The New Year did not start well for Penkovsky. He was just about ready to leave for New Delhi, having completed his pre-posting training and briefing when, on 5 January 1960, the Deputy Chief of GRU Personnel, Major-General A. A. Shumsky, called him in to say his posting had been cancelled.
Shumsky told him the KGB had discovered that his father had fought for the Tsar as a 1st Lieutenant in the White Guards, and had been killed in fighting near Rostov in 1919. His grandfather had been a nobleman: a judge in Stavropol. People with such anti-revolutionary family backgrounds had an automatic question mark against their names when it came to permission to travel overseas. Shumsky acknowledged that none of this was Penkovsky’s fault, but the real problem was that this information did not tally with what Penkovsky had originally said about his father, namely, that he was an engineer who had died of typhus in 1919.
When Penkovsky protested that he only recorded what his mother had told him, Shumsky suggested that he should ask his mother to provide a written statement about his father, and this she did: she wrote two pages recounting how, when she was eighteen, she met Vladimir Florianovich Penkovsky. They soon married and she became pregnant. Vladimir often disappeared for days at a time. He was called up for military service and, when Oleg was just four months old, Vladimir went away and never returned.
His mother’s letter was placed in Penkovsky’s file, but it was of little help. One small consolation was that the KGB had placed a note on top of the record of all of this saying ‘We trust Colonel Penkovsky’. Nevertheless, the cancellation of his posting to India was final. Penkovsky was furious and this incident removed any lingering doubts he may have harboured about passing secrets to the West.
He spent nearly two months on the GRU reserve list, doing virtually nothing. Then, on 29 February, he was assigned to a senior position on the operational side.
Part of his duties was to take charge of military training, including the weekly ‘Commander Day’. He conducted seminars and set examinations on new field service regulations. He also had to take his turn as duty desk officer, which entailed looking at telegrams and dealing with any emergencies that arose out of normal office hours.
He was the duty desk officer on the night of 1 May when the news arrived that an American pilot (later identified as Gary Powers) was in custody after his U-2 spy plane had been shot down. Powers was being taken to Moscow by plane and Penkovsky was asked to stand by to interrogate him as he was the only officer available who could speak English.
He immediately reported the incident to several generals who would need to know about it. Unhappily, from Penkovsky’s point of view, the KGB suddenly found their own English interpreter and took Powers under KGB control. This upset Penkovsky, not only because he had narrowly failed to be the first person to interview Powers, but because the U-2 was a military plane that had been shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft weapons and the whole issue should therefore have been handled by the military GRU rather than the KGB.
Penkovsky was at first mystified that the U-2 had been brought down at all. It must have been operating at 65,000 feet and no Soviet weapons – either plane or rocket – had ever succeeded in hitting a target at that height. However, he quickly learned the true story and was later able to discuss it at his weekly ‘Commander Day’ class.
There had been a number of U-2 spy flights in recent months and the Soviet defence forces were expecting another anytime from 28 April onwards, because Penkovsky’s successor in Ankara reported that on 26 and 27 April a U-2, a C-124 fuel transporter and a C-130 transporter had left the American Base at Incirlik in Turkey, and were seen landing at the American Base at Peshawar in Pakistan. The Soviets assumed it would fly right across the Soviet Union, taking in the missile sites on a route across the Aral Sea, Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk, before landing in Norway.* All of the Air Defence Units along that route were on Red Alert. The Lieutenant-General of the Air Force, Yevgeny Savitsky, was in charge of the operation. Over the previous three months he had had several Su-9s stripped of their armaments and modified so that they could fly much higher than their standard maximum of 55,000 feet, and he gave the pilots an order to ram the U-2 if they could get near it. (Penkovsky must have smiled to himself when he heard this part for he knew it would have been a futile exercise.)
The U-2 was detected on 1 May, soon after it crossed the Soviet border with Pakistan but the route it took kept it out of range of most surface-to-air missile sites. Four MiG-19s followed it all the way but there was nothing much they could do because the U-2 flew far above the maximum altitude the MiGs could reach. The spy plane reached Sverdlovsk before a battery of V-75 ground-to-air missiles launched. One of them headed for the U-2, exploding just before it reached the plane. However, the shock wave caught the U-2, causing sufficient damage to the tail and wing assembly to disable it. Powers was concussed but managed to eject. He blacked out several times on the way down.
On hearing the report from the KGB (not exactly the true report described above), Khrushchev decided to keep quiet about the incident and allow the Americans to confess their own violation of international law, or attempt a cover-up.
On 4 May – three days after the incident – the Americans announced that a NASA weather research aircraft had gone missing over northern Turkey. They said it had reported difficulties with the pilot’s oxygen supply.
Khrushchev was then able to launch one of his most successful propaganda coups by condemning the American lies and announcing that the U-2 had been shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. He did not say anything about the pilot.
The Americans naturally assumed that the pilot had been killed – as he most certainly would have been had the missile exploded into the aircraft – so they came up with the fanciful story that the plane may have strayed accidentally into Soviet air space if the pilot had passed out and the plane continued on automatic pilot.
On 7 May, a week after the spy plane had been brought down, Khrushchev announced that he had deliberately refrained from divulging that the pilot was alive and well. He joyfully said: ‘Now, just look how many silly things the Americans have said.’
Not only was the pilot, Gary Powers, still alive but his plane was also largely intact. The Soviets recovered the surveillance camera and even developed some of the photographs. The incident resulted in great humiliation for Eisenhower’s administration, caught in a lie.
While Khrushchev had a convincing propaganda victory in this U-2 incident, he was still disturbed by the fact that U-2s could fly over Soviet territory with virtual impunity. This may have triggered his dangerous reaction when another US Air Force plane was brought down just two months later.
On 1 July 1960 an American RB-47 electronic reconnaissance aircraft was following its planned route parallel to the Kola Peninsula in the Barents Sea when it was shot down by Soviet fighter planes. Only two of the six-man crew survived, having been picked up by Soviet fishing vessels. Penkovsky later confirmed to the Americans and British that the Soviets knew the American plane was in international air space, but Khrushchev nevertheless congratulated the Soviet Air Force, saying: ‘Well done, boys, keep them from even flying close.’
‡
Shortly after the U-2 incident there was a programme of staff reductions within the GRU. Penkovsky managed to hold onto his job for another three months before being transferred to the Staff College of the Soviet Army in Senior Instructor grade. This college was more commonly known within the GRU as the Military-Diplomatic Academy (MDA). It was a joint GRU–KGB establishment under the administrative control of the GRU. Its foundation course was a three-year programme leading to a doctorate-level diploma in intelligence gathering and there were short mid-career, refresher and other specialised courses. The classes were run specifically for GRU, KGB, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other staff headed for foreign assignments.
Penkovsky was disappointed at not being appointed the head of a course, which would have brought promotion to the rank of general. Initially, he was in the Mandate Commission, responsible for vetting applications and selecting the best sixty from the 150 or so applicants for each class. The process included lengthy interviews with the candidates by Penkovsky, and in this capacity he got to know an immense amount of personal and career information about the brightest officers in all of the services. He laboriously copied most of these records for his own further use.
Penkovsky was now determined to make his move. He wrote a letter to the American authorities giving full personal information, stating the kind of intelligence he could offer to the West and describing two ways for the American authorities to contact him: one, by chalk marks on a lamppost indicating that a message had been left in a specified dead-letter drop, and the other, as a last resort, by telephone. He put the letter in an envelope together with a photograph of himself alongside the American Colonel Peeke in Turkey as further evidence of his bona fides. In another envelope he placed copies of some secret documents as a sample of the quality of intelligence to which he had access. He kept both envelopes with him always, on the off-chance of meeting an American who could deliver them to the embassy.
Penkovsky was extremely popular with the staff and students and was well thought of by General Khlopov, the head of the academy. At the end of July, after the new academic year students had been selected, Khlopov encouraged Penkovsky to take some leave. He went to Odessa with his wife and daughter.
On the return journey, on 10 August, they were in the same compartment as a small group of American Russian language students, two of whom were older than the others: perhaps teachers rather than students. The teachers were called Eldon and Henry. (He later learned that their full names were Eldon Cox and Henry Cobb.) Penkovsky would like to have approached Cox and Cobb about delivering a message to the American Embassy in Moscow but he could not do so in front of his wife and daughter. In any case, the group was accompanied by a KGB agent in the guise of an official guide, as was standard practice in the Soviet Union at that time.
Back in Moscow, he started to spend some time near the American Embassy watching out for Cox and Cobb, or anyone else he might entrust with his envelopes. Across from the embassy was an alley with seats. He sat there for a long time, smoking and watching embassy cars come and go, but no suitable pedestrians passed by. He knew this was a risky tactic as there were always two Soviet militiamen guarding the embassy, on the lookout for possible defectors.
Having no luck there, he went to the American House; a large building that housed many junior members of the embassy staff, with recreational facilities for movies and bingo along with a well-stocked bar. Again, he was vulnerable to the watchful eyes of Soviet militia near the entrance, and, once more no opportunity arose to pass on his precious envelopes.
His luck changed the next day, 12 August, when he spotted Cox and Cobb walking through the rain from Red Square towards the river. He approached them and, with a smile, introduced himself as the man who, with his wife and daughter, had been in the same train compartment as them a few days earlier.
He explained that he could not have a conversation with them on the train because of the ‘guide’ who accompanied the Americans. Cox and Cobb acknowledged this and listened with some mistrust and even fear as Penkovsky explained that he wanted to help the West and would be eternally grateful if the students could deliver two envelopes that he produced from his pockets to the American Embassy.
Penkovsky had become aware of two militiamen a short distance along the road. One was talking to a woman and the other was walking along slowly in their direction. He quickly thrust the envelopes into Cox’s hands. Cox looked at them with a dazed expression, but he, too, had noticed the militiamen and started to walk away quickly, still looking at the envelopes. Cobb went with him. Penkovsky had never felt so afraid in all his life, including his wartime ventures. He had intended to complete the exercise by telling them what they should do and say when they handed the envelopes over at the American Embassy, and by asking them to leave a mark with a ballpoint pen on the corner of a particular wall to report the safe delivery of the envelopes. As he watched, he saw Cox put one of the envelopes in his pocket. ‘Please put the other one away, too,’ he pleaded silently.
After Penkovsky had gone, Cobb – still fearing that it might be a trap – returned to his hotel, but Cox was more positive and decided to take the envelopes to the embassy right away. He arrived there just after midnight and nervously satisfied the Soviet militiaman standing guard outside the embassy that he was an American citizen. The Marine on security phoned through to John Abidian, the officer on duty that night. Cox explained what had happened and handed the envelopes to Abidian, asking him to pass them on to the Deputy Head of Mission.
After Cox had left the embassy, Abidian called in Edward Freers, the Deputy Head of Mission, who studied the contents of the envelopes. He came to the conclusion that Penkovsky was an agent provocateur, but he also consulted Ambassador Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson. Thompson, a career diplomat, felt that CIA activities at overseas missions usually interfered with the normal process of improving diplomatic relations.† It was no surprise, therefore, that he strongly supported Freers’s line. Freers sent a telegram to the CIA, describing what had happened and advising them of the embassy’s conclusion that Penkovsky was an agent provocateur. The envelopes and their contents were dispatched to the CIA by diplomatic bag.
It seems strange that this action within the embassy was apparently taken by bona fide diplomatic staff. However, given the conditions in Moscow in those days it was exceedingly difficult for embassy-based members of the security services to function effectively. There was therefore no CIA station at the American Embassy, though there may have been a ‘singleton’ working quietly under cover of a diplomatic appointment, unbeknown to most members of staff and possibly even to the ambassador.‡
Penkovsky never saw Cox and Cobb again – they left Moscow on 15 August – so he did not know until several months later what had happened to the envelopes.
Washington
The cable and the envelopes arrived on the desk of Jack Maury, the head of the Soviet Division in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans. Maury read the embassy’s negative report and the content of the envelopes, but his reaction was positive, typifying the gulf between diplomatic and intelligence service perspectives. First, however, he would need verification of the American Embassy’s report on Penkovsky passing the envelopes to Cox and Cobb, and to familiarise himself with the CIA’s files on Penkovsky. He delegated these investigations to Joseph Bulik, the head of the CIA’s Internal Soviet section.
Bulik, whose parents came from Slovakia, was a tall, handsomely rugged man in his mid-forties. He had studied animal husbandry at Wyoming University and held a degree in agriculture from Minnesota University. Towards the end of the war he was appointed as the agricultural attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow, holding that position from 1944 until 1948, after which he joined the CIA. He knew Moscow and understood the plight of the Soviet people, sympathising with their suffering during and after the war, and sensed the probable futility of their attempts to find economic, social and military solutions through Communism.
He was meticulous, methodical and careful. He tracked down first Cobb and then Cox, who had gone their separate ways after their travels. They each confirmed their parts in the story and identified Penkovsky from an ‘identity parade’ of photographs Bulik produced. He found confirmation of Penkovsky’s service in Ankara in CIA files, but he considered it would not be appropriate, on security grounds, to contact Colonel Peeke. In the event that Penkovsky’s offer was genuine, it would be essential to keep his name and identity absolutely secret.
The large envelope contained, among other things, Penkovsky’s detailed notes on the Gary Powers U-2 incident. The Americans could not understand what had happened to the U-2 because their only sources of information were Khrushchev’s announcements and the public exhibits. Penkovsky’s notes gave them all the answers: now it made sense. On top of that, the notes belittled the Soviet inability to shoot down the U-2 with effective hits from missiles. The Soviets simply did not admit fault like this, even to give credence to an agent provocateur. Bulik’s judgement, and that of other CIA experts he consulted without identifying Penkovsky, was that Penkovsky’s offer was genuine and they should follow up on it.
Maury endorsed Bulik’s recommendation and somehow got it past James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, who could never bring himself to accept that a Soviet defector could be genuine.
As noted above, one of the two letters in Penkovsky’s smaller envelope outlined two methods to contact him. One was a dead-letter drop, with detailed information about its exact location and the placing of chalk marks to indicate that the drop had been made. The other was a phone call, to be made on a Sunday at exactly 10 a.m.: two rings and hang up, followed by a proper call.
The problem now was that the CIA had no one in place at the Moscow embassy to make the dead drop or the phone call, and Ambassador Thompson would not permit any of his staff to become involved in such activity. In fact, Ambassador Thompson would not even make any residential or office accommodation available for a senior CIA agent to be flown out to Moscow to engage with Penkovsky.
In the end, the CIA had to settle for sending a junior and relatively inexperienced officer who would be described as a janitor on the embassy staff list. His code name was COMPASS. The short, balding bachelor spoke very little Russian, but he was enthusiastic and committed.
Moscow
COMPASS turned out to be something of a disaster. After his arrival in Moscow he became paranoid about being followed by the KGB. He saw agents, imaginary and otherwise, everywhere. In the end, his paranoia advanced to the point where he was incapable of leaving the embassy. He began to drink too much. He decided that the best dead drop would be for Penkovsky to throw his material over the wall of embassy residential accommodation, even though the Soviet militia constantly watched that area.
Crucially, he was incapable of placing a message in the dead drop specified by Penkovsky in his letter. One Sunday morning he tried to make the phone call, but he phoned at 11 a.m. – an hour later than specified by Penkovsky – did not hang up after two rings and call back, as specified in Penkovsky’s letter, and when he finally succeeded in making contact, managed only to spout a few words of incomprehensible gibberish.
COMPASS was sent home and that line of possible communication with Penkovsky was in ruins.
For the next three months Penkovsky lived in hope and fear: hope that his letters had reached the CIA and that he would be contacted by them; fear – increasing by the day – that the letters had fallen into the hands of the KGB or some other Soviet authority. He clutched at straws, seeing an apparently increasing number of Western diplomatic cars pass by his apartment, their drivers or passengers looking up as if searching for him. There had been one phone call, an hour after the appointed time, by some drunk who spoke unintelligible Russian and English.
At the worst, he hoped Cox had destroyed his letters rather than let them fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities. With this in mind, he prepared a new package of sample intelligence material and a covering letter which he could give to someone else to deliver to the American Embassy. He addressed it to ‘President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America’.
‡
On returning to work after his holiday, Penkovsky was called in by Khlopov. After some pleasantries about his holiday, Khlopov told him they had been reorganising courses and were going to give him a senior instructor job, teaching tactics. This change had been approved by General Salodovnikov, the head of the Faculty of Tactics, who was, said Khlopov, looking forward to Penkovsky joining his team.
Penkovsky refused the job which, he told Khlopov, was for 60- or 65-year-old officers, not for people like himself who were still young and had further to go in their careers.
He again went to General Shumsky, who immediately passed him on to the head of the directorate, General Smolikov. Penkovsky detested Smolikov: a heavy-drinking philanderer, he had a tasteless, eclectic collection of furniture in his apartment, at least one item of which (the refrigerator) he had won playing cards.
Speaking firmly to his superior officer, Penkovsky asked him what was going on. Was this – he asked – because his father had fought on the Tsar’s side? Was this the end of his career?
Smolikov offered his sympathy but confirmed that it seemed that the noble blood in his veins was proving to be a serious liability in the eyes of the KGB’s personnel security department. The party’s Central Committee now knew his family history and were unlikely to approve any submission for him to work overseas.
Penkovsky still refused to accept the instructor appointment and was again placed in the reserves. He resorted to seeking assistance from his friend, Marshal Varentsov, who spoke to Serov.
Soon, on 15 November, Penkovsky was appointed to the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work (GKKNIR), which came under the aegis of the Department of Foreign Relations.§ This organisation was run jointly by the KGB and GRU with the purpose of gathering intelligence about scientific and technical developments in foreign countries. It operated largely through overt trade mission visits, sending delegates to international trade fares. Penkovsky was initially put in charge of the Canadian section but within a month the Australian section was added. Then there was a staff shortage and they asked him to make arrangements for a forthcoming trade delegation from the United Kingdom, led by British businessman Greville Wynne.
Wynne, with his expensive suit, strongly coloured tie, pencil moustache and greased hair, tried to adopt the looks and disposition of a serious businessman but succeeded only in looking the part of a stereotypical used car salesman. He had served in the Army Intelligence Corps during the war, but was an engineer by profession and now represented about a dozen companies exporting machine tools, electrical and electronic equipment to East European countries and the Soviet Republics. He regularly attended trade fairs and exhibitions and visited the relevant ministries on behalf of his clients, but this was the first time he had organised a trade mission for eight of his largest companies.
It had become routine for someone from MI6 to debrief Wynne on his return to the UK after each visit to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. He would give information about the contacts he had made. He was an occasional agent for MI6 but not an employee.
In November 1960, MI6 officer Dick Franks invited Wynne to lunch and asked him not just to report back after his forthcoming trip to the Soviet Union, but to seek an appointment with the GKKNIR and make personal contact with some of its staff.
He went to Moscow on 1 December to discuss plans for his trade mission and arranged a meeting with several members of the GKKNIR. Around the table, one well-dressed and neatly groomed man stood out. It was Penkovsky.
Penkovsky let his work on Canadian projects drop so that he could concentrate on servicing the British delegation of twelve people representing eight companies, which was due to arrive on 8 December. He had to prepare presentations, get together a panel of specialist electrical engineering experts for each presentation, arrange receptions, and invite Soviet officials with an interest in the proceedings. There were many phone calls to make and schedules to be drawn up.
He met the members of the delegation when they arrived on 8 December. They spent the next three days in and around Moscow, and on 12 December he accompanied them to Leningrad. That night, Penkovsky found himself in a relatively private situation with two of the delegates: Arthur Merriman and John McBride. It was Penkovsky’s nature to be impressed by military and scientific qualifications so he addressed himself to Merriman rather than McBride. McBride went to bed, leaving Penkovsky and Merriman alone.
Penkovsky explained that he had an important task for him. He had a package that needed to reach the American Embassy. Without hesitation, Merriman replied in his best ‘old boy’ voice that he most certainly could not do that.
Still sprightly and alert at sixty-eight, Dr Arthur Merriman GC, DFC, OBE, MA, MEd, DSc, CIMechE, FRSE had been an officer in the Royal Engineers during the war and afterwards became a government scientist. He was Britain’s top metallurgist, and the Soviet Union was desperate for the most up-to-date information about metals, particularly those used in the design and production of military weapons and vehicles.
With hindsight, Penkovsky realised that his approach to Merriman had been too sudden and too blatant.
After returning to Moscow from Leningrad, Penkovsky saw Wynne as a potentially useful contact and tried to curry favour with him. But he refrained, at that time, from asking his assistance with the packet.
Penkovsky went to the airport to see off the members of the trade mission. He caught Merriman alone for a few moments and this time asked him simply to inform the Americans that they should phone him at home on any Sunday at 10 a.m., repeating what he had written in the covering letter that Cox had – hopefully – delivered to the American Embassy some months earlier.
Merriman, like Wynne, had debriefing sessions with MI6 after his trips to Eastern Europe. When he returned on this occasion, he reported his two encounters with Penkovsky. MI6, in turn, arranged for him to talk to a CIA representative at the American Embassy.
‡
In the summer of 1960 Ruari and Janet Chisholm returned early from an overseas posting in Singapore. Janet was expecting their third child and the doctor thought it would be safest for her to deliver in the UK. Chisholm was assigned to the East European and Soviet Section at MI6 headquarters on a temporary basis pending another overseas posting. He was then transferred to Moscow in the autumn of 1960 as head of the MI6 station, with cover as the chief of the visa section.
He and Janet, now with three children, were allocated a large apartment in one of the diplomatic blocks along Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Ruari’s office was on the third floor of the east wing of the British Embassy building, from where he was able to look directly across the Moscow River to the Kremlin.
‡
On 4 January 1960, OVIR, the KGB-controlled Soviet Visa and Registration Department, summoned Lee Harvey Oswald and gave him the details of his new life under Communism. He arrived in Minsk on 6 January and, a week later, began work at an electronics factory.
Oswald’s factory pay was supplemented by an equal amount from the Soviet Red Cross, which made him as affluent as the factory’s most senior supervisors. He lived in an excellent apartment overlooking the river; again, well above the standard of Soviet-born shop-floor workers. He was a good ‘catch’ for factory and other local girls and was far from shy in taking advantage of this. He was, however, disappointed with the technical level of work he was given: cutting metal on a lathe.
He worked hard at first but in the course of time his fundamental instability manifested, leading to arguments, and even fights, with his fellow workers. The KGB saw this and were far from impressed. He was not suitable material for a professional KGB agent, but his temper and limited intellectual capacity did not rule him out for single operations.
He did not communicate with his family members or anyone else in the United States during this period. All attempts to find him by his mother, Marguerite, and by the State Department and the US Embassy in Moscow, failed.
When Oswald had left the Marine Corps he automatically became a member of the US Marine Corps Reserves, which carried an obligation to serve again if called upon. The USMC Reserves’ administration office, having heard of Oswald’s attempted renunciation of US citizenship and his application for Soviet citizenship, gave him an ‘undesirable discharge’ on 17 August 1960. The official notification of this was sent to Marguerite.
Towards the end of 1960 Oswald started to tire of the lifestyle in the Soviet Union. The apartment, the wages and the girls were fine, but then there was the Communist Party regimentation, lectures and propaganda. He had to attend mass physical exercise sessions, and travel with his factory colleagues to a collective farm to help with the potato harvest.
In December, he wrote to the American Embassy telling them he wished to return to the United States and asking what action was required. The KGB intercepted the letter and it was never delivered.
* Sverdlovsk was renamed Yekaterinburg in 1991.
† The majority of American ambassadors were political appointees, particularly at larger, more important, embassies. The appointment of a career diplomat at such a large mission was unusual.
‡ The first head of CIA station in Moscow was Paul Garbler, who did not arrive there until 30 November 1961.
§ He was actually appointed to the GNTK (State Committee for Science and Technology), which was reorganised in 1961 to become the GKKNIR. For ease of reference and continuity ‘GKKNIR’ is used throughout to cover Penkovsky’s appointment to this body.