Translated material
"Hero" setup
The fate of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky still raises questions
45 years ago, on May 11, 1963, an unusual trial took place in Moscow - against Colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army Oleg Penkovsky. After some time, according to the official report, the fate of the exposed spy was put to rest - with a bullet to the head. However, is this so?Volumes have been written about Penkovsky, who worked for the British and Americans for less than two years. Mainly in the West. And mainly as a person who played perhaps a key role in preventing a world nuclear war. One two-volume book was called “The Spy Who Saved the World.” The leitmotif of the book is simple: if Penkovsky had not informed the United States about the true state of the Soviet Union's nuclear missile potential, war would have been unavoidable.
All this seemed to me a far-fetched invention to justify the agent. But only for the time being. Several years ago I edited a book of memoirs of former intelligence officer Anatoly Maksimov. For eleven years this man played the role of a “Moscow agent” of Canadian counterintelligence, that is, as intelligence officers say, he was a setup. This led to partial disorganization of the work of the Royal Mounted Police, as Canadian counterintelligence is called, and did not have the best effect on the CIA. As befits an author and editor, we met with Anatoly Borisovich more than once, and we found mutual acquaintances. The interlocutor became more frank with me and told me about his version of the story with the “spy of the century.” According to my friend, Penkovsky was also a KGB setup.
In support of this unusual version, there is, although indirect, quite convincing evidence. Penkovsky completely neglected his safety, which is not at all characteristic of his position at that time (if you do not regard his work as a fake). He tried to establish contact with the Americans even in the Kremlin area, although he knew, of course, how strictly surveillance worked there. He handed over 5 thousand frames of photographic film, and that would have been enough, but he also brought original documents, which was practically impossible in the USSR. Penkovsky, as a high-ranking employee of the State Committee for Science and Technology (a cover position), could transfer materials during foreign business trips or through a contact (an English businessman), but he did this through hiding places in his country.
Actually, we need to start with the fact that Penkovsky’s father was a white officer. With such a “spot” on his biography, he simply would not have been allowed abroad. And if they let him in, it means he worked under the control of the committee. It is interesting that Penkovsky’s own daughter, after exposing her father, worked in the information service of the First Main Directorate of the KGB, as foreign intelligence was then called. Knowledgeable people said that influential people from the secret services helped her get a job. It is quite possible that this was the condition of Oleg Penkovsky himself, who agreed to become a setup.
Now about the most important thing - why was “Hero” (Penkovsky’s operational pseudonym) framed? By 1962, the Americans had developed their next plan for a preventive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. A group of troops numbering almost half a million people was prepared to suppress Cuba. The USSR, according to the CIA, at that time had about 400 nuclear warheads, but the first American satellite detected only 25 missile positions. The fact is that the Soviet Union tried to pretend to be weak so that, knowing this, the Americans would not move forward in the development of nuclear weapons - usually, as soon as the USSR caught up with them, they would immediately break away.
Penkovsky’s information was needed in order to show the “weakness” of the Union, and the USSR would continue to build its full-fledged nuclear shield behind this screen (which, by the way, was done subsequently). According to those who call Penkovsky a savior, the picture was similar: seeing that the USSR was weak and could not harm the Americans, they decided against fighting. During the Cuban missile crisis, according to intelligence officer Maksimov, Penkovsky’s information about the Soviet military potential in Cuba was needed to legalize the very fact of the deployment of Soviet missiles there. There was a big bargain, the meaning of which was simple: Americans, leave Cuba alone. A big trade required a big bluff.
Penkovsky was arrested in mid-October 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis reached its peak. The then head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, already said today that the arrest could have happened earlier, but he was ordered to leave Penkovsky alone for a while. Perhaps this was done so as not to frighten off the Americans who worked with him. If only because, based on the tasks that were assigned to him, it was possible to determine the interests of that side and its awareness of us. In addition, Penkovsky had to “collect” more compromising material for a powerful political anti-American campaign. As a result, a dozen and a half employees of the American embassy were expelled from the USSR.
Anatoly Maksimov is confident that Colonel Penkovsky was not shot - even if the global intelligence game had to be brought to its logical conclusion. There are many examples when participants in such games disappeared, and after a long time they suddenly “surfaced”. In Operation Trust (1921-1927), the head of the border post, Toivo Vähe, who carried the English spy Sidney Reilly, was shot. And 40 years later, in 1965, he appeared on television screens under the name Petrov, and then wrote books. The purpose of Operation Snow (1940-1941) was to pit the Americans and Japanese in the Far East. It became known about it from the book of General Elisey Pavlov, a participant in the operation, only in the mid-90s, and even then the author was reproached for impropriety. In Operation Monastery, which lasted throughout the Great Patriotic War, the Germans considered Agent Max to be a model of Abwehr penetration into the Soviet intelligence services. And only in the mid-90s of the last century, the “main saboteur of the country,” General Pavel Sudoplatov, said that it was not “Max”, but a Soviet agent “Heine”.
When preparing for the role of a double agent, Anatoly Maksimov was asked if he was ready to play the role of a traitor - with all the ensuing consequences. He was ready. And when the Canadian intelligence services suffered a fiasco in this story, the following line of behavior was imposed on them: take everything upon yourself, let the government have nothing to do with it. Until the very end, the Canadians believed that their agent Anatoly Maximov worked honestly and was tortured in the basements of the Lubyanka.