25 Facts About Oleg Penkovsky

Oleg Penkovsky was the highest-ranking Soviet official to provide intelligence for the West up until that time, and is one of several individuals credited with altering the course of the Cold War.

Oleg Penkovsky was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and tried and executed the following year.

Oleg Penkovsky was a baby when his father was killed fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War.

Oleg Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer.

In 1945, Oleg Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron.

Oleg Penkovsky was selected for the post of military attache in India, but the KGB had uncovered the history of his father's death, and he was suspended, investigated, and assigned in November 1960 to the State Committee for Science and Technology.

Oleg Penkovsky later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research.

Oleg Penkovsky approached American students on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package in which he offered to spy for the United States.

Oleg Penkovsky asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy.

Peter Wright, a former British MI5 officer known for his scathing condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence during most of the Cold War, believed that Oleg Penkovsky was a fake defection.

Wright noted that, unlike Igor Gouzenko and other earlier defectors, Oleg Penkovsky did not reveal the names of any Soviet agents in the West but only provided organisational detail, much of which was known already.

Bagley says that after this detection, Oleg Penkovsky was allowed by the KGB to continue spying for the US and Britain for sixteen more months while a scenario was created in which he could be arrested and charged in such a way that would not reveal who, in Western Intelligence, had betrayed him.

Bagley based his conclusion on the fact that, when Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were arrested, and imprisoned in Russia, Wynne was confronted with a tape recording of a conversation he had had with Oleg Penkovsky in a Moscow restaurant two weeks after his recruitment.

Oleg Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites in Cuba to the West.

The documents provided by Oleg Penkovsky showed that the Soviet Union was not prepared for war in the area, which emboldened Kennedy to risk the operation in Cuba.

Top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Oleg Penkovsky was a British agent, but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6.

Alexander Zagvozdin, chief KGB interrogator for the investigation, stated that Oleg Penkovsky had been "questioned perhaps a hundred times" and that he had been shot and cremated.

Suvorov denied that the man in the film was Oleg Penkovsky and said that he had been shot.

Oleg Penkovsky was reputedly on friendly terms with Penkovsky, which is very likely to have been a cause of his fall.

Oleg Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky.

Oleg Penkovsky's spying career was the subject of episode 1 of the 2007 BBC Television docudrama Nuclear Secrets, titled "The Spy from Moscow" in which he was portrayed by Mark Bonnar.

The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Oleg Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting up with Janet Chisholm, a British MI6 agent stationed in Moscow.

Oleg Penkovsky's fate is mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School.

Oleg Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kuklinski, another Cold War spy.

Oleg Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne.