Art of Betrayal

by Gordon Corera

  Hugh Montgomery was woken out of a deep sleep by his phone. It was two o’clock in the morning on 2 November but the remnants of his slumber were soon shaken off as the CIA’s deputy station chief in Moscow heard three breaths at the end of the line. Then the click of the phone hanging up. Then the same again. He was all alone, and he uttered an expletive. It was the signal for war. He knew he had to make the drive to the Embassy to cable Washington.

  He walked out into a howling blizzard. It felt like fifty below outside as he struggled to start his car. There were only three other cars on the street as he drove off – his car and three KGB Volgas, one driving alongside him, the others in front and behind. When he made it into the Embassy, he despatched a flash message of the highest priority saying that the signal for war had been received. ‘While we have serious reservations about its authenticity, nonetheless we are obliged to inform you in case you have any other relevant information,’ he wrote. Gervase Cowell would also later say that he had received a warning signal of three breaths but in a display of sangfroid decided simply to ignore it, not even telling his Ambassador.102

  In the morning, Montgomery called Richard Jacob, a twenty-five-year-old CIA officer on his first overseas assignment, into the ‘bubble’ – the secure room in the Embassy which was suspended in the air to prevent microphones being drilled through the walls. He explained to the young officer that there had been a signal on the designated lamppost and so the dead drop needed to be cleared. They knew it might be a trap. Jacob headed for the doorway of the apartment where the message was due to be left and pulled a matchbox from behind the radiator. At that point four men jumped him. In the confusion he managed to drop the matchbox. He was taken to an office. He was an American diplomat, he explained. That surprised his interrogators who believed they were dealing with a British operation.103 ‘I wish to say at this time that I have never in my life seen the material that you have there on the desk,’ Jacob said when presented with items of ‘an intelligence nature’ and a confession to sign.104 They stared at him. He stared back, locking their gaze for two minutes. ‘Well, your dirty career is finished,’ one of the men finally said to him.

  President Kennedy was told the next morning that Penkovsky was now compromised. He had clearly talked and given away the signalling procedures. The KGB had decided to use them to smoke out Western intelligence officers and Montgomery, along with twelve other Britons and Americans, was expelled. One theory still troubles those involved in the case – had Penkovsky explained that the phone signal meant war and had the Russians tried it anyway? Or had he not told them what it meant in the hope of finally fulfilling his desire to change the world and, by starting a war, destroy those in Moscow who had thwarted him?105 ‘He knew he was doomed, he figured that he might as well take the Soviet Union down with him,’ Bulik later reflected.106

  How had their man been caught? the team wondered. Tensions surfaced across the Atlantic. We should never have used Wynne, the Americans grumbled, he was an amateur. In a memo, a CIA official blamed ‘a penetration in the British government who saw Wynn [sic] and Penkovsky together’.107 Others began to wonder if there was another mole in London or Washington – another Philby. It would have to be someone high up since the operation was such a closely guarded secret.

  There was a more likely explanation. Rauri Chisholm had previously worked in Berlin. Alongside him in the MI6 station was George Blake. MI6 knew he was blown and his file was marked ‘Sov Bloc Red’.108 The discovery that the Americans had managed to run Popov in Moscow had deeply troubled the KGB and it had begun blanket surveillance of diplomats. It also realised that wives were sometimes employed in clandestine activities, so they may have begun tailing Janet. They spotted her heading into apartments in January and saw someone nervously following her in.109 They were not yet sure who the Russian was but the frequency of those meetings in public places and the fact that they continued after the first suggestions of compromise made the KGB task easier. By the time Penkovsky had spotted the surveillance on 19 January and decided to halt the meetings it was too late. A KGB investigation had begun which led eventually to surveillance of Penkovsky’s apartment and of his meetings with Wynne.110 It took time as they had to establish that he was not running a legitimate GRU operation and they knew he was protected by his friendships within the elite. Cameras were installed to look down into his apartment. A poison was smeared on his chair to force him into hospital, allowing his flat to be searched. A Minox was found and the one-time pads used to decipher messages broadcast over the radio. He was brought in. ‘When he realised what we had found and was in our possession, Penkovsky knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on,’ an investigator later recalled. ‘He started to confess that he was an agent for the British.’ He was taken in to see a top official and crumpled into a chair. ‘He came in dragging his heels,’ the official recalled. ‘He was limp like a wet rag hanging on a hook.’111 The use of the Chisholms had been a risk – everyone knew that – but Shergy thought there was little choice. ‘Everybody in the British Embassy was under surveillance,’ he later recalled. ‘The name of the game was to avoid surveillance.’112 The Penkovsky operation was success and failure all rolled into one.

  The same night that the telephone rang for Hugh Montgomery in Moscow, Greville Wynne was at a trade fair in Budapest, having just arrived from Vienna.113 In his later years, he would claim to have been on a daring rescue mission to smuggle his friend out in a false-bottomed trailer. No one else involved in the case knew anything about such a bizarre plan. As he walked down the steps from the trade pavilion in the fast-dimming light, he realised that the Hungarians he had been drinking with for the previous two hours had all melted away. Now there were four men – all wearing trilby hats at the same angle – walking towards him.

  ‘Mr Veen?’ one man asked in a thick accent.

  ‘Yes, that is my name.’

  A car pulled up. His arms were grabbed. The back door of the car was opened and he was pushed inside. He shouted for his own driver to help but it was too late as a door and then something else hard slammed against his head. He awoke a few moments later, his hands cuffed and blood on his face. He was taken to a dirty room.

  ‘Why do you spy on us?’ an unshaven, tired-looking man said.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  Wynne was stripped naked and examined roughly. The next morning he was on a Soviet military aircraft flying to Moscow. ‘I suppose that James Bond would have spat from his mouth a gas capsule (concealed in his molar) which would have overcome everyone but himself and would then have leapt to safety with a parachute concealed up his backside. But I regret to reveal that the British Intelligence Service lags behind Bond in ingenuity.’114

  He was taken to the basement of KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka – a dark place where dark things happened. Under interrogation he maintained he was just a businessman. He might have passed some notes, he said, but he had no idea what was contained within them. They played the tape of his conversation at the hotel with Penkovsky which the two thought had been obscured by music. He realised he was in trouble.

  As he was moved from his solitary cell one day, he says he was sure he saw Penkovsky through a spy-hole shutter. ‘He sits motionless with his head down, like a bull after the lance-wound has weakened him.’115

  Wynne’s wife came to visit on 17 December bearing vitamin pills, English tea and cigarettes. She found Wynne’s mood oscillating between dejection and excitement. Wynne said that he had seen all the evidence and he had no defence against it. He asked his wife to try and see the Prime Minister to plead for some kind of deal. ‘He said that “British intelligence” had pushed him into this and it was for Her Majesty’s government to get him out of it,’ she told officials afterwards. Wynne’s fate did lead to much soul searching within MI6 about the use of businessmen and questions about whether the risks of their work on the side had been sufficiently explained.116

  For Wynne, the game was up.
But this was no game. And in Washington and London they understood the price that Penkovsky would pay. The heads of the CIA and MI6 argued over whether to negotiate with the KGB directly and threaten to expose its secrets. Joe Bulik pressed hard for something to be done. ‘I feel we owe him a tremendous debt,’ he wrote in a CIA memo. ‘For us not to consider ways and means of saving his life is to me a reflection of low moral level.’117 His anger grew. ‘There was no gratitude,’ he said later. ‘He was expendable. An abandoned hero.’118 He also vented his anger in later years against the British. ‘The big lesson on the Penkovsky case is never to enter into a joint operation with another service,’ he would say. ‘Joint operations, by definition, double the risks of exposure. The differences in any two services’ operating styles lead to confusion, misunderstandings and raise the possibility of compromise.’119

  The trial came in May 1963. The courtroom was stiflingly hot. Wynne and Penkovsky had been put through their rehearsals for the crowd that had gathered, bristling with anger. Penkovsky may have been a hero to the CIA and MI6 but to them he was just another shabby traitor who had sold out his country for some Western trinkets. Wynne was first in the dock and had visibly aged. The luxuriant black hair was grey and shaved, his moustache tinged white; he looked gaunt, with lines across his face. He read most of his script correctly but incurred some displeasure for the occasional deviation. Had he been deceived by his own countrymen into being an unwitting spy? he was asked. ‘Exactly so,’ he said to the merriment of the crowd. ‘It is exactly because of that that I am here now.’120

  Wynne, whose status as a British citizen ensured that he garnered most of the international attention, was the light relief. The real venom of the prosecutor was reserved for the Russian. What had made him do such a wicked thing? ‘It was the base qualities which have brought him to the prisoner’s dock,’ the prosecutor suggested. ‘Envy, vanity, the love of an easy life, his affairs with many women, his moral decay, brought about in part by his use of liquor. All of these blotches on his moral character undermined him; he became a degenerate and then a traitor.’121

  Penkovsky played it by the book. His moral decay was due to alcoholism and frustration over his job. ‘I lost the road, stumbled at the edge of an abyss and fell,’ he explained in a dull, monotonous voice. The crowd became silent at this, its bloodlust finally sated by seeing the walking corpse in front of it. ‘I deceived my comrades and said that everything was well with me, but in fact everything was criminal, in my soul, in my head, and in my actions.’122 Wynne listened to the translation, headphones pressed to his ears.

  Penkovsky talked and perhaps told the KGB everything in return for his family’s safety. But the Soviets tried to cover up just how damaging he had been and how well connected he was. They also tried to sow division between the British and Americans, claiming that the Americans in Paris had tried to cut out the British. When he recounted his meeting with Janet Chisholm in the park – ‘I patted the child on the cheek, stroked him on the head and said, “here is some candy for you, eat it’” – the crowd uttered ‘noises of indignation’ at the idea that innocent children had been dragged into the midst of this degradation.123 He admitted he had worn the uniforms of a British and an American colonel. ‘Which did you like better?’ he was scornfully asked.

  ‘I did not think about which I liked better,’ he replied.124

  By the end of the trial, Penkovsky looked a wreck. Unshaven, his eyes darted back and forth as if looking for a way out. But there could be no doubt about the verdict. ‘Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky: guilty of treason to the Motherland, to be shot to death.’ The crowed jeered and clapped. Women clambered on benches to catch sight of the traitor’s reaction. Penkovsky stood silent.125 Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was taken out of Moscow to a flat and barren land. He reached the gloomy Vladimir prison in twilight with the rain pouring. His moustache was shaved off and he was placed in a cell with an old oil drum for a toilet. Others also paid a price. General Ivan Serov was demoted and fired as head of Russian military intelligence. Marshal Varentsov – the man who thought of Penkovsky as his son – became Major General Varentsov and was expelled from the Central Committee. How he looked back on his sixtieth birthday is easy to imagine.

  Penkovsky is believed to have been shot on 16 May 1963 and then cremated. His wife – who had never known he was a spy – was simply handed a death certificate.126 Rumours – probably untrue – surfaced that he had been cremated alive in front of other officers to send a message about the fate of traitors.

  Penkovsky may not quite have been ‘the Spy who Saved the World’ as some claimed. But he was the spy who helped save MI6 and the CIA. Both organisations were reeling when he walked through the door of Room 360. Blake had just been exposed as a traitor for the British, while the CIA had just days earlier embarked on the catastrophic Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba which ultimately cost Allen Dulles his job as director. Penkovsky’s manic, messianic spying generated 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. Within it were the first real insights into Soviet intentions and capabilities at a time when the Cold War had yet to settle into a stable pattern of mutually assured destruction and when fears of missile imbalances and crises in places like Cuba, the Congo and Berlin threatened all-out war. Penkovsky allowed the spies to show the policy-makers that what they did mattered and could make a difference.

  The Penkovsky case, even though it ended tragically, represented a ray of hope for the British Secret Service. After all the disasters and betrayals of Blake and Philby, all the frustrations of Albania and the Baltics, the dead agents and the probing questions from Whitehall mandarins, it was a sign that it could – at least for a while – successfully run a valuable agent even in the hardest possible place and provide intelligence that was genuinely valued. The case did not just restore confidence, it also set a marker for a new professionalism in the service, an end to the era of Robber Barons and crazy operations. Perhaps there was a light at the end of the tunnel from the horrors that had gone before.

  Dick White wanted a professional service – one that did not engage in hare-brained mini-wars and pointless bravado but quietly and skilfully acquired secrets, one that could put the past behind it. The shy but determined Shergy was the man who would help deliver it. With Penkovsky his model, Shergy would create a nucleus of staff in MI6’s Sov Bloc division who over the coming decades worked their way outwards and upwards through the organisation instilling such concepts as ‘need to know’ and focusing on the careful collection of intelligence. These officers would become known as the ‘Sov Bloc master race’, a term often employed by their colleagues from other parts of the service who felt a touch put out by the arrogance of those who felt they were the elite.

  Shergy’s mission was to find more Penkovskys. He wanted to identify and target disaffected Soviet officials who could stay in place and spy, rather than drop agents by boat or parachute in the style of the Second World War. This required a different mind-set and skill-set. One of the young officers drawn into this sub-culture of the service was Gerry Warner. Never one of the club men and something of an outsider, his disillusionment with the quality of work in Burma had led him to decide to quit. One evening just before he planned to leave he was sitting in the small bar in the basement of the service’s Broadway headquarters. He overheard a racist and offensive joke and voiced his objection. ‘Who are you?’ the man who had told the joke said.

  Warner replied, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The head of personnel. I’ve got your file on my desk. Come and see me tomorrow.’

  Shergy and the Sov Bloc team were trawling through the personnel files to look for young entrants who might be suited to agent running. Their preference was for people who were ‘clean’ and had not worked in the region before and so were less likely to be blown to the Soviets. Warner was one. Another was a young officer just back from Laos called Colin McColl. He, like Warner, had joined after the customary interview with Admiral Woodhouse in whi
ch intelligence work had been hinted at but never openly discussed (the Admiral’s attractive secretary had also provided an extra inducement for some applicants to join up). After being taught Polish by an eccentric Yugoslav on a barge in East London, Warner was sent to Warsaw under cover as cultural attaché. Here came one of the early successes for Shergy’s team.

  One day a rake-like young Pole with wispy, thinning hair walked into the British Embassy in Warsaw. His name was Adam Kaczmarzyk, he explained, he was a cipher clerk in the Warsaw Pact HQ and had secrets to pass on. Agents provocateurs were commonplace, but cipher clerks were not normally planted because any ciphers they handed over could quickly be checked by the experts at GCHQ to see if they were genuine or not. Cipher clerks were also highly valued since they had access to all the secret traffic that went through an embassy. Warner took the Ambassador down to a secure room to tell him that he would come up with an operational plan to organise meetings with the potential agent. The Ambassador, whose job was to advise on whether the benefits of recruiting an agent outweighed the political risk of being discovered, was reluctant. The next morning, Warner showed him what the latter assumed to be a draft of a telegram. In it Warner indicated that the Ambassador had signed off. ‘Quite right, I’ve changed my mind,’ the Ambassador said. This was fortunate as the telegram had already been sent to Shergy. Warner always explained the risks to anyone becoming an agent. ‘I was always a bit anxious about whether the person I was going to ask to work for the British government, for the Queen, was fully conscious of the risks that he or she was taking, whether they were sufficiently mature to know what they wanted to do … And all this was a very intense business. It was as intense a sort of relationship as you could possibly get into and that led on of course to what I think is one of the basic principles of the secret service that the first responsibility of any officer of the service towards his agents is their safety and their security. That is the first basic principle and after that everything else flows.’127 Not all agents would listen though.