Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  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 late
st 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