Colonel Oleg Vladmirovich Penkovsky

A detailed Summary of Colonel Oleg Vladmirovich Penkovsky

Colonel Oleg Vladmirovich Penkovsky is a name that doesn't ring a bell for most people. However, for many in the intelligence community this name is as about household as you can get. He is a legend in his own right. Those who lived during and through the Cuban missile crisis actually benefited from this man's activities. Colonel Penkovsky was a joint spy for the United States and England. He is often thought of as the highest ranking, most damaging person to spy on the Soviet Union. While most everybody is thankful for the information he provided there are questions to be brought to light. For example, why did such a devoted officer turn on his own country and spy for the west? What were the motives to keep him doing such a thing? To try to answer these various and complex inquiries one must start at the beginning.

Oleg Penkovsky was born in a small town on the 23rd of April in 1919. By 1939 he had graduated from a Soviet military school and had been part of a group called Komosomol, meaning "young communists." He also went to war serving as a unit commander of an artillery unit. Penkovsky was decorated four times during his 1939-1940 tour of duty. After that to

Initially the CIA and the SIS were both awestruck and suspicious of the information that they received. There were some who felt that Penkovsky knew too much and acquired information to effortlessly to be legitimate (Knightly 320). Eventually, "Many of the doubts - but not all - about his bona fides faded in the light of one intelligence maxim." That maxim or fact was that he had to be a genuine based on the information he was providing. It was inconceivable that the Soviet's would willingly give up this kind of delicate information just to get a plant in place. Eventually most everyone accepted Penkovsky as genuine because of this very fact (Knightly 320).

While in Turkey Penkovsky was noticed by the British intelligence agency known as Military Intelligence department 6 (MI6), more precisely a man named Greville Maynard Wynne. Wynne felt that they could possibly use Penkovsky since he showed dissatisfaction in the Soviet Union's communist system of government (Volkman, Warriors 98). When Penkovsky returned to Moscow in 1956 his military career came to a screeching halt. By 1960 he had had enough and decided to take matters into his own hands (Richelson 275).

ur he was injured and spent most of his time doing various assignments that took him between Moscow and the Ukrainian front for the rest of the Second World War. When the war was over, Penkovsky attended two military academies. One of the academies was the Frunze Military Academy and the other was the Military Diplomatic Academy. By 1950 he had married a woman who was the daughter of a fairly important general in the Soviet army. At this time he was also promoted to the rank of Colonel and was a member of the Soviet military intelligence agency, also known as the GRU. He was given various foreign assignments, Ankara, Turkey being the last location of these assignments (Richelson 274).

Greville Wynne was also arrested in Budapest (Pincher, Too Secret 265). Wynne was in the process of trying to get Penkovsky out of the Soviet Union. His plan was to use a van with secret compartments and hide the Colonel in it. This plan did not come to fruition because the KGB found Wynne and the van. The KGB stripped the van and arrested Wynne (Pincher, Traitors 206). There were several factors that may have lead to the arrest of Colonel Penkovsky. Many speculate that it was his out right disregard for being discreet. For example, on occasion he passed information at a diplomatic party where the KGB was usually surveilling. He also demanded that he receive a large amount of money so that he could spend it in London even after the MI6 warned him that the KGB would wonder about where he got the money to buy such expensive things (Pincher, Traitors 258). Some analysts believe that an inside agent working in the MI5 blew Penkovsky's cover. There is some evidence to support this idea. When the MI5 was supporting the MI6 when debriefing Penkovsky, a man by the name of Roger Hollis asked for Penkovsky's real name. Roger Hollis was the head of the MI5 and is now believed to have been a spy against England (Pincher, Too Secret 265). In any case, Colonel Penkovsky had been captured and arrested. Penkovsky and Wynne both stood trial together before the Soviet Supreme Court. Both men were convicted of spying. Wynne's was sentenced to eight years in prison while Colonel Penkovsky was to be executed by the firing squad (Knightly 315). While most believe that Penkovsky was executed by the firing squad still others believe that he was executed by being slowly fed into a furnace. This method for execution is supposed to be reserved for the most heinous of traitors. Some even suggest that his closest friends were made to watch (Volkman, Spies 30). Wynne served about one year in prison before he was exchanged for a man by the name of Conon Molody who was arrested as Gordon Lonsdale (Knightly 315).

The second important factor is the timing in which the information w

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