Less than a month after she had met Penkovsky at the debriefing meeting in London, Janet Chisholm took her three children out for a walk. She stopped to rest on one of the seats in the grassy area opposite the Moscow Circus building on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, allowing her two daughters, aged six and four, to play on the grass while she gently rocked her 14-month-old son in his pram. In her anxiety to see the handover succeed, she had arrived fifteen minutes ahead of the thirty-minute window that had been set for the operation. This was something of a mistake because the two older children had already tired of playing at that spot and wanted to move on.
Janet carefully positioned the pram so that it would have been difficult for anyone else to sit on the bench, though other nearby seats were occupied, and on this pleasant early summer morning there were lots of people about, some of them stopping to admire the beautifully dressed blond-haired youngsters. Janet was pleased about this because one more person doing the same thing would not seem suspicious.
She spotted Penkovsky when he was still some distance away and for the first time in years her heart started to pound with nervous excitement. She looked casually away, not daring to follow his progress in case someone should notice her eyes trailing after him. It seemed an eternity before the man helped the two older children to retrieve their ball and, smiling, started to praise the children’s beauty in Russian. He talked of how much Russians loved children and mentioned his own teenage daughter.
Janet spoke passable ‘school’ Russian, having learned it at Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, and her first six months in Moscow had provided an opportunity to brush up her grasp of the language.
Smiling, Penkovsky leaned over and put his hand into the pram as if to touch the baby, but deftly removed the package containing ten tiny film cartridges for his Minox cameras. He put his hand in his pocket, depositing the package and brought out a box of Russian sweets which he handed to Janet. She took the sweets and thanked him. The box contained exposed film cassettes of top-secret military documents.
‘Ann’ was pleased with the results of the exchange. She wanted to tell Ruari about it when he came home for lunch but knew she dare not say a word because all members of the embassy staff had to work on the assumption that the diplomatic flats and houses were bugged by the KGB. Besides, Martina Browne, their young children’s nanny, who had come out from England with them, was ever-present and could not be allowed to share any knowledge of espionage activities. Ruari was simply the head of the British Embassy’s visa section.
After George Blake’s confession, Chisholm would have had to work in the knowledge that he had been exposed as an MI6 officer. This became abundantly obvious when he received more attention from the KGB than any other member of the British Embassy staff. All staff were followed and watched to some degree; Chisholm was followed and watched closely virtually all the time. As an expert in surveillance, he was able to spot two and sometimes three watchers in cars, on motorcycles or on foot, virtually every time he moved.
He sometimes tried to attract such attention. One of his tricks when driving was to increase speed and then swerve into a side street, stop suddenly, jump out and casually install himself on a nearby bench. His pursuers would then turn the corner to find their target at rest, perhaps smiling slightly at their consternation.
Attracting attention to himself was intended to remove suspicion from others, including Janet.
Unlike the American Embassy, the British Embassy housed a properly functioning MI6 station. Jeremy Wolfenden, using cover as the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Moscow, was a professional MI6 agent. Academically and intellectually gifted, he had been described as ‘the cleverest boy in England’ while at Eton, and he sailed through his Oxford degree with eight alphas, the highest possible marks. But he was an overt homosexual and a heavy drinker, which made him something of a liability in Moscow.
John Vassall, the homosexual clerk in the Naval Attaché’s Office in Moscow during 1952–5 had been compromised by the KGB and spied for the Soviet Union for a number of years before being caught. There were at least three instances of Western diplomats being compromised during the first six months of 1962. Two British Embassy staff members were caught with their pants down in the company of attractive Soviet women controlled by the KGB. One of them was spotted by another member of staff, who reported the incident. The other reported himself as soon as the KGB attempted to blackmail him. Both were quickly sent back to the United Kingdom and kept out of harm’s way. The Air Attaché at the French Embassy, Colonel Louis Guiband, shot himself after being shown compromising photographs of himself with his Russian girlfriend. The KGB’s practices and procedures – as laid down by Serov before he transferred to the GRU – were still being vigorously applied in spite of Khrushchev’s orders to the new KGB chief, Alexander Shelepin, to give the KGB a softer image.
Wolfenden knew Penkovsky, but was not directly involved in managing any aspect of his espionage activities, in all likelihood because of the risk of compromising his cover.*
Several members of the embassy staff were subordinate to Chisholm, and some senior (non-intelligence) members were also used occasionally to facilitate the exchange of Penkovsky’s Minox camera film cassettes.
It is possible that Chisholm, as head of the MI6 station, orchestrated and conducted the activities of these and other people, but it would not make sense for someone who was already known to the KGB through Blake to carry such responsibility.
Howard Smith was an extraordinarily good Head of Chancery.† He was a career diplomat, though he had spent five years with MI6 at Bletchley Park during and immediately after the war, working energetically and successfully on the Enigma code-breaking project. In 1978, after thirty-two years as a career diplomat, Smith (by then Sir Howard Smith) was appointed the 9th Director General of the British Security Service (MI5), a post he held until 1981. If Smith were the deep-cover head of the MI6 station in Moscow, with control over Chisholm, it was the embassy’s best-kept secret.
‡
The CIA officers involved in the Penkovsky case resented MI6 for running Penkovsky; not simply because they thought the work should be more evenly shared, but because they still viewed MI6 as a dangerously leaky organisation following the Burgess, Maclean, Philby debacle and, more recently, Blake’s exposure. However, in spite of its best efforts, the CIA remained incapable of placing reliable agents in Moscow. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson was proving to be an obstacle.
The CIA were seriously worried about the security consequences of so many meetings between Penkovsky and Janet Chisholm. They brought this up at a debriefing session and Penkovsky suggested he should be invited to official cocktail parties where he could pass over film cassettes and other material and receive new supplies of cassettes. His handlers agreed. Dr David Senior, the scientific attaché at the British Embassy, had met Penkovsky in the context of visiting trade delegations. It would be natural for him to invite Penkovsky to a reception at his house, but the purpose would be twofold: to enable Penkovsky to meet the Chisholms casually and in public so that they would be able to greet each other openly in future, and to facilitate the exchange of films. For the latter exercise, Penkovsky would ask Dr Senior the way to the lavatory. Senior would direct him to a toilet that had been prepared for the exchange. Penkovsky would recover a package of new film cassettes from the underside of the cistern cover and replace it with his package of exposed film, which would then be retrieved by a third party.
A similar event would be arranged at a later date in the house of the commercial minister, Mr Hilary King.
In spite of these occasional alternative arrangements, Penkovsky continued to meet Janet Chisholm virtually every week during the final three months of 1961, passing her twenty-seven rolls of exposed film, each capable of holding thirty-six exposures: a total of almost 1,000 pages of secret documentation in just three months. On top of that, he was taking ever greater risks. On one occasion he was briefly left alone in General Buzinov’s office and, spotting a secret document on the desk, proceeded to photograph its pages, hoping to complete the task before anyone entered the room.‡
Penkovsky was advised, for the third time, to stop taking unnecessary risks and to reduce the frequency of his meetings with Janet. But he paid no more than lip service to this. In Moscow, Penkovsky was his own master. He knew the city; he had his own network of contacts, both social and professional. He knew how the KGB operated and knew what the militia could and could not do. A professional; he understood the risks and could calculate them accurately. In Moscow he knew best and was careful in his own way, which did not necessarily mean observing the London and Langley-based protocols of MI6 or the CIA.
* When Wolfenden was posted ‘by the Daily Telegraph’ from Moscow to Washington he surprised everyone by marrying Martina Browne, the nanny of the Chisholms’ children in Moscow. He drank himself to death in Washington at the still young age of thirty-one.
† In essence, the Head of Chancery is the head of the political section of the embassy but he or she also has overall responsibility for staff management, morale and welfare, and is generally the coordinator of the work of all sections on behalf of the Ambassador.
‡ General Buzinov was Chief Marshal Varentsov’s aide.