The first three weeks of April 1961 had been incredibly fraught for the intelligence organisations of Britain, the Soviet Union and America. George Blake was arrested on 4 April and confessed his treachery as a Soviet mole inside MI6. On 12 April the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into space. On 17 April, a small army of Cuban exiles supported and part-funded by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs in a dismally unsuccessful attempt to invade Castro’s Cuba. On 20 April, a Soviet Trade Mission led by Oleg Penkovsky was due to arrive in London.
The two-man American team arrived in London on 19 April, giving them just enough time to finalise arrangements for debriefing Penkovsky and to discuss their modus operandi with the British team.
For obvious security reasons the four men used aliases, though with their actual first names: George McAdam [Kisevalter], Joseph Welk [Bulik], Harold Hazlewood [Shergold] and Michael Fairfield [Stokes].
Penkovsky and the other five members of the Soviet Trade Mission were greeted at the airport by Greville Wynne, who saw them safely into their hotel, the Mount Royal. They all met late in the afternoon for a final briefing about their itinerary and other administrative arrangements. An early dinner was followed by drinks and they were then encouraged to have an early night.
Wynne had warned Penkovsky that certain people wished to see him at nine o’clock in the evening, or soon thereafter. After the drinks session Wynne and Penkovsky left together ‘to tie up some loose ends’, and soon arrived at Room 712 which was registered in the name of Harold Hazlewood [Shergold]. Shergold and Bulik were waiting there for them. Wynne left immediately, his task having been completed. After introductions, they took Penkovsky to Room 360 which was larger and more appropriate for the debriefing, particularly as it had no windows. Stokes and Kisevalter were already there and, after further introductions, they all sat round a small circular serving table.
Kisevalter: Would you prefer to speak in Russian or English? Penkovsky: I would much rather speak Russian because I can express myself better in Russian.
Thereafter, for this and for all future meetings, the debriefing was carried out in Russian with Kisevalter taking the lead role. There were occasional switches to English when any of the other three wished to ask a question or seek clarification, and when Penkovsky himself decided that English would better illustrate his point.
Penkovsky had been preparing himself for this moment for years. He had studiously collected an incredible amount of secret information and could barely wait to get it off his chest. The debriefing team had decided beforehand that they would initially allow Penkovsky to speak freely, at his own pace, and only rein him in if he started to wander off track.
At the outset Penkovsky drew blood from the CIA team.
Penkovsky: Well, gentlemen, let’s get to work. We have a great deal of important work to do. I have thought about this for a long time and I have attempted to make this contact taking a very devious path about which I feel I must report to you in full.
Kisevalter: You must know that we are in receipt of your original letter?
Penkovsky: You mean the one I gave to the two teachers? If you knew how many grey hairs I have acquired since that time; if you had only marked the signal so that I would have known the message got into the proper hands. I was worried so much about this.
To reassure him, Bulik pulled out the original copy of Penkovsky’s first letter, including the photograph of Colonel Peeke in Ankara.
Kisevalter: This is to reassure you as to why we did not respond immediately. We deliberately delayed signalling you until a secure manner for receipt of the materials you wanted to pass could be devised. This was done exclusively in consideration of your security.
Penkovsky: And, between friends, admit that you did not trust me. That is the most unpleasant and painful thing to me.
Kisevalter: No, it is quite the opposite.
Penkovsky then launched into his life story, incorporating much detail about GRU and military people, training and deployment. He had an incredible memory for names, faces and the minutiae of people’s lives. He was equally well versed in the disposition of Soviet forces and the technical specification and capability of their armaments. He spoke quickly and continuously and preferred his own idea of continuity to that of the debriefing team.
Kisevalter: Could you tell us about…?
Penkovsky: Yes, I’ll come to that in a minute, but first I want to tell you about [something else].
Penkovsky: I’ll remember the name of the Captain and tell you later.
Penkovsky: [About twenty minutes later, in the middle of talking about something completely different] The Captain I mentioned a while ago: he is Captain Yakovlev.
Penkovsky interposed his own thoughts and wishes with his intelligence reporting. They were sometimes surprisingly naive.
Penkovsky: Mr Harold [Shergold], what is the status of my request to formally meet a government representative? I want to present myself officially. It doesn’t have to be a specific lord, and I don’t expect to meet the Queen.
Kisevalter: [Not bothering to refer this to Shergold] Be assured; this is being taken care of.
Penkovsky: Also, I need some more money.
On another occasion he spoke about his commitment to the West.
Penkovsky: What I would like to do is to swear an oath of allegiance to you, to give you a signed statement and to swear an oath in order to formalise our relationship.
He gave his proposals for working for the Americans and British.
Penkovsky: But please give me your opinion of a Strategic Intelligence officer, now your soldier, your worker ready to fulfil any missions you may assign to me now and in the future. All I ask is for you to protect my life, and I only have three persons close to me: my wife, my mother and my daughter. I would be happy now to live in England or America myself, but I cannot leave them behind. It would drive me insane in time thinking about this should I leave them behind. I have to prepare a basis for my future existence and I believe that I can serve you most usefully in place for at least a year or two, particularly if I were to work under a specific directive set by you to fulfil missions which would be within my capability to accomplish.
He continued, then, to discuss financial arrangements, which included funding to help him to purchase a dacha (country house) near Moscow, and regular payments into a Western bank account to provide him with ready funds when the day of defection came.
He said he thought the West did not react strongly enough to Khrushchev’s aggressive statements, actions and threats.
Penkovsky: With Cuba, for example, I simply cannot understand why Khrushchev should not be sharply rebuked. I do not know what answer Mr Kennedy will give him, but he certainly should be accused of arming Cuba with Soviet tanks and guns, right under the gates of America. Kennedy should be firm. Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets. He is not ready for any war. I, certainly, in Kennedy’s place, would be firm. This is my opinion and the opinion of many of our officers. The day we arrived in London – the 20th – I read in the newspapers the next day that Castro claimed victory at the Bay of Pigs. I do not understand what that was about but it seems he is claiming victory over the Americans. Tell me, Gentlemen, that this is not true. You are too soft in the West.
And, later:
Penkovsky: Khrushchev will rant and rave and even send arms here and there just as he did to Cuba, and possibly even send small calibre rockets there. In fact there was talk about this with Castro, and possibly a few rockets are already there. But I read in that same newspaper, maybe it was the day before – that is, the day we arrived – that Khrushchev assured Kennedy that the Soviet Union has no bases or designs for bases in Cuba but warned him of the danger of any future invasions of the island by American forces, threatening renewed global war. Khrushchev is a liar and a warmonger.
It is necessary to call together all the leaders of the Free World and to arrange first their coordination, secondly their unity, and thirdly the material sacrifices which they must make in the name of common victory. If this is not done there will be a great disaster. Khrushchev and the General Staff can leave you behind. He is throwing together these rockets and he can do terrible damage with them. But in my estimation, and according to powerful people in the leadership, he will need two or three more years. But not longer, Gentlemen, not longer, believe me.
At one point Penkovsky said he had a plan to blow up all of the main military establishments in Moscow by placing small nuclear sabotage weapons in dustbins. He offered to plant the bombs himself and gave technical details about the timing devices (in the manner of later al Qaeda terrorists, he was intent upon simultaneous detonation) and the type of explosive that should be used.
Marshal Varentsov featured regularly in Penkovsky’s comments, either in the context of a story about a particular meeting or, more often, as the source of secret information.
The debriefing team protected Wynne.
Penkovsky: Tell me: do you think Wynne did the right thing by not taking all my material when I offered it to him?
Kisevalter: Remember, he is a simple mortal, and not an intelligence man.
Penkovsky: Don’t tell him anything about this.
There were sixteen meetings with the debriefing team during this visit by the Soviet Trade Mission (20 April to 6 May 1961), most of them in London, but some in Leeds and Birmingham. Nearly all these meetings were held in the evening, after Penkovsky had put in a full day’s work shepherding the Soviet delegates and dining with them. It was tiring but he thrived on it, being prepared to continue with the debriefing for as long as the team wished. It was often after midnight before they finished. Penkovsky, of course, also had specific assignments to perform for his GRU masters.
Kisevalter: Tell us about your mission here.
Penkovsky: I have to cultivate the acquaintance of people I meet, to get on good terms with them.
Kisevalter: What sort of man were they looking for: a businessman?
Penkovsky: Yes, but it doesn’t matter because every Englishman or American has, in our opinion, some possibility or other as an agent. Even if we don’t use them directly we can get in touch with other people through them, select those who are of interest to us, and give them money. We don’t give much.
Kisevalter: In other words, a contact or a spotter.
Penkovsky: I give you my word that I got into no agent relationship with any member of Wynne’s delegation. Quite the opposite, since I approached Merriman and McBride with my own problem; with my own life. Anyway, I have to find somebody, get to know them better, to work with them, estimate their value as agents, and if they have any value, to report to our Rezident in London about their possibilities. The Rezident would then assign an operational officer; probably Colonel Pavlov or Shapovalov. I would arrange a meeting with him and we might have a drink and so on. Then a further meeting would be arranged at which the Englishman’s weaknesses would be explored; perhaps he might be in debt or something. It might be possible to take advantages of these weaknesses, compromise him, and eventually get him into a compromising position for recruitment. Today the Rezident said to me that I should look out for new acquaintances at the Exhibition of Industrial Engineering and report on them to him not later than three days before we are due to leave.
Shergold arranged for MI6 to brief Arthur Merriman, the 68-year-old metallurgist who had refused to take Penkovsky’s envelope in Moscow, to be Penkovsky’s potential agent. The Rezident assigned Shapovalov as his operational officer but soon changed this to Viktor Generalov. Shapovalov and Generalov met Merriman and were delighted with Penkovsky’s ‘find’. They later told Penkovsky that he was too old to be recruited as a full agent but that they would use him as a trusted informant.
A month later there was a hiccup in the GRU–Merriman relationship when Generalov claimed to have phoned Merriman to make an appointment to see him and Merriman refused. However, Merriman claimed that he had never had a phone call from Generalov. Penkovsky shrugged this off by saying that they should never deal with the elderly. This incident caused Penkovsky some loss of face, but inflicted no lasting damage on his excellent GRU record and reputation.
Another of Penkovsky’s personal tasks was to purchase an incredible number of gifts for family, friends and colleagues back in Moscow. He had a notebook listing the items he wanted, including actual outlines of feet so that he could buy shoes. He explained that some of these gifts were extremely important as they enabled him to remain on the best of terms with people who could help him. MI6 gave him enough money to buy some of the gifts himself, so that he could join with other members of the delegation in this necessary part of any Soviet official’s trip to the West, but most of the gifts were purchased by the four young case officers who supported the debriefing team. Two of the gifts, both of them for Marshal Varentsov, were particularly noteworthy: a silver rocket-shaped cigar and cigarette holder with a built-in lighter, and a rare bottle of sixty-year-old Napoleon cognac for Varentsov’s sixtieth birthday party. The latter caused a problem because they could not find a sixty-year-old vintage. However, MI6’s in-house document forger did an excellent job on the label of a fifty-year-old bottle. No one – not even Penkovsky – noticed.
At one of the meetings they instructed him in the use of a specially adapted Minox: a miniature camera for photographing documents. In all, they gave him three of these cameras because of the prolific number of documents he was in a position to copy. The photographs he later sent back were of such high quality that they suspected they were the work of GRU or KGB specialists, suggesting that their double agent may have been a Soviet plant. At a meeting some months later the debriefing team surprised Penkovsky with an attempt to ascertain the extent of his own skill as a photographer: ‘We’re giving you an extra camera but we haven’t tested it yet. Would you mind copying this document for us, Oleg, and we’ll develop the cassette negatives overnight to see that they’re OK?’ The photographs he took were of superb quality.
The room telephone rang during one of the London meetings. Michael Stokes, the quiet one of the British pair, lifted the receiver.
Stokes: Michael Fairfield here. [He listened for a few seconds.] Good. I’ll come down and fetch her. [He replaced the receiver.] Ann has arrived. Perhaps you could explain whilst I fetch her, Harold.
Shergold: Ann is the lady we told you about, Oleg. She’s the wife of one of the diplomats in our Moscow Embassy. She has three young children. Do you remember what we agreed? She will be on one of the public bench seats in the park area opposite the Moscow Circus building on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. You will be walking casually by and notice the children – particularly the one in the pram – and stop to say hello to them, in Russian. Then do what you think seems natural so that you are ‘coo-coo-ing’ the child in the pram. At that point give the mother – that’s Ann – the packet of sweets with all your film cassettes and messages in it; either give it to Ann or put it in the pram. Put your hand into the pram to touch the baby’s face, but then reach gently under the pillow to see if there’s anything for you to take away. There’ll usually be more blank film cassettes to replace the ones you’ve used.
Penkovsky: Yes, I remember all that. Please don’t talk to me as if I’m a child. I’m an experienced and successful secret intelligence officer. You must give me the essential basics and allow me to do the rest in a style that suits me and fits the circumstances.
Stokes: [Returns to the room with Janet Chisholm.] Oleg, this is Ann. She’s flown here from Moscow just to meet you. We thought it would be important for you to meet her here so that you’ll recognise each other in Moscow.
Penkovsky: [Standing up and shaking hands with Janet.] I’m delighted to meet you. I shall certainly not forget such an attractive lady.
Janet Chisholm: Nor I, you. I look forward to meeting you again in Moscow, and I shall try to be as casual as I can.
In the course of the April/May debriefing sessions the joint team showed Penkovsky approximately 7,000 photographs – many of them with groups of people – from the files of the CIA, MI6 and the British Security Service (MI5). He was able to identify about 10 per cent of the people in them. In all, he identified and described the positions and duties of more than 1,000 GRU officers and nearly 300 KGB officers.