducted right under the noses of Soviet intelligence, but it was also home to the American ambassador at Spaso House, where Janet attended ballet classes on Fridays and Mondays. These were her cover for her meetings with Penkovsky in the area, as they gave a plausible reason for her to be there. If either had strayed too far from their expected areas of movement, suspicions might have been raised.
But while these meetings had all seemed to run smoothly, senior officers at CIA headquarters in Washington were anxious: was Penkovsky overdoing it? Joe Bulik was particularly concerned at the frequency of contact with Janet. ‘I tried to urge Shergold to cut down on the meetings,’ he later said, ‘but I couldn’t persuade him to do that. It’s in a sense like being married and your wife has equal opportunity to sell this house, but you can’t sell it without her signature and I couldn’t get the meetings to slow down without [Shergold’s] signature.’
As a result of the CIA’s qualms, in late January the Soviet Russia division’s Quentin Johnson flew to London to meet Shergold to discuss the operation, and to find out for himself just how the British were conducting their end of it. Janet Chisholm attended one of these meetings, and told Johnson that although her husband was ‘heavily surveilled’ by the Russians, she herself was ‘seldom followed’. Listening to her assessment of the situation, Johnson felt confident she could detect surveillance and was impressed and reassured by her grace under pressure, feeling she was ‘fairly relaxed about her part in the operation’. ‘She might have appeared so,’ her daughter Janie says today, ‘but she was probably terrified.’
Shergold told Johnson that the Chisholms would be withdrawn from Moscow around June, as Janet was once again pregnant. They agreed that it would be appropriate to make a ‘handsome present’, probably in the form of cash, to the Chisholms after they had left Moscow as a gesture of appreciation for the dangerous and valuable work they had done, and that the two agencies would share the cost.
Shergold planned to replace the Chisholms with another couple, Gervase and Pamela Cowell: he was an MI6 officer, and she, like Janet, was a former MI6 secretary. ‘She has three children,’ Johnson noted in his memorandum of the meeting. ‘Two are too old for cover use, but the third will be “pram age” at her arrival in the area.’ MI6 was also considering supplementing these clandestine meetings with ‘a cover’, meaning another member of the Station, who would presumably be given a job at the British Embassy. Shergold had someone in mind with very good Russian, whom he thought he could send to Moscow a few months after the Cowells. Johnson had ‘speculated whether George Blake might know of him’, and suggested that in the meantime all personal contacts with Penkovsky be slowed down. The mention of Blake confirms that MI6 and the CIA were aware that the KGB might know the identities of their people in Moscow as a result of his treachery. But they had nevertheless decided to use Ruari and Janet Chisholm, both of whom Blake had known in Berlin.
And Bulik had been right to worry. On 5 January, after Penkovsky met with Janet in the hallway of the apartment building in the Arbat, he spotted a car entering the lane, violating traffic regulations. He watched as the car, a brown saloon, swung around, and saw that one of the two men in it was looking intently out of the window. After a couple of minutes, the car moved off the lane and turned into Arbatskaya Street.
Could it be surveillance from the KGB? At his next meeting with Janet, on 12 January, Penkovsky saw nothing untoward, either before, during or after their contact, and didn’t mention the car to her. But after his meeting with her the following week he walked down Arbatska Square and just as he turned on to Bolshaya Molchanovka he saw the same brown saloon. This time there was only one man in it, wearing a black overcoat. Penkovsky moved along quickly, and didn’t turn up for his next three appointments with Janet. On 20 February, Maurice Oldfield informed Jack Maury at the CIA: ‘I have just heard from Shergie that there was no sign of HERO at the reserve RV scheduled for today.’
Penkovsky finally made contact with Janet again on 28 March. The occasion was a cocktail party at the home of Dr David Senior, the British Embassy’s scientific attaché, and his wife Sheila. Improvising, Penkovsky suggested that Janet lie down in a bedroom, as she must be tired from her pregnancy. A few minutes later he joined her there under the pretext of being shown around the apartment by Sheila Senior and, as he was leaving the room, quickly passed her a pack of cigarettes behind his back. It contained eleven rolls of exposed Minox film and a letter.
The letter explained Penkovsky’s vanishing act, and even gave the licence plate number of the brown saloon. He had concluded that surveillance was being conducted on ANNE, ‘perhaps periodically’, and suggested calling off all meetings on the street for three or four months, proposing instead that he hand over material once or twice a month at diplomatic functions. If he had anything urgent, he would place it in the dead drop.
It seemed the most sensible course of action, and the operation was put on ice.
*
On 26 February 1962, at a meeting in the White House, US Attorney-General Robert Kennedy told General Edward Lansdale to wind up all plans for covert actions against Fidel Castro, which had been codenamed Operation MONGOOSE: none of the efforts were getting anywhere, and so he should instead submit a plan ‘for an initial intelligence collection program only’ in Cuba.
Kennedy’s order was ignored. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had previously noted that the United States could only intervene militarily in Cuba if they were provoked – in March, they proposed ways in which they could create the appearance that this had happened. While none of the proposals, codenamed NORTHWOODS, were put into action, they make for shocking reading even today, as they show that senior figures in the US military considered, among other things, blowing up an American ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Castro, and killing and wounding Cuban refugees living in the United States and pretending it was part of ‘a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington’.
*
Penkovsky was on ice, but he was no longer the West’s only human source of intelligence about Russia. Anatoli Golitsyn was unloading his knowledge of Soviet deception and penetration in Washington, and there was more to come. In May 1962, during an interval in an arms control conference at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, a first secretary from the Soviet foreign ministry, Yuri Nosenko, sidled up to an American delegate and, glancing around to make sure he was out of earshot of anyone else, told him that he urgently needed to make contact with American intelligence.
The CIA’s station in Bern was notified at once, and two days later Nosenko met CIA officer Pete Bagley at a safe house in the heart of the city’s Old Town. Bagley was a CIA case officer working under diplomatic cover. Within minutes of shaking hands with Bagley, Nosenko revealed that his job as first secretary was cover for his real role: he was a KGB officer, previously deputy head of the Second Chief Directorate section responsible for operations against the American Embassy in Moscow, now assigned to its Tourist Section. His current role was to oversee the security arrangements of the Soviet delegation in Geneva. But Nosenko had a problem: he had spent so much money in bars in Geneva that he had eaten into the official advance he had been given for the trip. On returning to Moscow, he would have to pay it back or he would be in serious trouble. He offered to give the Americans classified information in exchange for their paying his debt immediately.
Pete Bagley was a young man going places. Born in Annapolis, he was from a noted naval family: his father was an admiral, as were both his brothers and two of his great-uncles. He had enlisted in the Marines in 1943 aged seventeen, and after the war had studied political sciences, taking a PhD at the University of Geneva. In 1950, aged twenty-five, he had joined the CIA. In a few months he was due to take the position of head of counter-intelligence in the Soviet Russia division, aged just thirty; some in the agency already regarded him as a potential future director.
And now Bagley had what seemed to be a boost for his already stellar career: Nosenko felt like a major catch. He immediately cabled CIA headquarters informing them of what had happened, and George Kisevalter – no longer in the front line of the Penkovsky operation following his indiscretions in Paris – flew to Geneva at once. Bagley met him at the airport and took him to the safe house, where Kisevalter swiftly installed hidden microphones.
For the next week the two men questioned Nosenko, who was given the codename BARMAN, which was coincidentally appropriate considering his drinking debts. During these meetings, the Russian claimed that the KGB had detected the CIA’s former agent-in-place Pyotr Popov by chance as a result of routine surveillance on an American diplomat in Moscow, who had been seen delivering a message via a dead drop.
This was major news to both Kisevalter, who had been Popov’s chief case officer, and Bagley, who had also worked on that operation. Nosenko’s story seemed to confirm what Penkovsky had said at his second meeting in London, when he had recalled a lecturer saying that the KGB had spotted American intelligence operations being conducted in the Krasno-Presnensky Rayon area of Moscow, and that this had led to the expulsion of a US attaché after a meeting on a bus.
Nosenko’s debriefings have yet to be declassified, and Bagley and Kisevalter’s accounts of what he said differ on some points, but there are puzzling aspects to it whoever’s memories one accepts. For example, according to Kisevalter at one of these meetings Nosenko claimed he had personally overseen surveillance in Moscow of the American Embassy’s security officer, John Abidian, for several months and that this had led to the discovery of a dead drop in the lobby of a block of apartments in the city in December 1960.
Abidian was the man who had scolded student Eldon Ray Cox in August 1960 when he had turned up at the embassy with two sealed envelopes he had been given by a strange Russian on Moskvoretsky Bridge. The discovered dead drop had to refer to Pushkinskaya Street, the only apartment block in Moscow that contained a CIA dead drop. That was Oleg Penkovsky’s drop: he had recommended using it, and had even drawn a diagram and explained how to do so, in one of the letters he had given Cox.
But there was a problem with the dates. That letter had been read by Abidian and others in the Tank shortly afterwards, but the CIA and MI6 hadn’t managed to regain contact with Penkovsky until April 1961, and so had had no need to visit the drop until then. Before that first meeting in the Mount Royal Hotel in London, neither the CIA nor MI6 had even been completely certain that Penkovsky was genuine. As far as the CIA were aware, the dead drop had only ever been visited by them once. That had indeed been by John Abidian, but his visit had taken place a whole year later than Nosenko claimed, in December 1961, just after the mysterious silent phone calls to Alexis Davison’s number. Might Nosenko simply have been mistaken about the dates, and meant 1961? No, Nosenko said, he had not been involved in surveillance work in December 1961, but had been preparing for his current assignment in Geneva. The drop had been discovered in December 1960, he insisted.
As well as these mysteries, Nosenko also mentioned that he had once recorded the conversations of an Indonesian diplomat in Moscow by the name of Zepp. In time, Bagley would come to believe that this was a crucial piece of information – but for different reasons than Nosenko would have wanted him to.
*
A few days later, Bagley walked through the marble-floored lobby of the CIA’s new headquarters, past the imposing inscription from the Book of John: ‘And Ye Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Make You Free.’ Allen Dulles – the son of a Presbyterian minister – had picked out the verse.
Although located in 225 acres of woods in McLean, just eight miles from downtown Washington, the whitish-grey concrete complex would soon become better known as ‘Langley’, the previous name for the neighbourhood.
Bagley and Kisevalter had both been recalled to Langley after debriefing Nosenko, taking different flights with records of the conversations just in case anything happened to one of them. Bagley was also due to move to Langley in a few months to take over as chief of the Soviet Russia division’s counter-intelligence section. He took the lift to the fifth floor, where he and Kisevalter debriefed SR chief Jack Maury on Nosenko. Maury felt the case had potential, but told Bagley about Anatoli Golitsyn’s defection six months earlier and suggested he see James Angleton, who had all the data on that operation, so he had a wider picture. After speaking to Angleton, Bagley retreated to a sparse conference room and sat down to read the transcripts of the briefings with Golitsyn.
As he did, a shiver crept up his spine. Most of the information Nosenko had revealed in Geneva had already been given by Golitsyn. While it was plausible that there would be some overlap, Golitsyn and Nosenko claimed to be working in completely different departments of the KGB, and it didn’t make sense that they would both know so many of the same details about such a range of agents and operations.
It looked like one of them was lying, and of the two, Nosenko seemed to Bagley to be the more suspect. Could it be that Nosenko was simply exaggerating his knowledge to impress them – or could it be something worse? In his first debriefing with the CIA in January 1962, Golitsyn had predicted that the KGB would try to discredit him by sending false defectors to muddy the waters. Looking at the information Nosenko had given him with fresh eyes, it seemed to Bagley that his versions of the intelligence Golitsyn had handed over either downplayed their importance or negated their validity completely. What if, he wondered, Yuri Nosenko was a KGB plant?
Bagley and Kisevalter continued to work together to get information out of Nosenko, and Kisevalter was also involved in debriefing Golitsyn. But as more information emerged from both defectors, the atmosphere of suspicion grew. Oleg Penkovsky was no longer alone as a source, but Golitsyn and Nosenko were troubling. Like Penkovsky, they provided a wealth of intelligence on how the KGB and other organisations operated, the identities of officers, technical details and insights into Soviet capabilities and intentions – Golitsyn also claimed that the KGB was involved in deception on a grand scale. But while Golitsyn’s initial intelligence had been highly valuable, as time went by it seemed as if he believed that the KGB had agents, and were operating conspiracies, everywhere. He claimed that the Sino-Soviet split wasn’t real, but was instead a grand ruse designed to lure the West into a sense of false security, and that the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, had been assassinated by the KGB in order to make way for its own agent, Harold Wilson. As Maurice Oldfield, who would later become head of MI6 and who was also a wine connoisseur, once remarked: ‘The first pressings from a defector almost always have the most body. The third pressings are suspect.’
In time, Nosenko and Golitsyn would become locked in a surreal war of words to convince the CIA of their bona fides, with Golitsyn claiming Nosenko was a KGB plant. Two factions emerged within the agency, one side convinced that Nosenko was a valuable defector and the other that he was fake. As a result, nothing would ever be seen the same way again – the Penkovsky operation included.
*
On 20 May, Khrushchev told his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, that he was considering placing nuclear ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba, just ninety miles from the coast of the United States.
In retirement, Khrushchev said that he had had two goals in mind: to defend the island from further American attempts to invade it, and to try to equalise the balance of power with the West by establishing a ‘tangible and effective deterrent’ to wider American involvement in the Caribbean.
He may have felt he needed such a deterrent because he had been warned that the United States was considering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In March, the GRU had produced two reports that supported an earlier assessment by the KGB that the Pentagon was planning a nuclear first strike, even though this was not in fact the case. The GRU even claimed that the US had planned a nuclear attack in September 1961, but had abandoned it shortly beforehand because they had discovered that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was far more powerful than they had believed.
Ironically, at almost the same time as Khrushchev was mulling this over, the Americans were presuming something very similar, and equally false, about Soviet intentions. In July 1962, in a report that examined a range of intelligence, including some provided by Penkovsky, CIA analysts concluded that the Soviet military had received approval from the political leadership to consider ‘a doctrine of pre-emptive attack’.
This was never Khrushchev’s intention – but he did want a credible deterrent. His attempt to force the West into agreeing to his terms over Berlin had failed, but they had called his bluff. Now he was going to be one step ahead of them, and threaten them in a much more dramatic manner. After a Soviet delegation returned from an exploratory mission to Cuba, Khrushchev unveiled his grand plan at a meeting of the Presidium on 8 June 1962. Codenamed ANADYR, after a river in Siberia, the project was to transform the island into a major Soviet military base. The plan was to send forty nuclear missiles to Cuba, including R-12 medium-range ballistic missiles and R-14 intermediate-range ballistic missiles. A submarine base would also be built on the island, and over fifty thousand Soviet troops stationed there.
ANADYR was an extremely well-kept secret, with messages about it hand-delivered to those in the know, making sure it was totally compartmentalised. But it wouldn’t stay secret long.
*
Penkovsky had kept a low profile since March – but now he reappeared. On 31 May, he attended a reception for 600 people at the British Embassy in Moscow to celebrate the Queen’s official birthday. In the alcove of a cloakroom in the embassy’s eastern wing, he quickly conducted an exchange with Janet Chisholm: she passed him unexposed film for his Minox and a letter with further instructions from the team, while he in turn handed her a package containing seven rolls of exposed film and three letters.
In his letters, Penkovsky revealed that his wife had given birth to a second daughter, but that was the extent of the good news. He had heard that towards the end of 1961 the KGB had been unable to locate his father’s grave and now suspected he was still alive, possibly overseas. As a result, his permission to accompany an upcoming trade delegation to Seattle had been refused. He felt that he might be discharged or arrested at any moment, and asked for advice: should he move to another city where it might be easier to escape to the West, or stay put? He also asked the team to ‘send film and a small pistol that can be conveniently carried’, adding: ‘We will continue to work until the last opportunity.’
On 2 July, Greville Wynne arrived in Moscow again: his trading company, in which his old MI6 contact Dickie Franks was conveniently a sleeping partner, owned England’s longest articulated lorry, and Wynne had set up meetings with the State Committee to discuss bringing it to Moscow to show off British products. Penkovsky picked Wynne up from the airport and accompanied him to his room at the Ukraina. After his customary procedure with the taps in the bathroom, Penkovsky told his friend that Ivan Serov, the head of the GRU, had just cancelled an application he had made to travel with his job to Cyprus, apparently because they feared he might be targeted by a Western provocation there.
Wynne gave Penkovsky some records by Alexander Vertinsky, a popular émigré singer whose music was very hard to find in Moscow: Penkovsky had asked the team to get them for him when he was in Paris, so he could give them to Varentsov, Serov and others. In return, Penkovsky handed Wynne a letter, two rolls of exposed film and six passport photos of himself. He was visibly under pressure, fearing he was under KGB surveillance, and thinking of escape – he told Wynne that the team had considered various means of getting him out of the country, including by submarine. According to the files, this had in fact been his own idea at the last meeting in Paris, but perhaps they had agreed while toasting wine with him that it was possible and their comments were not recorded. Or perhaps Penkovsky was clutching at straws. Echoing his last letter to the team, he asked Wynne if he could get him a gun: it seemed he was thinking of another way out if the KGB came for him in the night.
Unsurprisingly, Penkovsky’s bleak mood appears to have affected Wynne. The Chisholms’ nanny, Martina Browne, would later say she had once had dinner with Wynne and come away with the impression that he was ‘too nervy to take the pressure’. Perhaps he was starting to sense just how high the operation’s stakes were and was experiencing, as John le Carré’s character Barley Blair does when faced with a similar position in the novel The Russia House, ‘the Moscow fear’: the sudden realisation of the terrors that lay behind the façade of life in the city, and the reality of what might happen to him at the hands of the KGB if he were arrested.
*
On 4 July, Penkovsky visited Spaso House for an Independence Day lunchtime reception. He was accompanied by Vassily Petrochenko, another senior member of the State Committee, who was a last-minute addition to the invitation list. One of the cisterns in a toilet inside had been prepared by a CIA officer so that Penkovsky could deposit material there: Rodney Carlson, a bespectacled assistant attaché at the embassy, had been given the task of retrieving it.
Penkovsky, looking relaxed, mingled on the lawn and chatted easily with other guests. Paul Garbler, in pressed uniform in his cover role as a naval attaché, shook his hand: the Russian had no idea he was the head of the CIA station. In the latter stages of the party, Penkovsky managed to engineer a very brief one-on-one conversation with Carlson, whom he recognised on account of his red tie clasp, which matched the one Kisevalter had shown him in London, as well as a photograph Wynne had shown him a couple of days earlier. In a quiet moment, Penkovsky told Carlson he had nothing to hand over, and both men left empty-handed.
The CIA analysed every moment of the party. Why had Petrochenko turned up? Was it simply protocol that he had insisted on coming, or was there something more sinister behind it?
The following evening, the noose seemed to tighten again. Wynne met Ruari Chisholm at the bar in America House and followed him to the bathroom, where he handed him Penkovsky’s material. He then took a taxi to the Hotel Pekin, where he and Penkovsky had arranged to meet for dinner. He got there early and so wandered around the neighbourhood, circling back every few minutes to check if Penkovsky had arrived yet.
Then he saw them: two men standing in a doorway. He walked towards the restaurant, and the men walked after him. He saw Penkovsky coming the other way, wearing a raincoat and heading for the entrance of the restaurant. But Penkovsky didn’t greet him and instead walked in, looking for a table. In an echo of the Laurel and Hardy routine he had performed with Kisevalter, as Penkovsky came out of the restaurant Wynne was going in, and pretended to look around himself. As he followed Penkovsky back out, he saw the two men from earlier standing across the road. Wynne stopped a taxi and asked to be taken back to the Ukraina, but the driver refused, as it was just a short walk away. In his peripheral vision Wynne saw Penkovsky turning into a small alleyway, and left the taxi and ducked in after him.
Penkovsky was waiting for him by the wall as he turned the corner. ‘You are being followed,’ he hissed. He told Wynne he would have to leave the country immediately, and promised to arrange a flight the next morning – he would pick him up from his hotel and take him to the airport to make sure he got on it.