It was surreal, like a bad nightmare, Andrei told me. "He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. That the KGB ran a fourth mole is undeniable, Victor Cherkashin, a wily KGB counterintelligence officer, has written. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, 1985almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Wynne dutifully passed the images to his contacts with British intelligence, who established their legitimacy. The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. Russia was building missile bases in Cuba, armed with nuclear . The films screenwriter, Tom OConnor, found Wynnes story of a nobody suddenly becoming a somebody compelling. Because I knew it was a death sentence.. Top KGB officers had known for more than a year that Penkovsky was a British agent, but they protected their source, a highly placed mole in MI6. They have two children, and he works as an independent research analyst for business and government contractors in Northern Virginia. That happened several times.. But it was only a matter of time. They had a sumptuous lunchBokhan knew it might be his last meal with his familyand Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff. They were alone in the world with this incredible burden except for the other man.. He asked it be given to Joe, with a message, Here is something from Leo. By the time Joe learned of the gift, Andrei said, his father had been arrested. what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky daughter, what happened to oleg penkovsky wife and child, what happened to oleg penkovsky family, what happened to oleg penkovsky . The KGB took her to a sanitarium, where she was drugged and interrogated further. He started having trouble breathing. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. For his treason, Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad days after the trial ended (though Wynne would later claim he died of suicide). He was probably the West's most valuable double agent during the Cold War. During their visits, Penkovsky and Wynne would get out on the town, visiting restaurants, nightclubs and shops under the cover of talking business, with each man proudly showing the other around his home country. Janet continued to travel around the world until well into her 70s. Inside the CIA, Howard was blamed for Tolkachevs unmasking and subsequent execution, although Ames, too, had betrayed the researchers identity. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA and MI6 agent deep inside Soviet military intelligence, provided le Carr inspiration for The Russia House (1989). Between April 1961 and August 1962 Penkovsky passed more than 5,000 photographs of classified military, political, and economic documents to British and U.S. intelligence forces. Some of the documents provided were originals, which Wright thought could not have been easily taken from their sources. The mole reported that Janet Chisholm, the wife of a British intelligence officer working in Moscow, was also active in collection activities herself. Greville Wynne, a British spy who told in his celebrated memoirs how he pried loose some of Moscow's best-kept secrets and who served 18 months in a Soviet prison for Investors Helping Baby Boomer Business Owners. They made an odd contrastthe short, energetic, and thinly mustachioed Wynne alongside the military bearing of Penkovskybut there seemed to be genuine affection between the two, and this friendship is a central focus of The Courier. MI6 and the CIA ran Penkovsky jointly, in an operation that ran through . 3.80. After months of negotiations, the British government was eventually able to arrange a trade of Wynne for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, whod been arrested the year before and was serving a 25-year sentence in England. Penkovsky-wynne spy trial, May 1963, a Sanyo portable transistor radio . British intelligence officer and Soviet spy. "And Greville played a big part in that.". He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat. But if he returned home, he could be shot. Penkovsky was wounded in action in 1944, at about the same time as Varentsov, who appointed him his Liaison Officer. At first I couldnt even recognize him, Andrei said. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. He walked down the steps and shook hands with the waiting CIA officers. Thus, Gordievsky was born, as it were, "into the KGB," in 1938 in Moscow. Wynne, despite claiming ignorance of what materials he was smuggling to the West, was sentenced to eight years in prison. The BBC produced a TV movie based on them. But as he began researching Wynnes story, he learned that this ordinary man could also tell some extraordinary lies. He drove across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. and entered Chadwicks, a popular Georgetown restaurant, where he handed the documents to a Soviet Embassy official named Sergei Chuvakhin. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. If he refused the summons, he would destroy his career. And yet to an intelligence agency, ignoring the possibility of a mole isnt really an option, either. He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. He decided to leave Athensbut not for Moscow. On the front door of his apartment, someone had locked a third lock he never used because he had lost the key; he had to break in. Posted on . Toasty. What neither the CIA nor Poleshchuk knew was that the apartment was a KGB operation. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Rachel Brosnahan portrays CIA-contactEmily Donovan, who helps recruit Wynne in "The Courier." Before Leonid Poleshchuk left Lagos, he had asked the CIA for $20,000 to buy the apartment that was supposedly waiting for him. Penkovsky was in fact arrested by the Soviets on Oct. 22, 1962, at the height of that crisis, after they realized that highly classified information was leaking to the West. He was selected for the post of military attach in India, but the KGB had uncovered the story of his father's death, and he was suspended, investigated, and assigned in November 1960 to the State Committee for Science and Technology. They were driven to the infamous Lefortovo prison for interrogation. In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed. | Kent. Maybe a fifth. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). These things have to be run to ground.. As important as Popov was to the United States and the West, it was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, another Soviet GRU officer, who has earned the sobriquet, the "spy who saved the world.'. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba, to help build . (Howard, Russian authorities reported in 2002, died of a fall in his KGB dacha near Moscow. But over time, intelligence experts and those involved in the case, though reluctant to share sensitive information, cast doubt on much of what Wynne laid out in his books. While Oleg was tried and executed by the Soviets, Wynne was sentenced to eight years in prison. He succeeded in transferring to the West 111 Minox films with 5,500 top-secret military documents, totaling 7,650 pages, as well as revealing the identities of hundreds of Soviet agents in the West. His first attempt was to approach two American students in Moscow. Penkovsky was portrayed by Eduard Bezrodniy in the 2014 Polish thriller Jack Strong, about Ryszard Kukliski, another Cold War spy. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, 'Fatal Encounter' BBC TV documentary 3 May 1991, KGB, MI6 and CIA officers involved with the Penkovsky reveal their stories, This page was last edited on 30 January 2023, at 08:39. what happened to penkovsky wifemostar bridge jump injuries. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lore and popular culture tout Col. Oleg Penkovsky as "the spy who saved the world" during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach. In Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky. One of them finally answered: For espionage.. They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. Penkovsky gave a huge amount of details about what missiles the Soviets had, how old they were, how there were queues for foodit was an extremely vivid portrait of the country and the people within intelligence, says Duns. Penkovsky was ultimately undone by a mole within the British government. His 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. It was the KGBs way of saying my father worked for the CIA, Andrei said. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program. Oleg Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence colonel during the late Fifties and early Sixties responsible for informing the UK about the Kremlin's emplacement of missiles in Cuba. Brought up in the North Caucasus, Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy with the rank of lieutenant in 1939. You have the wrong number, he was told. Greville Wynnefitthe bill simply assomebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.". Hed been back at headquarters only four months earlier, and all seemed well. Penkovskys information, and Wynnes help in delivering it to British and American intelligence officers, would produce mountains of material, play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and land both men in prison. The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange forSoviet spy Konon Molody. After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. The coded exchange triggered a meeting that night with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser, who cabled headquarters in Langley that BLIZZARD was in trouble. I talked to some old MI6 friends, and they say they are sure there is. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. He did so, but nothing happened. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, (born April 23, 1919, Vladikavkaz, Russiadied May 1963?, U.S.S.R.), senior Soviet military intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for the United Kingdom and the United States. Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prisonthere are disputing accounts. You, in your own mind, have developed this sense of self-importance, says West. Gordievsky was served sandwiches and Armenian brandy. [10], The Soviet leadership began the deployment of nuclear missiles, in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. His father, an avowed communist, served in the NKVD, Joseph Stalin's secret police, a forerunner of the KGB. The timeline just didnt work to explain Gordievskys recall to Moscow, FBI Special Agent Leslie Wiser, who ran the Ames case, told me. And the intelligence culture is not going to let that go. In the West he is hailed as "the spy who saved the world". In all, Penkovsky had provided Western intelligence with about 140 hours of interviews and 111 exposed rolls of film, contributing to some 10,000 pages of intelligence reports. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and Greville Wynne (Benjamin Cumberbatch) in The Courier. After his father was executed, Andrei kept working for Novosti. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. No child today is doing duck and cover drills or helping to build a fallout shelter. Your Privacy Rights But some highly experienced U.S. counterintelligence experts doubt it. In 1961, jet travel did not allow someone to fly from the U.K. to the U.S. and back again in 24 hours, says West. Inside were three British intelligence agentsthe candy-bar man and two women, one of whom was Gordievskys MI6 case officer in London. Penkovsky was referred to in four of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan espionage novels: The Hunt for Red October (1984), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), The Bear and the Dragon (2000) and Red Rabbit (2002). [8] The KGB defector Vladimir N. Sakharov suggests Penkovsky was genuine, saying: "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganisation precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. Because his father opposed the Communist revolution, Penkovsky was routinely denied promotions. Confess again! the general roared. Sentenced toeight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow'sLubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture. Controversy surrounds Penkovsky's death, with many believing that MI6 put him in danger after Blake confessed all to the Soviet officials. Like Popov, Penkovsky volunteered his services and Kissevalter was called in to handle the spy, in league with two counterparts from the British Secret . "Most experts agreethat what Penkovsky provided on the Soviet's capabilities was extremely useful during the Cuban Missile crisis," saysRobert English, director of Central European Studies at the University of Southern California. Morbi eu nulla vehicula, sagittis tortor id, fermentum nunc. [2] On Varentsov's recommendation, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in 1945-48, then worked as a staff officer. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. After months of interrogation at Lefortovo, Andrei Poleshchuk told his captors he wouldnt answer any more questions unless they told him who his father worked for. Cookie Policy "The Courier" has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. Moscow, August 3, 1985: It was 2 a.m. when Andrei Poleshchuk got home. He has two daughters. I always thought there was another one, he told me. In extended CIA and FBI debriefings, he talked about his nine years of spying for Moscowincluding the day when he turned over, in his words, the identities of virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me.. 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. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. He drove around Athens in his BMW for close to an hour to make certain he wasnt being followed, then walked into a 100-foot pedestrian tunnel under a highway. Since Oleg Penkovsky offered his services to both the Americans and the British, the CIA and MI6 developed him jointly. The Courier: Directed by Dominic Cooke. The KGB surveilled Janet and witnessed her meeting with Penkovsky. [16] The noted Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny said that he had been told by the director of the Donskoye Cemetery crematorium "how Penkovsky [had been] executed by 'fire'". Finally, in 1991, with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities let Alla and her daughter leave. In April 1961, through Greville M. Wynne, a British businessman, he offered his services to British intelligence. This is the scenario described in The mail, and that generally accepted by . With Vladimir Chuprikov, Merab Ninidze, James Schofield, Fred Haig. The two then visited the White House where President John F. Kennedy personally thanked them for their servicethen the two returned to the U.K. just 18 hours later. Housing in Moscow was nearly impossible to find, even for a KGB officer, but sometime that May, hed received a seemingly miraculous letter from his father. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and asked Wynne for his help. He was senior enough that you could sit down with the agents for hours and explain the entire context of how Soviet intelligence worked.. Among the explanations are a desire for money or fame, a ruinous case of alcoholism, or perhaps even psychological scars left by his time in Soviet prison or the shame he felt for publicly turning against British intelligence during the trial. 276 to 280, "A Spy Story: Sergei Skripal Was a LIttle Fish. The year 1985 was a catastrophe for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. For months, Andrei had been hoping his father would find him an apartment. It said his parents had unexpectedly heard of an apartment they could buy for him; his father decided to take his vacation early and come home to close the deal. Oleg Gordievsky. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him. By 1993 their marriage was over. Dont call us, well call you in a couple years. When Greville got out of prison, he was not prepared, as people obviously are not in those circumstances, to be ignored.. The domestic impact of foreign clandestine operations: the CIA and academic institutions, the media and religious institutions, Appendix B", The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963, "Nonfiction Book Review: The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War by Jerrold L. Schecter, Author, Peter S. Deriabin, With Scribner Book Company ISBN 978-0-684-19068-6", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oleg_Penkovsky&oldid=1136437646, Soviet people executed for spying for the United States, Russian people executed by the Soviet Union, Executed people from North OssetiaAlania, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Russian-language text, Articles having same image on Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2022, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2023, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. The CIA would want to debrief him at length to try to determine the full extent of his treachery. The "cremated alive" hypothesis appears in several Clancy novels, though Clancy never identified Penkovsky as the executed spy. [17] A similar description was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular history book about spies, Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit and in Viktor Suvorov's book Aquarium. Gordievsky never took a penny from MI6 until after he had defected to the U.K. His actions were motivated by a hatred of the tyranny of the Soviet system, and the degraded condition in which it. Businessman Greville Wynne is asked by a Russian source to try to help put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was flown to Moscow, imprisoned, and tried alongside Penkovsky, who it would later be learned had been arrested the week before Wynne entered Hungary. The operation was the most productive classic clandestine operation ever conducted by the CIA or MI6 against the Soviet target, as Schecter and Deriabin put it, and key to its success was the mustachioed courier with no prior intelligence experience. For the following 18 months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to the CIAMI6 team of handlers, including documents demonstrating that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than Nikita Khrushchev claimed or the CIA had thought and that the Soviets were not yet capable of producing a large number of ICBMs. Wright was bitter towards British intelligence, reportedly believing that it should have adopted his proposed methods to identify British/Soviet double agents. Bokhan assumed that both the KGB and the GRU were watching him. Now, he feared, the KGBs counterspies had become suspicious and were recalling him to confront him. The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. He worked as a double agent for the British secret service during the Cold War, between 1974 and 1985. In one of his biggest whoppers, Wynne explains that he and Penkovsky took a trip together in a private military jet from the U.K. to Washington, D.C. A skilled intelligence officer, he had been promoted a few months before to rezident, or chief, of the KGB station in the British capital. Penkovsky's espionage about Soviet missiles . He works as a computer programmer. Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky (Russian: ; 23 April 1919 16 May 1963), codenamed HERO,[1] was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That raised a possibility that remains, even today, a subject of deep concern among counterintelligence agents, a problem privately acknowledged but little discussed publicly: That the three agents may have been betrayed by a mole inside U.S. intelligence whose identity is still unknown. In November 1960, Greville Wynne, a 41-year-old British businessman, sat down for a lunch that would change his life. They were convicted of espionage. pictures of the galvin family; springfield, ma city council candidates; what happened to penkovsky wife He traveled frequently, to the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia, South America and the Middle East. He was transferred to MI6 and assisted with the 1959 defection of the Soviet intelligence officer, Major Kuznov. He had lost a lot of weight. It was pathological with him.. | READ MORE. The Soviet public was first told of Penkovsky's arrest more than seven weeks later, when Pravda named Wynne and Jacobs[clarification needed] as his contacts, without naming anyone else. As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled depression and the psychological after-effects of his incarceration. When Wynne visited Moscow in July 1962, his hotel room and luggage were searched, and he was tailed during his travels. troops.[15]. The President of the Court declared Greville Wynne, aged 44, would serve three years in prison and five in a labour camp. Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel of the USSR Central Intelligence Agency, a distinguished officer in the Second World War, who has a close relationship with many high-ranking military personnel, is also USA and Great Britain was a spy working for the intelligence agency. MI6 sees him and his international dealings as a perfect cover for. The same year, he said, they spotted the potential of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the assistant Soviet military attache in Ankara, Turkey. They expected I would do something stupid, he told me. Oleg Penkovsky was born in Russia in 1919. Penkovsky never knew his father, who was killed fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War when he was a baby. Upon servicing the dead drop, the American handler was arrested, signaling that Penkovsky had been apprehended by Soviet authorities. Penkovsky never knew his father, who was killed fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War when he was a baby. He divorced his first wife Sheila after his return before entering a second failed marriage. Wynne would later relate that as he walked down the steps of an exhibition pavilion, four men suddenly appeared as a car pulled up and Wynne was pushed inside. He had champagne and flowers waiting, a big basket of fruit, chocolates and a balloon. Before his father left Lagos, Andrei said, he gave a gold watch to his CIA case officer at the time. They had to go through a show trial, basically, so on the stand Wynne accused MI6 of using him as a dupehe may have just been saying whatever he could say because he worried they might execute him, says Jeremy Duns, an author of several spy novels set during the Cold War as well as the history book Codename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold Wars Most Dangerous Operation. 41 ratings1 review. Updates? Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC Television serial Wynne and Penkovsky. Upon release from prison, Wynnes old life was in tattershed lost much of his business and the time spent in the Soviet prison seemed to have caused long-term damage. Penkovsky was portrayed by Merab Ninidze in the 2020 British film The Courier, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Greville Wynne. This led to the publication of his dubious memoirs. He attended the prestigious Frunze Military Academy in 194548. "He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself," says Cumberbatch. Cold fear started to run down my back, he told me. He was recruited to MI5 just before World War II. Oleg Penkovsky, then a colonel in Russia's military intelligence service known as the GRU, had already passed along intelligence about the shoot-down of American satellite planes in Soviet territory and information on his own GRU graduating class. On that first day, Andrei pressed his questioners to explain why his father had been arrested. Penkovsky was executed but there are conflicting reports about the manner of his death. There is no statute of limitations for espionage. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Wynnes fabrications range from small to huge. His dining companion, Dickie Franks, revealed himself to be an officer of the. U.S. counterintelligence agents have established that neither Howard nor Hanssen had access to the identities of all the American intelligence sources who were betrayed in 1985. In 1945, Penkovsky married the teenage daughter of Lieutenant-General Dmitri Gapanovich, thus acquiring another high-ranking patron. He was detained at Lubyanka prison. He was the real deal. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War". This time it's a true story:Wynne served as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spyOleg Penkovsky atthe height of the Cold War. Boy and daughter now Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were captured by the Soviets in 1962. Andrei Poleshchuk told me his fathers arrest was a disaster for his mother. In 1962, Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky defied his country to save the world from nuclear war then paid for his heroism with his life. It said Bokhans son, Alex, 18, was having trouble in military school and suggested the deputy take his vacation now, three months early, and return to the Soviet Union to deal with him. American and British intelligence agencies believed the safest . He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School (1988). It shortened her life, he said. The deputy mayor of Bakhmut has spoken of the situation in the city saying there is fighting in the streets. [7], Former KGB major-general Oleg Kalugin does not mention Penkovsky in his comprehensive memoir about his career in intelligence against the West. It was scary.. Battled mystery flu, fake crew cut facing Jodie Foster in 'The Mauritanian', Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. Here's what to know about Wynne's real history. It dealt with capabilities and intentions. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. We had neighbors that were very close. Penkovsky was executed the following year and Wynne was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. He had graduated from school and found a good job, and he wanted to live on his own. Oleg lives a quiet and unassuming life with his wife Vera (played by Maria Mironova) and their daughter Nina (played by Emma Penzina), who's about 5 or 6 years old. Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynnewrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandizingbooks, "The Man From Moscow" (1967) and "The Man From Odessa" (1981). London, May 17, 1985: Oleg Gordievsky was at the pinnacle of his career. He asked them to deliver it to an intelligence officer at the US Embassy. In June 1986, Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. But Wynne paid a heavy price for his heroism. Clearly the KGB had searched his flat. The mere belief that theres another mole, whether correct or not, can cause chaos inside an intelligence agency. In 1988, he took a Moscow river cruise and met a blond, blue-eyed and very beautiful woman named Svetlana, who worked for an automotive magazine. Stay calm, he recalls telling himself.