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PERSON FILE · 23 April 1919 – 16 May 1963

Oleg Penkovsky

GRU colonel who spied for the CIA and MI6 in 1961–62, supplying the missile manuals behind the IRONBARK reporting of the Cuban crisis; arrested in October 1962 and shot in May 1963.

1919–1963

3 min read · 5 sources, 4 primary

Portrait: Oleg Penkovsky with a guard at his trial in Moscow, 1963. Unknown (Associated Press). Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Oleg Penkovsky was not a man the Soviet system had overlooked. He was a decorated artillery officer, married to a general's daughter, with a patron who rose to command the Soviet rocket artillery. That combination of access and grievance made him, in the words of the CIA's 1993 review of counterintelligence literature, "easily the greatest Anglo-American espionage success of the Cold War."2

Soldier and staff officer

Penkovsky was born in Vladikavkaz in the North Caucasus on 23 April 1919. His father, a White officer, died in the Civil War when he was an infant, a fact that would later damage his career.5 He served as an artillery officer through the Second World War and caught the eye of Sergei Varentsov, the front's artillery commander. In 1945, aged 26 and a lieutenant colonel, he married Vera, the 17-year-old daughter of Lieutenant General Dmitri Gapanovich.1

After the Frunze Military Academy he joined the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, graduating from its Military Diplomatic Academy in 1953. In July 1955 he went to Ankara as assistant military attaché and deputy GRU resident. The posting soured: he fell out with KGB colleagues and anonymously tipped off the Turkish authorities about one of them, and in November 1956 he was recalled. Varentsov rescued him with a place at the artillery academy, where he spent eight months copying some 1,500 pages of data on Soviet rockets.1

The decision to spy

By the CIA History Staff's account, Penkovsky had resolved to defect by January 1959. In November 1960, after the KGB's checks on his father blocked a posting to India, he was moved to the State Committee for Science and Technology, a job that let him travel with delegations.1,5 Three months earlier, on 12 August 1960, he had already pressed his first offer on two American students in Moscow.1

From April 1961 to August 1962 he worked for a joint CIA–MI6 team, meeting his handlers in London and Paris and passing film in Moscow. That operation, and the use of his material during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is told at IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case. The 18 October 1962 evaluation of Soviet missiles in Cuba bore the IRONBARK codeword because it drew on his reporting.3

Arrest and trial

Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962.2 The CIA review says the KGB had searched his apartment earlier that autumn and found his camera and a false internal passport hidden in his desk.1 Soviet newspapers did not announce the case until December; on 15 December Pravda ran a long article naming four US embassy officials, which the embassy called an attack "unprecedented in recent times."4

He was tried in Moscow in May 1963 alongside Greville Wynne, the British businessman who had carried his first papers to MI6. Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed on 16 May 1963; Wynne was later exchanged for the Soviet illegal Konon Molody.1 In the aftermath Varentsov, by then a chief marshal of artillery, was demoted, and the GRU chief, Ivan Serov, lost his post.5

A ghost-written memoir

In 1965 Doubleday published The Penkovskiy Papers, presented as his diary. It was a CIA product: according to the agency's own history staff, officers compiled it in 1964 from tapes of all 45 meetings with him, with a Russian draft by the defector Peter Deriabin. Penkovsky never kept a diary, but the content was drawn from what he had said. The CIA acknowledged producing the book during the 1976 congressional investigations.1

Key dates

  1. 12 August 1960 Approaches two American students on a Moscow bridge with an offer to spy.
  2. 20 April 1961 Arrives in London with a Soviet delegation; first meeting with CIA and MI6 officers.
  3. 2 July 1961 First film handover in Moscow to Janet Chisholm.
  4. 27 August 1962 Last known delivery: about 600 pages of photographed documents.
  5. 22 October 1962 Arrested by the KGB.
  6. 16 May 1963 Executed after a joint trial with Greville Wynne.

Sources

  1. CIA Review Essay: The True Story Behind the Movie 'The Courier' (Studies in Intelligence 66, no. 1), Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (2022-03).
  2. CIA Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature, 1977–92, Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (1993-10).
  3. FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XI, Document 30 (Editorial Note), US Department of State, Office of the Historian (1996).
  4. FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume V, Soviet Union, Document 273 (Editorial Note), US Department of State, Office of the Historian.
  5. Wikipedia Oleg Penkovsky, Wikipedia.
  6. Wikipedia English Wikipedia article (used for cross-checking).

Elsewhere in the files

Read next

20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet Union · 1918–1992 GRU (Soviet military intelligence) The Red Army's foreign intelligence service from 1918 to 1992: its interwar illegals, its wartime networks in America, the Western spies inside it, and its part in the war scare of the 1980s. 10 August – 20 November 1962 Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis How US intelligence missed, then found, Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962: a wrong estimate, a five-week gap in U-2 coverage, the 14 October flight over San Cristóbal, and what the photographs never showed. May – November 1962 Operation Anadyr The Soviet General Staff's 1962 plan to move nuclear missiles and some 42,000 troops to Cuba in secret, and the deception that hid it from US intelligence until a U-2 flight on 14 October. 1922–1970 Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale) Soviet intelligence officer who lived in London as the Canadian businessman 'Gordon Lonsdale', ran the Portland spy ring, was jailed in 1961 and was exchanged for Greville Wynne in 1964.