![]() ![]() The latter is sometimes referred to - and not unreasonably - as “ The Spy Who Saved the World.” They were a British businessman, Greville Wynne (played here by Benedict Cumberbatch), and his source, Oleg Penkovsky (played by Merab Ninidze), the heroic military intelligence service colonel who fed information about Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba to MI6 during the Cold War. It’s a place that looms over “The Courier,” an affable if slight dramatic thriller about two spies who tried to avert the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In declining health, he was released roughly two years later on Apin exchange for Soviet spy Konon Molody, who had called himself Gordon Lonsdale while operating in Britain.The tallest building in Moscow, goes the old Soviet joke, is the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (known by its Russian acronym, the FSB) - because you can see Siberia from its basement. Wynne himself had earlier stated that Penkovsky had been shot, including during his appearance on the game show To Tell the Truth.Īfter being arrested by the KGB in 1962 and convicted of spying on May 11, 1963, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, where he was held in brutal conditions and subjected to severe beatings and psychological pressure. However, that claim seems unlikely to be true. ![]() In Greville Wynne's 1981 book The Man from Odessa, Wynne claims that Penkovsky committed suicide in a Soviet labor camp. He claims that Penkovsky had been questioned probably 100 times before being shot and cremated. This version is supported by Alexander Zagvozdin, who was the KGB's chief interrogator during the investigation. The almost universally accepted version of events is that Oleg Penkovsky was executed in 1963 for providing top-secret information to the United Kingdom. In addition, Colonel Penkovsky provided Wynne with the names and photographs of roughly 300 East bloc intelligence agents, as well as information about Soviet weapons production and military manpower. Oleg Penkovsky also provided documents that revealed that the Soviet Union was ill-equipped to fight a war in the area. was then able to use U-2 spy planes to take photographs and identify the missile sites (see image below). This intelligence gave both the United Kingdom and the United States the knowledge necessary to manage the quickly evolving military friction with the Soviet Union. The true story behind The Courier confirms that some of the intelligence Wynne received from his Russian contact, Soviet military intelligence colonel Oleg Penkovsky, informed the United Kingdom about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba. Penkovsky's real-life codename was HERO.ĭid British spy Greville Wynne help to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis? However, in real life, IRONBARK was the codename for the documents that Soviet double agent Oleg Penkovsky had been passing to the CIA. In the movie, the title refers to Oleg Penkovsky's codename. The Courier premiered at Sundance in January 2020 under its original title, Ironbark. The Courier fact-check reveals that, like his father, Penkovsky had become disillusioned with the Soviet system. ![]() The loosely allied forces that made up the White Army favored capitalism and social democracy, which stood in contrast to the communist ideologies of the Red Army. Penkovsky's career in the Soviet military had been hindered by the fact that his father had died fighting as an officer for the White Army against the Bolsheviks (Red Army) during the Russian Civil War (1917 – 1923) and Penkovsky didn't denounce this legacy. In 19, at the height of the Cold War, disgruntled colonel Oleg Penkovsky (portrayed by Merab Ninidze) became the highest-ranking Soviet military official to spy for the United Kingdom up until that time. Why did Oleg Penkovsky want to become a spy for the West? This provided a near-perfect cover for spying. ![]() It required plenty of foreign travel, including to Soviet bloc countries. In 1950, engineer Greville Wynne set up his own business as an exporter of industrial engineering products. ![]()
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