Chief Marshal of Soviet Artillery, Sergei Varentsov, was head of the Soviet tactical missile forces, which included nuclear weapons. His friendship with Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU went back to WWII, when Penkovsky had served as his personal liaison officer.
Varentsov had a daughter, Nina, by his beautiful first wife, Anya, who died quite young of tuberculosis. Nina inherited her mother’s looks and Varentsov doted on her, though he did not approve of her choice of husband.
In January 1944 Varentsov’s car was involved in a collision with a tank, resulting in a serious hip injury. He was confined to hospital in Moscow for three months with his hip and leg in plaster, suspended by traction pulleys.
During this time Penkovsky shuttled backwards and forwards between Varentsov’s hospital bed and his current command at the First Ukrainian Front. He also visited Varentsov’s family (his mother, second wife Ekaterina, and two daughters by Ekaterina) in Lvov, also the home city of Nina and her husband. Times were hard and there was very little food or new clothing.
When news came through to Varentsov that Nina’s husband and two of his associates had been shot for dealing in the black market he asked Penkovsky to check in on Nina and assess her state of mind. Penkovsky arrived to find Nina dead: she had killed herself the previous day. He sold his watch to pay for a coffin and a black dress for her body, and made sure she was buried in a proper grave. When he reported to Varentsov on these events, the latter embraced and kissed him, telling Penkovsky he was like his own son.
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Now, in 1955, their friendship was closer than ever. Varentsov regularly invited Penkovsky and his family to visit, particularly when he threw family parties at his dacha just outside Moscow, such as when his daughter Yelena and her husband – a nephew of General Ivan Kupin – took leave from his assignment in East Germany.
Penkovsky had risen rapidly through the officer ranks during the war and later joined the GRU, winning promotion to the rank of colonel. At thirty-six he was in excellent physical condition and passably handsome, though he registered some concern over his receding hairline. To those who knew him well he was considered vain, but this was not always obvious on first acquaintance. He adored his wife, Vera, and their young daughter Galina who was now eight. Vera was the daughter of General Dmitri Gapanovich, who had died in 1952. Galina was in the same class at school as Varentsov’s third daughter, Natasha.
After dinner at the dacha parties the ladies would withdraw, leaving the men to discuss military matters. Emboldened by the liberating effects of good wine, the men would talk openly and often critically about the views and lifestyles of the most senior politicians and military personnel.
In this way, and in the course of other occasional meetings with Varentsov in Moscow, Penkovsky got to hear much about Soviet political and military thinking at the highest levels. In these informal seminars, he learned of Khrushchev’s concepts for Soviet military strategy, and the more he heard, the more he feared that Khrushchev would lead the Soviet Union into a disastrous war with the West.
Penkovsky’s growing interest in international politics made the news of his posting to Turkey all the more welcome and exciting. The appointment was as acting military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Ankara. He was informed at the outset that someone else would eventually be appointed military attaché, at which time he would be demoted to assistant military attaché. This hurt Penkovsky, who felt he had, by this point, served long enough as a colonel to warrant promotion to major-general. He had always received glowing performance appraisals from his superiors, and was an earnest and longstanding member of the Communist party, having joined in 1938. This slight by way of temporary promotion seems to have marked the beginning of Penkovsky’s dissatisfaction with his unappreciative superiors and the system behind them.
The other disappointing aspect of the posting was that he and Vera would have to leave their daughter Galina behind in Moscow. The reason given for this was that there was no suitable education available for Galina in Ankara, but in truth it was normal practice for Soviet officials sent to Western countries to be required to leave a close family member behind, reducing any risk of defection.
Turkey was a member of the powerful Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and stood right on the border with the Soviet Union. It was thus a strategically important place to both East and West.
On 9 May 1955, West Germany joined NATO, which greatly improved the organisation’s ability to defend Western Europe from Soviet invasion. In direct response, on 14 May, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact, a similar alliance for mutual defence, comprising the USSR, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania.
It was all quite perplexing for Penkovsky, who had expected Khrushchev to use the strength of the opposing alliances as a justification to expedite plans for a nuclear attack on the West. With these thoughts churning round in his mind, Penkovsky completed the briefing for his posting to Ankara.
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The year 1955 was a busy but unspectacular one for Ivan Serov as he strove to find an effective operational formula for his KGB in the post-Stalin era. He was determined that the KGB would retain the power of its predecessor, the MGB, to stamp down hard on anyone who dared to question or tried to undermine the supreme power of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. This applied to the representatives of foreign countries as well as to Soviet citizens.
His problem was that Khrushchev, who had appointed him the first chairman of the KGB, sought to rehabilitate the public image of the secret police. No longer ‘the butcher of the Ukraine’ Khrushchev was not Stalin, who had once accused him of ‘populism’, and seems to have been aware of the necessary limits of even totalitarian state power – or, as the Soviets preferred to call it, ‘centralised democracy’. Serov reluctantly accepted his orders but was determined to continue his fight against the enemies of the people in his own remorseless style.
Serov stepped up the KGB’s efforts to harass the staff of Western embassies. Security offensives on embassy staff, offices and residences, together with severe travel restrictions and intentionally clumsy administrative procedures sapped morale. Electronic scans by various embassies’ technical staff uncovered more hidden microphones than ever. Members of staff were followed more closely, both on foot and in vehicles. Requests to travel outside the ten-mile restriction zone in Moscow took up to two weeks for approval and, even once granted, approval was often withdrawn at the last minute on the slightest pretext. Even the use of a different car from the vehicle listed on the original request could result in the cancellation of an approved travel permit.
Serov gave instructions to redouble action to compromise and blackmail staff in foreign embassies and these met with some success. John Vassall worked as a clerk in the British Embassy Naval Attaché’s office. The KGB discovered that he was homosexual and, in 1955, invited him to a gay party where he was photographed in some highly compromising positions. He succumbed to blackmail and started to spy for the Soviet Union when he returned to the UK in 1956. For the next seven years Vassall passed thousands of highly classified documents and photographs to the KGB. These included information about British radar, torpedoes and anti-submarine equipment.
Vassall was arrested on 12 September 1962, following a lengthy investigation begun by warnings from Soviet defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko of his ‘turning’ by the KGB. Sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment, Vassall was released in 1972, having served only ten years. This relative leniency on the most serious of Cold War-era charges reflected, in part, a degree of public and governmental sympathy, as Vassall was widely thought to have been a victim of circumstances. Despite his attempt to explain and justify himself in a 1975 autobiography, Vassall felt compelled to change his name, and died in obscurity in 1996.