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 an
d 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.
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