10
Directly after Kennedy’s speech, the National Security Agency’s signal intelligence indicated that the Kremlin had put its military forces on an ‘extraordinarily high state of alert’. Unlike in September, it was mainly defensive forces that were affected – offensive forces were not placed at the highest level ‘as if to insure that Kennedy understood that the USSR would not launch first’. Nevertheless, the Russians’ tactical air forces and air defence units were now at the highest state of alert ever observed by the Americans.
The most significant step Kennedy had announced was the naval blockade, or quarantine, which went into effect two days later. Khrushchev immediately condemned it as illegal and told Kennedy in a letter on 24 October that the Soviet Union would not stand by and watch ‘piratical acts by American ships on the high seas’.
At 10 a.m. Washington time on 24 October 1962, as the quarantine went into effect, General Thomas Power placed the US Strategic Air Command at DEFCON-2, the defence condition one step short of imminent nuclear war: it was the first time in history that the United States had been at such a position.
*
Khrushschev had come on strong early in the crisis, but as it progressed he became worried that such a hard line might lead to the situation escalating, and slipping out of control. At a meeting of the Presidium on 25 October, he suggested proposing a solution to the crisis: if the US promised never to invade Cuba, they would in turn agree to remove their missiles from the island. Such a deal would represent a massive climb-down for the Soviet Union but, typically, Khrushchev presented it as a great victory, claiming that the Americans had been shown to be cowards and joking that Kennedy ‘slept with a wooden knife’, a reference to a crude Russian proverb that said that when someone goes bear hunting for the first time, they take such an instrument with them so they can clean their soiled trousers.
Khrushchev composed a letter to Kennedy outlining his proposal, but judging from declassified Soviet files it seems the nub of it may have been transmitted in advance, either on Khrushchev’s instructions or someone in his inner circle, to Alexander Feklisov.
Feklisov was the head of the KGB rezidentura in Washington, working under cover as a counsellor at the Soviet Embassy using the alias Alexander Fomin. On 26 October, he called the American journalist John Scali, whom he had met several times before, and invited him to lunch. Scali had already eaten but, noting the Russian’s urgent tone, agreed. They met at the Occidental restaurant, just two blocks away from the White House. Scali later recalled what happened next: ‘When I arrived he was already sitting at the table as usual, facing the door. He seemed tired, haggard and alarmed in contrast to the usual calm, low-key appearance that he presented.’ After the waiter had taken the two men’s orders, Feklisov ‘came right to the point and said, “War seems about to break out; something must be done to save the situation.”’
The previous afternoon, at an emergency session of the UN Security Council in New York the American ambassador Adlai Stevenson had humiliated his Soviet counterpart Valerian Zorin, challenging him to deny that the USSR had placed missiles on Cuba and then showing the photographic evidence of it. According to Scali, ‘Fomin’ now suggested that the Soviet Union would be prepared to dismantle the bases on Cuba, and that they would not provide Castro with any further offensive weapons, if the US pledged never to invade the island. Scali’s report of his lunch with Feklisov soon reached the State Department, and from there made its way through Washington’s decision-makers.
At the time, it was thought that Feklisov’s message might have been a peace feeler directly from the Kremlin, but even today the story remains unclear. Feklisov’s proposal was the same as the one Khrushchev had presented to the Presidium the day before, and yet in his report back to the KGB he made no mention that he had proposed anything, and instead claimed that it was Scali who had suggested the way out of the stalemate through fear of the ‘horrible conflict’ that might lie ahead. It may be that Feklisov had been affected by the stream of ciphered messages he was sending to Moscow about the Americans’ preparations for war and decided to take diplomacy into his own hands, perhaps prompted by someone close to Khrushchev. Or it may be that he or someone else decided that the KGB was not to be informed that he had made the peace overture.
Whether Feklisov was acting on his own initiative or on instructions from the Kremlin, his meeting with John Scali and his reports on it illustrate that even with the stakes as high as nuclear war, wires were being crossed on the Soviet side.
*
Meanwhile, the Americans were trying to track down Castro’s forces in Cuba, but with little success. A CIA report from 26 October suggested that Che Guevara had established a military command post in the province of Pinar del Río. In fact, he was in la Cueva de los Portales, a command and control centre hidden in a network of limestone caves in the mountains, fitted with the latest in Soviet communications equipment.
The crisis reached perhaps its most dangerous point on the evening of 26 October, although this didn’t become public until 2002. In enforcing the US quarantine, American aircraft carriers south of Bermuda were trying to track and stop a Soviet submarine, known as B-59 to the Russians and C-19 to the Americans. The USS Randolph located the submarine and the Americans dropped practice depth charges to tell the Russians they should surface and identify themselves. There was no response. Other American warships soon surrounded the scene, and the USS Beale dropped five hand grenades as a further challenge. But there was still no response.
This was because, unknown to the Americans, B-59 was carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes. In addition, the submarine’s captain, Commander Valentin Savitsky, exhausted and stressed, had assumed that the bombardments they were experiencing meant that a third world war had broken out above the surface. According to testimony from Vadim Orlov, a communications intelligence officer on board B-59, Savitsky ordered the submarine’s nuclear torpedoes to be assembled for battle readiness. ‘Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing somersaults down here,’ Savitsky apparently screamed. ‘We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not disgrace our Navy!’ Luckily, Savitsky was eventually talked down from giving the order to fire the torpedo by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who was also captain of the submarine fleet, and deputy political officer Ivan Maslennikov, and B-59 came to the surface shortly after.
*
The next day another crisis occurred, and this one was public: just hours after Khrushchev had delivered a speech on Radio Moscow offering to remove the missiles from Cuba if the United States withdrew its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, the Soviets shot down a U-2 on a reconnaissance flight over Cuba, killing the pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson. Kennedy and Khrushchev found themselves once more, in Ted Sorensen’s memorable phrase, ‘staring at each other down a nuclear gun-barrel’.
On the evening of 27 October, Robert Kennedy met with Anatoli Dobrynin, the Russian ambassador to the US, and told him that the shooting down of the U-2 had ratcheted up the pressure on his brother. In a ciphered telegram to Moscow that night, Dobrynin reported that Robert Kennedy had told him that the Americans felt their reconnaissance flights were necessary to monitor the building of the missile bases in Cuba, but that if their planes were to return fire, the situation might cause a ‘chain reaction’ that would be very hard to stop. Kennedy had added that much the same logic applied to the missile bases: ‘“The US government is determined to get rid of those bases – up to, in the extreme case, of bombing them, since, I repeat, they pose a great threat to the security of the USA. But in response to the bombing of these bases, in the course of which Soviet specialists might suffer, the Soviet government will undoubtedly respond with the same against us, somewhere in Europe. A real war will begin, in which millions of Americans and Russians will die.”’ He stressed that he and his brother wanted to avoid this if at all possible, and that he was sure that the Soviet Union felt the same. But he warned that some of the American military leadership were ‘itching for a fight’, and that the situation was in danger of spiralling out of control. He had a potential solution: to accept Khrushchev’s demand to remove the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The snag was that this would only happen afterwards, and would remain secret.
On 28 October, Khrushchev announced on Radio Moscow that missiles would be removed from Cuba. Although it was not made public until some time after, the US agreed to withdraw their Jupiter missiles from Turkey. This was not unilaterally well received – General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff, banged the table and told Kennedy it was the greatest defeat in American history. ‘We should invade today!’ he yelled. Kennedy overruled him. The Cuban missile crisis was over.
*
Although his intelligence had been heavily used during the missile crisis, Penkovsky himself had gone missing. On 2 November, MI6 and the CIA team were jointly composing a letter to him asking for an analysis of the crisis the world had just lived through when the phone calls came. One was placed to the CIA’s Deputy Chief of Station, Hugh Montgomery, and the other to MI6’s Head of Station, Gervase Cowell. Three short breaths being blown into the mouthpiece, before the caller hung up and the line went dead.
Both men were sceptical of the signal, but reacted differently. Although the crisis finally appeared to be over, Soviet MRBMs were still on Cuba and US forces remained at DEFCON-3, while British V-bombers were at Alert Condition 3. Gervase Cowell felt sure the call was a false alarm and, deciding it was not worth jangling highly jittery nerves, didn’t send it up the line as the procedure dictated but simply sat on the information. Sir Gerry Warner, a former deputy chief of MI6, recalled the incident in a 2012 interview with the BBC: ‘He did nothing – which was exactly the right thing to do. He didn’t tell his ambassador, he didn’t tell London, he didn’t tell anybody, because he was morally certain that Penkovsky was captured so this was meaningless. But had he told anybody else, he might have started the most enormous panic. And I think it is the most wonderful example of coolness under fire – of real, real bravery and judgement.’
The CIA, however, did send the signal up the line: Hugh Montgomery drove to the American Embassy and sent a flash message to Langley saying that the early warning signal for war had been received. ‘While we have serious reservations about its authenticity,’ Montgomery cabled, ‘nonetheless we are obliged to inform you in case you have any other relevant information.’
Alexis Davison was sent to see if there was a mark on the lamp post on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He set out in his Ford at 9.20 on the morning of 3 November, wearing a sports jacket and with a hood pulled over his head. There was no black mark on the post.
The CIA then decided to check the dead drop to see if Penkovsky had provided any further details, just in case. Montgomery summoned a junior CIA officer, Dick Jacob, to the Tank, and gave him instructions to clear the drop. Jacob then conducted what was known in the jargon as ‘dry cleaning’, taking a circuitous route through the city and walking through a bookshop with two exits to lose any possible tails until he reached the drop in Pushkinskaya Street. But as soon as he retrieved the matchbox from behind the radiator, he was seized by waiting KGB officers.
Pushed into a waiting Volga, he was taken to a nearby militsiya station, where he asked to be put in touch with the embassy. According to Jacob’s later debrief by the CIA, an official then asked him, ‘somewhat indifferently’, which embassy he meant, and Jacob specified that he was an American diplomat.
The Russians soon placed Jacob on a plane out of the country. The message was clear: Penkovsky had been ‘rolled up’ – exposed and captured. McCone reported that HERO in all probability had been compromised, adding: ‘this source will be of no further value’.
Robert Kennedy came out of the meeting and slumped on to a bench in the garden of the White House next to his sister-in-law. ‘It’s just awful,’ Jacqueline Kennedy later remembered him saying, ‘they don’t have any heart at CIA. They just think of everyone there as a number. He’s Spy X-15.’ Bobby Kennedy was angry that the CIA had apparently kept pumping Penkovsky for intelligence even though he was in obvious danger. ‘Why didn’t someone warn him?’ he’d asked McCone. ‘Why didn’t someone tell him to get out?’
Everyone’s worst fears were confirmed a few days later, when it was announced that Greville Wynne had been arrested at a trade fair in Budapest.
*
Unlike Harry Shergold, Oleg Gribanov didn’t conduct interrogations in elegant conference rooms overlooking parks. He operated from within the confines of the Lubyanka, the tallest building in Moscow.
Gribanov, head of the KGB’s counter-intelligence directorate, had arrested and interrogated Popov in 1959. Now he had Penkovsky, and his British accomplice Wynne, although neither arrest was made public for a while: the idea was that they might ‘start a game’ with their handlers to find out more, as they had done years before with Pyotr Popov. Assisting him in the investigation were two deputies, Alexander Zagvozdin and Nikolai Chistyakov. According to Zagvozdin, Wynne was utterly terrified after his arrest, and in his first interrogation session asked for time to consider how he could cooperate – for his second session, he told them all he knew about his contacts with Penkovsky. It seems he also offered to cooperate by working for the KGB as a triple agent for two years, pleading ‘but give me my freedom after this’.
According to Zagvozdin, when confronted with the paraphernalia taken from his desk Penkovsky gave a limited and misleading confession, claiming he had been recruited in Paris and significantly downplaying how much material he had handed over. But in his second interrogation session, he had talked about his contacts with Greville Wynne and revealed that he had handed material to someone Zagvozdin remembered as ‘Anne Chiskow’.
The day after his arrest, Penkovsky had also offered to turn triple agent, suggesting that as the Americans and British trusted him he could ‘be useful again to the Soviet Union’. A rare KGB file declassified in 2007 confirmed this.
The KGB decided not to use Penkovsky as a triple agent – he had betrayed too many secrets for that – so Zagvozdin instead told him that if he confessed everything they might consider it later. Zagvozdin had in fact been largely in the dark about his activities: ‘I didn’t know much, but I used the bits that I knew, and they helped.’ Initially, he didn’t even know whether Penkovsky was working for British or American intelligence, or both. The ‘most important thing’ he learned from questioning Penkovsky was that he had a dead drop on Pushkinskaya Street, so it seems plausible the KGB would want to use that information. It seems likely that at some point Penkovsky also revealed details of his emergency signal procedure, and that coupled with the location of the dead drop this resulted in the KGB calling Hugh Montgomery and Gervase Cowell. The KGB doesn’t seem to have understood the purpose of the signal, and that it could have led to nuclear annihilation. For this reason, it seems probable that Penkovsky hid that from them. Joe Bulik would later say that he felt the calls had originated with Penkovsky and that, ‘since he knew he was doomed, he figured that he might as well take the Soviet Union down with him’, and had told the KGB that the signal meant something else to try to force the United States to launch a nuclear strike. Such a strike would, of course, have had a high chance of being detected by the Russians, who would have retaliated, and so would probably have led to the destruction of a large part of the West as well.
There is one compelling piece of evidence to suggest that Penkovsky gave the KGB the wrong idea about the DISTANT signal in order to provoke a nuclear war. An article in Izvestia in December 1962 stated that Penkovsky had two ways of contacting the Americans. One was to call Alexis Davison, followed by another call to Hugh Montgomery. The other method, ‘in case of unexpected danger’, was to put a black mark on the pole at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, then dial both numbers, but ‘blow three times into the mouthpiece’. The KGB would not have risked triggering a nuclear war simply to expose a CIA officer, but the much vaguer ‘unexpected danger’ would not have worried them. The spy who some feel helped save the world looks likely also to have tried to destroy it.
*
Greville Wynne’s arrest, unsurprisingly, received widespread attention in the British press. ‘Reds arrest Briton’ proclaimed the Daily Express; ‘Director suspected of spying’ said the Guardian. The Daily Mirror took another line, implying the arrest might be the result of a prank by Wynne, and that he had earlier been ordered to leave West Germany after offending some influential people there.
MI6 and the CIA knew better. The arrests of Wynne and Jacob indicated that Penkovsky was by now almost certainly in KGB custody, but there was no way of knowing if he were being interrogated, tortured or was even still alive. But Robert Kennedy was wrong – not everyone saw Penkovsky as a number. Joe Bulik repeatedly pressed the agency to try to find a way to save his life. In November, he sent a memorandum to James Angleton and Howard Osborn, suggesting that they send letters to the KGB rezidenturas in Paris, London, Rome and Copenhagen, and to GRU rezidenturas in four other cities, stating that if Penkovsky was not treated considerately the CIA would leak information about the operation and the enormous amount of intelligence he had provided to embarrass them. Osborn returned the memo to Bulik as though it had never been read.
Bulik then took the proposal to Angleton in person, and was told by the counter-intelligence chief that the CIA never directly conversed with the KGB. Bulik was furious, recalling in an interview in 1998 that Penkovsky had provided intelligence worth ‘billions of dollars’ and that his proposal had entailed very little danger: ‘The only risk was to have some kid take the memo to the Soviet Embassy and give it to the guard, that was the only danger.’
However, unknown to Bulik, Angleton forwarded his idea to the British. Dick Helms also initially approved of the idea in principle, and suggested to MI6 that it could covertly pass a message to the KGB or GRU.
The British objected strongly to the idea – and then abruptly changed their minds. On 10 December 1962, Howard Osborn sent a memo to Helms outlining a fortnight of tense negotiations with the Brits. ‘Quite recently,’ he wrote, ‘in communications from SIS Headquarters in London through Maurice Oldfield, we were informed that they had indeed reversed their position and proposed discussions with the Foreign Office which, in the opinion of Mr. Angleton and me, went much too far and proposed a detailed exposé of several categories of substantive information that [Penkovsky] had provided during his tenure as a joint agent of SIS/CIA.’
In addition, Osborn wrote, the British were now proposing to make an official approach to the KGB/GRU on behalf of MI6 and the CIA. Osborn and Angleton had strongly objected to this idea, stating that the CIA could not under any circumstances establish ‘official contact with any intelligence organ of the Soviet Union’. Angleton and Osborn also pointed out that if they revealed too much of Penkovsky’s intelligence to the Russians it could backfire, because far from being cowed into affording him softer treatment they could instead use it in his trial and score a massive propaganda coup against Britain and the United States.
MI6 were peeved: they had initially disagreed with the CIA proposal, but now that they had changed their mind it seemed the CIA had decided it was a bad idea after all. In response, MI6 told the CIA that it would take ‘official unilateral action’, which might include retaliating by expelling Soviet intelligence officials in Britain. The CIA objected to this on several grounds. A unilateral approach to the Soviets would not work, they claimed, as the Soviets would know from Penkovsky that it had been a joint MI6–CIA operation. The CIA didn’t wish to PNG anyone, as this would merely provoke retaliatory expulsions of their own officials by the Soviets. Osborn and Angleton were prepared to countenance either a letter to the Russians ‘couched in general terms’ or the use of a ‘cleared British attorney’ who would ostensibly be working on behalf of Greville Wynne’s wife Sheila, but drew the line at official contact.
But no contact of any sort was ever made.
*
On 11 December, the TASS news bureau announced Penkovsky’s arrest, saying that he had passed scientific, technical, political and military secrets to British and American intelligence. The report added that Penkovsky had used a dead drop in number 5/6 Pushkinskaya Street and that Richard Jacob of the American Embassy had been apprehended on 2 November in the midst of retrieving espionage material from it. In Moscow, Reuters’ bureau chief Peter Johnson wondered aloud to his colleague John Miller what precisely the link was between Penkovsky and the businessman Greville Wynne, who TASS had also reported had been arraigned for trial. Miller had met Wynne at a function in Moscow, and had found him pushy and self-important, but could he really be a spy? The British government had responded to the charges against him with a muted denial: an under-secretary in the Foreign Office had stated in the House of Commons that Wynne had no connection with intelligence ‘so far as I know’.
In researching an earlier story, Miller had discovered that the KGB had a telephone number for citizens to call around the clock if they had any information. Johnson suggested he call the number and ask whether Wynne was now in the Lubyanka, and if so what condition he was in. Miller didn’t think much of the idea. ‘It’s not as though he is being kept in Bradford General Hospital, and we need to know his condition,’ he replied, proposing politely that Johnson make the call himself. Predictably enough, the KGB switchboard clerk who responded claimed never to have heard of Wynne and suggested he direct questions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Johnson wrote a four-paragraph article on the denial, and was no doubt noted down in a black book as being a troublemaker.
*
John Miller was soon to find out what really lay behind the arrests of Wynne and Penkovsky – and that his friends the Chisholms had played a key role in the affair. In the meantime, details were scanty, with the TASS report providing the bare bones from which most stories were being written.
The CIA and MI6 were equally in the dark. There was little doubt in their minds that Wynne would be transferred to Moscow: the more troubling question was what the Soviets would do after that. A CIA analysis written in May 1963 presented best- and worst-case scenarios. The best was separate trials for Wynne and Penkovsky, with Wynne’s in open court but Penkovsky’s in camera, with only the verdict announced. There was felt to be no hope for this for Wynne, because his abduction in Hungary had been represented as extradition. The worst was a show trial, although from a propaganda perspective it was thought that this would present ‘more problems to the Soviets than to us’.