There were also underlying professional differences between the team which began to surface. Bulik had never been keen on the Brits and he began to argue with Shergy. He did not like having to depend so much on someone else. Each would much rather have been running the show themselves and then sharing the take with their jealous partners. There were also differing styles to running agents. The Americans preferred a bit more glad-handing and a friendlier relationship, playing along with the agent’s quirks and desires. The British – and Shergy especially – liked to maintain just a touch more distance, to make it clearer that this was a professional relationship rather than a personal friendship. One area where the difference was apparent was over money. Bulik was content to keep it flowing to Penkovsky to keep him happy and confident, Shergy wanted him on a tighter rein and the Americans came to think of him as stingy. Although it is tempting to see this as a microcosm of the contrast between a cash-strapped MI6 and a CIA overflowing with cash, Shergy did have his motives – if agents start splashing the cash, it tends to get noticed and people start asking questions.
Greville Wynne had, out of necessity, become a key player, but the team worried that he was also the weakest link. The CIA in particular disliked using him. ‘Remember he is a simple mortal, and not an intelligence man,’ Kisevalter told Penkovsky at their first meeting. Penkovsky frequently commented on their increasingly difficult relationship and Bulik became frustrated at the amount of time spent talking about Wynne.73 ‘Wynne right now feels that I have a good deal of money, that I have been rewarded,’ Penkovsky told them. ‘He gives me glances and hints which say I should “fix” him also.’74 He wanted the team to tell the businessman not to ask him for money. At times he almost laughed at Wynne with his new friends, remembering how the Englishman had been so reluctant to take the documents in Moscow at first. ‘He was afraid. Oh how he was afraid!’
On the evening of 27 September, Penkovsky reported that Wynne had told him he wanted out.75 Wynne had said the time devoted to acting as a courier meant his business was collapsing. Penkovsky told the team how much he thought Wynne was being paid. Shergy replied that the figure was all wrong. Wynne had already received £15,000, far more than Penkovsky thought.76 Tellingly, Wynne had also told Penkovsky he was annoyed that the Russian could not talk to him about his clandestine meetings with the team. Wynne’s self-image was that he was a James Bond who had entered the glamorous world of espionage. Yet he knew he was not in the inner circle, not privy to the real work. He was an outsider, left on the margins imagining what was happening inside the room. The team patched up the problem, but this pivotal relationship between Wynne and Penkovsky was fracturing.77
Janet Chisholm joined the group to discuss meeting places in Moscow. It was agreed that from 20 October every week they would meet at a shop with a fall-back a few days later at a delicatessen after her ballet lesson. They would catch each other’s eye before one would follow the other to a discreet spot where they could make the exchange. At the next meeting a technician came and showed Penkovsky a secret, battery-powered short-range-burst transmitter which could be concealed in clothing. It could send a compressed message entered on a keypad through an antenna a distance of a few hundred yards. When perfected, this gadget could be used by Penkovsky when he was near the American Embassy.78
What if Penkovsky had an urgent message? What if he learnt that a nuclear strike was imminent? The desperate desire for a tripwire to warn of Soviet attack had evolved from the days of questioning defecting soldiers in Vienna into a vast bureaucracy that dominated the work of the transatlantic intelligence community. In London, a Red List and an Amber List catalogued possible signs of either a surprise attack or long-term preparations right down to the increase in petrol prices as a clue that the military was stockpiling supplies for war.79 Across the world, legions of men working for the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ and the military sat in small outstations listening on their headphones for any sign of war in intercepted Soviet communications, perhaps spending their whole career relieved never to have heard anything out of the ordinary. The fear of war was real and ever present and all the elaborate systems were needed precisely because there was no spy who could tip the West off about Soviet intentions. The remarkable aspect of Cold War intelligence is that perhaps 90 per cent of the material was never directly used. It was there to warn of an attack which never came or to help fight that war if it did start.80 That is not to say it was useless. The more understanding there was of the enemy, the less chance there was of a misjudgement about their capabilities or intentions, a misjudgement which could in turn trigger a war. During the years Penkovsky was spying, Britain was particularly concerned about being blind to a Soviet attack. A Joint Intelligence Committee meeting in September 1960 was informed that due to technical changes there might not be any warning, not even a few minutes, of a Soviet attack and this would remain the case until a new radar system came on stream in 1963.81 For this reason Penkovsky offered something enormously valuable at a critical moment. A plan was agreed in which he would telephone an American official. If a male voice said hello, he would hang up and repeat it. He was to say nothing on the phone line since the KGB recorded all calls and would match his voice.82 He would also place a dark smudge on a pole which would confirm the call. He could then load an assigned dead drop with a message on his way to work at 8.45 knowing that it would be clear within half an hour. This was to be the signal that war was imminent.
There was a darkening of the mood in Paris. A cloud increasingly loomed over discussions. The British and American case officers knew that they lost control of the single-minded spy when he was back in Moscow and that he would then dictate the pace. At the end of one meeting, Penkovsky asked what he should do if he was compromised. Should he run to a Western embassy? Shergy told Kisevalter to translate: ‘They can’t do anything for him because they can’t get him out of the country.’ Perhaps he could be exfiltrated by submarine through the Black Sea? Earlier he had talked about going to Riga in the Baltics where one of those fast boats that MI6 ran could perhaps extract him. Berlin might be better, Kisevalter suggested.83 The discussions never came to a resolution.84 At their last meeting, there was champagne and canapés. Penkovsky kissed and hugged each officer in turn. They then all sat down for a moment of silence.
A heavy fog had closed in around Paris the next morning. Penkovsky’s flight was delayed four hours. He became nervous and drank coffee and brandy. The delay meant that Kisevalter and Bulik saw him in the airport waiting room, but they avoided each other. As he walked through Customs, he stopped and Wynne, who was escorting him, thought he would turn round. He put his bags down and stood without speaking. Then he picked them up again and left.
The first few meetings with Janet Chisholm in Moscow went to plan. On 20 October, they spotted each other in the shop and walked separately down the street and into a building where the exchange occurred. Through November, the pattern continued – the exchange often lasted less than half a minute. On 9 December Penkovsky was a no-show. Next week he explained it had just been bad weather.
Tensions over tradecraft were growing and the team and their bosses were beginning to argue. The British were worried that the Americans were placing too much faith in Penkovsky’s signal for war – they argued that if it was received it needed to be carefully assessed by the Joint Intelligence Committee in case it was a false alarm. They were nervous of the American plan to send it immediately to the President, fearing this might trigger a war. The two sides agreed to disagree.
The real dispute came over whether to try and restrain Penkovsky. His intelligence was phenomenal and no one had ever seen anything like it before. This created pressure for him to supply more, but that brought dangers. The Americans were worried the British were taking too many risks. ‘The pace set by the British was a little too hard and fast,’ Bulik reckoned.85 By January 1962, the CIA was worried by the way in which Penkovsky was whipping out his camera at every opportunity. In one cas
e he had photographed a 420-page manual on atomic weapons which proved to be of ‘only marginal interest’.86 The CIA believed that the admonitions to be careful had not been clear enough, especially when coupled with simultaneous requests for more information. ‘They are of a “stop it, I love it” nature and have clearly been interpreted by Penkovsky in this vein,’ wrote one CIA officer. Just because the risks were justified at the start did not mean they were now, especially when a huge backlog of material to translate and analyse was building up. Penkovsky himself was not a good judge of what risks he could and should take, they thought. He needed to be cooled off.
Shergy agreed there was a danger, but believed that there was no way Penkovsky would respond to a call to slow down. The Russian was too driven to be the best and to change the world. It was a matter of his running himself rather than the team running him. An instruction to stop meeting might destroy him psychologically as it would be seen as a rejection. Penkovsky simply did not see himself as an agent and the team did not have that kind of control over him, Shergy argued.87 Penkovsky ‘revels in what he is doing, is determined to be the best of his kind ever (perhaps not appreciating that he has probably achieved this status already). We feel that it would be a tactical and psychological mistake on our part to renew the warning at this juncture.’88 ‘Penkovsky was an extremely difficult person to control,’ Dick White said later. ‘He took immense risks. He wanted to appear as the person who altered the balance of power between the two sides. His vanity was enormous.’89
On the streets of Moscow, events outpaced the discussions as the first signs emerged that something was going awry. On 19 January, Janet Chisholm saw Penkovsky scanning for surveillance from a phone booth. He had seen a car go the wrong way down a one-way street the previous week and saw it again this time. As she took a bus to her ballet class she had also noticed a car make a U-turn and follow behind. MI6 now agreed that street meetings looked too risky. ‘It appears we will not have any trouble [with the British] on this score in the future,’ a CIA officer wrote.
There were more investigations by the KGB into Penkovsky’s father, including a search for his burial place.90 An added complication came when Janet fell pregnant. She was replaced by Pamela Cowell, wife of Gervase Cowell, the new MI6 man at the Embassy who had ‘pram age’ children. Cowell had been recruited at Cambridge and then sent to Berlin. There he had intercepted a set of cyanide bullets, designed to kill one of his agents, that had been hidden inside a cigarette packet from which they could be fired completely silently. For years afterwards, he would take a step back if someone offered him a cigarette. To reassure his agent that the British had better weapons (which they did not), Cowell showed him a massive sleeve gun which, he later observed, ‘you could only fire if a locomotive happened to be leaving Frankfurt station at the time and then at the risk of dislocating your shoulder [as] you let off this enormous clang’.91 He had also discovered that a large network of agents reporting on the movement of Russian matériel on the East German railways was a figment of the imagination of one man sitting in West Germany reading railway magazines. ‘I’m terribly sorry but you know all those reports that you got, they are all fabricated,’ he explained to officials back in London.
‘Oh actually, old chap, if you could keep on sending them, because they are rather good,’ came the reply.92
Meetings with Penkovsky continued sporadically at official functions over the summer. At cocktail parties, he would pick up a tin of Harpic bleach in the bathroom to find film and instructions stashed by Pamela Cowell or he would follow her into a room and then turn his back to indicate a cigarette packet with a message inside which she would quickly snatch. Gervase Cowell would later pay tribute to the British Ambassador for ‘the tolerance and equanimity with which he allowed us to rampage around Moscow in those uncertain and potentially very dangerous circumstances, running an agent which had never been done before’.93 Penkovsky’s letters revealed his fears that events were taking a turn for the worse.
The CIA finally managed to get operational officers into the American Embassy, leading to their first direct contact in Moscow, and they began to take over. Hugh Montgomery was one of the first officers posted over. He was followed everywhere by KGB men who were happy to let him know they were there. He could even hear them clatter round and change the tape in the recorder above his flat. Carrying out operational meetings was close to impossible. There were a few tricks that the team used when they wanted to lose their tails – one involved two people in a car and one jumping out as it turned a corner. A dummy in the passenger seat would then pop up to make it look to the following car as if both passengers were still there. Exchanges of information were hard but could occur.
At a heaving Independence Day party at the American Ambassador’s residence, both Khrushchev and Penkovsky made an appearance among the hundreds of guests. As hands were shaken at a receiving line there was not a hint from Penkovsky that he was anything other than another Soviet official in attendance. Benny Goodman and his jazz band had come over to play (‘I like good music but not Goodman,’ Krushchev joked sourly). Penkovsky drank heavily and, although he did not appear drunk, the Americans thought he looked morose. A quick exchange was made. Penkovsky deposited a packet in the bathroom and Montgomery followed after he left. But the package had fallen into the cistern rather than remaining taped to the side, and the CIA man had to climb on to the sink, which proceeded to come away from the wall (the Ambassador would later express anger at whoever had trashed his bathroom and was never told the circumstances). In the communications, Penkovsky was starting to sound hunted and desperate and as if he was looking for a way out. Trips abroad were being cancelled. The loneliness of the long-distance spy was taking its toll.
Wynne arrived in Moscow on 2 July and found a changed man. ‘He looked pale and taut, there was a shocking weariness in his eyes.’ With the music and taps turned on at the hotel, they talked hurriedly. Penkovsky broke down. He was frightened. At one point, he asked Wynne for a gun.94 The next night, they were due to meet at a restaurant. Two men were skulking in the doorway. As Wynne entered, Penkovsky instead of greeting him signalled not to make contact before whispering, ‘Follow behind.’ He had spotted surveillance. They headed down a street and into a courtyard. ‘You must get out, quickly! You are being followed,’ Penkovsky said hurriedly. The same two men appeared at the end of the alley. Penkovsky moved away quickly. Wynne was left facing two men for a few heart-stopping moments. Back at his hotel, Wynne found his room key missing from reception. When it was returned, there was evidence of a search. On a bathroom shelf was a tin of Harpic bleach with a false bottom. Had it been discovered? The last communication came in late August. ‘It will soon be a year since our last meetings. I am very lonely for you, and at the present time still do not know when we are fated to see each other,’ Penkovsky wrote.95 The skies were darkening over Moscow. Then they went black. From September, Penkovsky dropped off the radar entirely. At that exact moment, the Cold War threatened to turn hot.
Cuba had replaced Berlin as the flashpoint that could lead to nuclear Armageddon. In his first meetings the previous year, Penkovsky had warned vaguely of Soviet intentions there.96 Khrushchev believed that if he moved fast enough to install missiles on the island he would be able to counterbalance his present weakness in overall missile numbers. He nearly got away with it. Few in Washington had believed that Khrushchev would take such a provocative step. Only the new CIA Director John McCone suspected that the Soviets might be so audacious and ordered the resumption of U2 spy-plane flights in October 1962 which detected missiles being installed. This time the giant machines that Graham Greene had presaged in Our Man in Havana were for real.
Penkovsky’s technical information, including the manual for the SS-4 missile which had been passed to Janet Chisholm, helped analysts interpret the reconnaissance pictures to identify the missiles by their footprint. The Penkovsky material had ‘special value’, according to one of the photo-analyst
s who worked on the images.97 This helped decision-makers establish that the missiles would eventually be able to reach Washington DC but were not ready yet.98 The President and his National Security Advisor said the identification ‘had fully justified all that the CIA had cost the country in its preceding years’ because it allowed them to face down the Soviet Union before the missiles became operational.99 Penkovsky’s intelligence was only part of the story. It was the overhead imagery which was of crucial importance and which Penkovsky’s information simply helped the Pentagon to interpret.100 In the next few years, Penkovsky’s role would often be inflated by CIA officials precisely to hide the new capabilities up above which remained top secret.101
A new era of satellite spying was dawning. Spotting trains could now be done by an unseen eye high in the sky rather than by a human spy on the ground. But no satellite image could explain what Soviet leaders were thinking and what their intentions were. In Washington, technology would become king. But in Britain, oddly, the advent of satellites placed an even higher premium on MI6’s human spies. Satellites cost the earth. Britain could barely afford them and came to depend on the largesse of its American ally. The best way of ensuring undiminished access to the flow of American technical secrets was by staying close and by bringing human sources to the table. If they could maintain this relationship then Britain’s spies knew, as in the Second World War with the breaking of the Enigma codes, that they in turn could bring to their Whitehall masters something precious which justified their existence. After Suez, staying close to the Americans and their vast intelligence machine was becoming gospel.
The Cuban drama was a moment Penkovsky – who always thirsted for recognition as someone who could dictate world events – would have savoured had it not already been too late for him. The decision to slow down had become futile. Through September and October, he was silent.
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