The Spy Who Loved Us
Weiner, Tim
The Spy Who Loved Us KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets’ deepest secrets. So how did the CIA lose him? by Tim Weiner he Central Intelligence Agency knew little...
...Air Force invented the “missile gap” by creating and leaking estimates during the late fifties Not only was Khrushchev lying when he claimed Moscow was squeezing out ICBMs “like sausages,” but the Soviet Union’s sausages were horsemeat...
...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...
...the agency could not...
...barstool gossip:, and minutiae about life inside the Soviet state...
...The Spy Who Saved The World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War...
...F’enkovsky’s place as an unparalleled Soviet spy was ensured by Angleton’s attempts to discredit all defectors who came after him...
...And had presidents and policymakers achieved that understanding, some of the treasure the United States devoted to our costly standoff with that doomed slate might have been saved, and our present fortunes vastly improved...
...Like most transcriptions, it is full of facts and devoid of deep thought...
...The U.S...
...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...
...They took the goods to the embassy in Moscow and received a stern lecture from a security officer...
...Why was Garbler cut out of the loop...
...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...
...They were published in 1965, albeit in sanitized, souped-up, and somewhat fictionalized form, with the CIA’S editorial assistance, as a purported spy’s diary, The Penkovsky Papers...
...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...
...Angleton tore the agency apart looking for the mole, ruining the careers of scores of CIA officers...
...Penkovsky produced a torrent of data: the command structure of the KGB, Soviet military intelligence, and the Communist Party central committee...
...The CIA had never had a source quite like him...
...In some 50 hours of meetings with CIA officers in London and Paris during the next three months, with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe...
...The Soviets knew we knew...
...They show-as The Penkovsky Papers did not -that this most valuable agent revealed that the SoWar...
...The Spy Who Loved Us KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets’ deepest secrets...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Nothing...
...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 tried as a turncoat and shot...
...Red Army doctrine...
...Nothing...
...Unfortunately, the CIA sent an incompetent to Moscow to make contact with Penkovsky-an inexperienced, alcoTim Weiner is Washington correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of Blank Check: The CIA’S Black Budget...
...There are no roads, which results in unbelievable transportation delays and breakdowns...
...The plan was developed after the U.S...
...Penkovsky continued: [In a land war in Europe] countless numbers of officers and soldiers would simply desert to the other side...
...naval officer who saw the war plan of the late fifties observed, to “a smoking, radiating ruin” within two hours...
...grain is rotting since it cannot be delivered...
...The Spy Who Saved The World is an important antidote to previous histories of tlhe CIA that have accepted uncritically the reams of nonsense published in the United States and Great Britain about the Penkovsky case...
...U.S...
...viets were playing a game of liar’s poker with their nuclear weapons...
...Lengthy excerpts of the conversations between Penkovsky and the CIA over the months in which they communed form the basic text of this book...
...He approached two British businessmen who delivered Penkovsky ’s business card and home telephone number to M16...
...Drunk, the CIA man called the Soviet officer an hour past the appointed time and babbled senselessly to him in broken Russian...
...The package made its way to Washington via a diplomatic pouch...
...the names of more than 300 Soviet spooks...
...It was like nothing they had ever seen: actual inside information from an active-duty Soviet intelligence officer...
...imprisoned an important defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came over in June 1962...
...The current book’s co-author, Peter Deriabin, translated the edited transcripts of the original CIA bestseller...
...He also delivered more than 10,000 pages of military manuals and documents...
...There is always the promise that things will be better, but actually nothing is better and things are only getting worse...
...knew it was far more powerful than the Sovi1:ts...
...Jerrold L. Schecter, Peter S. Deriabin...
...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 MI6, and turned over yet another packet of secrets...
...Nothing...
...Penkovsky stared at his phone for months...
...It both benefits and suffers from its extensive use of transcripts from the CIA’s Penkovsky files...
...In crisis, both sides acted accordingly...
...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...
...He had fallen victim to Angleton’s paranoia and was tagged as a “potential Soviet agent...
...In their first meeting, Penkovsky told the CIA that “the Soviet Union is definitely not prepared at this time for war...
...Outside the ,cities] it is difficult to get bread...
...The enemy was really nothing more than Upper Volta with rockets-and not many rockets at that...
...He begged the CIA to exfiltrate him...
...While the take from Penkovsky was invaluable in the case of Cuba-his data on Soviet missiles gave the White IHouse time to thinkother factors were at least as important in helping Kennedy reach his decision...
...that the Sovyets had hundreds of ICBMs and soon would have thousands...
...An official record of the CIA written in 1976 deemed Penkovsky “the single most valuable agent in CIA history...
...That evening, he met with American and British intelligence officers in a smoke-filled hotel room and began his new life...
...The British foreign intelligence service passed on the number to its American cousin...
...Everything of strategic value from Poland to the Pacific would have been reduced, as a U.S...
...As is now well known, the CIA’s 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...
...The fear of Soviet nuclear superiority was founded in ignorance...
...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...
...Fans of Le CarrC 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...
...An assignation was set...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...KGB tradecraft...
...Scribner ’s, $25...
...Penkovsky waited...
...That may be oversimplifying a bit...
...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...
...He had been under surveillarice for months, burned by the CIA’S inability to provide experienced contacts or safe sites where he could deposit information in Moscow...
...strategic doctrine of the day called for the destruction of the Soviet Union and all its satellites The enemy was really nothing more than Upper Volta with rockets-and not many rockets at that...
...He vigorously attempted to debunk Penkovsky...
...Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets...
...He continued to spy regardless, driven by his own desires and the demands of his handlers...
...The economy was crumbling because “everything is subordinated to the armaments race...
...In the first of Penkovsky’s four attempts, he surreptitiously handed off a package to two wary American students...
...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...
...by Tim Weiner he Central Intelligence Agency knew little of Tv alue about the Soviet Union in the summer of 1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was terrifying voters with the fraudulent but powerful image of a missile gap...
...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...
...Penkovsky divulged that the Soviets had a mere handful of ICBMs, whose electronics and fuel systems were dubious...
...He gave a large envelope containing drawings of Soviet ballistic missiles to a Canadian diplomat and begged him to take it to the CIA...
...and in time paralyzed the Soviet division...
...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 The transcripts of Penkovsky’s debriefings were generously bequeathed to the authors by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act...
...I swear to you that only in Moscow and Leningrad can one even purchase decent food...
...CIAO At about the time Kennedy confronted the Soviets in Cuba, Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB...
...holic officer code-named COMPASS...
...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...
Vol. 24 • May 1992 • No. 5
