Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Some fifty Seventh Directorate officers cased the British embassy. They knew all about its employees, including where they lived and what cars they drove. Chisholm wasn’t followed all the time, but in twenty-four-hour shifts. When he left the embassy grounds, up to three cars kept track of his movements. His wife was watched too. She was often seen taking her two small children to a park near her apartment in northern Moscow. This time, several of our men followed her as she left her building for a walk. She was soon seen entering a nondescript residential building nearby. She remained inside for a few minutes, straightening her skirt when she came out as if she’d ducked into the entrance to adjust her underwear.

  As the Seventh Directorate officers prepared to follow, one spotted a man hastily leaving the same building. He wouldn’t have attracted attention but for one thing—he’d entered right after Chisholm. For all the officer knew, the man lived there. But the coincidence of his departure seemed a little odd. The officer hastily described what he’d seen to a colleague, and as the two debated their course of action, they lost track of the unknown man.

  Listening to Fyodorov on the phone now, I didn’t think the incident meant much, and neither did Fyodorov. But we agreed to inform department head Markelov, who thought differently. He ordered reprimands issued to the Seventh Directorate for letting the man slip out of sight. My entire department was also alerted. Everyone was to be on the lookout for the mysterious figure who’d spent a few minutes in the same building as Janet Chisholm.

  If the surveillance team had followed the man, the matter wouldn’t likely have drawn the SCD’s attention. But the mistake and the dressing down for it put him prominently on our radar screens. Nevertheless, I expected the incident to fade away. It didn’t. The very next day—on New Year’s Eve, when we were still in pursuit—Fyodorov called again. “He’s been spotted!”

  It was incredible but true. The very same surveillance officer who’d lost sight of the man the day before happened to be in a group watching a military scientific institute on the Moscow River’s Ovchinnikovskaya embankment. Out walked the unknown man, this time wearing the uniform of a Red Army colonel. What a coincidence! The department’s dour atmosphere lifted. Now the surveillance officers didn’t let the colonel out of their sights. They photographed him and brought back the film to identify the handsome mystery man of medium height and slightly graying red hair. It didn’t take the Seventh Directorate long. His name was Oleg Penkovsky.

  Together with others in the SCD English department, I was drafted to compile everything known about Penkovsky and write reports for the top brass. During the next several days, we discovered he wasn’t just any army colonel but an intelligence officer, a member of the Chief Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff. His cover was deputy chief of the Scientific Research Commission’s foreign section, which oversaw delegations, missions and technical intelligence work with foreign countries. Penkovsky frequently traveled abroad. He’d visited London and Paris three times recently. As soon as we knew he was a GRU officer, SCD chief General Oleg Gribanov took personal command of our counterintelligence operation.

  I still couldn’t believe that spotting a man with Penkovsky’s credentials in a building with the wife of an MI6 officer meant he was spying. And the more we learned during the following days, the more unlikely that seemed. Penkovsky had an outstanding Party record. He’d been a military attaché in Turkey, a regimental artillery commander and a general’s aide. He also had a distinguished war record and was highly decorated. He was incredibly well connected and circulated in the highest circles of the military and political elite. His wife was the daughter of an important military man, artillery General Sergei Varentsov. He was also close to General Ivan Serov, who had become head of the GRU in 1958. But we also discovered a black spot on Penkovsky’s record: His family came from the upper ranks of the tsarist civil service. His father, a White Army officer, was killed fighting Bolsheviks outside Rostov—making him a bona fide counterrevolutionary.

  As soon as we were sure of our information, the SCD directors informed the GRU and the KGB Third Directorate, which handled military counterintelligence. Markelov asked me to write a report stating our suspicions that Penkovsky was a spy. “But we still have no factual basis for such assumptions,” I protested. “Just do it!” Markelov snapped angrily. I had little choice. The case was then transferred to the special section of the English department in charge of planning operations, although my office continued to assist in planning the investigation.

  Penkovsky wasn’t your average suspect—if he was actually collaborating with the British. So before taking any move against him, we would have to have incontrovertible proof. I wrote recommendations to Markelov about how to proceed with observing Penkovsky, including advice on setting up eavesdropping bugs and secret cameras in his apartment. We monitored all of his contacts, which led us to one in particular: British businessman Greville Wynne, whose every movement in the Soviet Union and abroad was followed.

  Penkovsky was trailed around the clock, and we soon had the incontrovertible proof. In January, he and Janet Chisholm were filmed as they routinely entered and left the building in which they met, as our surveillance report read, “with inevitable regularity.” Eavesdropping equipment was installed in Penkovsky’s apartment when he was out one day. We soon knew the agent the British code-named ALEX was passing secrets not only to them but also, as he himself would later learn, to the Americans as well. The process took many months because we had to make absolutely certain of our evidence. Janet Chisholm left Moscow in June, but Penkovsky continued meeting with other British handlers.1

  We then had to decide what do with him. We knew Penkovsky was continuing to pass documents to the West even after his membership at the GRU library, from which he got much of the information he passed along, had been canceled. We also knew he had plans to defect. But we had to make sure not to tip him off in any way, enabling him to notify the CIA or SIS that we were on to him or even to escape. Finally, on October 22, KGB special forces swooped in to arrest him. His contact Wynne, detained while on a trip to Hungary, was brought to Moscow to face trial.

  Penkovsky confessed to everything. He described first trying to make contact with U.S. authorities in Moscow in 1960. Approaching American students in Moscow, he asked them to take a letter to the CIA. They took it to the U.S. embassy. The letter described Penkovsky and proffered his services spying for the United States. But the understaffed Americans stalled, and he made three more approaches before establishing ties with the British through Greville Wynne. Penkovsky soon began spying for British intelligence, and the SIS eventually asked the CIA to help run him jointly. Penkovsky used three miniature Minox cameras, the espionage industry standard that could take up to fifty pictures without reloading. At his trial, prosecutors accused him of handing over five thousand separate photographed items of military, political and economic intelligence to the two agencies.2

  Penkovsky’s arrest came at a particularly tense time for international relations. In the weeks and months leading up to it, ties between the Khrushchev regime and the administration of the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, had become especially frayed. The exposure of American U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union in 1960 had already quashed hopes of a détente between Khrushchev and Kennedy’s predecessor, General Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy came to office, Khrushchev tried to take advantage of a young leader he saw as weak and inexperienced. Relations went from bad to worse. In 1961, the United States became mired in the Bay of Pigs fiasco that outraged the Soviet Bloc. In June of that year, Khrushchev tried to humiliate Kennedy by haranguing him during a summit in Vienna.

  The Berlin Wall went up some two months later. Then something far more serious hit both sides. The day before Penkovsky’s arrest, Kennedy appeared on national U.S. television to announce that Moscow had placed nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in Cuba.

  Penkovsky spied from April 1961 to late August 1962 under vario
us cryptonyms, including HERO (CIA) and YOGA (SIS). The true value of his intelligence is still hotly debated. Many in the West say his information helped Kennedy decide to force Khrushchev to back off from his insistence on a 1961 treaty for a “solution” to the division of Berlin. More important, Penkovsky is credited with giving Kennedy the information necessary to take his stand during the Cuban missile crisis, making Khrushchev back down by removing the missiles and defusing a potential nuclear war.

  But that’s stating the case too strongly. For the West, Penkovsky was a gold mine, providing highly sensitive information, including missile specifications and Soviet military strategic plans. He even gave the CIA the manuals for the missiles we had on Cuba—which revealed, among other technical information, how long it would take the projectiles to travel to the American mainland. Still, it’s improbable the information played the key role credited to it by CIA officers and others. Washington figured out by itself that something was brewing. For one thing, it was clear that Moscow had stepped up shipments to Cuba over the summer and had increased military activity on the island. Some in Kennedy’s cabinet correctly surmised that the activity was meant to facilitate and conceal the true nature of our work—the installation of mediumrange ballistic missiles. The United States took U–2 spy plane pictures of the Cuban bases. A batch taken on October 14 allowed expert CIA analysts to identify the missile installations.

  The extent to which the CIA and SIS actually trusted Penkovsky also remains disputed. Without proof, it’s impossible to say how much foreign governments base their decisions on intelligence. Despite their admiration for the man, even Penkovsky’s handlers admitted he had a paranoid streak. Certain that Khrushchev was bent on waging nuclear war, he demanded a private audience with the British queen to warn her. He even offered to plant portable nuclear devices in Moscow.3

  Penkovsky was arrested during the tensest moments of the crisis, a day after Kennedy announced his intention to blockade Cuba. Knowing the missiles on the island were on standby, Washington put its own nukes on alert. Nuclear war was a razor’s edge away. During his arrest, Penkovsky managed to signal to his handlers that the Soviet Union was preparing a nuclear attack on the United States. The crucial fact is that U.S. intelligence treated Penkovsky’s message skeptically. His handlers knew he was determined to paint the scenario in the starkest possible terms—and it was actually U.S. intelligence officers who, perhaps more than anyone else, saved the world from nuclear war. Penkovsky’s threat of a nuclear strike wasn’t conveyed to Kennedy, relieving him of the pressure to react. Four days later, after Khrushchev announced he might be willing to withdraw the missiles if the United States would dismantle its nuclear arms in Turkey, the crisis began to subside.

  Another misconception about Penkovsky is even more misleading. It concerns the man, his motivation and his role in the history of Cold War espionage. The colonel worked hard to penetrate the top echelons of Soviet society. Cunning and able, he deserved his rewards—so why would he want to risk them for espionage? In fact, ideology very rarely, if ever, motivates treason. Personal reasons usually prevail, and ideological justifications often come after a decision to commit treason has been made for those much more private and immediate motivations.

  Penkovsky’s position in the Scientific Research Commission didn’t satisfy his ambition. He’d suffered some setbacks in his career; for example, during his stint as attaché in Turkey he crossed swords with the GRU chief. After his superior made a series of inexcusable blunders, Penkovsky rightly accused him of mismanagement. But he did that by going over his head, sending a cable to the KGB rezidentura in Ankara, with which the GRU had a traditional rivalry. The move backfired. The incident reached Khrushchev’s desk, after which Penkovsky was recalled and dressed down for insubordination. (Despite the official censure, Penkovsky was still considered in the right, and the GRU Ankara rezident was eventually dismissed from service.)

  For that and other reasons, Penkovsky hadn’t achieved his ambitions by the early 1960s. Sitting on recommendation committees for general staff medals, he put his own name down more than once. When it came to making the decision to spy for the Americans, his frustrations crossed into delusions of grandeur. Contacting the CIA, he made a bid to help decide the fate of the entire state, even of the Cold War itself. He saw himself taking a major part in international relations by playing one side off against the other. Hence the screeching warnings about nuclear war. He wanted the British and Americans to be afraid—and to listen to his advice.

  After his arrest, Penkovsky made no effort to hide his espionage but didn’t admit to treason. What’s more, he tried to convince his interrogators to use him as a triple agent against the British and Americans, even suggesting ways to go about doing it—by entrapping a CIA officer recently sent to Moscow to help run him. Was that the pleading of a condemned man? Certainly—and of a naive one too. But his actions helped shed light on the man and the game he wanted to play. In any case, Penkovsky’s interrogators—while never actually saying he’d be reprieved from the “ultimate measure,” as we termed the death penalty—let him know his help was appreciated and held out hope that he could receive a lesser sentence for cooperating.

  Meanwhile, we developed Penkovsky’s idea of entrapping his CIA handler. In November, the SCD—almost certain the Americans didn’t yet know Penkovsky had been exposed—ordered the spy to signal the CIA that he’d loaded a dead drop, a prearranged hidden location used to exchange packages, messages and payments. I was assigned to take part in the operation—my biggest so far. Penkovsky described the drop site, in a building near central Pushkin Square with a bookshop downstairs. A theater stood next door to the left, a shoe store to the right and a hospital in front. The drop itself was a container the size of a matchbox lodged behind a radiator inside the entrance. Determined not to tip off the CIA officer, we blanketed the area with surveillance personnel. So many observers were posted in each monitoring zone that eyes would be on the American at all times, without moving people around.

  I was stationed in the shoe shop. Pressure mounted early. About two hours before the scheduled time, CIA case officer Richard Jacobs was spotted leaving the U.S. embassy. It seemed the Americans had taken the bait. Jacobs slowly wended his way toward Pushkin Square in an attempt to throw off surveillance. By the time he was two kilometers away, his every step was being closely watched. He eventually approached the bookshop building, opened the door, entered and reached in to take the container. We stormed in to arrest him just as he was about to leave.

  After the operation, surveillance detected no movement between the U.S. and British embassies. That is, as far as we knew, the CIA—which probably realized immediately that Penkovsky had been compromised—didn’t inform the SIS. So we decided to try to nab a British handler too. The next day, the KGB ordered Penkovsky to signal MI6 for an urgent meeting at the Moscow circus on central Tsvetnoi Boulevard. A KGB officer was made up to look like Penkovsky and sent to wait at the appointed meeting place. But the British didn’t show, probably because the Americans had tipped them off without our knowledge. Several days later, Jacobs was expelled from the Soviet Union.

  Penkovsky and Wynne were put on public trial by a military tribunal and sentenced on May 11, 1963. Wynne received eight years but was released seventeen months into his sentence in an exchange for Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, who was serving twenty-five years in England. Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed a week later. Following the trial, eight British and five U.S. diplomats were declared personae non grata and expelled from the Soviet Union. GRU chief General Ivan Serov—Penkovsky’s mentor—was transferred and then publicly demoted. In the shakeup, some three hundred Soviet military intelligence officers serving abroad were recalled to Moscow.4

  Penkovsky’s exposure was pure chance, chiefly the result of sloppy British tradecraft. He had excellent cover as an intelligence officer detailed to meet foreign intelligence officers, diplomats and businesspeople. He could even travel
abroad to meet his handlers and arouse no suspicion. But the operation to run him wasn’t properly thought through. While the SIS and CIA used standard and usually secure methods of running their most valuable agent—dead drops, coded signals and undercover meetings in Moscow and abroad—the lack of professionalism was staggering. Penkovsky’s dual handling only increased the variables for possible failure.

  Couldn’t the CIA and SIS officers involved in the operation have devised a better liaison than the wife of the MI6 station chief? The location picked for their meetings also betrayed a lack of imagination. How often do people enter downtown buildings in which they neither live nor work nor have an apparent reason for visiting? The meetings were conducted in broad daylight on a busy street, and in an obvious way. On top of that, Chisholm and Penkovsky entered and left within minutes of each other. Dead drop operations are best conducted at night, when streets aren’t busy with pedestrians, and in places less suspicious than random building entrances. The British almost seemed to be playing a game by risking so much and conducting their business so clearly under our noses.

  We learned from that mistake. The odds that an agent can be exposed through shoddy tradecraft today are too small to even consider.

  Although Penkovsky’s characterization of the Soviet leadership was exaggerated, the Cuban missile crisis confirmed one of his main points about Khrushchev. Many members of the Soviet military and political establishment, including Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, thought him wildly impulsive and secretly opposed setting up nuclear missile installations in Cuba. But Khrushchev’s economic policies, such as his ruinous decision to plant corn in unfertile land all over the Soviet Union, were failing massively. The decision to ship missiles to Cuba in one sense was a time-honored method of distracting public attention. Khrushchev’s main mistake was underestimating Kennedy’s resolve.