Key communist spy was recruited in city, documents reveal
ASOVIET colonel gave Western spies a vast trove of Cold War military secrets in a Birmingham hotel, newly-released CIA documents show.
Oleg Penkovsky, a military intelligence officer, provided detailed insights into his homeland’s war machine at the former Midland Hotel.
He talked at length about missile technology, and air defences around Moscow – and even asked for a pistol.
Under the cover of touring Britain on a scientific delegation, he slipped away to meet secret agents at the venue, now the Macdonald Burlington Hotel, that sits between New Street and Stephenson Street.
The documents reveal Penkovsky had been tasked with gathering information for Russia’s GRU intelligence service but had in fact decided to betray his countrymen.
Phil Wood, head of the School of Management and Professional Studies at Buckinghamshire New University, said: “Oleg Penkovsky was effectively offering himself as a spy to the CIA and MI6.
“He was saying how loyal, committed and bona fide he was in wanting to provide information.
“He then talked about a guy called Greville Wynne, who was a businessman but also an MI6 asset working in Moscow and, as handlers and subjects often do, they had become quite close.”
Penkovsky had contacted Western intelligence in Moscow, where he was involved in “dead drops” of letters, including one using a toilet cistern.
He was in touch with MI6 and the CIA, with one or both represented at the meeting in Birmingham, where the delegation was visiting refrigeration plants.
The Russian was taken to rendezvous with his handlers in a meeting room after walking into the lobby at 9pm on April 27, 1961. Handed pictures of military technology, he identified rockets and the altitudes and launch methods involved in their deployment.
He also discussed tanks, submarines, the Sputnik satellite and Red Army personnel, right down to the insignia they wore and the family life of one officer, said Mr Wood. “He was giving away information on the disposition and nature of military formations that allowed our people to put a picture together about where these organisations were based and the terminology that could be picked up through signals and intercepts.
“He also talks a lot about missiles, including the V-75 and the R2, which was a bit like a version of the V2 rocket from World War Two.”
Although Penkovsky went into great detail – he invited his handlers to kill him if they doubted his loyalty – he divided opinion among Western agents about his usefulness and motivations.
But the military intelligence officer’s information was vital to the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.
He provided
Oleg Penkovsky was effectively offering himself as a spy to the CIA and MI6
plans and descrip- tions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba, vital information which allowed the West to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by their spy planes.
After a long period of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between US President John F Kennedy and USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev.
However, Penkovsky’s fate was sealed when he was betrayed by a KGB agent working for America’s National Security Agency.
He was arrested by the Soviet authorities on October 22, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and shot by firing squad in 1963, with his ashes believed to have been dumped in a mass grave in Moscow.
The Red Army’s great traitor has been given a lofty epitaph by the CIA, which considers him one of the most valuable assets in the agency’s history.