Each man here is
alone.
—Oleg Penkovsky quoted
in the Penkovskiy Papers
Bad news, like every secret communication from Moscow,
arrived at CIA Headquarters encrypted. The news that arrived mid-morning on
November 2, 1962—as the Cuban Missile Crisis was winding down—was particularly
bad. Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a career Soviet military
intelligence officer and the Agency’s most spectacularly successful spy, was,
in all likelihood, lost. Penkovsky had held a senior position in the Glavnoye
Razedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the
Soviet General Staff while secretly reporting to U.S. and British intelligence.
In the colorful parlance of espionage, he had almost certainly been “rolled
up.”
At the new Agency compound at Langley, Virginia, the paint
was barely dry on the walls when the Communications Center on the ground
floor—Headquarters’ sole secure link to Moscow personnel—received the
super-enciphered message. It arrived as an “IMMEDIATE” cable, a long, narrow
strip of paper snaking out of a bulky machine, much like a price quote from an
old-fashioned stock ticker. The encoded message was contained in an intricate
pattern of perforations that ran along the paper’s length. When the
transmission was complete, the paper was torn off by the communicator, and then
run through a printer that produced a neat array of seemingly random numbers
and letters on a sheet of standard letter-sized paper. A second level of
decryption was needed to render the message into plain text. This phase of decryption
guarded against the potential for security failures along the transmission
path, whether over the air or via land lines. Like placing a strong, small safe
inside a larger safe, this last layer of decryption could be performed only by
one of a handful of authorized officers from the Soviet Russia Division (SR) of
the CIA’s Directorate of Plans.
Although the DDP sounded like the dullest of bureaucracies,
its name veiled the most secretive directorate in the Agency. Hidden beneath
the vague acronym resided the responsibility for the CIA’s “cloak and dagger”
work. Within the DDP, SR was particularly shrouded with “cloak.”
If asked about their job by neighbors or friends, SR
personnel would repeat a carefully rehearsed cover story of working for one or
another government department, but never the CIA. It was not unusual for DDP
operations officers to remain undercover even after retirement, and maintain
their cover stories until their deaths. Even the top-secret clearance, required
for employment at the Agency, did not authorize someone to know rudimentary
details regarding SR or its personnel. If an Agency colleague asked about an SR
staffer’s job, they would receive only generalized replies and most knew better
than to probe for details. Secrecy within the Agency was both enforced by
official policy and expected as part of professional etiquette.
Virtually no one, with the exception of SR personnel, was
allowed into SR spaces. A no-nonsense secretary immediately confronted any
visitor who opened the unmarked, always closed, hallway doors that led into the
division’s suite and friends of SR officers from other parts of the agency did
not drop in to plan weekend activities or for office gossip. When SR officers
left the area, even for a short time, security procedures mandated that desks
be cleared and all work secured in one of the division’s high-security
500-pound black steel safes.
SR Division applied strict need-to-know compartmentation
through BIGOT lists that restricted access to what many would consider routine
information coming out of the Soviet Union. Within the division information was
distributed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only a very few ever saw an entire
operational picture. Those outside of SR could only assume that a puzzle
existed. Within CIA’s instinctively tight-lipped security environment, SR’s
added multilayered security cloak created a mystique that some viewed as
arrogant and unnecessarily obsessive.
The term “BIGOT list” existed—and still exists—as a holdover
from World War II when the most prized stamp on the orders of personnel
traveling from England to Africa was “TOGIB,” meaning “to Gibraltar.” To reach
Africa, the majority of personnel made the dangerous journey by ship through
seas controlled by German U-boats. However, for a select few, there were the
highly prized seats on a flight to Gibraltar. For these lucky individuals, the
stamp on their orders was reversed to read BIGOT and the term thus acquired its
special meaning in intelligence circles, carrying with it the inference of not
only rarity, but also safe passage and a valued mission.
There were other levels of compartmentation as well. A
top-secret clearance did not provide automatic access to specific operations or
programs. TS, a security clearance level required for all CIA staff employees,
only made one eligible for potential access to a compartmented program. The
BIGOT access was granted based on responsibilities and an individual’s
demonstrated need to know about the operation.
SR’s security policies extended to written communications
within Headquarters. SR did not rely on the CIA’s usual interoffice mail
couriers nor were its officers permitted to use the 1960-era state-of-the-art
pneumatic tube system that carried classified documents to every corner of the
1.4 million-square-foot building. Everything regarding Soviet operations was
hand-carried from office to office by either an SR operations officer or one of
a dedicated cadre of women known as Intelligence Assistants.
It was standard operating procedure for the communicator to
place the encrypted message in a heavy manila security envelope, securely seal
it, and call SR to advise that a cable had been received from Moscow. On the
morning of November 2, the young SR officer who walked to the communications
vault, accepted the sealed envelope, and, without opening it, retraced his
three-minute route to SR’s small warren of offices, could not have known that
he now had a role in one of history’s most significant espionage events.
At his desk, the officer opened the envelope, removed the
single sheet of paper, and, with painstaking care, began deciphering the
message by hand. He used a one-time pad, or OTP, whose printed columns of
numbers and letters exactly matched those used by the person who had composed
the brief message. After the message was deciphered, the page of the one-time
pad used was destroyed. The Soviet Union paid a heavy price during World War II
when they reused one-time-pad pages for communicating with agents in different
parts of the world. This seemingly innocuous error provided an advantage to
U.S. code breakers who were able to unravel many Soviet ciphered communications
that had been intercepted from Washington, D.C. and New York City. This secret
would become known as VENONA and remains one of the notable achievements of the
Army Security Agency and later the National Security Agency.
The cable did not mention Penkovsky by name. Rather, it
reported that Richard Jacob, a CIA officer in Moscow, was apprehended while
clearing a dead drop. After a nerve-shattering but relatively brief
interrogation, the message continued, Jacob was released to the custody of the
U.S. ambassador and returned to the safety of the U.S. embassy. Because he was
a diplomat, Jacob could not be formally charged with a crime. Instead, he was
“PNG’ed,” declared persona non grata by Soviet authorities and ordered out of
the country.
Penkovsky’s arrest by the KGB was not confirmed during those
first few hours, but it did not seem realistic to hold out much hope for the
agent. As in the immediate aftermath of any roll-up, there were more questions
than facts, but for those few who knew about the case, it required no
imagination to conclude that Penkovsky either was dead or would be very soon.
The officer delivered the decrypted cable up the chain of
command to the SR Division Chief. The Chief took the bad news to the Deputy
Director for Plans who in turn briefed John McCone, the Director of Central
Intelligence. Within twenty-four hours, McCone would personally inform
President Kennedy. That so few understood the enormous impact Penkovsky’s
arrest would have on America’s national security was partially due to the
extraordinary secrecy surrounding the nearly eighteen-month operation and the
care given to the handling of the remarkable intelligence he single-handedly
supplied.
Intelligence reports based on Penkovsky’s information had
been structured to suggest that the intelligence originated from multiple
sources. To reinforce this illusion, the Penkovsky product circulated under two
code names, IRONBARK for that material that was scientific or quantifiable and
CHICKADEE for material that included his personal observations. For anyone
outside the small group who knew the truth, the vast quantity of intelligence
flowing from the Soviet Union looked like the work of an extensive spy network,
coupled with mysterious and advanced technical collection, rather than the
efforts of a single spy.
A small team of CIA and British intelligence officers ran
Penkovsky. He was alternately known as HERO to his American handlers and YOGA
to the British. Jacob had been chosen to service the dead drop because he had
recently arrived in Moscow and had a strong cover in a traditionally non-alerting,
low-level administrative position. As such, he was less likely to be identified
as a CIA officer and draw KGB surveillance.
According to later accounts, Jacob entered the dingy hallway
of an apartment house at 5/6 Pushkinskaya and removed an ordinary matchbox
wrapped in a short length of wire that formed a hook to secure it behind a
radiator. As Jacob was placing the matchbox in his pocket, the KGB team jumped
him from their hiding places in the vestibule. During the ensuing scuffle, he
managed to drop the matchbox to the floor through a slit in the lining of his
raincoat pocket, ridding himself of incriminating evidence and avoiding the
nasty legal and diplomatic problems arising from having Soviet state secrets on
his person. The technicality did not matter to the KGB team, since it was
obvious why the American was in the building. Once subdued, Jacob was hustled
into a waiting car and whisked off to a nearby militia station.
The final act of the Penkovsky drama had begun that morning
with two voiceless phone calls—silent calls—to a phone answered by a U.S.
official. The silent call was a signal activating the communication plan issued
to Penkovsky by his handlers when they had met outside the Soviet Union.
Arguably the most critical piece of any operation, the commo plan provided
agents, such as Penkovsky, with precise contact instructions and schedules to
establish secure communication under both ordinary and extraordinary
circumstances.
Because the CIA assumed that the KGB monitored all telephone
calls to and from the U.S. officials, the silent call represented a clever
piece of tradecraft that allowed a message to be sent, even if the call was
monitored. Penkovsky had been instructed to go to a remote public telephone and
call a specific number. When the phone was answered, he said nothing, but
waited ten seconds before hanging up. The call to the specific number and the
length of silence before hanging up were the message that directed intelligence
officers to a telephone pole marked with a symbol written in chalk, an X. The
simple chalk mark announced that the dead drop site at the Pushkinskaya
apartment house had been loaded.
These standard pieces of tradecraft—the silent call, followed
by a signal site marked with an X and dead drop—were part of a commo plan,
code-named DISTANT, designed specifically for Penkovsky to provide an early
warning of imminent Soviet attack on the West. The small matchbox that Jacob
found tethered by wire behind the radiator might have contained information
signaling the start of World War III.
With the silent call, Penkovsky, who had not been heard from
or seen since early September, had apparently, reemerged. It was possible that
nothing serious was wrong. If it was a trap—a provocation on the part of the
KGB—then it was worth the chance. “We had been worried about him, it had been
quiet for quite a while,” said the case officer who decrypted the message and
whose memories are still vivid after more than four decades. “But in the past
he had come up again. To my knowledge we had no warning, nothing to indicate
they’d caught him.”
Now, with Jacob’s arrest, whatever glimmers of hope that
might have existed with Penkovsky’s reemergence, seemed far-fetched. It was
possible that a bystander had seen Penkovsky suspiciously fiddling behind the
radiator as he loaded the dead drop and called authorities who then laid in
wait. It was also possible that the KGB had not been fooled by Jacob’s cover
and defeated his countersurveillance maneuvers en route to the dead drop site.
Any number of other scenarios about Penkovsky’s fate was possible, but only a
single distressing conclusion was probable.
Penkovsky’s handlers had grown increasingly troubled by recent
events surrounding the operation. Penkovsky had vanished from operational sight
for several weeks prior to the silent call and his GRU superiors abruptly
canceled his scheduled trip to Seattle in the autumn of 1962. Additionally, the
sheer volume of intelligence he was providing on his Minox film cassettes
suggested a level of clandestine activity that could not continue undetected
indefinitely. So voluminous was Penkovsky’s productivity during the first half
of 1962 that his handlers decided to discontinue temporarily tasking him for
new intelligence collection.
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. 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.” 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.
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.
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 flood of questions. If
Penkovsky was under KGB suspicion as early as December of 1961, or January of
1962, did this mean the Soviets manipulated the information he provided? If so,
when did he begin reporting controlled information designed to mislead American
and British analysts? For that matter, could anything he reported be trusted?
Material long disseminated by analysts to policy officials
was recalled and painstakingly reexamined. The eventual conclusion was that the
Soviets had not played Penkovsky back against the Americans and British, but
that left unanswered the mystery of why, if Penkovsky was suspected as early as
December 1961, the Soviets continued to allow him access to secret files and
materials.
Over the next several years, the Penkovsky case would become
a cottage industry within the CIA as every aspect of the operation was analyzed
to determine what was accomplished and what went wrong.
The Penkovsky operation had produced an astonishing amount
of material. During his year and a half as an active agent, he supplied more
than a hundred cassettes of exposed Minox film (each containing fifty exposures
or frames). The more than 140 hours of debriefings in London and Paris produced
some 1,200 pages of transcripts and reams of handwritten pages. He identified
hundreds of GRU and KGB officers from photos, and provided Western intelligence
officials with their first authoritative view of the highest levels of the
post-Stalin Soviet Union. In fact, he supplied so much information that both
the CIA and MI6 set up teams dedicated exclusively to processing the material,
which resulted in an estimated 10,000 pages of intelligence reports.
More than the quantity, the substance of the documents on
the Minox film and his knowledgeable debriefings impressed both CIA and MI6.
Penkovsky appeared at a crucial time during the Cold War when tensions and the
potential for nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West were at an
apex. This volatility was heightened by a lack of certainty on each side about
the intentions and capabilities of the other.
The failed Soviet attempt to isolate the British-, French-,
and U.S.-controlled sections of Berlin by blocking all ground and rail
transportation and shipments into the city during 1948 and 1949 was still a
fresh memory when the United States was caught off guard by unpredicted
assertive Soviet technological, military, and political actions beginning in
1957. The USSR launched Sputnik in 1957; shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2
reconnaissance plane on May Day, 1960; and built the Berlin Wall in 1961. So
anemic was U.S. intelligence access to the plans and intentions of the Kremlin
that the text of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth
Party Congress in 1956 came to the CIA via a third party, an Israeli source
operating behind the Iron Curtain.
Through the late 1950s, Khrushchev’s seeming obsession with
the United States was rising to dangerous levels. His fixation with U.S. objectives
was fueled first by an alarmist 1960 KGB report that falsely described the
Pentagon’s intention to initiate war against the Soviet Union “as soon as
possible” followed by a failed attempt to overthrow Castro in 1961. Then, in
1962, two erroneous GRU intelligence reports warned of an imminent nuclear
first strike on the Soviet Union by the United States.
“Our production of rockets is like sausages coming from an
automatic machine, rocket after rocket comes off the assembly line,” bragged
Khrushchev.
Penkovsky’s assignment to the State Committee for the
Coordination of Scientific Research Work granted him access to the highest
levels of military circles. He, in turn, provided the West with a contrasting
view of both Soviet capability and Khrushchev’s belligerent stance. “His
[Khrushchev’s] threats are like swinging a club to see the reaction. If the
reaction is not in his favor, he stops swinging,” Penkovsky explained to the
team in a Paris hotel room in 1961.
For the Kennedy administration, Penkovsky’s reporting put
the lie to the Soviet leader’s braggadocio, while the intelligence he provided,
combined with overhead intelligence, influenced downward revisions of Soviet
missile production in National Intelligence Estimates.
Penkovsky also revealed the real dangers of diplomacy
without independent and timely intelligence. As the Cuban missile crisis heated
up, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin used back-channel communication through
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, and other White House
officials to assure President Kennedy that only short-range defensive, rather
than offensive, missiles were going into Cuba. Similar false assurances also
flowed through the back channels of diplomacy from GRU Colonel Georgi Bolshakov,
working under cover of the TASS news agency, through Robert Kennedy.
However, the technical manuals provided by Penkovsky for the
Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles allowed CIA photo analysts to
identify and match the deployment pattern or footprint with U-2 reconnaissance
photos taken over San Cristobal, Cuba. Far from being defensive and of short
range, the missiles were armed with 3,000-pound nuclear warheads and a range of
some 1,000 nautical miles, and were more than capable of reaching Washington,
D.C., and New York City.
Finally, Penkovsky’s information provided analysis of the
Soviets’ overall lack of preparedness for war, allowing President Kennedy to
face off against Khrushchev during the crisis. His insights, derived from
personal access to Kremlin leaders, added independent weight to technical
evidence that Soviet military threats were overstated, if not hollow. The
American President was emboldened to act and denied the Soviets a nuclear
missile foothold in the Western Hemisphere. For that brief and critical moment in
time, history turned on the material provided by one man, Oleg Penkovsky.
In the wake of the Penkovsky case, the CIA undertook the
unprecedented measure of bringing to press in 1965 The Penkovskiy Papers [sic].
The Agency, working with journalist Frank Gibney and the publisher Doubleday
& Company, publicly exposed many of the operational aspects of the GRU
revealed by Penkovsky. An immediate bestseller, the book presented most
Americans with one of the first in-depth looks at Soviet intelligence operations
in the West.
The Penkovskiy Papers offered remarkable details of Soviet
tradecraft, from tips on American personal grooming and social customs (“Many
Americans like to keep their hands in their pockets and chew gum”) to evading
surveillance and selecting dead drop sites. One section warned of the dangers
presented by squirrels running off with small packages left at dead drop sites
in New York’s Central Park.
For American readers, the book confirmed their worst
suspicions that Soviet spies were active and successful in the United States.
It may have also implied an equally aggressive and thriving U.S. espionage
capability in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The few
who understood how dependent American intelligence had been on HERO’s
production knew the time had come to change the game plan. The case had
revealed grave deficiencies in the tradecraft needed to handle long-term agents
inside the Soviet Union. America’s technology and the CIA’s Technical Services
Division would become key players in a new operational strategy.
