CIA officer, last link to the OSS

Benny Goodman and his band serenaded the guests as Hugh Montgomery slipped into the powder room in the Moscow residence of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. The date was July 4, 1962, Independence Day, and the musical entertainment had attracted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to the ambassador’s festivities.

Montgomery, a CIA officer posing as a diplomat, was there to receive a cache of documents from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet intelligence officer widely considered the most valuable double agent working for the West during the Cold War. Penkovsky was to leave the material in the ambassador’s toilet tank, where Montgomery would furtively collect it.

What transpired was “more ‘The Pink Panther’ than John le Carré,” a writer for U.S. News and World Report quipped decades later. To reach the tank, suspended up high, Montgomery first stood on the toilet seat, which cracked under his weight. He then climbed atop the sink, causing it to detach from the wall. He retrieved the documents, but only after soaking his sleeve in the toilet-tank water. Taking his wife by his wet arm, he escaped unnoticed.

Montgomery, who had darted behind German lines with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and became one of the most admired CIA officers of his generation, died April 6 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 93 and had congestive heart failure and other ailments, said his son, Hugh Montgomery Jr. Montgomery had retired at 90, after more than six decades in intelligence.

“He really was the last link to the OSS and the very beginning of the American intelligence capability,” former CIA director Leon E. Panetta said in an interview. “He was every bit a symbol of the kind of officer that we were proud to have in the CIA.”

Montgomery joined the CIA in 1952. Montgomery brought to the CIA proficiency in eight languages and working knowledge of more.

During the Reagan administration, he left the CIA to serve as director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and later as alternate U.S. representative to the United Nations for special political affairs, holding the rank of ambassador.