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KGB defector
Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets' deepest secrets,
So how did the CIA lose him? \
The Central Intelligence Agency knew little of value about the Soviet
Union in the summer of T1960, when presidential candidate John F.
Kennedy was terrifying voters with the fraudulent but powerful image of
a missile gap. The fear of Soviet nuclear superiority was founded in
ignorance. In 1960, there was no CIA station chief in Moscow and no
station to speak of, no CIA officer who spoke Russian, no way to
penetrate the steely Soviet shield -no one, in short, to listen when
Oleg Penkovsky, a deeply disgruntled colonel in Soviet military
intelligence who knew the truth about Soviet missilery, tried to deliver
himself unto America.
In the first of Penkovsky's four attempts, he surreptitiously handed off
a package to two wary American students. They took the goods to the
embassy in Moscow and received a stem lecture from a security officer.
The package made its way to Washington via a diplomatic pouch. Penkovsky
waited. Nothing. He approached two British businessmen who delivered
Penkovsky's business card and home telephone number to M16. The British
foreign intelligence service passed on the number to its American
cousin. Penkovsky stared at his phone for months. Nothing. He gave a
large envelope containing drawings of Soviet ballistic missiles to a
Canadian diplomat and begged him to take it to the CIA. Nothing.
At CIA headquarters, the agency's best Soviet officers read through the
contents of Penkovsky's first package with the ardor of Keats looking
into Chapman's Homer-"like some watcher of the skies when a new planet
swims into his ken." It was like nothing they had ever seen: actual
inside information from an active-duty Soviet intelligence officer.
Unfortunately, the CIA sent an incompetent to Moscow to make contact
with Penkovsky-an inexperienced, alcoholic officer code-named COMPASS.
Drunk, the CIA man called the Soviet officer an hour past the appointed
time and babbled senselessly to him in broken Russian.
In the meantime, Penkovsky had been assigned to the State Committee on
Science and Technology, limiting his freedom to travel abroad. Eight
months after he first tried to contact the CIA, he met Greville Wynne, a
British businessman in Moscow who worked for M16, and turned over yet
another packet of secrets. An assignation was set. On April 20, the day
Fidel Castro declared victory at the Bay of Pigs, Penkovsky landed in
London as the head of a trade delegation. That evening, he met with
American and British intelligence officers in a smoke-filled hotel room
and began his new life. An official record of the CIA written in 1976
deemed Petikovsky "the single most valuable agent in CIA history."
This book has something of the air of an official history, which should
come as no surprise given that one author is a journalist and former
White House spokesman and the other a KGB defector who served as a
consultant to the CIA for 30 years. But the authors go beyond even the
agency's glowing appraisal to anoint Penkovsky savior of the world, the
spy whose intelligence kept the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban
missile crisis from exploding into nuclear war.
The transcripts of Penkovsky's debriefings were generously bequeathed to
the authors by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. (They were
published in 1965, albeit in sanitized, souped-up, and somewhat
fictionalized form, with the CIAs editorial assistance, as a purported
spy's diary, The Penkovsky Papers. The current book's co-author, Peter
Deriabin, translated the edited transcripts of the original CIA
bestseller.) Lengthy excerpts of the conversations between Penkovsky and
the CIA over the months in which they communed form the basic text of
this book. They show-as The Penkovsky Papers did not -that this most
valuable agent revealed that the Soviets were playing a game of liar's
poker with their nuclear weapons.
U.S. strategic doctrine of the day called for the destruction of the
Soviet Union and all its satellites with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons
in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Everything of strategic
value from Poland to the Pacific would have been reduced, as a U.S.
naval officer who saw the war plan of the late fifties observed, to "a
smoking, radiating ruin" within two hours. The plan was developed after
the U.S. Air Force invented the "missile gap" by creating and leaking
estimates during the late fifties that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs
and soon would have thousands.
Penkovsky divulged that the Soviets had a
mere handful of ICBMs, whose electronics and fuel systems were dubious.
Fans of Le Carre will see in Penkovsky the basis for Dante, the
physicist in The Russia House who reveals Soviet rocketry to be as
efficient as Soviet econometrics.
In their first meeting, Penkovsky told the CIA that "the Soviet Union is
definitely not prepared at this time for war... Khrushchev is not going
to fire any rockets." There was no Soviet ICBM force worth the name,
though the Soviets were struggling furiously to catch up with the U.S.-a
goal they would not achieve for nearly 20 years.
Not only was Khrushchev lying when he claimed Moscow was squeezing out
intercontinental ballistic missiles "like sausages," but the Soviet
Union's sausages were horsemeat. The economy was crumbling because
"everything is subordinated to the armaments race." Penkovsky continued:
[In a land war in Europe] countless numbers of officers and soldiers
would simply desert to the other side. This is because all of these
ideals for which many of our fathers, brothers, and relatives died have
turned out to be nothing but a bluff and a deceit. There is always the
promise that things will be better, but actually nothing is better and
things are only getting worse. I swear to you that only in Moscow and
Leningrad can one even purchase decent food.... [Outside the cities] it
is difficult to get bread. There are no roads, which results in
unbelievable transportation delays and breakdowns; grain is rotting
since it cannot be delivered.
The enemy was really nothing more than Upper Volta with rockets-and not
many rockets at that.
In some 50 hours of meetings with CIA officers in London and Paris
during the next three months, Penkovsky produced a torrent of data: the
command structure of the KGB, Soviet military intelligence, and the
Communist Party central committee; the names of more than 300 Soviet
spooks; KGB tradecraft; Red Army doctrine; barstool gossip; and minutiae
about life inside the Soviet state. He also delivered more than 10,000
pages of military manuals and documents. Penkovsky unnerved his auditors
by offering to plant dozens of small nuclear mines at strategic sites
throughout Moscow, and by urging a preemptive war against Moscow. The
CIA had never had a source quite like him.
The authors credit Penkovsky with providing the first reliable human
intelligence of Soviet nuclear strength and, in so doing, giving the
White House the backbone to stand up to the Soviets in the
confrontations over Berlin and Cuba. That may be oversimplifying a bit.
In February 1961, two months before Penkovsky's first debriefing, the
newly appointed secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, reviewed the
first set of spy-satellite photographs ever taken of the Soviet Union
and told the press that the missile gap did not exist-and if there was
one, it was in Washington's favor. Penkovsky's revelations simply would
not have been decisive without overhead reconnaissance, and without
McNamara's reevaluation of the wisdom of a massive, spasmodic nuclear
strike against the Soviets. While the take from Penkovsky was invaluable
in the case of Cuba-his data on Soviet missiles gave the White House
time to think-other factors were at least as important in helping
Kennedy reach his decision. The U.S. knew it was far more powerful than
the Soviets. The Soviets knew we knew. In crisis, both sides acted
accordingly.
CIAo
At about the time Kennedy confronted the Soviets in Cuba, Penkovsky was
arrested by the KGB. He had been under surveillance for months, burned
by the CIA's inability to provide experienced contacts or safe sites
where he could deposit information in Moscow. He continued to spy
regardless, driven by his own desires and the demands of his handlers.
He begged the CIA to exfiltrate him; the agency could not. He was tried
as a turncoat and shot.
The official recognition of Penkovsky as the most valuable agent ever to
come to the CIA from inside Russia should be evaluated in light of the
CIA:s treatment of others. As is now well known, the CIAs ability to
deal properly with Soviet defectors had been, by the time of Penkovsky's
trial, poisoned by the byzantine conspiracy theories of the agency's
half-mad counterintelligence chief, James J. Angleton. A KGB officer who
defected in December 1961, Anatoly Golitsin, quickly convinced Angleton
that any Soviet who followed him would be a plant, and that there was a
Soviet mole somewhere in the CIA's chain of command. Angleton tore the
agency apart looking for the mole, ruining the careers of scores of CIA
officers. He vigorously attempted to debunk Penkovsky; imprisoned an
important defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came over in June 1962; and in
time paralyzed the Soviet division. As David Wise demonstrates in his
book, Molehunt, Penkovsky's capture may have been facilitated by the
fact that the first CIA station chief in Moscow, Paul Garbler, who took
his post in December 1961, knew almost nothing of the Penkovsky
operation. He was not told that a "dead drop" (a secret location for
passing materials to and from Penkovsky) was under KGB surveillance,
though CIA headquarters had been told of that fact. Why was Garbler cut
out of the loop? He had fallen victim to Angleton's paranoia and was
tagged as a "potential Soviet agent." Penkovsky's place as an
unparalleled Soviet spy was ensured by Angleton's attempts to discredit
all defectors who came after him.
The Spy Who Saved The World is an important antidote to previous
histories of the CIA that have accepted uncritically the reams of
nonsense published in the United States and Great Britain about the
Penkovsky case. It both benefits and suffers from its extensive use of
transcripts from the CIA's Penkovsky files. Like most transcriptions, it
is full of facts and devoid of deep thought. But it convincingly
demonstrates that 30 years ago the CIA possessed inside information from
a unique source that strongly suggested that the Soviet state was
foredoomed. Had the CIA not gone down a thousand blind alleys searching
for moles, it could have developed a clearer understanding of the enemy
long before Soviet policy defeated itself. And had presidents and
policy-makers achieved that understanding, some of the treasure the
United States devoted to our costly standoff with that doomed state
might have been saved, and our present fortunes vastly improved.
COPYRIGHT 1992 Washington Monthly Company
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