The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal Read Online Free

Soviet intelligence officer had gone off the rails, and he was bitter. His father died when he was only four months old, and his mother had told him it was from typhus. But papers had been found about a year earlier showing that his father had served as a first lieutenant in the White Army, fighting against the Bolsheviks, which threw Penkovsky’s loyalty into doubt. He was accused of covering it up. An assignment to India fell through, and he was shunted aside. He loathed the KGB.
    On two extended visits to London, first in April and May and then in July and August, and one trip to Paris in September and October 1961, Penkovsky spoke to the British and American intelligence officers for 140 hours in smoke-filled hotel rooms, which produced twelve hundred pages of transcripts. Penkovsky also delivered 111 rolls of exposed film. In Moscow, he used a tiny Minox commercial camera to photograph more than five thousand pages of secret documents, almost all of them about the Soviet military and taken from the GRU and military libraries. Penkovsky was filled with zeal and took risks, once photographing a top secret report right off the desk of a colonel who had momentarily stepped out of his Moscow office.
    Not all the conversations with the American and British officers went smoothly. In one of the early sessions at the Mount Royal Hotel, Penkovsky presented a bizarre plan to hold Moscow and the entire Soviet leadership hostage. He wanted to deploy twenty-nine small nuclear weapons in random fashion throughout Moscow in suitcases or garbage cans. The United States was to provide the weapons, instruct him on welding them into the bottom of garbage cans, and provide him with a detonator. With difficulty, he was talked out of the fantasy. 19
    But Penkovsky took his espionage mission seriously and demonstrated to the CIA how a single clandestine agent could produce volumes of material. When asked if he could obtain copies of the Soviet General Staff journal Military Thought and urged to look for the secret version, Penkovsky asked if the CIA also wanted the top secret version. The CIA didn’t know there was one. Penkovsky provided almost every copy of the journal, in which Soviet generals debated concepts of war in the nuclear age. 20 His reports provided critical insights into Soviet intentions during the 1961 Berlin blockade, informed the West for the first time about the existence of the all-important Military Industrial Commission, which made decisions about weapons systems, and provided key technical details of the R-12 medium-range missiles that the Soviet Union sent to Cuba in the fall of 1962, especially the range of the missiles and time required to make them operational. Penkovsky’s intelligence, code-named ironbark and chickadee , was a key ingredient in decision making as President Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. 21 Penkovsky’s information on the Soviet medium-range missiles was included in the President’s Daily Brief in the third week of October 1962. Additionally, Penkovsky’s information, along with the first reports from the new Corona spy satellite, debunked the myth that the Soviet Union was churning out intercontinental ballistic missiles like sausages, as Khrushchev had boasted. The “missile gap” didn’t exist.
    Penkovsky was, at the time, the most productive agent ever run by the United States in the Soviet Union. 22 The CIA and MI6 agreed to pay him $1,000 a month for intelligence worth millions. 23 After the meetings in the hotel rooms in London and Paris, the operation moved into a second phase in which Penkovsky was run in Moscow. The British businessman Wynne, who visited the Soviet Union periodically, met with Penkovsky, collecting intelligence and passing it to MI6. But Penkovsky was eager to deal directly with the American and British intelligence services in Moscow.
    The CIA was not ready. Ever since the disaster of compass , a replacement officer had been in