The KGB must have been astonished when Blake confessed because, presumably, they would have known that there was no legal evidence against him. But any distress at losing such a valuable agent was amply compensated for by the disruptive effect of his activities on Anglo–American intelligence relations when these became public. Much of the effort made by Macmillan and his government to blanket the horrific details of Blake’s treachery was to conceal from the British public the inefficiency that had allowed such a spy to operate for so long inside the secret service. The main objective, however, was to conceal the facts from the US Congress after the Fuchs and Maclean cases had already done so much damage to the reputation of Britain as a safe ally with whom to share secrets.
Blake was staggered by the unprecedented sentence of forty-two years, which, as it happened, amounted to about one year for every British agent he had betrayed, many to their death. In retrospect, however, the security authorities believe the severity to have been counter-productive, for it must have deterred others from confessing. In any event, the sentence proved to be academic because Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 after serving only six years and, with KGB assistance, reached refuge in Moscow.
The Blake case is evidence of the depth to which the secret service has been penetrated by Soviet spies. It was also a further instance of the total failure of the parent organisation or of MI5 to suspect a spy’s existence until given the information ‘on a plate’ by a chance defector.
• • •
In the minds of many former members of the secret service and of some still there, the greatest triumph for British intelligence since the war was the defection of the Russian intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky in April 1961. In the minds of many members of MI5, however, Penkovsky was a Soviet ‘plant’, the key figure in a Soviet disinformation exercise of the highest political consequence.
Whatever the truth, an analysis of the facts as they are now known raises grave suspicions. Penkovsky, a senior member of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff, was in his early forties when he first approached the West in order to defect. He walked quite openly into the American embassy in Moscow, a building that, as he must have known, was under constant surveillance by the KGB. The Americans rejected him as an obvious plant – what the CIA calls a ‘provocation agent’.
He received the same treatment from the Canadians when he openly approached one of their officers in a Moscow hotel. As a third resort, Penkovsky approached the British secret service through a British businessman who had need to visit Moscow and other Iron Curtain capitals and had been given some intelligence training. His name was Greville Wynne.
Once the British became convinced of Penkovsky’s bona fides, as they quickly did, the American CIA decided that it might as well take an interest, and the running of Penkovsky became a joint Anglo–American operation from its effective start. On 20 April 1961, Penkovsky had his first debriefing session in London, which he was visiting as a member of a Soviet delegation, ostensibly to further Anglo–Soviet trade in the field of machinery and electronics. Two British secret service men and two CIA officials asked the questions. Officers of MI5 were involved only in organising the interrogation arrangements and counter-surveillance in the Mount Royal Hotel, where the delegation was staying.
Penkovsky brought with him some Red Army rocket training manuals, which gave detailed information about missiles already in use, along with copies of some rocket training lectures. His most startling news was his statement that missiles of the type described in the manual were shortly to be established in Cuba, only 200 miles off the American shore, where they would be capable of threatening many cities.
His information convinced the US National Security Council that it had been mistaken in believing that the Russians were so far ahead of the Americans in rocket development that there was a dangerous ‘missile gap’. This belief had been responsible for crash programs in speeding the production of American missiles to close the gap, one of them, called Thor, being already installed on the east coast of England.
There is no doubt that Penkovsky’s information not only provided President John F. Kennedy with advance information about the Cuban missiles but gave him confidence in taking a tough stand with the Kremlin by blockading Cuba and insisting that the missiles be withdrawn. In the result Khrushchev withdrew the missiles, an apparent climb down that has always been hailed as a victory for Kennedy and for the West.
Penkovsky also gave the names of hundreds of Soviet intelligence officers, including that of Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet naval attaché in London who was to be a central figure in the Profumo affair – though Penkovsky could not have foreseen that. He gave other information believed, at the time, to be of great importance. So why should there be any doubts about him?
The first doubt was raised by his original behaviour, which had been incredibly imprudent for a professional intelligence officer. His blatant walk-in to the Americans and Canadians had been suspicious in itself. Then, after one of the interrogation sessions in the Mount Royal Hotel, he had demanded an immediate payment of £1,000 in notes.
When it was suggested that it would be unwise to be seen spending so much money in London shops, which was his purpose in asking for it, Penkovsky lost his temper and cried, ‘Whose neck will get it, yours or mine? The stuff I gave you tonight is worth more than £1,000!’
He got the money and spent it all, mainly on presents for senior officials and their wives back in Moscow. It is not known whether he was observed by the KGB handing so much cash across counters, though it would be normal practice for an eye to be kept on such a Russian visiting Britain. According to Greville Wynne, in his book The Man from Moscow, it would have been of little consequence, anyway. When Penkovsky had to buy a large extra suitcase to hold all the loot, Wynne asked him how he would get it through the Moscow customs. ‘Oh, General Serov will see to that,’ he replied. Serov was the reigning head of the KGB.
Penkovsky returned to London in July for a trade exhibition, to which he escorted Madame Serov. At that time, he was interrogated at great length, as he was again during a visit to Paris in September. He had been equipped to take photographs of secret documents, but, as Wynne’s trips behind the Iron Curtain were infrequent, some more regular courier had to be found. The courageous wife of Rory Chisholm, the chief secret service man in Moscow, posing as a diplomat there, agreed to take on the task. On fourteen occasions, Penkovsky strolled in parks and other places where Mrs Chisholm ‘happened’ to be with her children and handed over films while pretending to talk with them and give the youngsters sweets.
When George Blake was further interrogated in prison after his conviction, he said that he had betrayed Rory Chisholm to the KGB before the officer had ever left London for Moscow. He had picked out the Chisholms, husband and wife, from photographs shown to him by a Russian intelligence officer. It would seem most likely, therefore, that Penkovsky’s meetings with Mrs Chisholm were probably watched by the KGB from their start. It is certain that they were being monitored by early 1962 and that Penkovsky was aware of it.
After Greville Wynne had been arrested on behalf of the KGB while visiting Budapest in November 1962, he was taken to the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow and grilled for weeks. During one session, they played him a tape recording of one of his conversations with Penkovsky. He recognised it as one of their earlier talks in a room in the Ukraine Hotel. This was firm proof that they had been under surveillance from an early stage. So Penkovsky either had been quickly ‘blown’ or had been a fake from the beginning.
A re-examination by MI5 of the information brought in by Penkovsky showed that almost all of it could be classed as ‘chicken feed’ – genuine information provided to establish confidence in Penkovsky so that his major objective could succeed.
The technical information about the rockets was several years old. Many of the GRU intelligence officers he identified were already known as such in the West. He did not provide a
single lead to the identification of any Russian spies actually operating in the West, which was most unusual for a defector of his potentiality. Penkovsky was deputy head of a combined operation between the GRU and the KGB to collect and collate scientific intelligence, yet he declined to give any information of consequence in that field. He produced very little about intercontinental missiles or Soviet reconnaissance satellites, on which he should have been knowledgeable because of his position.
Some of the ‘facts’ he did provide turned out to be misleading – perhaps deliberately so. For example, he said that Soviet scientists had developed a nerve gas that was doubly as effective as anything available to the West. The Americans spent a huge sum trying to make something similar without success, and it is now believed that the information was false.
But what about the true and immensely valuable information about the proposed location of Russian missiles in Cuba? When the defector Golitsin was debriefed in 1962, he told the CIA that, three years previously, when he had completed his current task in the KGB, he was looking around for a move to a more interesting department. Knowing a senior officer in the Disinformation Department, which had been given heightened status, he approached him. The officer had agreed to take on Golitsin but explained that he would be unable to arrange a transfer for another year because a traitor had been discovered inside the GRU. Until the ramifications of his activities, which affected the KGB, had been thoroughly explored and rectified, it would not be possible to proceed with a major disinformation exercise against the West, in which there could be a role for Golitsin.
The traitor was a certain Col. Peter Popov, who had been recruited by the CIA in 1953. He had given the codenames of nearly 400 ‘illegal’ agents operating for the GRU, many of them being eventually identified, and had done other damage to the Soviet intelligence machine. He had been betrayed eventually to his death probably by George Blake, who confessed that he had known all about Popov. With the good fortune that so often smiled on British traitors, Blake had by chance been sitting in an intelligence post in West Berlin when Popov had breezed in while trying to contact the CIA.
Golitsin now believes that the major disinformation exercise that his colleague had forecast was the Penkovsky affair and that it succeeded. So do some senior officers of the British security and intelligence services.
Their view is that Khrushchev’s purpose was essentially to force President Kennedy into a commitment not to invade Cuba, which was, and still is, far more important to the Kremlin as a centre for the spread of communism in the Caribbean and South America than as a base for missiles.
Any medium-range rockets on Cuba were soon to be outdated by intercontinental missiles based on Soviet soil. Moreover, Khrushchev could have been in little doubt that no American President could really countenance the presence of Russian nuclear rockets so near to the United States. In fact, if installed, they would have given the United States an excellent excuse, in the eyes of the world, for invading Cuba and unseating Fidel Castro and his regime.
Though Khrushchev appeared to climb down by withdrawing the missiles, Kennedy agreed in return not to invade Cuba. The result at the time of writing, eighteen years later, is that Castro and the communist regime are still in power and all American cities are threatened by Soviet missiles.
Independent evidence that this could have been Khruschev’s objective was provided by the Czech defector Maj. Gen. Jan Sejna, in his debriefing by the CIA. Sejna testified that, when defending his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev pointed out that the main purpose had been achieved – the procurement of an American agreement not to interfere in Cuba. Cuba had been ‘saved for communism’.
The American U2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured in May 1960. Eisenhower, then President, had forbidden any further flights over the USSR. There were no western spies on the ground in Russia, so the United States remained blind to Soviet missile developments until the first spy-in-the-sky satellite was launched at the end of 1962. This situation, which may not have been accidental, meant that the West lacked any means of checking Penkovsky’s claim that there was no ‘missile gap.’ So it could have been disinformation.
Penkovsky was tried along with Greville Wynne in Moscow in a propaganda show trial aimed at discrediting the British and Americans as a gang of warmongering spies, using methods to which the Russian peace-loving government would never stoop. There had previously been a rehearsal, and a claque had been selected to laugh and jeer at the required moments.
The precise timing of the trial was unusually interesting. After the Soviet spy in the Admiralty, William Vassall, had been convicted, a public inquiry into certain political repercussions of the case was held under the name of the Vassall Tribunal, opening its proceedings in January 1963. This generated worldwide coverage of the ruthless way in which Vassall had been recruited by KGB homosexual blackmail. Shortly after the tribunal’s report was published, it was announced in Parliament that there would be a debate on it. On the afternoon of that announcement the counsellor at the Soviet embassy, Romanov, was sitting in the public gallery, as was his frequent custom. The next day, the Kremlin announced that the public trial of Wynne and Penkovsky would open in Moscow on the same date.
The Moscow show trial received worldwide publicity. The KGB also used it to expel eight British ‘diplomats’ and five Americans, whom they knew to be intelligence agents. There was a substantial reorganisation of the GRU with postings and retirements, but, if the Penkovsky affair had been a disinformation exercise, that would have been a necessary requirement.
After the trial, it was announced that Penkovsky had been summarily executed by firing squad, but that sounded most unlikely. The KGB’s practice is to interrogate a traitor over a very long period before silencing him. Wynne believes that Penkovsky committed suicide while in prison, but there are others who believe that he may still be alive in Russia under a different name. He did not have close ties with his family, as his behaviour with women, while in London and Paris, indicated.
What is certain is that the Penkovsky Papers, a book published in 1965 and alleged to be compiled from diaries and other documents secretly penned by Penkovsky and smuggled out of Moscow, was a CIA concoction. I was officially told this in advance when offered the British serial rights on the book during a visit to New York. Penkovsky left no diaries. The concoction was compiled from tapes of the long interrogation sessions during his visits to London and Paris.
There are many who cannot bring themselves to believe that Penkovsky was a fake, if only because, having accepted him as the greatest Soviet defector ever, their professional reputations are bound up with his integrity. Some of those, however, do not deny that he was ‘blown’ soon after contact with the West was made. One of these, James Angleton, suspects that the KGB source of this act of treachery was British and could well have been a high-level officer of MI5.
The number of people in any security organisation who are given the name of a defector who is still ‘in place’ is strictly limited, for obvious reasons. But, though MI5 was only marginally involved in the Penkovsky operation, Sir Roger Hollis had taken the unusual step of asking for the defector’s name and had been given it.
The major public disaster for the secret service was, of course, the scandal of Kim Philby, culminating in well-deserved, worldwide publicity following his defection to Moscow in 1963. It was apparent that, until the unexpected evidence of his treachery arrived from Flora Solomon in 1962, he had duped almost all his former secret service colleagues with the exception of the director general, Sir Dick White, who had moved over from MI5 already convinced of Philby’s guilt.
To what extent his colleagues were motivated by loyalty to a friend or determination to protect the good name of the service, which was of the highest repute throughout the world, may never be known. But both they and certain members of MI5 were culpable in failing to take note of events that should have aroused deep suspi
cion. The Volkov affair, which I have described, was one of these.
In the first place, Philby had twice been cleared for entry by MI5, when he managed to insinuate himself with Burgess’s assistance into a side branch of the secret service in 1940 and then into the secret service headquarters in the following year. His communist past had been so well known in Cambridge that an alert security organisation should have discovered it, especially at a time when Russia was not an ally but tied to Nazi Germany by a nonaggression pact.
What is more unpardonable, both on the part of MI5 and the secret service, is their failure to find out that Philby was married to a communist, so ardent as to be an active agent for the Soviet Union. Philby’s first wife was a Viennese Jewess called Litzi, who continued to live in London and keep in touch with Philby even though he was already cohabiting with the woman who became his second wife. The latter was to have three children by him and was about to give birth to a fourth when he finally married her.
Their Trade Is Treachery Page 22