Art of Betrayal (27 page)

Daphne Park's American counterpart Larry Devlin looking out at the ferry in Leopoldville. Devlin would be described as the ‘arch-puppeteer' of Congolese politics. He and Park remained lifelong friends.

Patrice Lumumba arriving for the Congo's independence day ceremony in July 1960. Daphne Park had already forged a relationship with the nationalist politician. Devlin would be involved in a plot to assassinate him. (Topfoto)

Patrice Lumumba (centre) at Leopoldville airport, 2 December 1960. He had just been arrested the previous night and would be executed soon after. (Topfoto)

The joint CIA–MI6 team that ran Oleg Penkovsky, one of the key agents of the early Cold War: (from left to right) Michael Stokes, Harold Shergold (Shergy), Joseph Bulik and George Kisevalter, pictured at the Mount Royal Hotel London in April 1961.

Harold Shergold listens as Penkovsky (with his back to the camera) makes a point.

Oleg Penkovsky wearing the uniform of a British Colonel as a sign of his desire to transfer his allegiance from the Soviet Union to the West.

British businessman Greville Wynne was a key go-between with Penkovsky in Moscow. He would later be put on trial and imprisoned for his work for MI6.

Miloslav Kro
č
a was a major in the Czechoslovak security forces and a long-standing agent of MI6.

(Archive of Security Services, Czech Republic)

During the debriefing Kisevalter did most of the talking, but when it came to arranging the tradecraft, Shergold, the details man, took the lead. Options were thrown around including a controlled dead-letter drop in which the material would be left in place for a matter of seconds or minutes before being picked up. Could they meet at a football match and brush past each other at a crowded buffet when getting a glass of beer? The team pored over every detail of Penkovsky's daily routine and movements to look for opportunities.

Shergy came up with a plan. Why not use the wife of the MI6 man in Moscow? The two could meet in a park. Penkovsky would drop material into her pram without saying anything. Penkovsky suggested it would be better to make some small talk with her. It was agreed that the next time Wynne arrived in Moscow the two men could pass material and messages back and forth. Within Wynne's message would be details of how to organise a meeting in the park. Bulik later claimed he was not keen on using this method regularly. ‘You can do this once or twice, but beyond that you are gambling,' he said to the British. He recalled (perhaps with a touch of paraphrasing) the British reply as ‘And what do you have, American, beside a big mouth?' ‘They [were] just about as nasty as that.'
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The Americans were working to get a CIA officer into the Embassy under cover, but it was taking time.

On the last day of his trip Penkovsky, true to form, mentioned that he had asked for a picture of the receptionist at the hotel, one Valerie Williams. She told him she did not have one. So he gave her £5 and asked her to take one for him. She did so and gave it to him the next day with a ‘nice' letter in which she said staff were forbidden to go out with guests. ‘You see how I spent the last of my pounds!' he told the team.
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Penkovsky returned to Moscow on 6 May laden with gifts and secret
instructions. He went to a payphone two days later, rang a number and hung up, and then did it again. It was a sign he was in place.
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His trip was seen by his Soviet superiors as a success, partly thanks to the gifts he brought back and partly thanks to the low-level intelligence he had been supplied with by the team. A few weeks later Wynne returned for a trade show. As they drove from the airport, packages were exchanged including camera film. Wynne went on to the British Embassy and handed them – unopened and without saying a word – to Rauri Chisholm, MI6's station chief. The two men exchanged notes rather than speak in case they were bugged.
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At dinner that evening, Wynne showed Penkovsky a picture of Rauri's wife, Janet, whom he said was called Anne. They would meet in a park along Tsvetnoy Boulevard. If she had a pram he was to approach and give her a sweet box for the children in which the films could be secreted.

Janet Chisholm was taking on a risky role. But she was capable and smart. Being the wife of an MI6 officer in the field is not easy. Your husband will often be working late doing his real job long after the working day of his cover job is over. You may not be able to ask him what he was doing. And your female friends may gently question why your husband has not been promoted to ambassador and is still only a first secretary. Perhaps that is one reason why, especially in the early days, many relationships remained in-house with officers marrying secretaries who understood the game and who could be trusted. Janet had been one of those secretaries. After learning Russian she joined the service aged twenty and then met and married Rauri. To her dying day, she retained the most important quality for an MI6 secretary – discretion. She never spoke a word about her work with Penkovsky.
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Janet Chisholm and Penkovsky made their way separately to the small, narrow city park on 2 July. It was busy and Penkovsky waited for the rain to come and the crowd to thin before approaching. Janet was wearing a brown suede jacket as agreed. He gave the children a box of sweets. Inside were two sheets of paper and seven rolls of film. The material was so important that parts of it would be communicated personally to the President of the United States nine days later. It would be the first of a dozen such brush contacts between the two in the coming months. Her husband was under heavy surveillance, but she believed hers was minimal.

The good news from Penkovsky's note was that on 18 July he was returning to London for an exhibition at Earl's Court. This time he was staying in Kensington. Stokes met him and took him to a nearby flat. The first topic was how the meeting with Janet had gone. ‘Did I work correctly with this lady, or not?' he asked, seeking approval. Penkovsky found Shergy harder to read and colder, but, as was his nature, he wanted to impress him. ‘You stayed a little bit too long with her,' said Shergy, ever the perfectionist. ‘Excuse me, I also am a clever man. It's impossible to sit, give and vanish. It is impossible … The place is bad.' Penkovsky evidently disliked not like not being showered with approval. But then again his life was the one at stake, he was a professional spy and he knew Moscow better. The team were beginning to understand that he was not going to be easy to direct. Who was leading this dance? they wondered.

Penkovsky's reputation as one of the most important spies of the Cold War comes partly thanks to timing. As well as the mountains of technical information about rockets and spies, he was also able to provide the first insights into the thinking of Soviet leaders at a time when tensions were running high. In June 1961, the newly minted President Kennedy had met the wily Premier Khrushchev at a disastrous meeting in Vienna. The bullying Khrushchev was determined to push the new boy around and the Cold War playground of Berlin was to become the site for their clash of wills. The Soviets were looking at settling the city's status by the end of the year and preventing the flow of people west (100,000 had fled in the first half of 1961). They were considering concluding their own peace treaty with East Germany which would effectively hand over control of the city to their Communist allies. There would be war if America interfered, Khrushchev said in Vienna. ‘Then, Mr Chairman, there will be war,' replied Kennedy. The White House was unsure whether the Russian leader was all bravado and bluff or whether, as Washington's hawks claimed, he wanted war. Penkovsky could help them find out.