4

MOSCOW RULES

It was just before ten in the evening when the door to Room 360 swung open. A taut, straight-backed man with deep-set eyes and red hair flecked with grey walked in and sat down across a coffee table from two Britons and two Americans. They introduced themselves with false names.1 Apprehension and expectation hung in the air at the Mount Royal Hotel in London’s Marble Arch as the Russian guest lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. It was 20 April 1961 and the Cold War threatened to flare hot.

The man had many identities. His first was as a Soviet official leading a trade delegation to London. His second was an intelligence officer, there to collect technical secrets for the Soviet Union. But as he sat down he embarked on a third, brief and fateful life as a reckless and driven spy, betraying his country. The five men around the coffee table would go on to spend 140 hours in each others’ company. The intense and forceful Russian would become the most important spy for the West in the early Cold War and would help the British Secret Service kick the worst habits of its past.

‘Would you prefer to speak Russian or English?’ George Kisevalter asked. Kisevalter, the bearish CIA officer who had handled Popov in Vienna, had the easy-going manner and fluent Russian which ensured that he would take the lead in the conversation out of the four. ‘I would much rather speak Russian because I can express myself much better in Russian,’ replied the well-dressed Soviet official, explaining that his English was rusty. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the visitor continued, trying to wrestle back control, ‘let’s get to work. We have a great deal of important work to do.’ He was hungry for betrayal and there was not a moment to waste in disgorging his secrets. ‘I have thought about this for a long time.’

Desperation had driven the Russian to undertake ever greater risks to reach this point. He had watched and waited for the right moment, experiencing many false starts. Nearly nine months earlier in Moscow, two American students had been walking on a bridge leading away from Red Square when a man approached them. ‘I have tried to get in touch with other Americans but so few of them speak Russian,’ he told them cautiously. ‘I have some information I wish to give directly to the American Embassy.’ They walked on with him. ‘Do not open it or keep it overnight in your hotel. Go immediately to the American Embassy with the letter.’ The man explained how an American U2 spy plane, piloted by Gary Powers, had been brought down a few weeks earlier after surface-to-air missiles exploded around it. A few streets from their hotel, he entrusted a white envelope to the students. One of the students went to the Embassy with it, fearful every step of the way of a hand on his shoulder.

The letter made its way back to the CIA. It included the first details of how the U2 had been downed. There was also a photograph of a Soviet and an American colonel at a party with the Soviet’s head cut out and the words ‘I am’ written in its place. Tracking down the American was easy, and he explained that the Soviet colonel was a man who had served in Turkey in the mid-1950s called Oleg Penkovsky.

More secrets could be left in a dead drop, Penkovsky explained in the students’ letter. The act of physically passing secret information is the most dangerous because it is the most vulnerable. If caught in the act, both agent and officer are finished, the agent as good as dead. A dead drop is one solution. Material is deposited in an agreed hiding place and later picked up, the two parties never having to meet in person. Penkovsky wrote that he would look for a chalk mark in a particular phone booth before loading the drop. Everyone knew that the KGB’s home turf was the hardest place to operate, requiring the most rigorous methods. The phrase ‘Moscow Rules’ would come to be used as shorthand to refer to the type of procedures or tradecraft an intelligence officer would have to employ to carry out his trade in the city’s streets.

This might be a provocation, the Americans thought as they looked at the letter – the old Soviet trick of dangling a fake agent to tempt the other side. Whoever took the bait would be identified as an intelligence officer and could be expelled, watched or perhaps targeted to be turned. But the chance of this being a real offer – the chance to run the first top-level spy inside the Soviet Union – was too good to pass by. However, the CIA had a problem. It had no operational presence in Moscow. An officer had been posted to Moscow a few years back to try and work with Popov, but the American had been seduced by his maid, who worked for the KGB. When they tried to blackmail him using pictures taken from a camera in her handbag, he had approached the Ambassador, who had been furious to find that the CIA were operating in his Embassy without his knowledge.2 Since then, the State Department, which controlled the cover slots that CIA officers would use, had resisted further deployments to avoid upsets. So how could the CIA contact Penkovsky?

A young, inexperienced officer was their first and utterly disastrous answer. Codenamed ‘Compass’, he arrived in Moscow in October 1960 with cover as a cleaner.³ The city was a grey, unforgiving place to foreigners. Days would go by without seeing a smile on the streets. The traffic was light because almost all cars were official, but a vehicle belonging to a foreigner would be followed and surveillance would continue on foot on the streets, often in a manner designed to be obvious and enough to put someone on edge. Any conversation with an ordinary Russian would be quickly interrupted. There were few restaurants for foreigners, tickets for the Bolshoi were hard to come by and formal meetings would be stilted and unwelcoming. The only fresh vegetables for American diplomats were those flown in from the US once a week. They said you could tell how long someone had been in Moscow because newcomers headed for the caviar at diplomatic receptions while veterans quickly snaffled fresh lettuce or celery. Life was isolating and Compass could not cope. He became depressed by the cold, dark winters and turned to drink. Like many who served in Moscow, the ever-present surveillance began to play with his head. He became paranoid and came up with increasingly ludicrous schemes to establish contact with Penkovsky. Perhaps, he suggested to headquarters, Penkovsky could practise throwing snowballs and then hurl his material over the wall into the house where Compass lived, pretending he was getting rid of dirty pictures. Not exactly Moscow Rules.

As Christmas approached, Penkovsky had become frustrated that he had heard nothing. He decided to try another route. On 21 December, an American businessman who lived in London reported to the CIA what he thought had been a provocation in Moscow during a recent visit organised by the State Scientific and Technical Commission.4 A friendly Russian from the Commission had gone back with him to his hotel and asked for cigarettes. He spoke English with a heavy accent but was jovial company. Once they were in his room, the Russian locked all the doors, turned up the radio as loud as he could and produced a folded pack of paper from his coat pocket. These were secret documents, he explained, and needed to go to the American Embassy. The businessman refused. At the end of the trip, the Russian approached him again at the airport and asked him to contact American officials on his return. The Russian gave his phone number and said he would be waiting every Sunday at 10 a.m. for a call.

Penkovsky had picked the wrong member of the delegation to approach. But there would still be time for his path to cross with that of an unusual British businessman who had been on the same trip. Suggesting to a businessman, over a good lunch at a club, that he might like to do his bit for Queen and country has always been par for the course for MI6. Businessmen could move behind the Iron Curtain in a way spies found hard. And surely if they saw something interesting, overheard something interesting or – best of all – met someone interesting, then it would not hurt to report back, would it? MI6 ran a large team out of an office in Queen Anne’s Gate, milking the salesmen and industrialists for every drop of intelligence, and the plush Ivy Restaurant in Covent Garden was the venue where MI6 officer Dickie Franks, a future chief, had made just such a suggestion to Greville Wynne, a consultant for British companies. In November 1960, Franks suggested it might be worth getting in touch with a particular committee in Moscow.⁵

The well-groomed moustache, well-cut suits and well-oiled hair gave Greville Wynne the appearance of a well-bred, public-school-educated businessman. But it was a façade he had carefully constructed. Wynne had endured an unhappy childhood in a small Welsh village. When he was a young boy, his mother, who liked to dress him up to impress the neighbours, had taught him how to pretend to be something else, a trick accentuated by his dyslexia which he worked hard to hide. His father, by taking him down the mines to see where most local boys ended up, gave him the urge to escape.6 When he was eleven his mother died. The overwhelming emotion from father and son was relief, Wynne would later say. As a young man he scrimped and saved to pay for evening studies in electrical engineering and eventually made his way into business, deliberately adopting the clipped tones of the upper class to acquire some social polish, marrying Sheila and stretching to pay for a house in Chelsea. In the stratified world of the English class system his origins could not be entirely hidden, however. ‘He was a dapper little figure in his dark suits, what a lower-middle-class Englishman thinks of wearing to put himself up a class,’ observed an English journalist who met Wynne.⁷ Wynne was a bon vivant, but there was also something fragile about him. When he arrived in Moscow, the Commercial Counsellor at the Embassy thought his trade promotion visit ‘ludicrously worthless’ and the man ‘a silly ignoramus’.⁸ But he did not know about the secret life in which Wynne was revelling. The world of spying offered the chance to join a club even more exclusive than those notionally offered by the British class system and with it the opportunity to escape, to be different and to have a secret from others. Exposure to the margins of this world would eventually plunge Wynne into a fantastical Bond-like landscape of the mind.

During the December visit when Penkovsky had approached the American, Wynne had visited the Russian’s office. His first observation, true to form, was about the women. ‘Buxom healthy girls, but with bad complexions and no make-up. Brassieres and deodorants are unknown to them,’ he noted.⁹ One of the men at his meeting struck him as different. ‘He had a very straight back and did not wriggle or slouch. He sat quite still, his pale firm hands resting on the cloth. His nails were manicured. He wore a soft silk shirt and a plain black tie. His suit was immaculate.’ Penkovsky had circled round Wynne during the December visit but never made his pitch, opting instead for the American. At the ballet on the last evening, Penkovsky did suggest to Wynne that perhaps he might like to ask for a Soviet delegation to come to London.

Wynne returned to Moscow in April, just a few weeks before the Marble Arch meeting, to discuss the proposed London trip which he would host. As late snow fell around them, Wynne and Penkovsky walked across Red Square to a hotel. The Russian revealed a hidden pocket in his trouser which he cut with a razor blade to produce documents that he insisted on handing over to a wary Wynne. The Briton was non-committal. At the airport at the last minute Penkovsky offered Wynne an envelope for the American Embassy in London. ‘Look, Penkovsky, you are a likeable guy, but I want to go to London, not Vladimir or some damn jail place,’ the businessman said. ‘I want nothing like that on me when I go through your customs.’10 Wynne eventually relented and took a letter back, but handed it to MI6. He had become a courier.

The letter was addressed to Queen Elizabeth and President Kennedy among others. ‘I ask you to consider me as your soldier. Henceforth the ranks of your armed forces are increased by one man,’ it read. American and British intelligence realised that they had both been contacted by the same man and, after edging around what the other side knew, agreed to work jointly. Penkovsky had wanted to talk to the Americans, but the British had the contact in the form of Wynne as well as more people in Moscow. From Wynne they had learnt that Penkovsky was coming to their home turf within days. Neither side had known if he was for real or not. Soon afterwards Penkovsky had arrived in London with his delegation in tow. He greeted Wynne formally at the airport. Later, once the two men were at the Mount Royal Hotel, he gripped Wynne’s shoulders. ‘I can’t believe it, Greville, I just can’t believe it.’¹¹ That evening, Penkovsky had waited until after dinner before making his excuses and heading first for his room and then for Room 360 to begin his betrayal in earnest and deliver to the CIA and MI6 a rich seam of intelligence at a critical moment in international affairs.

The relationship between agent and officer is normally conducted one on one. But Penkovsky was unusual. He was assigned no fewer than four officers, partly because of his importance, partly because meetings could take place in the controlled environment of London and partly because this was a joint operation. This created an unstable mix which would eventually combust.

On the American side, there was Kisevalter. He was the obvious choice to try and make a connection with the unknown officer while also trying to judge whether he was genuine. Kisevalter thought he should be the branch chief in the CIA’s Soviet Division.¹² But he was not and the man who had the job made up the other half of the CIA team in the room. Joe Bulik’s family was originally from Slovakia and he spoke Russian fluently, having served in Moscow as an agricultural attaché during the war. With his black wavy hair, close cropped at the sides, he was a details man, secretive even with his own colleagues. Kisevalter would rather not have had Bulik around. Bulik knew it, but he was the boss. Working with a fellow CIA officer was one challenge, working with another country – even the old ally Britain – was a totally different ball-game. Neither American had wanted to do it, least of all Bulik. He had been overruled.

The junior member of the British team was a fresh-faced thirty-four-year-old called Michael Stokes. Kisevalter thought he was capable and enthusiastic. Bulik did not, later saying that he thought he was a ‘fill-in’ and ‘hopeless’ and was annoyed at his relaxed manner in the hotel room. ‘I could have kicked his ass,’ the confrontational Bulik remarked.13

The senior member on the British side was, many say, the most important officer in MI6’s history never to have become chief. Harold Shergold was known to everyone as Shergy. Before the war, he had been a master at Cheltenham Grammar School. Short and well built but slightly bookish, he was intrinsically a shy man but one whose pupils benefited from his keen sense of discipline. In the war he ended up in the Intelligence Corps running forward interrogations of German prisoners in the Middle East with an expertise that impressed those around him.¹⁴ After the war, he went to occupied Germany and learnt the skills of agent handling, winning the respect of his peers for his persistence in getting the information he wanted. He was quietly forceful and he was not of the small, clubby world of the old-school-tie men who had previously dominated MI6. In 1954, he returned to MI6 headquarters at Broadway and picked over the bones of the Baltic operations, learning from the disastrous experience just how capable the Soviet enemy was. He was among the few to fight the battle within the office against those who refused to believe that they had been misled. He realised MI6 had nothing in terms of intelligence in the Soviet Union, just ashes.¹⁵ Daphne Park was one of many young officers who would benefit from his patronage. He would be the man who would instil a sense of professionalism in the British Secret Service and its work against the Soviets in the wake of the horror show in Albania and the Baltic States and the recurrent discovery of traitors. It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into legends, John le Carré’s Smiley suggests at one point.16 Shergold and Kisevalter were both legends within their own services.

Shergy was taking the service through an intense period of triumph and disaster. Precisely two weeks before he waited for Penkovsky in Room 360 he had been waiting for another betrayer of secrets down the road at MI6’s Broadway headquarters. But this traitor was a colleague. ‘There’s a few things we’d like to discuss with you about your work in Berlin. Certain problems have arisen,’ Shergy said to George Blake as he arrived back from language training in Beirut.¹⁷ The two men proceeded to walk across St James’s Park from Broadway. Dick White had chosen the cool Shergy to try and break Blake, who had been identified as a possible spy thanks to a Polish defector. At the MI6 safe house in Carlton Gardens, where Blake had taken the minutes for the Berlin tunnel, he was now carefully probed by Shergy. The morning was spent dancing around the subject, but in the afternoon Shergy began to lay out documents which the Polish defector had identified as compromised, all of which had been handled by Blake. Blake denied everything. Shergy said he was a Soviet spy. Blake denied it. At six o’clock Blake was allowed home (though he was followed by an MI5 surveillance team). He was asked to return for more questioning the next day, and then again the day after that. Shergy knew there was no admissible evidence since the files could not be produced in court. Without a confession, Blake would walk. ‘After another half-hour’, Shergy later said, ‘Blake might have been free.’¹⁸

Just as he was about to throw in the towel Shergy tried another tack. ‘We know that you worked for the Soviets,’ he told Blake, staring him in the eye. ‘It is not your fault. You were blackmailed and had no choice but to collaborate with them.’¹⁹ When he heard this something inside Blake snapped. He was an emotional man who believed he had committed himself to an ideal. He could not bear to be seen as someone who had been coerced. ‘No, nobody tortured me,’ Blake burst out. ‘Nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets and offered my services to them of my own accord!’ Unburdened, it all tumbled out, how it had started and what he had done. Every other spy who confessed had secured an immunity deal, but Blake did not ask for one. He revealed how in Berlin he had copied station chief Peter Lunn’s card index of agents. Blake later said he had perhaps betrayed 500 or 600 agents. Scores had been killed, though this is a truth Blake has always sought to hide from. He clung to a naive faith that the KGB had been telling the truth when they promised they would not harm people based on his intelligence, a move which would have been utterly out of character. Shergy concealed the horror he felt at what he was hearing and barely skipped a beat. ‘Am I boring you?’ Blake asked at one point. ‘Not at all,’ Shergy replied. Then it was six o’clock and time to go home.

The next day Shergy drove Blake to a cottage in Hampshire, where they stayed for three days in order to set down a formal confession. Surreally, Blake cooked pancakes with Shergy’s wife and mother-in-law. It was like a weekend house party except for the Special Branch outside and the MI6 officer inside confessing to being a traitor. On the Monday, Blake was taken back to London and arrested. An enciphered telegram was sent out to every MI6 station across the world. It was in two parts. ‘THE FOLLOWING NAME IS A TRAITOR,’ read the first part. Every MI6 officer, whether Daphne Park in the darkest Congo or the new man in Laos, remembers deciphering the five letters of the second part which spelled out ‘B-L-A-K-E’.20 Dick White sent over a report, admitting not quite everything, to the Americans. They were furious. One American said he had ‘sweated blood’ on the Berlin tunnel. ‘Here we go again. We should never trust the Brits.’²¹

The revelation that there had been another traitor was not the ideal context for the most sensitive of joint operations between the two nations. But Shergy’s temperament and professionalism won the two Americans over as they prepared to meet Penkovsky. At dinner at his house in Richmond his vegetarian wife (a former Olympic athlete) cooked a meal that pleasantly surprised the two carnivorous CIA officers. ‘You are sitting opposite me just the way George Blake did when he confessed,’ Shergy told Kisevalter and Bulik at the table.²² Two weeks after Blake, other less sure-footed officers might have run a mile from a Soviet walk-in, fearing another plant or that if he was for real he would be compromised by yet another traitor, but Shergy persisted. Both MI6 and the CIA, rocked by the failure to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs that same week, needed a success.

And now the four sat across from Penkovsky. He was an unknown quantity to them. Once he had expressed his relief at finally meeting, he vented his annoyance that it had taken nearly a year to get there. ‘If you knew how many grey hairs I have acquired since that time.’23 One of the Americans pulled out the original letter given to the students to show that it was in safe hands and explained that the delay had been needed purely to find a secure way of communicating.

‘Between friends, admit that you did not trust me,’ replied Penkovsky. ‘That is most unpleasant and painful to me.’

The team were beginning to understand that their agent would require careful massaging. ‘No, it is quite the opposite,’ lied Kisevalter.

Kisevalter asked if the Russian had received a telephone call. The hapless CIA man Compass had called Penkovsky in February. But he had bungled it. Penkovsky said he had received a call but it had come at the wrong time. It was in English and he had hardly understood a single word. His wife and daughter had also been in the room.

‘Is your wife absolutely unwitting of your intentions?’ asked Kisevalter.

‘She doesn’t know a thing,’ replied the Russian.

With that, Oleg Penkovsky, an extremely well-connected colonel in Russian military intelligence, began to recount his life story. Biography is crucial with all spies: the team needed to understand why he knew what he knew and why he was telling them what he was telling them. Only by understanding that could they hope to determine whether the information he would pass was real or had been planted. Every detail would be checked to assess its originality and veracity. The team had decided to let him speak. They all took notes. This was a charade since they knew a secret recording device was in Shergy’s briefcase, but they did not want to reveal that to Penkovsky. Penkovsky spoke in rapid-fire sentences, often jumping from one subject to another without completing his thoughts. The team interrupted as little as possible to allow him to unburden himself of the words he had kept trapped inside for so long.

Penkovsky explained that he had been born in 1919 in the Caucasus. He was an only child brought up by his mother. His father, it was clear, was the key to unlocking his story. He had disappeared without trace just after the 1917 Revolution. ‘I was four months old when he last held me in his arms and he never saw me again. That is what my mother told me.’24 The real truth was deeply troubling and dangerous for the spy. Penkovsky’s father had been a White Russian who had fought the Bolsheviks and who was presumed dead. It was dangerous in the Soviet Union to have a White father who was unaccounted for. So Penkovsky’s mother had created what spies call a legend – a false back-story to hide the truth. She said his father had died of typhus in 1919. With the truth obscured, Penkovsky joined the Communist Party and the Red Army.

At this point, Kisevalter asked how long Penkovsky could stay in Room 360 without raising suspicion. About two hours, Penkovsky replied. If anyone called his own room while he was with the team, he would say he had disconnected the phone to get some sleep. He continued with his story.

During the Second World War he was at one point the youngest regimental commander on the front line. He had married the daughter of one general and had managed to secure the patronage of another important figure, General – later Marshal – Sergei Varentsov. When he was recovering from an injury, Varentsov asked Penkovsky to take care of one of his daughters whose husband had been shot for participating in a black-market ring. The daughter was distraught and killed herself. Penkovsky sold his watch to pay for her funeral. When he reported back to the father, Varentsov took the younger man under his ring. ‘You are like a son to me,’ the Marshal had said to Penkovsky. The son had found the father figure he had never had. Now, in a hotel room in Marble Arch, he was turning against him.

Thanks to Varentsov’s patronage, Penkovsky was admitted to prestigious military academies and then into military intelligence, the GRU, working on Egypt and the Far East before becoming acting military attaché in Turkey. He had been a colonel by the age of thirty and may well have made general. He was a member of the elite and he knew it. But he had been involved in a nasty bust-up with a superior whom he had informed on. It had meant he gained an unhelpful reputation for intriguing against colleagues. He could be ‘vengeful’, he admitted. The steep upward trajectory of Penkovsky’s career had peaked and then fallen back. A posting abroad as a military attaché had been blocked. Perhaps he had rubbed too many people up the wrong way with his ambition and powerful friends, but a year ago he had learnt of another reason which he believed explained it all. The Chief of Personnel in military intelligence had summoned him and asked him questions about his father. ‘You said your father simply died,’ he said, going on to explain that the KGB had been going through the archives and had found out more about him, including a possible Tsarist past.

‘I have never seen my father and never received a piece of bread from him,’ said Penkovsky.

‘But evidently you have concealed the fact,’ said the inquisitor.

He had been deemed politically unreliable. The KGB were unsure about him rather than convinced of any real wrongdoing, but that was enough to end any hopes of advancement. This was the moment when he had begun to reach out to the West. Frustrated ambition and a desire for revenge is, after money, the most common motivation for an agent. The State Scientific and Technical Commission was the best posting Penkovsky could get now: it required him to operate under cover and look for technical secrets from the West. And even there the KGB expressed reservations about letting him go abroad. It was only a push from Varentsov at the very last minute which had made it possible for him to come to London and to be in the room.

‘They will never make me a general,’ he told the four attentive listeners, a theme he would return to again and again. ‘Maybe I will become a general in another army,’ he joked. He talked briefly about being disaffected politically with the Soviet Union, but it was clear that this was a thin veneer masking frustrations relating to his career.

The men sipped on a mild Liebfraumilch as they talked. That was, they noted later as if to justify the presence of wine to their superiors, only to quench thirst because the room became increasingly hot and stuffy, filled with cigarette smoke. The windows could not be opened for fear of someone overhearing.25

Penkovsky began to canter through intelligence that the CIA and MI6 team would previously have been scrabbling around to try and piece together. The blindness that had afflicted British and American intelligence since the Cold War had not yet lifted and the years of Penkovsky’s espionage were to be the tensest and most dangerous of the Cold War when many believed a conflict and perhaps even a nuclear exchange were imminent. Penkovsky began with details of the structure and personalities of the GRU, and then revealed which brigades were being equipped with atomic warheads. He explained that the rocket troops for use against Britain were located north of Leningrad and that secret tunnels connected the Ministry of Defence to the Kremlin. He roamed backwards and forwards, around and about as the team became almost dizzy. Missiles and rockets were the latest weapons of the Cold War and were becoming the defining technology in the nuclear race as each side tried to show that the future was on its side. Washington had become obsessed with the idea that there was a growing ‘missile gap’ in which the Soviet Union was perceived to be streaking ahead in terms of both numbers and the power and extent of its arsenal, a concern London shared, although not quite to the same extent.26 John F. Kennedy had just been elected on a promise to close the gap. Exactly a week before Penkovsky appeared in London, Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space, spurring a panic among the American public that they were falling behind. (Newly arrived in prison, George Blake found the news an enormous morale boost.) Penkovsky disclosed an important secret. There was no gap. The Soviets had fewer weapons than Khrushchev claimed and their programme had weaknesses in key areas like electronics and guidance systems. ‘You know, Oleg, with respect to ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], we don’t have a damn thing,’ Varentsov had said to him.²⁷ It would take some time for everyone in Washington, especially those with a vested interest in talking up the threat, to believe Penkovsky, but he would provide ammunition for some officials, including the President, in their argument with the air force and others who lobbied for more and more missiles.

Penkovsky also offered a unique glimpse into life behind the Iron Curtain. Only around two million of the seven or eight million Communist Party members were really committed Communists, he explained. Visits by British businessmen to factories outside Moscow had been cancelled so they would not see the starving cattle. There had been food riots in some cities and people were resorting to horsemeat sausages. The younger generation was disaffected, he said.

Penkovsky captivated the men as he turned to high politics. ‘As your soldier I must report to you that the Soviet Union is definitely not prepared at this time for war.’ He told them that the USSR should be sharply confronted. Khrushchev was not going to attack now but he was preparing for the time when a ‘rain of rockets’ would bury imperialism. The Soviet leader had to be faced down in the next two or three years before he was ready.

‘What I would like to do is to swear an oath of allegiance to you,’ Penkovsky said as the first meeting came to an end. The men discussed plans to meet again the following night. ‘I want to have a clear soul, that I am doing this irrevocably.’ He stopped. ‘All I ask is for you to protect my life,’ he said prophetically. He offered to do what every spy service wants from an agent – to stay in place for a year or two rather than defect, giving himself the opportunity to gather more secrets to fit London’s and Washington’s requirements.

Penkovsky left Room 360 at three minutes past one in the morning after three and a half hours. He lay in his bed for another two hours with thoughts of missiles and betrayals spinning through his mind. He left behind four intelligence officers who had been almost winded by the ferocity of the intelligence tornado in which they had just been caught up. And it was only the beginning. He would be back the next evening and then again night after night to spill secrets. On the second night, he signed a formal contract. This is standard practice to take an agent beyond the point of no return and bind them into their betrayal. Penkovsky needed no persuading. ‘Henceforth I consider myself a soldier of the free world fighting for the cause of humanity as a whole and for the freeing from tyrannical rule of the people of my homeland Russia.’28 He went on to explain what intelligence he had been asked to collect during his time in London – for instance, about the chemicals for solid fuel for missiles – which revealed Soviet weaknesses. He had also been told to collect any information on MI5 surveillance methods. Did they use watchers in vehicles or on foot, for example? In the course of these meetings, Penkovsky looked at a staggering 7,000 photographs from the files of MI5, MI6 and the CIA, identifying nearly one in ten of the faces staring out at him, including hundreds of KGB and GRU officers.²⁹ This included almost all the spies operating out of the Soviet Embassy in London, although he warned the team not to put any surveillance on them to avoid pointing the finger at him.

Penkovsky’s delegation was touring the country and he went up to Leeds with Wynne. During a car journey on the way north, Kisevalter read from the details that Penkovsky had provided on missile systems while the other members of the team compared notes.30 What struck the team most was Penkovsky’s access to top military figures, especially Marshal Varentsov. He also had access to the classified library of Russian military intelligence and through Varentsov could look at pretty much anything on missiles.

In Leeds on 23 April 1961 the whole escapade nearly descended into farce. After visiting British businesses in the city, Penkovsky stopped at a small restaurant and downed a litre of cold beer. This led to stomach cramps for about two hours until Wynne called a doctor, who diagnosed an extreme kidney irritation caused by drinking the beer too quickly. ‘I feel all right now except that I’m a little weak from the anxiety of this ordeal,’ Penkovsky explained as he walked into Room 31 of the Hotel Metropole at around 10.30 p.m. to meet the team. If he had been taken to hospital, he might have come under suspicion, he said.³¹ On another occasion, more reminiscent of Austin Powers than James Bond, Kisevalter met Penkovsky and took him towards the hotel. Kisevalter went through the revolving doors only to realise that the Russian was not with him. He then stepped into them just as Penkovsky did the same and they ended up revolving to opposite sides. They then entered the doors again, neither knowing when the other would get out. Eventually they both emerged into the lobby watched by curious guests.³²

The team were beginning to suspect that there was something unbalanced about their prize agent. In Leeds he elaborated on a suicidal and almost comical plan he had begun mentioning at the first meeting. All he needed, he explained to the stupefied audience, was for suitcase-size nuclear bombs to be smuggled into Moscow in diplomatic bags. He would hide these in his dacha and then bring them into the city and place them in dustbins where they could be used to destroy the Soviet military command in a pre-emptive strike just before it launched a war on the West.³³ ‘Here is a note about target number 1,’ he said, handing over a piece of paper, ‘which must be blown up by a bomb of one or two kilotons.’ The target was the General Staff complex in Moscow. The bomb should be detonated between 10 and 11 a.m. to maximise casualties. He had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this. The team listened patiently without interruption, both awed and embarrassed by this scheme. Three days later, Penkovsky would sit in front of a blown-up map of the centre of Moscow with a red pen and plot a total of twenty-four targets to be sabotaged in this way. ‘I could run around and set all these in the proper places.’34 ‘Your intentions are very fine,’ replied Bulik, ‘and when the time comes to consider this, your proposition will not be ignored.’ There was no more revealing sign of the deep bitterness Penkovsky harboured against the Soviet elite which had stymied his career. A psychologist might have had something to say about the fatherless spy who decides, in an attempt to prove his new allegiance, that he wants personally to kill and destroy the institutions which have become his family.

Like a priest in a confessional, listening is important for a case officer. Penkovsky was a loner. He had few close friends and so, as with many spies, the relationship with his case officers was intense. He could not talk so frankly with anyone else, including his wife. The spy–officer relationship is close but also fundamentally deceptive. After all, the spy never even knows the true name of the officer he is spilling his heart out to. The intensity of those first meetings and of Penkovsky’s desire to betray startled even the seasoned intelligence professionals in the team. As they listened to him talk, they were all asking the questions every case officer asks when they first meet an agent. What makes him tick? What did he want? How far was he willing to go?

Penkovsky’s frustrated ambition was at the core of his fissile personality. This had been compressed into a thirst for vengeance. But lurking in the background, the team soon realised, were other motivations. For many, though not all traitors, money provides an additional incentive. In some cases, it will be the prime mover. For instance, the official who has got into debt and needs a way out might be offered money for secrets. Penkovsky did not spy for the money, but he certainly kept asking about it from the very first meeting. The references began carefully. He wanted to live better and provide luxuries for his family, he said, including a new dacha outside Moscow. Kisevalter explained that monthly payments would be deposited in a bank account. Could they be backdated to when he first began to collect information and before he actually began meeting the team? Penkovsky inquired. At the end of the second meeting, he admitted he had got into debt. Perhaps the team could supply a one-carat diamond he could smuggle back, he suggested.

He also began to reel off a long list of Western luxuries he needed, including fountain pens, ties, nail polish and lipstick. After one meeting had finished he had returned to the room ten minutes later with a jacket over his underwear explaining that he had left a notebook down the side of an armchair. The notebook contained a beautifully presented list of items his wife had prepared, written out in red ink and itemised. It contained magazine clippings of fine ladies’ clothes and outlines of the feet of both Penkovsky’s wife and his daughter so that he could purchase the right-size shoes for them. His wife, he said, had become very impressed by Western life and consumer goods while in Turkey. Penkovsky himself was also partial, spending three hours with Wynne in Harrods. At one point, Stokes, who was vaguely the same size, was sent to Oxford Street to get measured for a suit for Penkovsky. The Russian liked good clothes – smart white shirts and two red ruffled umbrellas were purchased for him at one point. Not all the gifts were for him or his family. Many were for his mentors in the Soviet elite (including medication to improve their sex lives). The team appreciated that the consumer goods would help smooth their spy’s access to the centre of power. The thirst for Western goods among those who ruled the country was a little-noticed sign that, even though the Soviet machine was churning out missiles, rockets and military hardware, it was failing to keep pace in the field of consumer goods which people actually wanted. Only the top officials who travelled abroad understood this, but it revealed a weakness which would eventually help undermine Communism.35

Penkovsky would often ask the team to value the intelligence he was providing.³⁶ Payment had been raised in the first letter he passed to Wynne. He mentioned he had heard that some spies had been paid $1 million. The team tried to avoid too many specifics. They would pay $1,000 a month into an escrow account, but there could be more, they said. It was not just money. His repeated pleas for his worth to be acknowledged were as much about boosting his ego and affirming his self-image as a hugely valuable individual as they were about boosting his bank balance. He quite simply wanted to be the best. ‘I wish to do great things – so that I will be your “Number 1”,’ he declared. ‘I consider that I am not just some sort of agent – no, I am your citizen. I am your soldier … I am capable of great things. I want to prove this “as soon as possible”.’ Those last four words he spoke in English as if to emphasise the urgency of his desire to prove his allegiance.37

Lust, like money, often motivates spies, and satisfying that lust is a way of rewarding them. It is also often the expression of the risk-taking, ego-driven personality. At their meeting on 1 May in London, Penkovsky said Wynne had promised to take him to a ‘very big nightclub’.³⁸

‘And you are not going to take us with you?’ asked Bulik.

The issue of entertaining women, as it occasionally can, overlapped with that of money at this point.

‘Now I will spoil Mr Harold’s mood,’ said Penkovsky, looking at Shergy who controlled the purse-strings tightly. ‘I was told that it costs £50 to go to a nightclub. I was told that it costs £10 to dance with the girls and the tables cost a lot. He [meaning Wynne] said £50 so that I would pay for him also.’ At half-past midnight, having done a day’s work as Soviet spy followed by an evening’s work as Western spy, Penkovsky headed off to party.

When the five reconvened the next afternoon, Penkovsky was still nursing a sore head but one adorned with a smile. He had left a girl at 4.30 in the morning after two hours at her apartment, he explained, before getting up again at 7 a.m. to go to the Soviet Embassy.³⁹ ‘I was at a most luxurious cabaret. Could you extend my leave for about another ten days?’ he quipped. He had met a twenty-three-year-old girl and proudly told the whole team her telephone number. ‘She was a nice girl, somewhat experienced in her line of work,’ the sated spy remarked.

‘The phone number was what, once more?’ joked Shergy.

She had been paid £15 by Wynne and told he was Alex from Belgrade. In a rather awkward moment, the team then inquired whether he had been ‘careful’. He assured them he had washed himself properly and there was no chance of disease. Her apartment was nicer than his in Moscow, he added appreciatively.

Penkovsky’s hunger for recognition also expressed itself in his repeated request to see a government representative to present himself officially. The British were initially at a loss how to deal with this, much to the Americans’ amusement until Penkovsky asked to be flown to Washington to see the President. Eventually, a solution was found to appease him. At their fourteenth meeting, Shergy turned to him. ‘Now listen attentively. In ten or fifteen minutes a high-ranking representative of the Ministry of Defence of Great Britain will come here. He is personally speaking for Lord Mount-batten, the Minister of Defence [Mountbatten was actually Chief of Defence Staff at the time]. The most important thing for you is to realise that he is in a position to give you complete assurance for your future, for the promises given to you, and to confirm what we have told you.’ Shergy left the room to bring in the special guest.

The man who walked in that night – the same night that Blake was taken to Wormwood Scrubs to serve a forty-two-year sentence – was C, Dick White. Chiefs of MI6 do not normally meet agents, but White knew this was not just any agent. Penkovsky was crucial for MI6 as an organisation. He offered a chance to overcome the disasters of Philby and Blake and restore the relationship with the Americans and the service’s reputation in Whitehall.40 White explained that Lord Mountbatten regretted he could not meet Penkovsky personally but he had a message: ‘I am filled with admiration for the great stand you have taken, and we are mindful of the risks that you are running. I have also had reported to me the information which you have passed on. I can only tell you that it would be of the highest value and importance to the Free World.’

‘I have hoped for this for a long time now,’ replied Penkovsky. ‘I did the best I could to prove my faithfulness, my devotion, and my readiness to fight under your banners until the end of my life.’ Penkovsky then said he wished to swear fealty to Queen Elizabeth II and President Kennedy whose soldier he had become. ‘I hope that in the future I will be blessed by this fortune personally by the Queen.’

‘I beg that he proceed with caution in view of the great risk,’ White said, asking Kisevalter to translate. ‘But I want him to know that should the time come when he must leave Russia and make his home in the Western world, the obligations that we undoubtedly have towards him will be firmly and clearly fulfilled.’

‘This is clear to me and I think you,’ said Penkovsky. ‘Please fulfil my request that the Lord at some convenient moment state to Her Majesty the Queen, that her forces have been increased by one member – this colonel who is located in Moscow on the Soviet General Staff and who is fulfilling special assignments, but actually is a colonel in Her Majesty’s Service.’

Wine was served for a toast. White then made his excuses to be escorted out by Shergy. When Shergy came back in, Kisevalter explained that Penkovsky was keen to know what impression he had made. ‘Oh very good indeed,’ said Shergy. That was only part of the truth. After the very first meeting, Shergy had reported back to White that Penkovsky was unstable and motivated by vanity. White believed that Penkovsky was ‘neurotic, highly risky and crazy’ but he also knew the material was gold dust and set about skilfully using it within Whitehall to try and restore his service’s standing.41 At later meetings, Penkovsky would say that he had appreciated the visit but wondered why he had not met the Queen yet.

Shergy and the others knew they were on to a winner with Penkovsky – a fantastically well-placed spy who was willing to remain in place and collect more and more information rather than defect. Penkovsky himself asked for a small Minox camera to photograph documents which he was trained to use during the meetings. His enthusiasm and his willingness to take risks was astonishing. But that posed a problem, the same one the CIA had faced months earlier and failed to overcome – how were the secrets to be passed in Moscow?

One answer was to use Wynne as a courier. The great advantage of the businessman was that Penkovsky was authorised to meet him for work, so there would be no suspicion or need for illicit contact. But Wynne was only in Moscow occasionally. There needed to be a means of making regular contact. No one had ever successfully run an agent in Moscow.⁴² In previous years, opportunistic spying rather than real running of agents was all that had been possible for MI6 officers, like Daphne Park who had been stationed there in the mid-1950s. When she arrived, her Ambassador had warned her that any Russian who talked to her was either a fool who was risking his life and liberty by doing so or else a KGB plant.⁴³ During a visit to Kalinin with the Assistant Air Attaché, Park had located the local KGB HQ and, finding the door open, walked in, up the stairs to a landing where all the offices of the officials were situated. Each door had the name and position of the person who worked behind it. Park and the Attache got out their pens and their notebooks and spent twenty minutes writing down every detail. When they later found themselves being watched, they put on swimming costumes and escaped by crossing the Volga.44 This was not the same as running a high-level Russian military intelligence official. But at least MI6 was able to get its people into the city: the CIA remained barred by its own State Department. ‘What do you have?’ Shergy asked Bulik at one point, meaning resources and people in the Soviet capital. ‘We have zilch, with a capital Z,’ Bulik replied.⁴⁵

Vienna in the aftermath of the Second World War. On the city’s streets, rival intelligence services first began to get the measure of each other. (Getty)

Graham Greene (seated) and film director Carol Reed. Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man, which Reed directed, captured Vienna after the war on celluloid. (Getty)

Anthony Cavendish on his motorbike in Cairo, shortly before being recruited as the youngest ever member of the Secret Intelligence Service.

Kim Philby just after he left Cambridge in 1933 and around the time he went to Vienna. There, his intellectual commitment to Communism would be reinforced by clandestine activity, and set him on a path to betrayal.

Anthony Courtney at his investiture at Buckingham Palace in 1949. Soon after, he began to organise the infiltration of agents behind the Iron Curtain. His later parliamentary career was cut short by a KGB blackmail plot. (Photoshot)

Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb went missing in 1956 after diving beneath a Soviet cruiser visiting Portsmouth in a disastrous MI6 operation. The frogman’s headless corpse was found a year later. (Getty)

MI6 officer and KGB spy George Blake. This picture was released by the police after his escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966. (Getty)

Kim Philby at the press conference at his mother’s flat in 1955, when he denied being the so-called “Third Man” who had assisted Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to flee to Moscow. (Getty)

The young Daphne Park helped train the French resistance in Britain during the Second World War. Initially rejected by MI6, she went to Vienna with military intelligence before being recruited to the Secret Service. In MI6 she forged a formidable reputation with postings in Moscow and the Congo.

Daphne Park’s American counterpart Larry Devlin looking out at the ferry in Leopoldville. Devlin would be described as the ‘arch-puppeteer’ of Congolese politics. He and Park remained lifelong friends.

Patrice Lumumba arriving for the Congo’s independence day ceremony in July 1960. Daphne Park had already forged a relationship with the nationalist politician. Devlin would be involved in a plot to assassinate him. (Topfoto)

Patrice Lumumba (centre) at Leopoldville airport, 2 December 1960. He had just been arrested the previous night and would be executed soon after. (Topfoto)

The joint CIA–MI6 team that ran Oleg Penkovsky, one of the key agents of the early Cold War: (from left to right) Michael Stokes, Harold Shergold (Shergy), Joseph Bulik and George Kisevalter, pictured at the Mount Royal Hotel London in April 1961.

Harold Shergold listens as Penkovsky (with his back to the camera) makes a point.

Oleg Penkovsky wearing the uniform of a British Colonel as a sign of his desire to transfer his allegiance from the Soviet Union to the West.

British businessman Greville Wynne was a key go-between with Penkovsky in Moscow. He would later be put on trial and imprisoned for his work for MI6.

Miloslav Kroča was a major in the Czechoslovak security forces and a long-standing agent of MI6.

(Archive of Security Services, Czech Republic)

During the debriefing Kisevalter did most of the talking, but when it came to arranging the tradecraft, Shergold, the details man, took the lead. Options were thrown around including a controlled dead-letter drop in which the material would be left in place for a matter of seconds or minutes before being picked up. Could they meet at a football match and brush past each other at a crowded buffet when getting a glass of beer? The team pored over every detail of Penkovsky’s daily routine and movements to look for opportunities.

Shergy came up with a plan. Why not use the wife of the MI6 man in Moscow? The two could meet in a park. Penkovsky would drop material into her pram without saying anything. Penkovsky suggested it would be better to make some small talk with her. It was agreed that the next time Wynne arrived in Moscow the two men could pass material and messages back and forth. Within Wynne’s message would be details of how to organise a meeting in the park. Bulik later claimed he was not keen on using this method regularly. ‘You can do this once or twice, but beyond that you are gambling,’ he said to the British. He recalled (perhaps with a touch of paraphrasing) the British reply as ‘And what do you have, American, beside a big mouth?’ ‘They [were] just about as nasty as that.’46 The Americans were working to get a CIA officer into the Embassy under cover, but it was taking time.

On the last day of his trip Penkovsky, true to form, mentioned that he had asked for a picture of the receptionist at the hotel, one Valerie Williams. She told him she did not have one. So he gave her £5 and asked her to take one for him. She did so and gave it to him the next day with a ‘nice’ letter in which she said staff were forbidden to go out with guests. ‘You see how I spent the last of my pounds!’ he told the team.⁴⁷

Penkovsky returned to Moscow on 6 May laden with gifts and secret instructions. He went to a payphone two days later, rang a number and hung up, and then did it again. It was a sign he was in place.48 His trip was seen by his Soviet superiors as a success, partly thanks to the gifts he brought back and partly thanks to the low-level intelligence he had been supplied with by the team. A few weeks later Wynne returned for a trade show. As they drove from the airport, packages were exchanged including camera film. Wynne went on to the British Embassy and handed them – unopened and without saying a word – to Rauri Chisholm, MI6’s station chief. The two men exchanged notes rather than speak in case they were bugged.⁴⁹ At dinner that evening, Wynne showed Penkovsky a picture of Rauri’s wife, Janet, whom he said was called Anne. They would meet in a park along Tsvetnoy Boulevard. If she had a pram he was to approach and give her a sweet box for the children in which the films could be secreted.

Janet Chisholm was taking on a risky role. But she was capable and smart. Being the wife of an MI6 officer in the field is not easy. Your husband will often be working late doing his real job long after the working day of his cover job is over. You may not be able to ask him what he was doing. And your female friends may gently question why your husband has not been promoted to ambassador and is still only a first secretary. Perhaps that is one reason why, especially in the early days, many relationships remained in-house with officers marrying secretaries who understood the game and who could be trusted. Janet had been one of those secretaries. After learning Russian she joined the service aged twenty and then met and married Rauri. To her dying day, she retained the most important quality for an MI6 secretary – discretion. She never spoke a word about her work with Penkovsky.⁵⁰

Janet Chisholm and Penkovsky made their way separately to the small, narrow city park on 2 July. It was busy and Penkovsky waited for the rain to come and the crowd to thin before approaching. Janet was wearing a brown suede jacket as agreed. He gave the children a box of sweets. Inside were two sheets of paper and seven rolls of film. The material was so important that parts of it would be communicated personally to the President of the United States nine days later. It would be the first of a dozen such brush contacts between the two in the coming months. Her husband was under heavy surveillance, but she believed hers was minimal.

The good news from Penkovsky’s note was that on 18 July he was returning to London for an exhibition at Earl’s Court. This time he was staying in Kensington. Stokes met him and took him to a nearby flat. The first topic was how the meeting with Janet had gone. ‘Did I work correctly with this lady, or not?’ he asked, seeking approval. Penkovsky found Shergy harder to read and colder, but, as was his nature, he wanted to impress him. ‘You stayed a little bit too long with her,’ said Shergy, ever the perfectionist. ‘Excuse me, I also am a clever man. It’s impossible to sit, give and vanish. It is impossible … The place is bad.’ Penkovsky evidently disliked not like not being showered with approval. But then again his life was the one at stake, he was a professional spy and he knew Moscow better. The team were beginning to understand that he was not going to be easy to direct. Who was leading this dance? they wondered.

Penkovsky’s reputation as one of the most important spies of the Cold War comes partly thanks to timing. As well as the mountains of technical information about rockets and spies, he was also able to provide the first insights into the thinking of Soviet leaders at a time when tensions were running high. In June 1961, the newly minted President Kennedy had met the wily Premier Khrushchev at a disastrous meeting in Vienna. The bullying Khrushchev was determined to push the new boy around and the Cold War playground of Berlin was to become the site for their clash of wills. The Soviets were looking at settling the city’s status by the end of the year and preventing the flow of people west (100,000 had fled in the first half of 1961). They were considering concluding their own peace treaty with East Germany which would effectively hand over control of the city to their Communist allies. There would be war if America interfered, Khrushchev said in Vienna. ‘Then, Mr Chairman, there will be war,’ replied Kennedy. The White House was unsure whether the Russian leader was all bravado and bluff or whether, as Washington’s hawks claimed, he wanted war. Penkovsky could help them find out.

Berlin dominated Penkovsky’s second round of meetings. The question which everyone looked to him to answer was whether the Soviet Union was really prepared for war. Previously, the CIA and MI6 had no sense of what the Soviet leadership actually thought. Now they had someone who could offer real insight into whether the Soviets desired a conflict and were capable of winning it.

‘They are not ready,’ Penkovsky explained to a relieved audience. ‘Khrushchev’s statements about this are all bluff … The reasoning is simply this, to strike one sharp blow, let a little blood flow and the Americans and British will be frightened and withdraw. This is what he is banking on.’ He revealed that there were those around Khrushchev who disagreed with him and might try and remove him if he failed. Penkovsky’s access, thanks largely to gossip from Varentsov, was priceless and he had a brilliant ability to ingratiate himself with the Soviet elite and curry favour with his bosses (he wrote to Khrushchev complaining that Karl Marx’s grave in London was in a shabby state which earned him credit in the Krelim and no doubt annoyance within the Embassy in Britain). He was even able to produce the notes of the Kennedy–Khrushchev meeting that were being distributed to the Communist Party in the USSR and internationally. Penkovsky knew this was a highly valuable document and enjoyed reading excerpts out loud.

In the Oval Office on 13 July, President Kennedy was personally briefed about Penkovsky by his CIA Director, who explained that Khrushchev was not ready for war.51 Kennedy was a self-confessed fan of spy fiction and especially of James Bond. He had hosted Ian Fleming for dinner before he became president (during the same dinner, CIA chief Allen Dulles had been sufficiently intrigued by Fleming’s ideas for destabilising Castro, including trying to persuade Cubans to shave their beards off by saying they contained radioactive particles from a nuclear test, that he tried to meet the author afterwards and would often ask the CIA if they could match the gadgets he read about in the books). Reportedly, like his assassin, Kennedy was even reading a Bond novel the day before he died.⁵² Spies knew that their myths could help seduce not just agents but political leaders and it made it easier for the CIA to sell Kennedy their wares (including the Bay of Pigs). It is no surprise that the President became fascinated by Penkovsky. And the Russian’s information had a real impact. On 25 July, based in part on the intelligence from the meeting in the flat in Kensington, President Kennedy addressed the American people and signalled that he would call his opponents’ bluff in the showdown over Berlin. The city had now become, he said, ‘the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945 and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation’.53 Surprised by the firmness of the American response, Khrushchev decided to back away and opted instead for another way of preventing the human tide heading west.

Penkovsky’s information was so good that it sparked a fierce debate about whether he was a plant. James Jesus Angleton, Philby’s old friend and the head of counter-intelligence, thought Penkovsky might be a crank ‘trying to get us in war with the Russians’.⁵⁴ Some argued for Penkovsky to be polygraphed. The British resisted, saying it would alienate him. One of those who argued strongly that he was for real was Maurice Oldfield. ‘Moulders’ had become the MI6 liaison officer in Washington and, when not engaging in a risky personal life involving young men, had followed the tried and tested strategy of trying to get as close as he could to the Americans. He described Penkovsky as ‘the answer to a prayer’ in that task.⁵⁵

The Minox pictures Penkovsky took were so good that suspicions were aroused that perhaps the KGB were taking the pictures for him. So during one meeting a member of the team shouted ‘Catch!’ and threw Penkovsky a camera and asked him to take a picture of a map while they made a cup of tea (it being Britain, a tea break at four in the afternoon was mandatory).⁵⁶ Penkovsky took fifty pictures and then threw the camera back. When they were developed they were perfect. The team breathed more easily. In Moscow, he would photograph reams of classified manuals, directories, phone books and everything else he could lay his hands on, including a top-secret version of a document entitled ‘Military Thought’ which outlined the thinking of senior officers – MI6 and the CIA did not even know that a top-secret version had existed.⁵⁷

Penkovsky explained to the team that his duties during his second London visit included looking after the wife and daughter of General Ivan Serov, the head of Russian military intelligence, the former head of the KGB and the man who had been in charge of crushing Hungary in 1956.⁵⁸ He took the two women to their hotel and wined and dined them – dancing to rock and roll in a nightclub. He even lent them money when they ran out. ‘He did everything, except he overdid it,’ recalled Kisevalter later.⁵⁹ ‘He began to play footsie with Serov’s daughter Svetlana, and I begged him on my knees almost, “This is not the girl for you. Let us not complicate life.”’

‘But she likes it,’ Penkovsky said.

‘There are others. Not this one,’ Kisevalter pleaded.

To aid the process of winning over Svetlana’s father, Kisevalter even went shopping and bought a V-neck sweater for the head of Russian military intelligence to wear while playing tennis.60 Serov summoned Penkovsky on his return to thank him personally and said he would see about getting him sent to Washington.⁶¹

Penkovsky increasingly referred to the West as ‘we’ or ‘us’. To encourage him, Shergy and Bulik brought out American and British colonels’ uniforms for him to try on. Shergy later complained to the Americans that he had not been told they would be putting medals on their uniform which made it look better.⁶² Penkovsky at times encouraged his new comrades to start a minor war with the Soviets, in Iran or Pakistan, in order to expose the weakness of low morale within the regime. He really did want to be a general directing armies and not just a spy providing intelligence. ‘Penkovsky was the classic example of the pathology that affects the mind of the really important spy,’ Dick White recalled later. ‘Penkovsky thought “single-handed I can alter the balance of power”.’⁶³

Paris in September 1961 hosted the next set of meetings as Penkovsky led another delegation. Wynne met him off the plane and took possession of eleven films and copious notes. ‘Greville, this is great, really great. Paris, here we come!’ The two men enjoyed the bright lights, spent plenty of time on the Champs-Elysées watching the women (to whom Wynne was also partial). At a cinema a spy film was showing.

‘Maybe we could learn something, Greville.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ replied Wynne.

‘One thing you can be sure of. It will all end happily,’ said Penkovsky.

‘He’ll get the girl, I expect,’ mused Wynne.

‘I was thinking more of the man himself.’ Penkovsky paused. ‘I don’t have to go back. I could stay in the West.’

‘It’s up to you,’ said Wynne. He had been told by MI6 not to try and pressure the Russian either way.

Penkovsky explained that the decision was troubling him. ‘I’m really two people, can you understand that?’ he said to Wynne.

‘Yes,’ said Wynne, ‘I understand.’

‘If we could be like all those people. If we could go back to the beginning, I wonder what would happen.’

‘It would be the same over again. You know that.’ Just as Wynne wondered what to say next, he realised that Penkovsky had stopped paying attention. A chic Parisian blonde had sat down at the next table.64

Penkovsky’s eye for the ladies was hard to miss and, liberated from the watching eyes of informers in Moscow, he wanted to make the most of his ventures abroad. ‘The trouble is, Greville, that I need girls, I really do,’ he told Wynne once. ‘Not to give my heart to, that would be too dangerous. But just to have a good time with. What I need is a permanent supply of little sugar-plums to help me forget myself.’⁶⁵ One thing the British and Americans noted about Penkovsky, though, was that while he talked about women, he never really spoke of any close male friends. He was a man who wanted to belong.

The reality of life in the British Secret Service is that rather than consuming vast quantities of loose women as James Bond does, the British officer is more likely to be taking on a less glamorous role more akin to pimp. One job for the officers was to organise women who could be trusted in London and in Paris. Wynne introduced his friend to some English girls who ‘just happened’ to be over. He did not reveal to Penkovsky that they had been carefully selected and approved by MI6 to avoid the risk of his meeting any local girl and talking too freely. ‘But what’s the use of it all?’ Penkovsky complained after meeting one. ‘I can’t be myself with her because she knows nothing about my work. She’s like all the others. There’s nothing permanent, not ever, not anywhere. Why does everything have to be so difficult?’⁶⁶

Paris was not as easy a location in which to operate as London. The French police were everywhere on the streets as the struggle over Algeria was spilling over into violence in the city. But the Americans were surprised at just how many ‘assets’ like safe houses and vehicles MI6 had in Paris – and how nice they were.⁶⁷ MI6 also had a former racing driver as their helper who enjoyed motoring down the Parisian streets at hair-raising speeds. Penkovsky presented the team with caviar and a ‘Georgian horn of plenty’ at their first meeting. He revealed that his wife was expecting a baby and had cried because she wanted to go to Paris but was not allowed.

Since their last meeting one of the defining moments of the Cold War had taken place. Just days after Penkovsky had returned to Moscow, the Soviets had decided to stem the flow of refugees by flinging up the barbed wire of the Berlin Wall to seal off the Western sectors of the city. The last chink in the Iron Curtain had been slammed brutally shut. On the Western side, a young MI6 officer, David Cornwell (also known as John le Carré) witnessed the force that met the last frantic attempts by some in the East to clamber to freedom. Across the city, on its Eastern side, a young Russian Foreign Institute student had arrived days earlier for six months’ work experience just in time to watch the Wall’s rise. Years later he would become MI6’s most important spy inside the KGB.68 Their failure to provide any advance warning of the Wall’s erection was a serious embarrassment for both MI6 and the CIA, and so the team listened with great interest in September as Penkovsky explained that he had known about the plan four days in advance but had no way of contacting anyone urgently. Everyone agreed that a system needed to be devised to pass intelligence in an emergency.

A birthday party the previous week had provided Penkovsky’s latest treasure trove of information. He had not just been invited to Marshal Varentsov’s sixtieth but had organised the entertainment. All the top generals had been in attendance (no one had less than two stars), including the Soviet Minister of Defence. Penkovsky had delivered a Cognac which the label claimed had been bottled in the year of the Marshal’s birth (it hadn’t been – MI6 had faked the label). ‘My boy,’ Varentsov had called him with pride as he cracked it open. All the time Penkovsky had kept his ears open, learning about plans for Berlin including news of upcoming military manoeuvres which could be used as cover for war if needed.⁶⁹

The claustrophobic intensity of the meetings in Paris was heightening tensions within the team. Some were simply personal. Because they were no longer on home turf, they were largely confined to a small two-bedroom apartment where they all shacked up together.⁷⁰ Kisevalter snored and was put on a couch. There was no privacy. Bulik at one point turned to Kisevalter and said: ‘George, buy a hotel room and help me pick up a whore for Oleg.’ Kisevalter thought Bulik wanted to show off that the Americans could also provide the entertainment, but he felt it was a mistake since the British girls were always carefully selected and he refused.71 For Kisevalter the strain of leading the debrief night after night was taking its toll. He had never warmed to the more grandiose Penkovsky in the way he had with the earthier Popov. Trying to restrain the Russian’s urges while also dealing with his colleagues was making him ‘morose, agitated, and impatient’. One night he and Stokes went to a bistro to unwind. When they got back Stokes told Shergy that Kisevalter had made a scene and had been talking too openly about the meetings. Shergy told the Americans and Bulik decided that Kisevalter would be off the team after Paris.⁷²

There were also underlying professional differences between the team which began to surface. Bulik had never been keen on the Brits and he began to argue with Shergy. He did not like having to depend so much on someone else. Each would much rather have been running the show themselves and then sharing the take with their jealous partners. There were also differing styles to running agents. The Americans preferred a bit more glad-handing and a friendlier relationship, playing along with the agent’s quirks and desires. The British – and Shergy especially – liked to maintain just a touch more distance, to make it clearer that this was a professional relationship rather than a personal friendship. One area where the difference was apparent was over money. Bulik was content to keep it flowing to Penkovsky to keep him happy and confident, Shergy wanted him on a tighter rein and the Americans came to think of him as stingy. Although it is tempting to see this as a microcosm of the contrast between a cash-strapped MI6 and a CIA overflowing with cash, Shergy did have his motives – if agents start splashing the cash, it tends to get noticed and people start asking questions.

Greville Wynne had, out of necessity, become a key player, but the team worried that he was also the weakest link. The CIA in particular disliked using him. ‘Remember he is a simple mortal, and not an intelligence man,’ Kisevalter told Penkovsky at their first meeting. Penkovsky frequently commented on their increasingly difficult relationship and Bulik became frustrated at the amount of time spent talking about Wynne.⁷³ ‘Wynne right now feels that I have a good deal of money, that I have been rewarded,’ Penkovsky told them. ‘He gives me glances and hints which say I should “fix” him also.’74 He wanted the team to tell the businessman not to ask him for money. At times he almost laughed at Wynne with his new friends, remembering how the Englishman had been so reluctant to take the documents in Moscow at first. ‘He was afraid. Oh how he was afraid!’

On the evening of 27 September, Penkovsky reported that Wynne had told him he wanted out.⁷⁵ Wynne had said the time devoted to acting as a courier meant his business was collapsing. Penkovsky told the team how much he thought Wynne was being paid. Shergy replied that the figure was all wrong. Wynne had already received £15,000, far more than Penkovsky thought.⁷⁶ Tellingly, Wynne had also told Penkovsky he was annoyed that the Russian could not talk to him about his clandestine meetings with the team. Wynne’s self-image was that he was a James Bond who had entered the glamorous world of espionage. Yet he knew he was not in the inner circle, not privy to the real work. He was an outsider, left on the margins imagining what was happening inside the room. The team patched up the problem, but this pivotal relationship between Wynne and Penkovsky was fracturing.⁷⁷

Janet Chisholm joined the group to discuss meeting places in Moscow. It was agreed that from 20 October every week they would meet at a shop with a fall-back a few days later at a delicatessen after her ballet lesson. They would catch each other’s eye before one would follow the other to a discreet spot where they could make the exchange. At the next meeting a technician came and showed Penkovsky a secret, battery-powered short-range-burst transmitter which could be concealed in clothing. It could send a compressed message entered on a keypad through an antenna a distance of a few hundred yards. When perfected, this gadget could be used by Penkovsky when he was near the American Embassy.⁷⁸

What if Penkovsky had an urgent message? What if he learnt that a nuclear strike was imminent? The desperate desire for a tripwire to warn of Soviet attack had evolved from the days of questioning defecting soldiers in Vienna into a vast bureaucracy that dominated the work of the transatlantic intelligence community. In London, a Red List and an Amber List catalogued possible signs of either a surprise attack or long-term preparations right down to the increase in petrol prices as a clue that the military was stockpiling supplies for war.79 Across the world, legions of men working for the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ and the military sat in small outstations listening on their headphones for any sign of war in intercepted Soviet communications, perhaps spending their whole career relieved never to have heard anything out of the ordinary. The fear of war was real and ever present and all the elaborate systems were needed precisely because there was no spy who could tip the West off about Soviet intentions. The remarkable aspect of Cold War intelligence is that perhaps 90 per cent of the material was never directly used. It was there to warn of an attack which never came or to help fight that war if it did start.⁸⁰ That is not to say it was useless. The more understanding there was of the enemy, the less chance there was of a misjudgement about their capabilities or intentions, a misjudgement which could in turn trigger a war. During the years Penkovsky was spying, Britain was particularly concerned about being blind to a Soviet attack. A Joint Intelligence Committee meeting in September 1960 was informed that due to technical changes there might not be any warning, not even a few minutes, of a Soviet attack and this would remain the case until a new radar system came on stream in 1963.⁸¹ For this reason Penkovsky offered something enormously valuable at a critical moment. A plan was agreed in which he would telephone an American official. If a male voice said hello, he would hang up and repeat it. He was to say nothing on the phone line since the KGB recorded all calls and would match his voice.⁸² He would also place a dark smudge on a pole which would confirm the call. He could then load an assigned dead drop with a message on his way to work at 8.45 knowing that it would be clear within half an hour. This was to be the signal that war was imminent.

There was a darkening of the mood in Paris. A cloud increasingly loomed over discussions. The British and American case officers knew that they lost control of the single-minded spy when he was back in Moscow and that he would then dictate the pace. At the end of one meeting, Penkovsky asked what he should do if he was compromised. Should he run to a Western embassy? Shergy told Kisevalter to translate: ‘They can’t do anything for him because they can’t get him out of the country.’ Perhaps he could be exfiltrated by submarine through the Black Sea? Earlier he had talked about going to Riga in the Baltics where one of those fast boats that MI6 ran could perhaps extract him. Berlin might be better, Kisevalter suggested.83 The discussions never came to a resolution.⁸⁴ At their last meeting, there was champagne and canapés. Penkovsky kissed and hugged each officer in turn. They then all sat down for a moment of silence.

A heavy fog had closed in around Paris the next morning. Penkovsky’s flight was delayed four hours. He became nervous and drank coffee and brandy. The delay meant that Kisevalter and Bulik saw him in the airport waiting room, but they avoided each other. As he walked through Customs, he stopped and Wynne, who was escorting him, thought he would turn round. He put his bags down and stood without speaking. Then he picked them up again and left.

The first few meetings with Janet Chisholm in Moscow went to plan. On 20 October, they spotted each other in the shop and walked separately down the street and into a building where the exchange occurred. Through November, the pattern continued – the exchange often lasted less than half a minute. On 9 December Penkovsky was a no-show. Next week he explained it had just been bad weather.

Tensions over tradecraft were growing and the team and their bosses were beginning to argue. The British were worried that the Americans were placing too much faith in Penkovsky’s signal for war – they argued that if it was received it needed to be carefully assessed by the Joint Intelligence Committee in case it was a false alarm. They were nervous of the American plan to send it immediately to the President, fearing this might trigger a war. The two sides agreed to disagree.

The real dispute came over whether to try and restrain Penkovsky. His intelligence was phenomenal and no one had ever seen anything like it before. This created pressure for him to supply more, but that brought dangers. The Americans were worried the British were taking too many risks. ‘The pace set by the British was a little too hard and fast,’ Bulik reckoned.⁸⁵ By January 1962, the CIA was worried by the way in which Penkovsky was whipping out his camera at every opportunity. In one case he had photographed a 420-page manual on atomic weapons which proved to be of ‘only marginal interest’.⁸⁶ The CIA believed that the admonitions to be careful had not been clear enough, especially when coupled with simultaneous requests for more information. ‘They are of a “stop it, I love it” nature and have clearly been interpreted by Penkovsky in this vein,’ wrote one CIA officer. Just because the risks were justified at the start did not mean they were now, especially when a huge backlog of material to translate and analyse was building up. Penkovsky himself was not a good judge of what risks he could and should take, they thought. He needed to be cooled off.

Shergy agreed there was a danger, but believed that there was no way Penkovsky would respond to a call to slow down. The Russian was too driven to be the best and to change the world. It was a matter of his running himself rather than the team running him. An instruction to stop meeting might destroy him psychologically as it would be seen as a rejection. Penkovsky simply did not see himself as an agent and the team did not have that kind of control over him, Shergy argued.87 Penkovsky ‘revels in what he is doing, is determined to be the best of his kind ever (perhaps not appreciating that he has probably achieved this status already). We feel that it would be a tactical and psychological mistake on our part to renew the warning at this juncture.’⁸⁸ ‘Penkovsky was an extremely difficult person to control,’ Dick White said later. ‘He took immense risks. He wanted to appear as the person who altered the balance of power between the two sides. His vanity was enormous.’⁸⁹

On the streets of Moscow, events outpaced the discussions as the first signs emerged that something was going awry. On 19 January, Janet Chisholm saw Penkovsky scanning for surveillance from a phone booth. He had seen a car go the wrong way down a one-way street the previous week and saw it again this time. As she took a bus to her ballet class she had also noticed a car make a U-turn and follow behind. MI6 now agreed that street meetings looked too risky. ‘It appears we will not have any trouble [with the British] on this score in the future,’ a CIA officer wrote.

There were more investigations by the KGB into Penkovsky’s father, including a search for his burial place.⁹⁰ An added complication came when Janet fell pregnant. She was replaced by Pamela Cowell, wife of Gervase Cowell, the new MI6 man at the Embassy who had ‘pram age’ children. Cowell had been recruited at Cambridge and then sent to Berlin. There he had intercepted a set of cyanide bullets, designed to kill one of his agents, that had been hidden inside a cigarette packet from which they could be fired completely silently. For years afterwards, he would take a step back if someone offered him a cigarette. To reassure his agent that the British had better weapons (which they did not), Cowell showed him a massive sleeve gun which, he later observed, ‘you could only fire if a locomotive happened to be leaving Frankfurt station at the time and then at the risk of dislocating your shoulder [as] you let off this enormous clang’.91 He had also discovered that a large network of agents reporting on the movement of Russian matériel on the East German railways was a figment of the imagination of one man sitting in West Germany reading railway magazines. ‘I’m terribly sorry but you know all those reports that you got, they are all fabricated,’ he explained to officials back in London.

‘Oh actually, old chap, if you could keep on sending them, because they are rather good,’ came the reply.⁹²

Meetings with Penkovsky continued sporadically at official functions over the summer. At cocktail parties, he would pick up a tin of Harpic bleach in the bathroom to find film and instructions stashed by Pamela Cowell or he would follow her into a room and then turn his back to indicate a cigarette packet with a message inside which she would quickly snatch. Gervase Cowell would later pay tribute to the British Ambassador for ‘the tolerance and equanimity with which he allowed us to rampage around Moscow in those uncertain and potentially very dangerous circumstances, running an agent which had never been done before’.⁹³ Penkovsky’s letters revealed his fears that events were taking a turn for the worse.

The CIA finally managed to get operational officers into the American Embassy, leading to their first direct contact in Moscow, and they began to take over. Hugh Montgomery was one of the first officers posted over. He was followed everywhere by KGB men who were happy to let him know they were there. He could even hear them clatter round and change the tape in the recorder above his flat. Carrying out operational meetings was close to impossible. There were a few tricks that the team used when they wanted to lose their tails – one involved two people in a car and one jumping out as it turned a corner. A dummy in the passenger seat would then pop up to make it look to the following car as if both passengers were still there. Exchanges of information were hard but could occur.

At a heaving Independence Day party at the American Ambassador’s residence, both Khrushchev and Penkovsky made an appearance among the hundreds of guests. As hands were shaken at a receiving line there was not a hint from Penkovsky that he was anything other than another Soviet official in attendance. Benny Goodman and his jazz band had come over to play (‘I like good music but not Goodman,’ Krushchev joked sourly). Penkovsky drank heavily and, although he did not appear drunk, the Americans thought he looked morose. A quick exchange was made. Penkovsky deposited a packet in the bathroom and Montgomery followed after he left. But the package had fallen into the cistern rather than remaining taped to the side, and the CIA man had to climb on to the sink, which proceeded to come away from the wall (the Ambassador would later express anger at whoever had trashed his bathroom and was never told the circumstances). In the communications, Penkovsky was starting to sound hunted and desperate and as if he was looking for a way out. Trips abroad were being cancelled. The loneliness of the long-distance spy was taking its toll.

Wynne arrived in Moscow on 2 July and found a changed man. ‘He looked pale and taut, there was a shocking weariness in his eyes.’ With the music and taps turned on at the hotel, they talked hurriedly. Penkovsky broke down. He was frightened. At one point, he asked Wynne for a gun.94 The next night, they were due to meet at a restaurant. Two men were skulking in the doorway. As Wynne entered, Penkovsky instead of greeting him signalled not to make contact before whispering, ‘Follow behind.’ He had spotted surveillance. They headed down a street and into a courtyard. ‘You must get out, quickly! You are being followed,’ Penkovsky said hurriedly. The same two men appeared at the end of the alley. Penkovsky moved away quickly. Wynne was left facing two men for a few heart-stopping moments. Back at his hotel, Wynne found his room key missing from reception. When it was returned, there was evidence of a search. On a bathroom shelf was a tin of Harpic bleach with a false bottom. Had it been discovered? The last communication came in late August. ‘It will soon be a year since our last meetings. I am very lonely for you, and at the present time still do not know when we are fated to see each other,’ Penkovsky wrote.⁹⁵ The skies were darkening over Moscow. Then they went black. From September, Penkovsky dropped off the radar entirely. At that exact moment, the Cold War threatened to turn hot.

Cuba had replaced Berlin as the flashpoint that could lead to nuclear Armageddon. In his first meetings the previous year, Penkovsky had warned vaguely of Soviet intentions there.96 Khrushchev believed that if he moved fast enough to install missiles on the island he would be able to counterbalance his present weakness in overall missile numbers. He nearly got away with it. Few in Washington had believed that Khrushchev would take such a provocative step. Only the new CIA Director John McCone suspected that the Soviets might be so audacious and ordered the resumption of U2 spy-plane flights in October 1962 which detected missiles being installed. This time the giant machines that Graham Greene had presaged in Our Man in Havana were for real.

Penkovsky’s technical information, including the manual for the SS-4 missile which had been passed to Janet Chisholm, helped analysts interpret the reconnaissance pictures to identify the missiles by their footprint. The Penkovsky material had ‘special value’, according to one of the photo-analysts who worked on the images.⁹⁷ This helped decision-makers establish that the missiles would eventually be able to reach Washington DC but were not ready yet.⁹⁸ The President and his National Security Advisor said the identification ‘had fully justified all that the CIA had cost the country in its preceding years’ because it allowed them to face down the Soviet Union before the missiles became operational.⁹⁹ Penkovsky’s intelligence was only part of the story. It was the overhead imagery which was of crucial importance and which Penkovsky’s information simply helped the Pentagon to interpret.¹⁰⁰ In the next few years, Penkovsky’s role would often be inflated by CIA officials precisely to hide the new capabilities up above which remained top secret.¹⁰¹

A new era of satellite spying was dawning. Spotting trains could now be done by an unseen eye high in the sky rather than by a human spy on the ground. But no satellite image could explain what Soviet leaders were thinking and what their intentions were. In Washington, technology would become king. But in Britain, oddly, the advent of satellites placed an even higher premium on MI6’s human spies. Satellites cost the earth. Britain could barely afford them and came to depend on the largesse of its American ally. The best way of ensuring undiminished access to the flow of American technical secrets was by staying close and by bringing human sources to the table. If they could maintain this relationship then Britain’s spies knew, as in the Second World War with the breaking of the Enigma codes, that they in turn could bring to their Whitehall masters something precious which justified their existence. After Suez, staying close to the Americans and their vast intelligence machine was becoming gospel.

The Cuban drama was a moment Penkovsky – who always thirsted for recognition as someone who could dictate world events – would have savoured had it not already been too late for him. The decision to slow down had become futile. Through September and October, he was silent.

Hugh Montgomery was woken out of a deep sleep by his phone. It was two o’clock in the morning on 2 November but the remnants of his slumber were soon shaken off as the CIA’s deputy station chief in Moscow heard three breaths at the end of the line. Then the click of the phone hanging up. Then the same again. He was all alone, and he uttered an expletive. It was the signal for war. He knew he had to make the drive to the Embassy to cable Washington.

He walked out into a howling blizzard. It felt like fifty below outside as he struggled to start his car. There were only three other cars on the street as he drove off – his car and three KGB Volgas, one driving alongside him, the others in front and behind. When he made it into the Embassy, he despatched a flash message of the highest priority saying that the signal for war had been received. ‘While we have serious reservations about its authenticity, nonetheless we are obliged to inform you in case you have any other relevant information,’ he wrote. Gervase Cowell would also later say that he had received a warning signal of three breaths but in a display of sangfroid decided simply to ignore it, not even telling his Ambassador.102

In the morning, Montgomery called Richard Jacob, a twenty-five-year-old CIA officer on his first overseas assignment, into the ‘bubble’ – the secure room in the Embassy which was suspended in the air to prevent microphones being drilled through the walls. He explained to the young officer that there had been a signal on the designated lamppost and so the dead drop needed to be cleared. They knew it might be a trap. Jacob headed for the doorway of the apartment where the message was due to be left and pulled a matchbox from behind the radiator. At that point four men jumped him. In the confusion he managed to drop the matchbox. He was taken to an office. He was an American diplomat, he explained. That surprised his interrogators who believed they were dealing with a British operation.103 ‘I wish to say at this time that I have never in my life seen the material that you have there on the desk,’ Jacob said when presented with items of ‘an intelligence nature’ and a confession to sign.¹⁰⁴ They stared at him. He stared back, locking their gaze for two minutes. ‘Well, your dirty career is finished,’ one of the men finally said to him.

President Kennedy was told the next morning that Penkovsky was now compromised. He had clearly talked and given away the signalling procedures. The KGB had decided to use them to smoke out Western intelligence officers and Montgomery, along with twelve other Britons and Americans, was expelled. One theory still troubles those involved in the case – had Penkovsky explained that the phone signal meant war and had the Russians tried it anyway? Or had he not told them what it meant in the hope of finally fulfilling his desire to change the world and, by starting a war, destroy those in Moscow who had thwarted him?¹⁰⁵ ‘He knew he was doomed, he figured that he might as well take the Soviet Union down with him,’ Bulik later reflected.¹⁰⁶

How had their man been caught? the team wondered. Tensions surfaced across the Atlantic. We should never have used Wynne, the Americans grumbled, he was an amateur. In a memo, a CIA official blamed ‘a penetration in the British government who saw Wynn [sic] and Penkovsky together’.¹⁰⁷ Others began to wonder if there was another mole in London or Washington – another Philby. It would have to be someone high up since the operation was such a closely guarded secret.

There was a more likely explanation. Rauri Chisholm had previously worked in Berlin. Alongside him in the MI6 station was George Blake. MI6 knew he was blown and his file was marked ‘Sov Bloc Red’.¹⁰⁸ The discovery that the Americans had managed to run Popov in Moscow had deeply troubled the KGB and it had begun blanket surveillance of diplomats. It also realised that wives were sometimes employed in clandestine activities, so they may have begun tailing Janet. They spotted her heading into apartments in January and saw someone nervously following her in.109 They were not yet sure who the Russian was but the frequency of those meetings in public places and the fact that they continued after the first suggestions of compromise made the KGB task easier. By the time Penkovsky had spotted the surveillance on 19 January and decided to halt the meetings it was too late. A KGB investigation had begun which led eventually to surveillance of Penkovsky’s apartment and of his meetings with Wynne.¹¹⁰ It took time as they had to establish that he was not running a legitimate GRU operation and they knew he was protected by his friendships within the elite. Cameras were installed to look down into his apartment. A poison was smeared on his chair to force him into hospital, allowing his flat to be searched. A Minox was found and the one-time pads used to decipher messages broadcast over the radio. He was brought in. ‘When he realised what we had found and was in our possession, Penkovsky knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on,’ an investigator later recalled. ‘He started to confess that he was an agent for the British.’ He was taken in to see a top official and crumpled into a chair. ‘He came in dragging his heels,’ the official recalled. ‘He was limp like a wet rag hanging on a hook.’¹¹¹ The use of the Chisholms had been a risk – everyone knew that – but Shergy thought there was little choice. ‘Everybody in the British Embassy was under surveillance,’ he later recalled. ‘The name of the game was to avoid surveillance.’¹¹² The Penkovsky operation was success and failure all rolled into one.

The same night that the telephone rang for Hugh Montgomery in Moscow, Greville Wynne was at a trade fair in Budapest, having just arrived from Vienna.¹¹³ In his later years, he would claim to have been on a daring rescue mission to smuggle his friend out in a false-bottomed trailer. No one else involved in the case knew anything about such a bizarre plan. As he walked down the steps from the trade pavilion in the fast-dimming light, he realised that the Hungarians he had been drinking with for the previous two hours had all melted away. Now there were four men – all wearing trilby hats at the same angle – walking towards him.

‘Mr Veen?’ one man asked in a thick accent.

‘Yes, that is my name.’

A car pulled up. His arms were grabbed. The back door of the car was opened and he was pushed inside. He shouted for his own driver to help but it was too late as a door and then something else hard slammed against his head. He awoke a few moments later, his hands cuffed and blood on his face. He was taken to a dirty room.

‘Why do you spy on us?’ an unshaven, tired-looking man said.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

Wynne was stripped naked and examined roughly. The next morning he was on a Soviet military aircraft flying to Moscow. ‘I suppose that James Bond would have spat from his mouth a gas capsule (concealed in his molar) which would have overcome everyone but himself and would then have leapt to safety with a parachute concealed up his backside. But I regret to reveal that the British Intelligence Service lags behind Bond in ingenuity.’114

He was taken to the basement of KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka – a dark place where dark things happened. Under interrogation he maintained he was just a businessman. He might have passed some notes, he said, but he had no idea what was contained within them. They played the tape of his conversation at the hotel with Penkovsky which the two thought had been obscured by music. He realised he was in trouble.

As he was moved from his solitary cell one day, he says he was sure he saw Penkovsky through a spy-hole shutter. ‘He sits motionless with his head down, like a bull after the lance-wound has weakened him.’¹¹⁵

Wynne’s wife came to visit on 17 December bearing vitamin pills, English tea and cigarettes. She found Wynne’s mood oscillating between dejection and excitement. Wynne said that he had seen all the evidence and he had no defence against it. He asked his wife to try and see the Prime Minister to plead for some kind of deal. ‘He said that “British intelligence” had pushed him into this and it was for Her Majesty’s government to get him out of it,’ she told officials afterwards. Wynne’s fate did lead to much soul searching within MI6 about the use of businessmen and questions about whether the risks of their work on the side had been sufficiently explained.¹¹⁶

For Wynne, the game was up. But this was no game. And in Washington and London they understood the price that Penkovsky would pay. The heads of the CIA and MI6 argued over whether to negotiate with the KGB directly and threaten to expose its secrets. Joe Bulik pressed hard for something to be done. ‘I feel we owe him a tremendous debt,’ he wrote in a CIA memo. ‘For us not to consider ways and means of saving his life is to me a reflection of low moral level.’117 His anger grew. ‘There was no gratitude,’ he said later. ‘He was expendable. An abandoned hero.’¹¹⁸ He also vented his anger in later years against the British. ‘The big lesson on the Penkovsky case is never to enter into a joint operation with another service,’ he would say. ‘Joint operations, by definition, double the risks of exposure. The differences in any two services’ operating styles lead to confusion, misunderstandings and raise the possibility of compromise.’¹¹⁹

The trial came in May 1963. The courtroom was stiflingly hot. Wynne and Penkovsky had been put through their rehearsals for the crowd that had gathered, bristling with anger. Penkovsky may have been a hero to the CIA and MI6 but to them he was just another shabby traitor who had sold out his country for some Western trinkets. Wynne was first in the dock and had visibly aged. The luxuriant black hair was grey and shaved, his moustache tinged white; he looked gaunt, with lines across his face. He read most of his script correctly but incurred some displeasure for the occasional deviation. Had he been deceived by his own countrymen into being an unwitting spy? he was asked. ‘Exactly so,’ he said to the merriment of the crowd. ‘It is exactly because of that that I am here now.’¹²⁰

Wynne, whose status as a British citizen ensured that he garnered most of the international attention, was the light relief. The real venom of the prosecutor was reserved for the Russian. What had made him do such a wicked thing? ‘It was the base qualities which have brought him to the prisoner’s dock,’ the prosecutor suggested. ‘Envy, vanity, the love of an easy life, his affairs with many women, his moral decay, brought about in part by his use of liquor. All of these blotches on his moral character undermined him; he became a degenerate and then a traitor.’¹²¹

Penkovsky played it by the book. His moral decay was due to alcoholism and frustration over his job. ‘I lost the road, stumbled at the edge of an abyss and fell,’ he explained in a dull, monotonous voice. The crowd became silent at this, its bloodlust finally sated by seeing the walking corpse in front of it. ‘I deceived my comrades and said that everything was well with me, but in fact everything was criminal, in my soul, in my head, and in my actions.’122 Wynne listened to the translation, headphones pressed to his ears.

Penkovsky talked and perhaps told the KGB everything in return for his family’s safety. But the Soviets tried to cover up just how damaging he had been and how well connected he was. They also tried to sow division between the British and Americans, claiming that the Americans in Paris had tried to cut out the British. When he recounted his meeting with Janet Chisholm in the park – ‘I patted the child on the cheek, stroked him on the head and said, “here is some candy for you, eat it’” – the crowd uttered ‘noises of indignation’ at the idea that innocent children had been dragged into the midst of this degradation.¹²³ He admitted he had worn the uniforms of a British and an American colonel. ‘Which did you like better?’ he was scornfully asked.

‘I did not think about which I liked better,’ he replied.¹²⁴

By the end of the trial, Penkovsky looked a wreck. Unshaven, his eyes darted back and forth as if looking for a way out. But there could be no doubt about the verdict. ‘Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky: guilty of treason to the Motherland, to be shot to death.’ The crowed jeered and clapped. Women clambered on benches to catch sight of the traitor’s reaction. Penkovsky stood silent.¹²⁵ Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was taken out of Moscow to a flat and barren land. He reached the gloomy Vladimir prison in twilight with the rain pouring. His moustache was shaved off and he was placed in a cell with an old oil drum for a toilet. Others also paid a price. General Ivan Serov was demoted and fired as head of Russian military intelligence. Marshal Varentsov – the man who thought of Penkovsky as his son – became Major General Varentsov and was expelled from the Central Committee. How he looked back on his sixtieth birthday is easy to imagine.

Penkovsky is believed to have been shot on 16 May 1963 and then cremated. His wife – who had never known he was a spy – was simply handed a death certificate.¹²⁶ Rumours – probably untrue – surfaced that he had been cremated alive in front of other officers to send a message about the fate of traitors.

Penkovsky may not quite have been ‘the Spy who Saved the World’ as some claimed. But he was the spy who helped save MI6 and the CIA. Both organisations were reeling when he walked through the door of Room 360. Blake had just been exposed as a traitor for the British, while the CIA had just days earlier embarked on the catastrophic Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba which ultimately cost Allen Dulles his job as director. Penkovsky’s manic, messianic spying generated 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Within it were the first real insights into Soviet intentions and capabilities at a time when the Cold War had yet to settle into a stable pattern of mutually assured destruction and when fears of missile imbalances and crises in places like Cuba, the Congo and Berlin threatened all-out war. Penkovsky allowed the spies to show the policy-makers that what they did mattered and could make a difference.

The Penkovsky case, even though it ended tragically, represented a ray of hope for the British Secret Service. After all the disasters and betrayals of Blake and Philby, all the frustrations of Albania and the Baltics, the dead agents and the probing questions from Whitehall mandarins, it was a sign that it could – at least for a while – successfully run a valuable agent even in the hardest possible place and provide intelligence that was genuinely valued. The case did not just restore confidence, it also set a marker for a new professionalism in the service, an end to the era of Robber Barons and crazy operations. Perhaps there was a light at the end of the tunnel from the horrors that had gone before.

Dick White wanted a professional service – one that did not engage in hare-brained mini-wars and pointless bravado but quietly and skilfully acquired secrets, one that could put the past behind it. The shy but determined Shergy was the man who would help deliver it. With Penkovsky his model, Shergy would create a nucleus of staff in MI6’s Sov Bloc division who over the coming decades worked their way outwards and upwards through the organisation instilling such concepts as ‘need to know’ and focusing on the careful collection of intelligence. These officers would become known as the ‘Sov Bloc master race’, a term often employed by their colleagues from other parts of the service who felt a touch put out by the arrogance of those who felt they were the elite.

Shergy’s mission was to find more Penkovskys. He wanted to identify and target disaffected Soviet officials who could stay in place and spy, rather than drop agents by boat or parachute in the style of the Second World War. This required a different mind-set and skill-set. One of the young officers drawn into this sub-culture of the service was Gerry Warner. Never one of the club men and something of an outsider, his disillusionment with the quality of work in Burma had led him to decide to quit. One evening just before he planned to leave he was sitting in the small bar in the basement of the service’s Broadway headquarters. He overheard a racist and offensive joke and voiced his objection. ‘Who are you?’ the man who had told the joke said.

Warner replied, ‘Who are you?’

‘The head of personnel. I’ve got your file on my desk. Come and see me tomorrow.’

Shergy and the Sov Bloc team were trawling through the personnel files to look for young entrants who might be suited to agent running. Their preference was for people who were ‘clean’ and had not worked in the region before and so were less likely to be blown to the Soviets. Warner was one. Another was a young officer just back from Laos called Colin McColl. He, like Warner, had joined after the customary interview with Admiral Woodhouse in which intelligence work had been hinted at but never openly discussed (the Admiral’s attractive secretary had also provided an extra inducement for some applicants to join up). After being taught Polish by an eccentric Yugoslav on a barge in East London, Warner was sent to Warsaw under cover as cultural attaché. Here came one of the early successes for Shergy’s team.

One day a rake-like young Pole with wispy, thinning hair walked into the British Embassy in Warsaw. His name was Adam Kaczmarzyk, he explained, he was a cipher clerk in the Warsaw Pact HQ and had secrets to pass on. Agents provocateurs were commonplace, but cipher clerks were not normally planted because any ciphers they handed over could quickly be checked by the experts at GCHQ to see if they were genuine or not. Cipher clerks were also highly valued since they had access to all the secret traffic that went through an embassy. Warner took the Ambassador down to a secure room to tell him that he would come up with an operational plan to organise meetings with the potential agent. The Ambassador, whose job was to advise on whether the benefits of recruiting an agent outweighed the political risk of being discovered, was reluctant. The next morning, Warner showed him what the latter assumed to be a draft of a telegram. In it Warner indicated that the Ambassador had signed off. ‘Quite right, I’ve changed my mind,’ the Ambassador said. This was fortunate as the telegram had already been sent to Shergy. Warner always explained the risks to anyone becoming an agent. ‘I was always a bit anxious about whether the person I was going to ask to work for the British government, for the Queen, was fully conscious of the risks that he or she was taking, whether they were sufficiently mature to know what they wanted to do … And all this was a very intense business. It was as intense a sort of relationship as you could possibly get into and that led on of course to what I think is one of the basic principles of the secret service that the first responsibility of any officer of the service towards his agents is their safety and their security. That is the first basic principle and after that everything else flows.’127 Not all agents would listen though.

Warsaw would provide a key testing ground for rising stars of the service and the team that ran the agent over a period of nearly three years included two future deputy chiefs of MI6 and one chief, Colin McColl. They supplied the clerk, codenamed ‘Beneficiary’, with a Minox camera and met him regularly at a heavily curtained British Embassy flat (a small Union Jack on the front door was the signal to enter).

To talk to him there, they used a strange device known as a hushaphone. This looked like an adapted doctor’s stethoscope with a speaking and listening mask at each end. The two parties to a conversation would speak through it to ensure their words could not be picked up by bugging devices. Money and a good time proved to be Beneficiary’s only motivation. MI6 were somewhat surprised when they developed the film from his camera and found pictures of ciphers mixed up with those of his unclothed ‘girlfriend’, pictures he explained he would like back. He spent freely on drink and prostitutes and a fancy car. Empty champagne bottles accumulated outside his house. Neighbours began to notice. Making an agent aware of the risks did not always make them unwilling to take more risks. One day he explained that he thought it would be a good idea to approach a colleague to join the spy ring. The team said no, realising that if the colleague refused it would probably be game over. He said it was too late. The team had to decide whether or not to meet the agent the next time, knowing he might have been compromised. He was Kaczmarzyk was arrested at one of the expensive restaurants he had begun to frequent in August 1967. At the same time an MI6 officer was arrested along with his secretary. The press reported that ‘spy documents and sketches’ were found in her handbag. In her flat, the secret police found a hardback copy of the latest James Bond book. Unfortunately that edition included what purported to be secret maps tucked into the back cover. The secret police were convinced they were real secret maps and gave the poor secretary a particularly hard time. After a four-day trial, Kaczmarzyk was sentenced to death and was killed by firing squad at a military fort.128

Beneficiary burned brightly but only briefly. Shergy’s protégés on the Czech desk secured a longer-running agent codenamed ‘Freed’, eventually a major in the Czech Security Service, the StB. Freed’s real name was Miloslav Kroča. He had begun his career hunting saboteurs in industry before going to Moscow for training with the KGB. Like Penkovsky, his career had stuttered, partly for personal reasons. A new girlfriend in Moscow led to a divorce and a black mark against his name as well as financial strains. In the early 1960s he managed to secure promotion to work on operations against the British. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the British Secret Service. Recruiting an opposing intelligence officer in such a position was a huge coup in terms of classic spy-versus-spy counter-intelligence. Freed knew all the details of operations against Britain and had access to Czech records. His career prospered with the help of MI6. Poor health, perhaps due to the stress of his double life, took its toll over the years and eventually he died of a heart attack. Only then was his betrayal discovered in spring 1976. Where Beneficiary was mildly crazy and reckless, Freed was cerebral and cautious and survived much longer. Freed’s sudden death meant that Czech investigators never knew the full scale of his betrayal. Their investigative files reveal that they were unsure when he started spying for the British; certainly it was by 1969, but some wondered if it was as early as 1962. They did establish, though, the identity of the MI6 officer who was handling Freed at the time of his death. Richard Dearlove was spotted arriving at a number of locations to meet Kroča before he realised he had died. The Czech investigators established that Dearlove, whom they codenamed ‘David II’, organised meetings both in Prague and in a forest outside the city. The StB spent much time puzzling over where Freed might have secreted payments from the British, a mystery only solved with Ml6’s help after the end of the Cold War.129 The successes of Beneficiary and Freed would help launch careers. Insiders say there were other successes in those years which have remained secret, not least because unlike these two, the other agents remained alive. Together the cases would be vital for Shergy as he began to fight his own internal battles against those who saw the shadow of Philby and other moles still haunting the service.

The CIA was also learning from Penkovsky. ‘Who are the people that dream of power and glory, and, not only frustrated in these dreams but perhaps even ridiculed in their daily lives, become so bitter as to turn their backs on family, friends and nation?’ That question was posed to colleagues by a CIA officer soon after Penkovsky. ‘The single, self-evident observation is that the enormous act of defection, of betrayal, treason, is almost invariably the act of a warped, emotionally maladjusted personality,’ the officer continued. ‘It is compelled by a fear, hatred, deep sense of grievance, or obsession with revenge far exceeding in intensity these emotions as experienced by normal reasonably well-integrated and well-adjusted persons … a normal, mature, emotionally healthy person, deeply embedded in his own ethnic, national cultural, social, and family matrix just doesn’t do such things.’¹³⁰

What made someone like Penkovsky take such crazy risks? The unbalanced nature of such spies, the CIA officer argued, was reflected in his own experience of agents.

All of them have been lonely people … [who] have manifested some serious behaviour problem – such as alcoholism, satyriasis, morbid depression, a psychopathic pattern of one type or another, an evasion of adult responsibility… It is only mild hyperbole to say that no one can consider himself a Soviet operations officer until he has gone through the sordid experience of holding his Soviet ‘friend’s’ head while he vomits five days of drinking into the sink.

A retired MI6 man agrees. ‘Most agents were unattractive people. Half were nasty characters who you wouldn’t want to spend much time with. It was a very strange relationship when you meet them in some woods and he hands you some Minox and begins telling you about his life.’

‘Normal people aren’t traitors,’ Dick White once declared. One recommended CIA strategy was to look for the ‘emotionally weak, immature and disturbed fringe elements’ seeking revenge for real or imagined slights. They should be investigated using telephone taps and the gossip of wives and by watching the small signs of irritation and professional or personal jealousy at social events. These irritations could even be encouraged by an officer who got close but who would do so while avoiding polemics and political evangelism. Watching the response to a carefully planted question about how promotions work in the Soviet military might be one way. The aim of the contact is to ‘awaken resentments and anxieties, to plant ideas, to make oneself a sympathetic friend … The process is one of pinning the blame for his intense personal dissatisfactions on the regime.’ In a final aside, the officer also suggests looking for the ‘unique vulnerabilities of middle age … The period of life from say age 37 on shows the incidences of divorce, disappearance, alcoholism, infidelity, suicide, embezzlement … because it’s a time when men take stock’ and the result is often ‘traumatic in the extreme’. ‘Nobody ever defected because they were happy,’ a CIA psychologist decided after studying the files, including that of Penkovsky.131

Most of the spies Britain and the US ran in the Cold War were walk-ins, like Penkovsky, rather than the result of careful cultivation. But still the hope was that spies could be recruited through careful preparation leading to an approach. ‘Ideally you should have got to know the person so you have built up some sort of trust and you are much more likely to get a yes if you have done that,’ explains Colin McColl. ‘The cold approach is very, very dicey. It has worked.’¹³²

The CIA took an especially aggressive attitude, trying to hoover up as many sources as it could, while the British were more selective even though they understood the same dynamic. But there was a fear which haunted intelligence officers from both services when it came to targeting Soviet officials. The fear was betrayal from within. In the immediate aftermath of Penkovsky’s capture no one knew how or why it had gone wrong or who was to blame. They feared the worst. The poison injected into the system by Philby and Blake was worming its way deep and inducing a delirium. The distrust was not just between Britain and America but within each service. What if a newly recruited agent was betrayed by a traitor? Or what if a new agent had in fact been planted by the KGB as part of some fiendish master plan with the connivance of someone on the inside? Such a fear could be paralysing and its chill was about to reach into the heart of the service. The era of the molehunts was dawning.