Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky ( Russian Олег Владимирович Пеньковский ; scientific transliteration Oleg Vladimirovič Pen'kovskij ; born April 23, 1919 in Vladikavkas ; †  May 16, 1963 in Moscow ) was a Soviet colonel in the GRU military intelligence service . As an agent , he spied for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the American CIA .

Life

Penkowski was born in 1919 as the son of a White Guard officer . Since 1940 a member of the CPSU and deployed as an artillery officer in World War II, he graduated from the Military Academy of the Soviet Armed Forces MW Frunze in Moscow in 1948 . He then studied at the Military Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Union and in 1953 joined the 4th administration (evaluation center) of the GRU. 1955 to 1956 he was employed as a military attaché in Turkey . In 1958/59 he completed a special course in missile technology at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy . In 1960 he was scheduled to be a military attaché in India, but was transferred to the reserve of the GRU because of his father's secret activities.

Agent of MI6 and CIA

In mid-1960 he then offered his work to the MI6 agent and resident in Moscow Greville Maynard Wynne . In November 1960 he was appointed advisor to the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific and Technical Work. During delegation trips to London and Paris in 1961 and 1962, he provided important political and military information to MI6 and the CIA. In return, he received economic information that he passed on to the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1961 he had already given Wynne more than 50 microfilms in Moscow. At the beginning of August 1961 he learned of the impending construction of the Berlin Wall . It was only 10 days later that he was able to pass this information on to his British contact, as he could not reach him beforehand.

From January 1962 he was monitored by the KGB. He noticed the surveillance and also that of his liaison and reported this to MI6 and the CIA. Despite his surveillance, he continued to spy. The US President John F. Kennedy learned of his surveillance in June 1962. During the surveillance, Penkowski was filmed taking photographs. He kept his connections to the Western intelligence services through dead mailboxes . He sent his last report on August 27, 1962. Despite all precautions, Penkowski was arrested by the KGB on October 22, 1962. Penkowski then offered espionage for the Soviet Union.

At the height of the Cold War , Penkowski provided the West with crucial information about the intentions of the Soviet Union during the Berlin crisis and the Cuba crisis .

Kennedy learned of 99 SS-4 missiles and SS-5 missiles being deployed in Cuba. Penkowski's reports enabled Kennedy to assess the threat that many American cities were threatened.

During the Cuba crisis, Penkowski advised the Western powers to take a tough stance on the Soviet Union. In a dramatic televised address on October 22, 1962, Kennedy called for all Soviet missiles and launch systems in Cuba to be dismantled . The state of Soviet armaments was known to Kennedy through Penkowski's espionage. On October 28, 1962, the Cuba crisis was resolved, but Penkowski learned nothing of this while in custody. During the interrogations, he revealed the secret contact agreements with which he would have signaled an impending attack by the Soviet Union.

In a show trial that began on May 7, 1963 in Moscow , Penkowski was sentenced to death two days later for treason and later executed . His body was not handed over to the relatives, but rather cremated in the then only Moscow crematorium in the Donskoy cemetery and the ashes there thrown into a mass grave.

His British contact, Greville Maynard Wynne, described the events in the book "The Man from Moscow". On April 8, 1993 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about Penkowski:

“And if the 'self-provider' and colonel of the Soviet military secret service GRU, Oleg Penkowski, did not save the world from nuclear war either, he undoubtedly made a major contribution to the United States in particular, to a more realistic assessment of Soviet intentions and possibilities were able to, especially during the Berlin crisis (1961) and the Cuba crisis (1962). "

Penkowski's role as a defector is viewed very differently due to its importance and the scope of the betrayal. The historian Phillip Knightley even expressed the assumption Penkovsky had been deliberately used by the Soviet leadership as a secret channel to the British and Americans to control in particular the information during the Cuban missile crisis. This is probably a mix-up by Knightley, and he means the then Washington GRU resident Georgi Bolshakov , with whom Robert F. Kennedy was in contact. Because of this mix-up, it is occasionally assumed that the Moscow trial against Penkovsky was only carried out on the surface. This theory is considered unlikely in intelligence circles and predominantly by historians. Rather, Penkowski's information enabled the US government to make a realistic assessment of the military strength of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and may have been instrumental in helping the US prevent nuclear war.

Fonts

• Oleg Penkovsky: Secret Notes , edited and commented on by Frank Gibney. Munich / Zurich 1966 ( No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list from March 28 to May 15 and from May 23 to June 12, 1966 )

literature

• Phillip Knightley: The History of Espionage in the 20th Century . Verlag Scherz, Bern 1989, ISBN 3-502-16384-7 .
• Wolfgang Krieger: Secret Services in World History. Espionage and covert actions from ancient times to the present . CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-50248-2 .
• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 343 ff.
• Jerrold L. Schecter, Peter S. Deriabin: The Penkovsky File - The Spy Who Saved Peace . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt / Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-550-06817-4 .
• Matthias Uhl, Dimitrij N. Filippovych: Before the abyss. The armed forces of the USA and the USSR and their German allies in the Cuba crisis . Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57604-6 .
• Greville Maynard Wynne: The Man from Moscow . German Book Association 1969

Web links

• Literature by and about Oleg Wladimirowitsch Penkowski in the catalog of the German National Library
• Oleg Penkovsky on Radio Voice of Russia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Chronicle of the Wall"
2. ↑ from "Before the Abyss" pp. 90/91 ff.