"No doubt everybody was happy with these goodies. The assortment was out of this world. But it furthered everything that Penkovsky was trying to do for the Americans and the British. He could do these favors, maneuver people around, and stay on their good side. Actually, just knowing the big people would help, but his enthusiasm was a bonus to the United States and the United Kingdom. He really could get along with the big people. He was making it lot of others jealous, however, and thereby making enemies. This concerned us a bit."
George related an example of Penkovsky's propensity to irritate people who irked hire. "To give you an idea of how he could really stick a pin into some body's tail, I'll mention one little episode. During this trip he went to a cemetery in London where there is a grave fir Karl Marx. It looked like an outhouse. There were orange rinds, banana peelings, scraps of paper, garbage, and everything else littered about in the little grave enclosure. He photographed the scene. He then sent the photographs, along with a letter, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow saying, `This is how they treat Karl Marx, our national hero, here in London.' Naturally, a great reprimand came to the Soviet Embassy in London. Following that, the station chief was cashiered and perpetual care and attention to the grave of Karl Marx was initiated, all thanks to Penkovsky's jabbing them one."
Since Penkovsky didn't have a delegation to worry about, meeting with him was a lot simpler, and the team had a very nice and comfortable safehouse at their disposal. It was an apartment in Kensington not far from his hotel, which was near the Soviet Embassy. In terms of operational activities, this time there were only thirteen meetings with Penkovsky. Leonard McCoy was the reports officer. It was his job to distribute the take and find out from the customers just what they wanted the team to pursue with Penkovsky. McCoy would brief the case officers beforehand as to what requirements the analysts were especially desirous of having fulfilled, and the team would try to get Penkovsky to respond to those requirements at that time or to make note of them for the future. McCoy would be advised after the meeting of the results, and then if something were of immediate import, he would send a cable back to headquarters describing that information. George described McCoy as being one of the best reports officers in the CIA's history and said that he received recognition from every director for his reports.
When the meetings of this second visit began, Penkovsky was anxious to tell the team about Soviet plans and thinking vis-a-vis Berlin and the gathering crisis there. He set forth Khrushchev's tactic of pushing ahead until he met resistance, then waiting awhile to see a reaction from the United States, then swinging around, perhaps in a different direction, and pressing ahead again. Any concession by the West was regarded as a weakness.
During this trip, the team learned more about Penkovsky's motivations, including his need for personal recognition. If he couldn't get it at home and in his own career, he certainly wanted to be recognized by his case officers. He demanded and got a complete United States Army colonel's uniform. He was very much pleased. He put it on and had himself photographed in it while he experimented with various poses. The British also came up with one of their army colonel's uniforms, and there he was, swagger stick and all. Both were kept for him to wear while he was with the case officers. Shergold and Stokes agreed that, no matter what Penkovsky thought his information was worth monetarily, he didn't have any concept of money in the Western sense. What he wanted was a dignified, comfortable, and secure life. His concept of security was founded more on personal recognition than having money in the bank that might allow him to do what he wanted to with his life. The CIA and SIS were not stingy with him in any way. The CIA agreed to escrow for him a full colonel's pay each month and also to provide him with an additional monetary reward, later to be determined. The British did much the same. He would defect with his family when possible. Before then, he wanted to earn his nickel with the British and the United States by going back to the Soviet Union.
Only a man with Penkovsky's exceptional exuberance for life could have performed so well in this environment. He seemed to thrive on eighteen-hour days, and he found time to do the sightseeing typically desired by all visitors to London. This included visits to the finest restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. The man liked to talk. Moreover, once he got going, he really could carry on.
According to Mike and Shergie, George was the same. The two of them never stopped talking. These were pretty exhausting meetings when the five of them were sitting there for six hours or so in the middle of the night, listening to Penkovsky and George nonstop. The two of them could go on forever. The others' minds would be a bit sore after being hammered about in that way hour after hour. But it was quite important that George do a good job in keeping the confidence of Penkovsky, and it required a lot of delicate handling in order to get him in the channels that the team wished to travel. This was vital and the British maintain that George did it superbly.
Penkovsky came to them wanting to drop atomic bombs in garbage cans in Moscow. They wanted intelligence information. The nuclear-holocaust scenario was prominent in Penkovsky's mind and it was driving him. He would have been content to participate in the elimination of Moscow were the West willing and able to assist him. Shergold stated, "If the team had only given Penkovsky a measure of atomic bombs to toss into the ministry of defense or the ministry of foreign affairs or the Central Committee headquarters or whatever building, he would have been content to go up in ashes along with the rest of Moscow." Penkovsky sorely wanted to get even with the Soviet system, which he thought had been a barrier to his professional progress. He believed that he should have risen higher; he should have been made general by then. When he came to the team in the first round, he really had little idea as to what he was going to do. He came to the first meetings with all of these strange, colorful ideas of miniature atomic bombs, which he could toss down staircases-quite utterly unrealistic nonsense. But this was the way he approached the CIA-SIS team. It was, therefore, quite important to steer his energies into more productive channels, which were, of course, the acquisitions of specifically designated pieces of intelligence information.
Once George got Penkovsky to understand the importance of focusing on the gathering of intelligence information, he began to take tremendous risks toward that end, risks greater than any ever known of by the case officers. When Penkovsky went into the GRU secret library, ostensibly to carry out his studies, he never read any of the material that he photographed. He just photographed it. He didn't take one Minox camera; he took two so that he didn't have to waste time reloading.
He took risks to enhance his access to top-secret intelligence. Chief Marshal Varentsov was in charge of missiles associated with artillery forces, and this group had a special headquarters. Penkovsky went to Varentsov and, on the grounds that he should keep himself up to date following his studies at the Dzerzhinskiy Academy, asked for permission to take documents from the headquarters building. Varentsov made available to him his own aide-de-camp, General Buzinov, and instructed Buzinov to let Penkovsky have access to the top-secret material there. This, then, was a created access rather than a natural one, and a lot of extremely valuable material came out of that entree, particularly with respect to missile development.
Soon, the case officers had an agent with a burning ambition to do their bidding. Penkovsky was told what was wanted and he went after it in a big way. According to the British, George handled him superbly, getting him into the correct frame of mind, away from his own ideas, while the others sat there and observed. Of course, they discussed things between themselves before they went into the meetings, but George was the spokesman for the team and the handler. Shergold maintained that the British felt quite indebted to George. "None of the other three could have handled Penkovsky the way that George did. It wasn't only the language; it was his understanding of Penkovsky's psychology and his superb background, not only of being a native of Russia, but the Popov experience. He was absolute master of the whole thing
. It seemed comparatively easy for him, having had all of those years trucking about the GRU with Popov." There was no question in their minds at all. George was the key to the success. Shergold and Stokes did not believe that their entire service could ever have produced such a man. There were, of course, other vital elements to the operation, but in the handling of the agent, in getting Penkovsky relaxed and producing, George was irreplaceable. The team knew that the main asset in the case (except for Penkovsky himself) was George.
CHAPTER 13
City of Light
In September 1961, George, Stokes, and Roger King, a general factotum provided by the British, took up residence in a Parisian SIS safehouse and waited, but no Penkovsky. Leonard McCoy came and stayed in a hotel nearby. The safehouse was on Beranger Haneau, in a quiet, attractive neighborhood just a few blocks up the hill from the Seine and about ten minutes from the American Embassy. George did not go anywhere near the embassy, which was down the Champs Elysees from the Etoilel at the Place de la Concorde overlooking the Seine.
George described his experience with the team in Paris as rollicking: "To drive around Paris, the British brought in Roger King, a case officer and a racecar driver. He could sail through Paris at eighty miles an hour like a damned fool, missing everything, thank God, unlike with poor Princess Diana, and he was at our beck and call. Oh, the British were loaded; they had many safehouses and they had safehouses that really were safehouses! We would come in through the basement. It would be dark. We'd press a button; lights would go on upstairs. An elevator was there for our use. Luckily, I knew a little more about Paris than some of the British, as I had been there many times before. My mother was French, you know, and of course I could speak French. French was my first language. The city happened to be loaded and overflowing. On one occasion, the British intelligence couldn't find a hotel room for a colleague's friend when he came to visit. I went to a little hotel and I told the manager that my mother was from Le Creusot, near Dijon, this and that. It worked like a charm; she said, `Ohhh, oooh, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.' She gave me the room. She said, `Anytime you are in Paris, come see me.' So I had an inside track into the little hotel adjacent tojardin du Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Gardens, a lovely place but always overloaded with people. Unfortunately, the hotel was next door to a whorehouse."
Penkovsky's arrival at Paris was delayed. French authorities held up his visa for three weeks while the team members waited. They brought Wynne from London to be with them and to front for them, using him as much as possible as an intermediary. Wynne finally met Penkovsky on 20 September and gave him instructions for meeting George and the others. When Penkovsky arrived at the safehouse, he began castigating them for not hurrying up the process. George explained to him, "Look, we did not cut the French intelligence service in on this operation because they are penetrated, so to speak. We have enough problems, for Pete's sake."
The circumstance for Penkovsky coming to Paris was again a Soviet trade fair, an exposition. In addition, he had a mission to find an American or French expert in steel who would give him some new technical information about steel fabrication. An Armco Steel man named George Hook agreed to give him a tour in a fabrication plant, supply him with a big stack of brochures, and personally entertain him a bit. Penkovsky was confident that this would go over well back at GRU headquarters in Moscow. He stayed at a hotel on the Rue de Grenelle near the Soviet Embassy on the Left Bank. It was very difficult for the team to meet with him in Paris. It was a very rough time, politically. As George said, "The Algerians were kicking up. The OAS, the Secret Army Organization, was very active; explosions were all over France. I used to have a drink of wine in a little place near the safehouse. A pretty girl was there, waiting on tables. One day she teased me, saying, You were walking down with a very beautiful woman in the morning.' That was Barbara, the British secretary sent to help me do tapes. She was very useful, good, obedient. After she completed her contribution to the Penkovsky operation, she had a long and successful career with SIS. The next day I could not see the little French waitress. The second floor of the building was where the first floor had been before. There had been an explosion. OAS. We actually had heard the roar of the explosion the night before but did not realize its cause."
The team determined that they would use the various bridges over the Seine to their advantage in order to set up their meetings. The first arrangement was to wait for Oleg in the Trocadero Square, right across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. From the Trocadero's giant staircases they could see a half-mile downtown, thus giving them a remarkable means of surveillance. In order to get to them, Penkovsky would cross the Pont d'Iena and then walk up to a prescribed meeting point where George would be hiding behind a pole. Once contact was made, George would escort him to the place where Roger King was in a car and then let Roger take them to the safehouse. One night George observed two other guys behind two other poles, waiting for some other agent. They were from the OAS. So the team abandoned that plan.
There was a humpback footbridge across the Seine about a block away from the Tuileries Gardens.2 It was like a shortcut between the Soviet Embassy on the one side and the Tuileries near where the Louvre is on the other side. Penkovsky could walk across that bridge to an opening in the Tuileries buildings, sort of an alleyway. The team members could observe him well during the whole transit, since they could see across the entire river and know whether or not he was being followed. Either Bulik or George would try to arrive early to escort him. When they spotted him on the bridge to the Tuileries driveway, they would walk him to where Roger King would be parked and ready to pick them up in the car and take them to the safehouse. There was only one problem: the Tuileries was also the homosexual meeting place of Paris. George had to take Barbara with him, and Bulik had to find an American secretary whenever he went. That way, they were less likely to be molested. As George said, "you run into the damnedest situations."
Finally, they settled on the Pont de Grenelle, much farther up. This was an automobile bridge across the Seine to the Right Bank, a one-way bridge-the wrong way for them. In other words, Penkovsky would walk across facing traffic and no car could follow him. This bridge connects to an island in the Seine where the little Statue of Liberty sits, the one that was copied in order to manufacture the Statue of Liberty that the French gave to the U.S. So from there, Roger would meet them at the corner and take all of them to the safehouse. Those were the different ways of picking him up, and George volunteered that "it seemed always to be me who was the poor boob who had to do this."
Penkovsky told the team all about the Soviet Embassy in Paris, who the station chief was, etc. This man had just arrived following a major promotion, so he was told by the U.S. Embassy, "You are welcome." The Soviets were shrewd. At a reception in their embassy, they had people on display talking with the wrong people. This was done to fool the French about who was, and who was not, an intelligence operative. The Soviets had penetrations all over France, so the team members were living in a very tenuous situation with regard to security. George said that he never even wanted to look cross-eyed at the American Embassy because he knew that even the Rumanian newspaper seller downstairs there was a Soviet agent.
Penkovsky told the team that when he had returned to Moscow after having squired Mrs. and Miss Serov around London, he was personally invited to their dacha. Someone from Serov's office picked up the phone and told Penkovsky to be at the house at six o'clock that evening. No matter that he was in the doghouse with his people at the GRU. George observed, "Can you imagine trying to fire a guy in this position? How is he going to be bawled out when that kind of call, directly from the chief of GRU, comes right into his office?" Penkovsky went to the house. Serov thanked him and excused himself because he had an engagement a little later, but said his wife and daughter would entertain him. Moreover, the Soviets paid back "his" money, the money that the team had given him in London to "lend" to the Serov ladies, so Penkovsky was doing quite well. He told G
eorge about the plush quarters, with guards throughout.
Shergold volunteered that they could arrange to have Janet Chisholm meet with Penkovsky and the case officers the next day in order to plan multiple meetings for the future. True to form, she was there the next morning and they arranged a whole series of meetings. Plan number one would be executed in much the same manner as the initial contact between Penkovsky and Janet. On almost every pleasant day, she would go out of her apartment with her two children and down into the public park. She would sit down. If there were a meeting, Penkovsky would walk by as before, discretely say hello, drop cassettes and notes into her open shopping bag, and offer a piece of candy to the children.
Plan number two was more complicated. There was a place in Moscow called a Kommission store. It was similar to a silver shop, a convenience store of relics and antiques, where poor Russians could sell their earthly goods. They would bring an icon or samovar, something old, something desired by Western people, and present it for sale. Women from the various Western embassies would make a beeline for this store whenever it was convenient in order to see what was newly offered. They would look, they would browse, and usually they would walk out. Most often there was little to see. Nearby was a restaurant/delicatessen where one could browse some more. On Fridays, Janet would take a ballet lesson at the American ambassador's residence and then she would walk to the commercial area, always stopping in one or two stores, including the Kommission store and then the restaurant/deli, thus adopting a recognizable pattern. On certain other days she would leave her home and go directly to either the Kommission store or the restaurant/deli. From within the store or the deli she would be able to see Penkovsky pass by. If a meeting were planned, he'd catch her eye and, without averting his head or otherwise acknowledging recognition, walk by the door of the store or the deli and then down the street. From then on he would be master of the situation. He would direct where to walk in order to make the pass. She discreetly would follow him a block or so. They would meet at a secluded spot such as a covered aperture between buildings. There they could pass things to each other. She would take a bus to go home and he would disappear. The rendezvous locations would sort of alternate, so that if one day it was at the store or deli, then the next meeting would be in the park. In addition, Greville Wynne could continue to serve as a drop for messages.
CIA Spymaster_George Kisevalter Page 20