Spycraft - Melton [22]
The operation would refocus on supporting his work for the GRU by providing comprehensively written technical articles to be published under his name and supplying harmless intelligence products he could take back to Moscow from trips to the West. The intent was to strengthen Penkovsky’s credibility among superiors, raising him above suspicion and moving him into circles of even greater access to Soviet secrets.
During a three-month period between October 1961 and January 1962, Penkovsky met with his contact in Moscow, Janet Chisholm, the young wife of British MI6 officer Roderick Chisholm, eleven times in public locations. During these brief encounters, she received thirty-five rolls of film containing hundreds of images of top-secret Soviet documents.14 In January, Penkovskyreported what he believed was surveillance on Mrs. Chisholm but showed no personal alarm. Rather, he suggested that dead drops replace their contacts “on the street.”15 Early successes, it seemed, emboldened Penkovsky but, in his handlers’ opinion, the agent’s level of productivity was alarming as well as gratifying.
Had Penkovsky dropped his guard or grown careless as the inherently dangerous work became routine? It was possible. Had he grown to feel invulnerable and above suspicion? That, too, was possible. It only became known much later that George Blake, an MI6 officer who spied for the Soviets, alerted the KGB that Janet Chisholm was actively supporting her MI6 husband in operations. Consequently, when the couple arrived in Moscow, KGB surveillance teams were waiting for them.
Confirmation of the disaster arrived a few hours after the first message with news of the arrest of Greville Wynne, a British businessman traveling in Hungary. A sometime contact between Penkovsky and his handlers, Wynne was arrested by a KGB team in Budapest, also on November 2, and flown back to Moscow.
The final curtain fell a month later. On December 12, a notice in the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced Penkovsky’s arrest in late October, more than a week before Jacob’s apprehension. Six months later, on May 7, 1963, Penkovsky stood in a courtroom before the same judge who had presided at the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot whose U-2 spy plane had been shot down in May 1960 over Sverdlovsk.
The trial lasted four days. Penkovsky, in an attempt to save his life, admitted that he had passed secrets to the Americans and British. Prosecutors cited “moral degradation” among the reasons for his traitorous acts, while a witness bolstered this claim by testifying that he had seen the defendant sipping wine from a woman’s shoe during a night of heavy drinking.16
On May 17, a public notice appeared that Penkovsky had been executed.
Rumors about his death eventually began to leak out. While the Soviet press announced an execution by firing squad, another, unconfirmed report, claimed that he had been burned alive in a crematorium and the grisly episode filmed as a warning to new GRU officers who might someday consider cooperating with the West.17
Wynne was also tried, found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was released in 1964 as part of a spy swap for Gordon Lonsdale, a Soviet spy convicted in Britain.
Like a silent explosion, the capture, trial, and execution of Penkovsky sent shock waves of uncertainty, recrimination, and retribution through American, British, and Soviet intelligence circles. While the badly burned Soviets restructured the GRU, the British and Americans, uncertain about when and how Penkovsky was first identified, faced a