Many of those involved in the Penkovsky operation never shook themselves free of it. In 1966, the CIA paid Greville Wynne a $213,700 ‘resettlement’ package, but he nevertheless continued to have financial difficulties. He sued the Daily Mirror for their 1962 article, which had suggested he had staged his arrest as a practical joke, and was awarded ‘substantial’ damages. He also published two ghost-written memoirs in which he claimed, in contradiction to his testimony at the trial, that he had worked for British intelligence for years before the operation.
He moved to Malta, and in 1969 approached British screenwriter Jack Whittingham to write a film about his experiences. Whittingham flew out to meet him several times, but although the script was finished it was never filmed. His experiences did eventually become the basis for a BBC TV series, Wynne and Penkovsky, broadcast in 1985.
Wynne finally settled in Majorca, where he had a business exporting roses, and he occasionally appeared in the British press to comment on other spy cases, sometimes revisiting his own. In 1990, he died of throat cancer in London, a few weeks short of his seventy-first birthday.
After leaving Moscow, the Chisholms moved to the Sussex countryside. Close by was a mansion that had belonged to an aristocrat who had died in the 1920s, and which had not been cared for much since. They discovered shortly after moving in that the house was used by Soviet diplomats for weekend retreats. The Chisholm children were delighted. ‘We thought it was very exciting that it was the Russians’ place,’ says Janie, ‘and we used to run around, and every now and again we would see a face at the window.’
The Chisholm children presumed that their father was simply a diplomat and their mother a housewife: Janie, who as a seven-year-old had been given sweets by Penkovsky in the park off Tsvetnoy Boulevard, had no memory of those occasions, and assumed that her parents’ involvement with Penkovsky had been a fabrication by the Soviet authorities. In 1963, Ruari and Janet had told the Daily Express that they had never spied on anyone, and they stuck to that story: once the newspapers had left their front door, Ruari didn’t speak about the affair. ‘My father was one of these people who came back from the office at six o’clock in the evening and would switch off and be a country type, chopping logs,’ says Janie. ‘He didn’t bring his work home with him. After the Penkovsky case, he was obviously blown for any posting, and so his attitude to MI6 was a little bit, “Oh well, it’s the day job.” The only posting he got after that was South Africa, presumably because the South Africans didn’t mind having someone who had blotted his copybook in the Soviet Union.’
When she was eighteen, Janie wandered into her parents’ bedroom and rummaged through one of her father’s drawers looking for a pair of socks to wear. She found some socks, but also a passport with his photograph in it, and someone else’s name. ‘I was completely terrified,’ she says, ‘and thought, “My God, my father’s an international criminal or something – what is going on?”’ After telling her mother of her discovery, she was summoned by her father to his garden shed, where he explained that he worked for MI6 – which in those days officially didn’t even exist. He never spoke about it again, but she remembers being most surprised by the fact that diplomats didn’t use their roles to engage in a little espionage on the side, but that MI6 was an entirely separate organisation and that, in effect, her father’s entire career had been a cover for something else: ‘Suddenly to think he wasn’t a diplomat, and he was never going to become an ambassador because he didn’t have that career path, that was a surprise.’
In later life, Ruari Chisholm pursued an interest in military history. He wrote a book on the Boer War, and started work on a second about General von Lettow-Vorbeck. Stopping off in Tanzania to carry out some research for it, he caught cerebral malaria and died in Scotland in 1979, aged just fifty-four. His memorial mass was held at Westminster Cathedral.
Janet Chisholm died in 2004, aged seventy-five, a talented garden designer and a keen hiker and traveller. Shortly after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, she and her three sisters had tried to visit Russia, but her visa was turned down by the authorities at the last moment: perhaps even then, the name Chisholm was stored in a black book somewhere. ‘She was always very quiet about the Penkovsky case,’ says Janie, ‘even after the fall of the USSR when she no longer had to deny it. When friends tried to encourage her to speak proudly of her achievement, she used to say that it was all very sad because in the end a man had died. And that wasn’t false modesty.’
Janie describes her mother as ‘a classic colonel’s daughter’ who had a strong sense of loyalty to her country. ‘I think doing what she did was the last thing that would have come naturally to her – had it not been for the fact that she felt she had a duty to do it. She smoked in those days, and smoked even more as a result of the pressures of the case. And although I’m not sure exactly how the dates coincide, she had a miscarriage in Moscow (and a particularly gruelling time in a Soviet hospital) and I think it was very much taken for granted that it was as a result of the stress.’
Like his predecessor in Moscow, Gervase Cowell also became involved in military history. After being expelled from Moscow, and despite being mentioned by name in the trial, he went on to serve with MI6 in Bonn, Paris and Tel Aviv. He was later awarded the CMG Moscow for his part in the Penkovsky operation. He was an accomplished painter and sculptor, and exhibitions of his work were held in several cities he was posted to while he was in MI6.
He retired from MI6 in 1981, and translated the work of several Russian authors, including Vladimir Tendryakov and Ivan Valeriy. In 1988, he was appointed the Foreign Office’s adviser on the wartime work of the Special Operations Executive, despite not having served with that agency; he was widely admired as a tireless defender of its memory. He later became chairman of the Special Forces Club Historical Sub-Committee, a role he elegantly explained to the Queen on receiving his MBE shortly before his death: ‘I help the old to remember and the young to understand.’ He died in 2000. His name lives on in the acknowledgements pages of dozens of books on SOE, but his own role in the secret world, in running Oleg Penkovsky, and not passing that phone call on, is less appreciated. After his death, one of his friends was quoted as saying that Gerry Cowell would probably have been as happy to have been remembered for being ‘the only MI6 officer who had a set of verses in Japanese haiku format published in The Jerusalem Post’.
George Kisevalter, despite the trouble in Paris, was fêted by the CIA, who in April 1999 opened the Kisevalter Center for Advanced Studies. It is the only CIA facility named after an individual apart from the headquarters building, which was renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence on the same day. He was also honoured as one of the agency’s ‘Trailblazers’.
After leaving the CIA, Kisevalter became a real-estate agent near CIA headquarters in McLean, where many former officers live and work. He died in 1996, after dictating most of his life story to another former CIA officer, and real-estate colleague, Clarence Ashley. It was published as CIA SpyMaster in 2004.
Joe Bulik retired in 1976 and became a rancher in Colorado. At a dinner in Washington, he was given a medal, which he had to return at the end of the meal because it would have linked him with the agency. After a near-death experience in 1986, he wrote a memoir about his life, but the CIA censored it. They later allowed him to discuss the operation on the record, but he never forgave the ‘high-ups’ in the CIA who had left Penkovsky to his fate without intervening. He died in 1999, aged eighty-three.
Paul Garbler, the CIA’s first Station Chief in Moscow, fell victim to James Angleton’s paranoia. In 1963, Angleton set up an operation with the FBI, MI6 and MI5 codenamed HONETOL to find Soviet moles within Western intelligence agencies. Anatoli Golitsyn’s claims that there was a KGB mole in the CIA codenamed SASHA led to Garbler falling under suspicion, and his career stalled as a result. He was eventually cleared, and given a six-figure sum in compensation for the false allegations. He settled in Arizona, where he wrote self-published spy novels, one of which speculated that Golitsyn had himself been part of a KGB deception operation, designed to stir up Angleton and others in the CIA into a rabid mole-hunt. Garbler died in 2006, aged eighty-eight.
Harold Shergold died in 2000. He trained guide dogs as a hobby and lived a quiet life with his wife in Richmond. Shortly before his death, he maintained that despite the story ending in capture and execution, there had been little choice but to run the operation at the speed Penkovsky had wanted – anything else wouldn’t have worked.
One result of the Penkovsky operation was a revision of some of the tradecraft used on the streets of Moscow and a concerted attempt to better the technology and techniques. However, the basics of how the operation was run have not changed, and the need for human intelligence has not disappeared with improvements in technology. Case officers continue to run agents and gather intelligence using dead drops and face-to-face conversations, even if the dead drops are now often electronic and the conversations take place via encrypted video conferencing. The analysis of intelligence from these sources also still requires the astute assessment of human psychology. All intelligence is human in the end, dictated by the same motivations as have always existed: better and more reliable technology doesn’t make someone a better or more reliable source.
Espionage doesn’t have as high a profile as it did during the Cold War, but it continues all the same, and always will. Espionage is in itself a cold war: it is waged in secret against one’s enemies and has far fewer fatalities than a hot war, but it’s a war nevertheless.
Neither have the risks faded since the end of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear extinction has never been more vivid than it was in 1961 and 1962, and it would have been constantly on the minds of all those involved in this operation. But the odds of nuclear war have, if anything, increased as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of volatile rogue states, even if the possibility is no longer as prevalent in our minds. Sources like Oleg Penkovsky are currently desperately needed in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.