12
The fallout from the Penkovsky operation descended swiftly in the Soviet Union. On 12 March 1963, the Presidium demoted Varentsov to the rank of major-general for ‘loss of vigilance and unworthy conduct’, and Serov suffered the same fate. Some three hundred Soviet agents were also reported to have been recalled to Moscow, rumoured to be all those who had ever come into contact with Penkovsky, and whose covers he could therefore have blown.
Nikita Khrushchev, it seems, either misinterpreted or misrepresented the damage done by Penkovsky. In a one-on-one meeting with President Lyndon Johnson in February 1964, John McCone stated that satellite photography suggested that the Soviets were stepping up their construction of ‘hard sites’ – extremely protected launching sites, often housed underground – for their ICBMs. In a memorandum of the conversation, McCone noted:
I explained that after Penkovsky was apprehended, Khrushchev had stated, and we had learned, that he had told the Presidium that Penkovsky had revealed the location of their missile sites, therefore he had to spend an enormous amount of money – 50 billion rubles – to relocate the missiles because we now knew where they were. This was untrue because Penkovsky had not told us the location of a single missile site. However Khrushchev knew that through satellite photography we were learning the exact location of missile sites. He was not relocating them – what he was doing, he was hardening them, and this was costing them an enormous amount of money.
Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, with Kosygin and Brezhnev taking over the reins of power: his reckless gamble with nuclear war played a significant role in his downfall.
*
There was fallout of a different sort in the United States. Ironically, John McCone’s standing with Kennedy fell as a result of the crisis. The President disliked the fact that once it was over the CIA’s director made it clear he had been right about the Soviets’ intentions on Cuba all along, sometimes in public. Kennedy was also disturbed that it had been possible for the intelligence community at large, and the CIA in particular – with the exception of McCone – to miss the problem for so long. This left McCone in the awkward position of having to argue that his men had done a good job even though he had disagreed with their judgements and overruled them. What should have been a great success for the CIA began to seem like the opposite.
It is still not clear today why McCone was so convinced that the Soviets were planning to place offensive missiles on Cuba, when nobody else thought it plausible and there was no proof of it. McCone clearly had an enormous body of intelligence about the military build-up in Cuba at his fingertips, and it may simply have been that the combination of all this material led him to guess that this was what Khrushchev was plotting. But his intuition may also have been guided by the persistent tune being played from one of the CIA’s most significant sources of intelligence. In his debriefings, Penkovsky had repeatedly expressed the view that Khrushchev was a maniac, and during the Berlin crisis had said that he could try to launch an attack if he felt he had ‘sufficient strength to knock out the USA and England’. In his very first meeting with the team in London in April 1961, he had claimed that the Soviet leader was ‘patiently awaiting the time when we can begin a war’ and that he wanted to bring a ‘rain of rockets’ down on the West. In the same meeting, he had also suggested that Khrushchev might later send more arms to Cuba, including missiles. ‘In fact, there was talk about this with Castro and possibly a few rockets are already there.’
Eighteen months later, the CIA’s director insisted, without any proof of it and speaking as a lone voice, that Khrushchev was placing offensive missiles in Cuba. If he had other sources for the assumption, he didn’t reveal it to his subordinates. So was this merely coincidence? Perhaps, but the CIA’s July 1962 report, ‘Soviet Strategic Doctrine for Start of War’, had made repeated mention that the Soviets had now placed the concept of preemptive attack on the table, and that report had drawn heavily on material provided by Penkovsky.
Kennedy had also used Penkovsky’s intelligence, and had followed the trial with interest. Two days after the sentence was handed down, he sent a memorandum to John McCone asking what had happened to the CIA’s greatest asset behind the Iron Curtain. ‘I would like to get a report of our estimate of how Penkovsky was caught,’ he wrote. ‘Was it due, do we think, to his own mistakes, was it ours, or was it almost inevitable.’
The CIA’s Soviet division swiftly wrote a report, which McCone handed to Kennedy at a private meeting on 15 May. The document stated that the agency had no proof of how Penkovsky had been compromised, but speculated that it may have been ‘due to a combination of circumstances, including the ever-present possibility of a Soviet penetration of either the British or American official government circles’. Conducting the operation in partnership with MI6, the report noted, had ‘multiplied the number of possible security leaks’.
The issue was to become a major preoccupation. In May 1963, Howard Osborn sent Dick Helms a report to guide him if he were asked about Penkovsky’s bona fides by the House Armed Services Committee, which was examining in the aftermath of the missile crisis the intelligence community’s performance. Osborn noted that there had been speculation that Penkovsky might have been a triple agent, working for the Soviets all along. The attached report stated that the CIA had no reason to believe this was the case, or that ‘any information he supplied us was wittingly provided to him as deception material by the Soviet authorities’. It also noted that throughout the ‘extraordinary operation’, the possibility of disinformation or deception had been constantly analysed, and that Penkovsky had been subjected to ‘subtle and varied tests’ during his debriefings, and had passed them all. The report concluded that there was no evidence of ‘planned deception, build-up for deception, fabrication, or double-agent activity’, and that the operation represented ‘the most serious penetration of Soviet officialdom ever accomplished and one that will hurt them for years to come’.
Helms drew on this for a document he sent to McCone and twenty-one other senior figures in the US intelligence community a week later, in which he set out Penkovsky’s career, character and achievements, and stated that he had provided ‘more than 8,000 pages of translated reporting, most of which constituted highly classified Soviet Ministry of Defense documents’.
The next month, McCone told the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that the agency suspected that a security leak had compromised the operation: ‘We think that the case was blown because of a penetration in the British government who saw Wynn [sic] and Penkovskiy together.’ It added that Penkovsky himself may have grown careless.
This was subtly but significantly distinct from the CIA’s report to Kennedy of the previous month, which had speculated that the compromise might have been due to ‘a Soviet penetration of either the British or American official government circles’. McCone didn’t reveal the identity of the British government official now suspected of compromising Penkovsky, nor the source for the supposition that the official had done so.
Despite the operation’s unprecedented success, some in the CIA were turning against MI6. Joe Bulik felt that the British had worked Penkovsky too hard and that this had led to his exposure. In July, the British government admitted that Kim Philby had defected to Moscow and had been a Soviet agent. Philby had been one of MI6’s most senior officers and had at one point headed its Soviet counter-intelligence section. He had also been under suspicion for years. How, wondered the Americans, could the British have been so stupid? And could Oleg Penkovsky also have been betrayed by a Soviet agent in the West?
The spat soon leaked into the public arena. Newsweek asked, ‘Should the CIA amend its close working relationship with Britain’s MI5 and MI6?’ The accompanying article relayed US intelligence’s distrust of the ‘treacle-footed’ way British governments had handled information about possible moles and bemoaned ‘the chummy reluctance of one Harrovian or Etonian to doubt the integrity of any other Old Boy’.
*
While the CIA waged a war of words with MI6, Greville Wynne was serving his sentence in a Soviet prison cell. As a foreigner, he was a potential candidate for a spy exchange, and so was not ill-treated to any extent that would endanger that. But he was nevertheless in the Lubyanka, and after several months was moved to an even grimmer prison in Vladimir, 150 miles from Moscow. He lost a lot of weight, and was questioned repeatedly about his role in the operation and his contacts in London and behind the Iron Curtain – he appears to have successfully stuck to his story that he was an unwitting accomplice, and knew nothing of what was in the packages Penkovsky gave him. To keep his sanity, he took to designing kitchen interiors on scraps of paper.
*
Soon the news was dominated by another story. Britain’s Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, resigned after admitting he had misled the House of Commons about his relationship with call-girl Christine Keeler. Keeler had also slept with Yevgeni Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. Profumo admitted to the affair with Keeler but denied any breach of security. However, shortly after his resignation a source in Soviet intelligence reported to the West that he had overheard claims by a KGB officer that Ivanov had obtained information from Profumo via Keeler, and that recording equipment had been used to do it. According to MI5’s authorised history, this is unlikely, as Ivanov worked for the GRU, not the KGB. But true or not, MI5 knew that Ivanov was an intelligence officer: Penkovsky had revealed it two years earlier. In 1962, the Foreign Office had even informed MI5 that they had provided Ivanov with ‘suitably tailored’ material.
Could a Soviet agent have persuaded a prostitute to reveal her pillow talk with the Secretary of State for War? The suggestion of espionage was enough. In October Harold Macmillan resigned as a result of ill health. The government staggered on until the following year, when it lost the general election to Labour and Harold Wilson became Prime Minister.
On 22 November 1963, the United States also lost its leader, and the man who had led it through the Cuban missile crisis, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The previous year, Pete Bagley at the CIA had been appointed head of SR’s counter-intelligence section, shortly before Penkovsky had been taken into custody. It was part of his job to re-examine the Penkovsky case, over which one question loomed more than any other: how had the KGB detected him?
But with Kennedy’s death Bagley, like millions of others, had different questions on his mind. Bagley didn’t believe that the KGB were involved in Kennedy’s death, but the day after the assassination he sent a memo to James Angleton in which he outlined why the possibility couldn’t be overlooked. He called attention to reports from the head of SR, now David Murphy: one was that the FBI had received information that the KGB rezidentura in New York contained officers of the agency’s 13th Department of the First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence). This department, Bagley noted, was responsible for ‘“liquid affairs”, sabotage and assassination’. The CIA had also received intelligence that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in contact with a KGB 13th Department representative in Mexico City.
It has since become clear that the KGB were not responsible for Kennedy’s assassination: they were utterly baffled by it. In December 1963, the deputy chairman of the KGB reported to the Central Committee in Moscow that a lead from Polish intelligence suggested that the most likely instigators of the assassination were three American oil magnates ‘who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations’ in the Deep South. One could no doubt construct conspiracy theories about why the KGB would lie to the Central Committee, of course, but that way lies the wilderness of mirrors.
But this was not known then, and for the time being, as a result of the Kennedy assassination the Penkovsky operation was not on many people’s radar, let alone Pete Bagley’s.
*
That changed in early 1964. On 9 January, the British Embassy in Moscow sent a secret memorandum to the Foreign Office in London. Just before Christmas, the Daily Express’s Moscow correspondent Martin Page had reported a rumour that Greville Wynne might be exchanged with ‘Gordon Lonsdale’. Page had since asked his Soviet source about this, who had admitted he had been told to ‘float’ the idea of an exchange ‘to see what reaction it produced’.
This first whispering would lead to negotiations between the British government and the Soviet Union. With both sides keen for an agreement, the deal was soon done. On a cold day in April, Wynne was ordered from his cell and driven to the Lubyanka, where to his surprise he was taken to an airport. He landed in East Germany and, very early on the morning of 22 April, was pushed into a yellow Mercedes and driven through the fog towards Berlin. He was told that if he spoke or misbehaved he would be shot, and then the car pulled up at the Heerstrasse checkpoint. Police on both sides had temporarily stopped all traffic within 200 yards of the border.
Wynne could see a small stretch of no man’s land, and then, on the other side of a set of gates, the West. Two black Mercedes were already parked there. In one of them sat Konon Trofimovich Molody, alias Gordon Lonsdale, accompanied by three British officials. The second car kept radio contact with British headquarters.
With everyone in position, an official from each side got out and slowly walked to the centre. After conferring, each walked on to check that the other had brought along the right man. At 5.35 a.m., Wynne and Lonsdale were marched into the middle of the no man’s land, and then kept walking until they reached the other side. It was one of the Cold War’s best-known ‘spy swaps’, and made headlines around the world. The exchange took just twelve minutes – and after sixteen months’ imprisonment, Greville Wynne was finally on his way home.
*
In January, Yuri Nosenko – BARMAN – had arrived back in Geneva, where he sent a pre-arranged signal to the CIA. Pete Bagley and George Kisevalter, who had interviewed him in the city two years earlier, flew to Switzerland to meet him again.
To their surprise, Nosenko announced that he no longer felt he could act as an agent-in-place, and that he wanted to defect to the United States immediately. Even more startlingly, he said he had detailed and crucial information about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and claimed that he had personally reviewed Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB file and as a result he knew for certain that the Soviet Union had not played any part in it.
Bagley and Kisevalter were stunned: less than two months after the most famous murder in the modern era, this agent-in-place apparently had crucial intelligence about it.
The surprises didn’t end there. At his debriefings in Geneva two years earlier, Nosenko had claimed that Pyotr Popov had been detected by the KGB in Moscow not thanks to any Soviet penetration of the CIA – as Golitsyn had claimed – but due to the routine surveillance of Western diplomats. He had also claimed that he had overseen the surveillance in the city of the American Embassy’s security officer John Abidian, which he said had led to the discovery of a CIA dead drop in December 1960. Now Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he also knew how Oleg Penkovsky had been caught. Over the years, he would give several different sources for how he obtained this information, at one point claiming he had heard it from General Gribanov.
This was big news: despite the trial, neither the CIA nor MI6 had any idea of how their greatest agent had been detected by the KGB, and as a result some had started wondering whether he might have been betrayed by a Soviet agent at work in the West.
The CIA’s operational files on Nosenko remain classified, but in 1992 George Kisevalter recalled Nosenko’s account to journalist David Wise. Nosenko, Kisevalter said, had claimed that Penkovsky’s downfall had begun almost by chance. As a matter of routine, the KGB conducted ‘light surveillance’ on foreigners in Moscow, and one of these was Janet Chisholm, the wife of MI6’s Station Chief in the city. One day, a KGB officer following her had noticed that she had appeared to react strangely to a Russian man in the street. As a result, they had increased their surveillance of Janet Chisholm, following her from her ballet class at Spaso House to a shop in the Arbat. When the Russian passed by, she would leave the shop and follow him to an arcade, where for a few moments they would be out of sight. She also often visited a small, triangular park, and the Russian would walk into it from any of three streets.
The KGB brought in an artist to draw a picture of the mystery man. A KGB officer was then dressed like him and told to walk in front of Janet Chisholm in the park, but not to turn his head, so she would not be able to make out his features. Janet Chisholm fell for the trick, turning to follow the KGB officer.
Now they were certain that Janet Chisholm was in contact with the unidentified Russian. They followed him relentlessly, until they identified him as Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU. But they needed proof of what he was up to. Unfortunately, his apartment was on an island, making surveillance difficult. So they hatched a scheme. While Penkovsky was out at lunch one day at a fast-food restaurant he frequented in Gorky Street, he suddenly suffered stomach pangs – they had poisoned him. An old gentleman in the restaurant rushed up to help, saying he was a doctor, and Penkovsky was rushed to the Kremlin Polyclinic. The KGB team immediately moved into his apartment and searched it – but found nothing, because Penkovsky had hidden his one-time pads, Minox cassettes and other spy paraphernalia in a trick drawer in his desk.
With Penkovsky still hospitalised, the KGB then investigated his upstairs neighbour, who worked as a steel trust executive. The man’s boss was persuaded to grant him a holiday in the Caucasus, and once he was safely away the KGB moved two officers into the apartment. They drilled a hole in the floor and installed a peephole camera so they could watch Penkovsky in his living room. They set up an observation post across the river, and the officers in the apartment also used a camera attached to a pot of geraniums that could be extended via cable from the balcony to take photographs of Penkovsky at work. Once enough evidence had been gathered, they poisoned Penkovsky again, using a wax smeared on his chair in his office at the State Committee that caused a skin rash, and this time a search of his apartment uncovered his equipment.
So according to Nosenko, Oleg Penkovsky had been detected, just like Popov before him, ‘almost by chance’ as the result of the routine surveillance of diplomats in Moscow.
Despite all this astonishing new information, Bagley wasn’t keen on Nosenko defecting. It’s usually far more advantageous to have an agent remain in place with access to classified information: once they defect all they can do is mine memories that become increasingly unreliable and are eventually made obsolete. For various reasons, Bagley also didn’t trust Nosenko’s account of why he had to defect.
But there was no real choice. Nosenko claimed to have intelligence about Kennedy’s assassination, and the CIA couldn’t afford to pass up that opportunity – or for it ever to become known that they had turned it down on mere suspicions. Bagley and a team of CIA officers drove Yuri Nosenko to Frankfurt, where a few days later he was placed on a plane bound for the United States.