Oleg Penkovsky, Soviet traitor who provoked the Cuban missile crisis

History 20/01/20 Oleg Penkovsky, Soviet traitor who provoked the Cuban missile crisis

according to many historians, it is a betrayal of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky provoked one of the most critical situations in the “cold war” between the USSR and the USA, as close the world’s two superpowers to the possibility of a nuclear confrontation.

Who he was, and how betrayed

Lieutenant-General of justice Nikolai Chistyakov, head of the investigation and the trial of Penkovsky Investigation Department of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, wrote in his book, “Catching “moles”. Secret tribunals of the KGB” that the future spy was brought up in a single parent household, his mother raised. After graduating from the artillery school at Finnish and the great Patriotic war was mostly political work. Career in the GRU, he started after the Military-diplomatic Academy in 1953.

According to the Russian historian of the world of intelligence, the writer Gennady Sokolov, Penkovsky himself initiated his meeting with foreign intelligence, especially one not recruited. Many of the documents about the case of the spy is still classified, and fully known, and when, to whom, how much and what type of information he passed. Veteran intelligence Anatoly Maximov, in his book “the Central Mystery of the GRU” writes, quoting the sentence Penkovsky: from 1961 to 1962 GRU officer more than a year according to top-secret information to the British and American intelligence services. The documents, he began to convey since April of 1961, during my London business trip. It was a film with frames photographed secret papers, codes.

the spy was useful

According to Western intelligence services, announced the publication of “top secret”, Penkovsky was the most productive informant in the entire history of the cold war, and that he reported to foreign intelligence services, who decided to combine their efforts in the confrontation with the “evil Empire”, VAinasia information about the supply of the USSR in Cuba ballistic missiles, medium-range R-12. A similar version adheres to the journalist and politician Alexander Hinstein who study the history of Soviet and Russian intelligence services, as well as the well-known Soviet defector, Colonel of the KGB Oleg Gordievsky, who believed Penkovsky “the only major source in the West.”

the Writer Gennady Sokolov argues that for all time of cooperation with British and American intelligence Oleg Penkovsky passed more than a thousand typewritten pages of copies of secret documents and over a hundred films with snapshots of information constituting state secrets. He as the Deputy chief of Department of external relations of the state Committee for coordination of scientific research at the Council of Ministers of the USSR (official cover officer of the GRU in the West) had the widest access to sources particularly valuable for the CIA information. Claim that the informant Oleg Penkovsky was chief Marshal of the rocket forces and artillery of the Soviet Union Sergei Varentsov (at the time a traitor, he served as adjutant), and tacit patronage of the spy, in particular, had and father – in-law, Lieutenant-General Dmitry Galenovich, in the last years of his life the chief architect in combat and political training of land forces of the USSR.

Oleg Gordievsky in an interview with “Radio Liberty” said his namesake to the details Penkovsky told the CIA details of the operation “Anadyr” – how many missiles the USSR had deployed in Cuba, what are the other details of this action. According to Gordievsky, this information helped America to realistically assess the availability and effectiveness of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union and subsequently contributed to the beginning of the negotiation process between Grushevyi and Kennedy.

… Among historians, there are still unresolved controversy about the role of pen in the escalation of the Cuban missile crisis. Opponents point of view Gordievsky (in particular, the Soviet and Russian intelligence officer, Hero of Russia Alexander Feklistov), believed that this agent was just not mog is fully informed Western intelligence agencies about the details of the operation “Anadyr”: Soviet missiles delivered to Cuba on 14 October 1962, a few days after Penkovsky was arrested. Before the arrest of the spy for a long time “grazed”, so to convey the appropriate information to the West that simply was not possible.

Nicholas Syromyatnikov

Source:
© Russian Seven

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