Oleg Penkovski

oleg vladimirovich Penkovski or penkovsky (in Russian оег вади́мирович пеньо́вский, academically translite as Soviet, April 23, 1919-Noscú?, then Soviet Union, May 16, 1963), whose Western Code was agent hero ("hero agent"), was a colonel of military intelligence Soviet (Gru) between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962 it warned the West that the USSR was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, in what was soon known as the Cuban missile crisis. He apparently felt that Nikita Jrushchov was a dangerous character who could lead the world to no less than a nuclear war. After discovering his double agent status, he was sentenced to death in 1963.

first years and military career

Penkovski's father died fighting as an officer of the White Army (Tsarist and Antibolchevique) during the Russian Civil War. In 1939, he graduated at the Artillery Academy of the Ukrainian capital of kyiv, obtaining the degree of lieutenant. After participating in the brief winter war against Finland in 1940, and doing the same in the Great Patria War of 1941-1945 (Soviet and Russian Name of the Eastern Front during World War II), reached the degree of Lieutenant Colonel.

As Gru officer, Penkosvki was appointed military aggregate in Ankara, the Turkish capital, in 1955. He then worked in the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. It would become a personal friend of the then head of the Gru, Iván Serov, as well as the Soviet Marshal Sercuéi Varesov.

Work for Western Intelligence

In July 1960, Oleg Penkosvky approached some American students who were passing through the Soviet capital of Moscow, and gave them a package, which would later reach the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA agents took him to contact him because they believed they were under constant surveillance, or because they assumed that it could be a trap or lightning lying by the KGB. In 1960 and 1961 he wrote to several Western people offering their services as a spy. These approaches were not initially attended by the CIA that continued to think it was a double agent. Penkovsky finally persuaded British Greville Wynne to organize a meeting with two British intelligence agents and two other Americans, during a brief visit to London, in 1961. Wynne would reveal in one of his messengers. The CIA regretted his delay to have trusted him, but the MI6 British promised them that they would share the confidential information provided by their new Soviet double agent.

During the next eighteen months, Penkovksy provided a tremendous amount of information to its two contacts of the British MI6 in Moscow, Ruari and Janet Chisholm, in addition to providing additional data to their contacts of the CIA and the SIS during their counted trips allowed To the exterior. But his most important achievement was to have provided the then American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy with reliable information about the real size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal during the Cuban missile crisis, which was much smaller than what Western experts had estimated, misinformation in part previously caused following the constants " Ardes " from Jrushchov, like that famous bravetest that " the [atomic] intercontinental missiles left the Soviet factories as sausages of a sausage machine " said during their famous assistance to The United Nations General Assembly Meeting, in October 1960. From the confidential documents, it was also clear that neither the fuel reappreasing systems of the USSR nor the missile guide systems were completely operational.

Action in the 1962 missile crisis

See also: Missile crisis

The Soviet Union began deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles (MRBMs) in Cuba, with the expectation that, once the US government learned of their existence, it would already be a fait accompli and could do nothing about it. regard. Penkovksy provided plans and descriptions of the missile launch sites installed in Cuba. Only from this information could US intelligence reliably identify them, since the photographs obtained through the reconnaissance flights of the Lockheed U-2 spy planes were of relatively low resolution.

Penkosvky was arrested by the KGB on October 22, 1962 - based on information provided by British double agent George Blake - shortly before Kennedy's message to the American people, through which he would reveal that U-2 spy planes had confirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were installing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba (dangerous operation code-named Anádyr).

In this way, President Kennedy was forcibly deprived of a very important intelligence agent, who could have helped somewhat mitigate the harshness of the thirteen days that the nuclear crisis lasted, intelligence such as, for example, that Khrushchev himself was looking for ways to defuse the dangerous situation of an eventual nuclear escalation, which, in the end, would turn out to be the closest historical moment that both antagonistic military superpowers had to undergoing a mutual atomic exchange.

Perhaps that information would have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch a full-scale invasion of the island - an action that, we now know, would have led to the use of 'Luna' class tactical nuclear weapons. 3. 4; against American troops. The Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Plíyev, had received permission to use them in an extreme case, without needing to consult Moscow first.

The final destination of Penkovsky

Penkovksy was judged and convicted of espionage in a summary trial that took place in 1963. The reports on what happened exactly after his conviction differ. Some sources claim that it was executed through the traditional Soviet method of a bullet in the neck, and then be " cremado " and finally buried in a common grave.

The author of Gru Vladimir Rezún, writing under the pseudonym " Víktor Suvórov ", he says in his book Aquarium that showed him a black and white film of the Gru in which Penkovksy was tied to a table, while it was " cremado alive ". That is, it would have been slowly introduced in a crematorium oven, from head to toe (in that order), while other officers were forced to look at the spooky scene, as a furious warning to potential future traitors. A very similar description would later make Ernest Volkman, in one of his books.

Legacy

Penkovsky is mentioned in the book Hunt to October Red (The Hunt for Red October), by American writer Tom Clancy. Likewise, Penkovksy's spy career was treated in the Nuclear Secrets series, in episode one of the same, entitled The Spy From Moscow ( the spy of Moscow). The chapter, transmitted in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2007, showed a declassified secret filming of the KGB while Penkovksy photographed confidential documents and was with the British agent Janet Chisholm, one of his contacts in the Moscow of the Jrushchov era.

In the film The Couer , the facts related to their revelations and subsequent capture are treated.