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The Soviet secret service agent who revealed the Kuba armaments to the West

Attack is the best defense.

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The Soviet secret service agent who revealed the Kuba armaments to the West

Attack is the best defense. Presumably that is exactly what Oleg Penkowski said to himself on October 22, 1962, when a KGB commando stormed into his apartment. So the colonel of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service, yelled at his unwelcome visitors “in a bass voice accustomed to command,” the government newspaper Izvestia reported weeks later.

It was only when a search of his desk turned up three miniature cameras, a forged passport and special paper for secret writing that Penkowski broke down. After this description, he took a deep breath and confessed: “Yes, I confess. I behaved shamefully towards Mother Russia.” The 43-year-old was arrested and taken to the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka in central Moscow. Even "Izvestia" said that the case was reminiscent of a "bad crime novel".

WELT correspondent Heinz Schewe reported from Moscow that the government newspaper drew "a gloomy character" of the arrested man - a man who had worked for the GRU for nine years. "Now he turns out to be a weakling, a drunkard, a morally depraved womanizer," Schewe said of the Soviet accusations: "He has always felt attracted to foreigners, has drunk and celebrated with them in Moscow restaurants. This is how Penkowski got caught by the foreign espionage service. His example is intended to warn all honest Soviet citizens: 'Stay away from the foreigners!'"

But what was true about it? One always had to be careful with publications originating in Moscow or Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Facts and false claims often formed an inseparable mixture in Soviet government communications. Nothing has changed since the Cold War.

Penkowski was born on April 23, 1919 in the northern Caucasus. He never got to know his father, who died when his son was still a toddler - as an officer in the anti-Bolshevik "white" troops in the Russian Civil War. At the age of 20, Penkowsi successfully graduated from the Artillery Academy in Kyiv. He then fought in the Soviet war of aggression against Finland and all of the almost 47 months in the German-Soviet War. In the end he was badly wounded, promoted to lieutenant colonel - and married to the daughter of a general, who promoted his son-in-law from then on.

After training as a staff officer (graduating in 1948), Penkowski joined the military intelligence service GRU in 1953. One of the tasks of this competition of the KGB was the official reconnaissance carried out by embassies abroad. Penkowski was sent to the Turkish capital Ankara in 1955 as a military attaché. But he made himself unpopular with his colleagues there because he reported their violations of the rules for Soviet (military) diplomats. He was recalled and continued his education in Moscow to become a rocket artillery specialist.

Thanks to protection, he was to receive another post abroad, this time in India. But the KGB had meanwhile determined that Penkovsky was the son of an "enemy of the Soviet power" - definitely a career brake in the USSR. As a colonel, he was deported to the GRU Committee for Scientific Research.

It was probably these humiliations that turned Penkowski into a spy. The information about him and his betrayal is contradictory and uncertain, because (at least) four secret services were involved, each with their own interests: the KGB, which wanted to make its competitor GRU as bad as possible; the GRU, which aimed at the opposite; the CIA, which in 1965, for example, published the supposed “Penkowski Papers” as a book; finally the British MI6, which had taken over the recruitment and emphasized its own role.

It is reasonably certain that Penkowski independently contacted the Americans in July 1960. He approached US tourists on a bridge in Moscow and asked them to bring a package to the US embassy. It contained classified documents and an offer to spy for the US.

But the CIA reacted cautiously. It was feared that the “self-supplier” could be an agent provocateur who was supposed to plant falsified information on the West and could, in due course, be “exposed” to the public. So the Americans asked British intelligence to contact Penkowski through an unofficial agent (not a diplomat).

This role fell to businessman Greville Wynne, born in 1919 like Penkowski. He had already worked for MI6 during the Second World War and established himself after 1945 as a qualified electrical engineer in the general export business. His many trips, including to the Eastern Bloc, provided ideal cover for a command officer.

Wynne established contact with Penkowski, subsequently meeting him in the USSR and abroad. In 18 months, the spy gave Wynne films containing almost 5,500 shots from a Minox camera, as well as other material. On the one hand, Penkowski's information about the halt in the construction of ICBMs was important for the West, on the other hand, from the spring of 1962, on the other hand, information about massive support of the Caribbean island of Cuba, dictatorially ruled by Fidel Castro, with Soviet weapons.

The US and UK worked closely together. It was likely information essential from Penkowski that led CIA Director John McCone to expect Soviet medium-range missiles to be deployed there - which is why reconnaissance flights using U-2 aircraft were scheduled, which eventually provided the proof. The Cuban Missile Crisis took its course.

The KGB had been secretly monitoring Penkowski since January 1962. But because he got along well with Ivan Serov, the former head of the KGB and now the GRU, even the almost all-powerful secret service had to be careful. The spy managed to pass on one last piece of important information to the CIA via a dead mailbox: the missiles in Cuba were not yet operational. Then he was arrested on October 22, 1962.

The KGB initially kept the success a secret. On November 2, 1962, a Soviet commando in Budapest kidnapped Greville Wynne and took him to Moscow. Here he was subjected to a show trial together with Penkowski in the spring of 1963. Penkowski received the death penalty and was executed on May 16, 1963; Wynne was sentenced to eight years in a foreigners' prison near Moscow. In 1964, after almost 18 months in prison since his kidnapping, he was exchanged for a Soviet spy code-named "Melody". Wynne lived to see the Peaceful Revolution sweep through East-Central Europe in late autumn 1989, but died in February 1990 at the age of 70.

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