Art of Betrayal (30 page)

Cuba had replaced Berlin as the flashpoint that could lead to nuclear Armageddon. In his first meetings the previous year, Penkovsky had warned vaguely of Soviet intentions there.
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Khrushchev believed that if he moved fast enough to install missiles on the island he would be able to counterbalance his present weakness in overall missile numbers. He nearly got away with it. Few in Washington had believed that Khrushchev would take such a provocative step. Only the new CIA Director John McCone suspected that the Soviets might be so audacious and ordered the resumption of U2 spy-plane flights in October 1962 which detected missiles being installed. This time the giant machines that Graham Greene had presaged in
Our Man in Havana
were for real.

Penkovsky's technical information, including the manual for the SS-4 missile which had been passed to Janet Chisholm, helped analysts interpret the reconnaissance pictures to identify the missiles by their footprint. The Penkovsky material had ‘special value', according to one of the photo-analysts who worked on the images.
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This helped decision-makers establish that the missiles would eventually be able to reach Washington DC but were not ready yet.
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The President and his National Security Advisor said the identification ‘had fully justified all that the CIA had cost the country in its preceding years' because it allowed them to face down the Soviet Union before the missiles became operational.
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Penkovsky's intelligence was only part of the story. It was the overhead imagery which was of crucial importance and which Penkovsky's information simply helped the Pentagon to interpret.
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In the next few years, Penkovsky's role would often be inflated by CIA officials precisely to hide the new capabilities up above which remained top secret.
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A new era of satellite spying was dawning. Spotting trains could now be done by an unseen eye high in the sky rather than by a human spy on the ground. But no satellite image could explain what Soviet leaders were thinking and what their intentions were. In Washington, technology would become king. But in Britain, oddly, the advent of satellites placed an even higher premium on MI6's human spies. Satellites cost the earth. Britain could barely afford them and came to depend on the largesse of its American ally. The best way of
ensuring undiminished access to the flow of American technical secrets was by staying close and by bringing human sources to the table. If they could maintain this relationship then Britain's spies knew, as in the Second World War with the breaking of the Enigma codes, that they in turn could bring to their Whitehall masters something precious which justified their existence. After Suez, staying close to the Americans and their vast intelligence machine was becoming gospel.

The Cuban drama was a moment Penkovsky – who always thirsted for recognition as someone who could dictate world events – would have savoured had it not already been too late for him. The decision to slow down had become futile. Through September and October, he was silent.

Hugh Montgomery was woken out of a deep sleep by his phone. It was two o'clock in the morning on 2 November but the remnants of his slumber were soon shaken off as the CIA's deputy station chief in Moscow heard three breaths at the end of the line. Then the click of the phone hanging up. Then the same again. He was all alone, and he uttered an expletive. It was the signal for war. He knew he had to make the drive to the Embassy to cable Washington.

He walked out into a howling blizzard. It felt like fifty below outside as he struggled to start his car. There were only three other cars on the street as he drove off – his car and three KGB Volgas, one driving alongside him, the others in front and behind. When he made it into the Embassy, he despatched a flash message of the highest priority saying that the signal for war had been received. ‘While we have serious reservations about its authenticity, nonetheless we are obliged to inform you in case you have any other relevant information,' he wrote. Gervase Cowell would also later say that he had received a warning signal of three breaths but in a display of sangfroid decided simply to ignore it, not even telling his Ambassador.
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In the morning, Montgomery called Richard Jacob, a twenty-five-year-old CIA officer on his first overseas assignment, into the ‘bubble' – the secure room in the Embassy which was suspended in the air to prevent microphones being drilled through the walls. He explained to the young officer that there had been a signal on the designated lamppost and so the dead drop needed to be cleared.
They knew it might be a trap. Jacob headed for the doorway of the apartment where the message was due to be left and pulled a matchbox from behind the radiator. At that point four men jumped him. In the confusion he managed to drop the matchbox. He was taken to an office. He was an American diplomat, he explained. That surprised his interrogators who believed they were dealing with a British operation.
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‘I wish to say at this time that I have never in my life seen the material that you have there on the desk,' Jacob said when presented with items of ‘an intelligence nature' and a confession to sign.
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They stared at him. He stared back, locking their gaze for two minutes. ‘Well, your dirty career is finished,' one of the men finally said to him.

President Kennedy was told the next morning that Penkovsky was now compromised. He had clearly talked and given away the signalling procedures. The KGB had decided to use them to smoke out Western intelligence officers and Montgomery, along with twelve other Britons and Americans, was expelled. One theory still troubles those involved in the case – had Penkovsky explained that the phone signal meant war and had the Russians tried it anyway? Or had he not told them what it meant in the hope of finally fulfilling his desire to change the world and, by starting a war, destroy those in Moscow who had thwarted him?
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‘He knew he was doomed, he figured that he might as well take the Soviet Union down with him,' Bulik later reflected.
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How had their man been caught? the team wondered. Tensions surfaced across the Atlantic. We should never have used Wynne, the Americans grumbled, he was an amateur. In a memo, a CIA official blamed ‘a penetration in the British government who saw Wynn [sic] and Penkovsky together'.
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Others began to wonder if there was another mole in London or Washington – another Philby. It would have to be someone high up since the operation was such a closely guarded secret.

There was a more likely explanation. Rauri Chisholm had previously worked in Berlin. Alongside him in the MI6 station was George Blake. MI6 knew he was blown and his file was marked ‘Sov Bloc Red'.
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The discovery that the Americans had managed to run Popov in Moscow had deeply troubled the KGB and it had begun blanket surveillance of diplomats. It also realised that wives were
sometimes employed in clandestine activities, so they may have begun tailing Janet. They spotted her heading into apartments in January and saw someone nervously following her in.
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They were not yet sure who the Russian was but the frequency of those meetings in public places and the fact that they continued after the first suggestions of compromise made the KGB task easier. By the time Penkovsky had spotted the surveillance on 19 January and decided to halt the meetings it was too late. A KGB investigation had begun which led eventually to surveillance of Penkovsky's apartment and of his meetings with Wynne.
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It took time as they had to establish that he was not running a legitimate GRU operation and they knew he was protected by his friendships within the elite. Cameras were installed to look down into his apartment. A poison was smeared on his chair to force him into hospital, allowing his flat to be searched. A Minox was found and the one-time pads used to decipher messages broadcast over the radio. He was brought in. ‘When he realised what we had found and was in our possession, Penkovsky knew he didn't have a leg to stand on,' an investigator later recalled. ‘He started to confess that he was an agent for the British.' He was taken in to see a top official and crumpled into a chair. ‘He came in dragging his heels,' the official recalled. ‘He was limp like a wet rag hanging on a hook.'
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The use of the Chisholms had been a risk – everyone knew that – but Shergy thought there was little choice. ‘Everybody in the British Embassy was under surveillance,' he later recalled. ‘The name of the game was to avoid surveillance.'
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The Penkovsky operation was success and failure all rolled into one.

The same night that the telephone rang for Hugh Montgomery in Moscow, Greville Wynne was at a trade fair in Budapest, having just arrived from Vienna.
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In his later years, he would claim to have been on a daring rescue mission to smuggle his friend out in a false-bottomed trailer. No one else involved in the case knew anything about such a bizarre plan. As he walked down the steps from the trade pavilion in the fast-dimming light, he realised that the Hungarians he had been drinking with for the previous two hours had all melted away. Now there were four men – all wearing trilby hats at the same angle – walking towards him.

‘Mr Veen?' one man asked in a thick accent.

‘Yes, that is my name.'

A car pulled up. His arms were grabbed. The back door of the car was opened and he was pushed inside. He shouted for his own driver to help but it was too late as a door and then something else hard slammed against his head. He awoke a few moments later, his hands cuffed and blood on his face. He was taken to a dirty room.

‘Why do you spy on us?' an unshaven, tired-looking man said.

‘I don't know what you are talking about.'

Wynne was stripped naked and examined roughly. The next morning he was on a Soviet military aircraft flying to Moscow. ‘I suppose that James Bond would have spat from his mouth a gas capsule (concealed in his molar) which would have overcome everyone but himself and would then have leapt to safety with a parachute concealed up his backside. But I regret to reveal that the British Intelligence Service lags behind Bond in ingenuity.'
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He was taken to the basement of KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka – a dark place where dark things happened. Under interrogation he maintained he was just a businessman. He might have passed some notes, he said, but he had no idea what was contained within them. They played the tape of his conversation at the hotel with Penkovsky which the two thought had been obscured by music. He realised he was in trouble.

As he was moved from his solitary cell one day, he says he was sure he saw Penkovsky through a spy-hole shutter. ‘He sits motionless with his head down, like a bull after the lance-wound has weakened him.'
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Wynne's wife came to visit on 17 December bearing vitamin pills, English tea and cigarettes. She found Wynne's mood oscillating between dejection and excitement. Wynne said that he had seen all the evidence and he had no defence against it. He asked his wife to try and see the Prime Minister to plead for some kind of deal. ‘He said that “British intelligence” had pushed him into this and it was for Her Majesty's government to get him out of it,' she told officials afterwards. Wynne's fate did lead to much soul searching within MI6 about the use of businessmen and questions about whether the risks of their work on the side had been sufficiently explained.
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For Wynne, the game was up. But this was no game. And in Washington and London they understood the price that Penkovsky would pay. The heads of the CIA and MI6 argued over whether to
negotiate with the KGB directly and threaten to expose its secrets. Joe Bulik pressed hard for something to be done. ‘I feel we owe him a tremendous debt,' he wrote in a CIA memo. ‘For us not to consider ways and means of saving his life is to me a reflection of low moral level.'
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His anger grew. ‘There was no gratitude,' he said later. ‘He was expendable. An abandoned hero.'
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He also vented his anger in later years against the British. ‘The big lesson on the Penkovsky case is never to enter into a joint operation with another service,' he would say. ‘Joint operations, by definition, double the risks of exposure. The differences in any two services' operating styles lead to confusion, misunderstandings and raise the possibility of compromise.'
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The trial came in May 1963. The courtroom was stiflingly hot. Wynne and Penkovsky had been put through their rehearsals for the crowd that had gathered, bristling with anger. Penkovsky may have been a hero to the CIA and MI6 but to them he was just another shabby traitor who had sold out his country for some Western trinkets. Wynne was first in the dock and had visibly aged. The luxuriant black hair was grey and shaved, his moustache tinged white; he looked gaunt, with lines across his face. He read most of his script correctly but incurred some displeasure for the occasional deviation. Had he been deceived by his own countrymen into being an unwitting spy? he was asked. ‘Exactly so,' he said to the merriment of the crowd. ‘It is exactly because of that that I am here now.'
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Wynne, whose status as a British citizen ensured that he garnered most of the international attention, was the light relief. The real venom of the prosecutor was reserved for the Russian. What had made him do such a wicked thing? ‘It was the base qualities which have brought him to the prisoner's dock,' the prosecutor suggested. ‘Envy, vanity, the love of an easy life, his affairs with many women, his moral decay, brought about in part by his use of liquor. All of these blotches on his moral character undermined him; he became a degenerate and then a traitor.'
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